Force Destiny

First Steps

"Ben?"

"Are you there?

Nothing.

The galaxy around them ceased to exist when Ben exhaled his last breath. Rey was lost in a paradox of contradictions. It wasn't real—it couldn't be real. Yet, simultaneously, it was the deepest, most honest reality she had ever faced. Time was no longer a reliable measurement of calculated units in exact intervals, ticking predictably into an indefinite future. Rey lived an entire lifetime in those moments with Ben in the silence of the escape shuttle, but in the blink of an eye, their last moments together would be over—only a blip in her lifetime without him. Every second she spent with him was prolonged torture, but there weren't enough seconds left until she would have to let him go. Her mind was gripped by a thick, unrelenting fog, but every emotion cut with aching clarity into the depths of her soul. She both wanted to die, to be with him, and to live, to tell the story of the man behind the mask.

She refused to leave Ben to help Blue pilot the shuttle. If the ship fell into Ilum's gravitational pull and she met her fate on its icy surface, so be it. Staying with him, in that moment between his last words and their inevitable separation, was her only reality. "Ben," she whispered to him softly. "You have to wake up. I can't lose you. I don't know what to do without you. There's so much left for us to do together; you have to come back. This isn't fair. You promised never to leave me alone." She wiped away the blood that stained his cheek, dried the tears that were still pooled in the corners of his eyes. His features were reposed in eternal peace. It was easy for her to pretend that he was only sleeping...to pretend that he would still wake up. "Please, please, please, Ben. Just open your eyes." She willed it with every cell in her body as she knelt in his blood, pulling him onto her lap to be close to him, grasping his lifeless body in a final embrace.

She imagined his eyelids fluttering open, the softness in those big, brown eyes as he stared up at her, smiling, whispering her name in reverence with the voice she would give anything to hear one more time. "Wake up," she begged, as she frantically swept her fingers through his blood-soaked hair. "I'll do anything, I promise, even if you never want to see me again; I just want to know you're okay. Please...just wake up, Ben."

Since she was young, Rey willed things to happen. She had made impossible leaps, survived through formidable storms and—once the Force had reawakened inside her—manipulated the Force in ways she had never imagined. She had done it all because she believed she could. Her hope had been enough, except for what she had hoped for most—for her family to return. Now she could feel the desperation again as she searched the Force for a sign of life, willing his chest to rise and his heart to beat once more. She refused to let him go. Not now, not after Ben Solo had come back to save them all. This couldn't be how their story ended. "Please, Ben!"

Rey grasped his blood-stained shirt, shaking him desperately, striking his motionless chest, screaming her pleas into the Cosmic Force. If the Force heard her, it did not heed her pleas. His eyes remained closed, his heart still, his lifeforce in a pool around them. As she breathed raggedly, her arms heavy with exhaustion, she only then admitted to herself how limp he felt in her arms. His face was his, but it wasn't. It looked unnatural, the face of an imposter— another clone. Only she knew with all her heart that it wasn't. There was something uniquely Ben that was missing, and she knew exactly what it was. His soul. "No," she whimpered. "No, this can't be it. You can't be gone."

Galaxies were created and destroyed in the moments she waited, silently begging for him to open his eyes. It hurt to imagine the love in his eyes she knew would have been there if he was alive, because she also knew she would never see it again. If love was enough, his heart would have resumed its steady beats that she still remembered like a love song in her soul. But love was not enough. She could have stayed there, never leaving that shuttle, waiting over a decade in self-imposed denial as she had done with her parents, and it wouldn't have changed the truth her aching heart knew with every beat. As intensely as she imagined, as deeply as she hoped, he would not gasp for the breath she desperately waited for. His eyes would remain unseeing, eyelids forever shut. She would never hear his voice again. As profoundly as she wanted to pretend differently, Ben Solo was dead, his life taken by her own lightsaber, because of her choices and her darkness.