Force Destiny

The Truth

Kylo opened his eyes to the cool sands of a desert. It was barren and endless...and unforgivingly warm for a desert night. There was enough light from the night sky to recognize the peaks and shadows as dunes of sand as far as the eye could see. There were two suns just below the horizon, leaving a red haze in the sky. He didn't know whether it was sunset or sunrise—not that it mattered. It would be beautiful if he wasn't dead. Kylo hated everything about this place. He didn't know how Rey survived in Jakku for nearly two decades.

Rey.

Had he failed her? Had he not been strong enough to save her? His heart clenched at the thought of her light gone from the galaxy. If being stuck in a barren wasteland was his punishment for the lifetime of being a monster, so be it. But he didn't think he could spend the rest of eternity, suffering in a desert, believing that she hadn't survived. Rey had convinced herself of a pretty delusion in a forsaken desert world, why couldn't he?

"You didn't need a desert to convince yourself of delusions, Ben."

Kylo turned to see a man kneeling in the sand next to him, fixing a speeder. The stranger was staring at him expectantly, waiting for him to respond to his statement. Kylo could have sworn the man hadn't been there when he first arrived, but he was dead, so perhaps that explained how it worked in this place.

The first feature Kylo noticed about the stranger was his eyes. They were a piercing blue. His right eye was bisected by a scar, similar to Kylo's. The man looked to be around his age, but his eyes seemed wise and filled with far more hope than he could ever imagine having.

The second observation Kylo made was that the man had hair nearly as long as his, but it was closer to the color of the sand around them. The third was his robes. Kylo would have guessed him to be a Jedi based on his robes—admirable choices of dark brown and black—but if he was a Jedi, he was missing his lightsaber. He couldn't be a Jedi, because a Jedi would never be caught without his weapon.

The last thing he noticed was his glove, only on his right hand. In death, the man could not have projected with both gloves? Or neither? Kylo stared at his own hands; he was missing both of his gloves. And his lightsaber. The man was still staring at him expectantly, so Kylo asked the first thing that came to mind. "Is this Hell?"

"Might as well be," the other man chuckled. "Tatooine. It was my home once."

Kylo squinted at the endless dunes of sand. "I'm sorry."

The man shrugged as he turned to a bag of tools. "I don't think where you come from matters as much as where you're going." Kylo brushed the sand from his dark clothes in frustration. It had to be Hell. Why else would he be stuck with a strange man who spoke as cryptically as Luke on a hot, desert world, surrounded in all directions by mountains of sand? The man watched him with an air of amusement. When Kylo glared at him, the man turned back to his work. "I hate sand, too," he said.

Kylo gestured to the dunes in a grand display. "So this is hell, then."

"Can you hand me that that hydrospanner?" the man asked, nodding to the tool that was clearly within reach. Kylo studied him with narrowed eyes but ultimately acquiesced. With a twitch of his fingers, he retrieved the tool and passed it to him with aid of the Force. When he had first done that to his father, the older Solo had reacted with exasperation. When he had done it to Lando, he had reacted with wonderment. The man with the sand-colored hair nodded in gratitude, but otherwise didn't react to the display. It confirmed one of Kylo's suspicions; the man was intimately familiar with the Force. He didn't speak until he returned to his work. "Can you help me with this?"

"I know nothing about speeders," Kylo warned, but the man didn't respond. With a sigh, he begrudgingly lowered himself to his knees in the sand. He had the rest of eternity; he could help a dead man fix a non-existent speeder. Besides, there was something about this stranger that intrigued him.