The Art of Broken Pieces

10 Porgs

Finn had wanted to come with her. Chewbacca had refused. Poe had given her a look of resignation that said he wasn't even going to bother making an order she'd just break. So, in the end, Rey went after Ben Solo alone.

Alone, except for the colony of porgs nested in the smuggling compartments, which she'd sensed only after several parsecs in hyperspace. She was glad for their company. The life support system in the Falcon had been updated a dozen times but ships this small rarely combatted the cold of space very well. There weren't enough interior rooms that didn't border the hull. So each night she piled into the bunk nearest the cockpit, and the porgs piled in with her taking up the rest of the triple bunk, which must have once been modified for a couple's use.

Han and Leia. They must have spent so much of their married life on this ship. A double-wide bunk had been welded in place.

It felt strange to lie in this bed, where Ben's parents had once slept. She found herself wondering where he'd slept. In the second tiny room, on one of the bunks above Chewie's? Or maybe in the single bunk in the lounge. He was so private, she had to think he'd have wanted to be alone...but maybe he hadn't always been that way.

What had he been like as a child?

She banished those thoughts, but they returned every time she stretched out for a sleep cycle, confronted with the ship that seemed to have been steeped in Solo and Skywalker memories.

At last, after what would have been several Jakku weeks, the proximity alert blared.

She'd reached the outer rim, and the planet that had hailed the Alliance with their triumphant capture. She entered atmosphere unchallenged, hailed their frequency, and met the scrappy town's de facto leader with a grim nod.

On the Alliance base, she'd felt that Ben-shaped presence like a tiny pinprick, piercing the fabric of the universe somewhere in the back of her mind. Now she felt him stronger, a dark well of gravity ringed in poisoned spikes, drawing her in.

"Take me to him."

He had expected them to kill him, perhaps he had hoped they would. But instead he had grown accustomed to the pain and the darkness they kept him in. Doubtless they had contacted the new government, a public and shaming execution would no doubt be more satisfying to the downtrodden of the universe than a silent death on a no name planet.

At every step it would have been easy to break free of them, to give up and rain down destruction that would make them tremble and regret his humiliation, but he locked himself away in the shield that Rey had given him and held onto it with both hands even as cracks spiderwebbed across its fragile surface. It was the best he could do... It was all he could do. Had he let go for even a moment--when they beat him, when they manacled him--he knew he would have torn them apart and he would have been unable to stop.

Their hate and anger beat at him, justified and white hot even when they left him alone in the darkness of his cell. This was his punishment, his judgment. He wanted to rebel against it but in the darkness the faces that haunted him also condemned him and justified their actions. Faces he had tried so hard to ignore turned on him in his restless dreams, accusing him.

When his captors came near enough he taunted them, threatened them, pushing at their triggers in an almost desperate attempt to force them the rest of the way. There was only one person left in the universe to fail, and Ben found he didn't want her to see whatever public display was the obvious last step in this ridiculous experiment of his. He should have known better than to think it could have gone any other way.