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Ben Solo can feel himself fading. Gifting his life force to Rey is a fitting atonement for everything he’s done, and he’s at peace with it.
But Rey isn’t. Her joy and relief dissolve into panic as he slips away, just moments after she kissed him. All she’s ever wanted was connection, and now that she’s finally found it, he’s leaving her. Just like her parents did.
He promised her she wasn’t alone. He can’t abandon her like this.
With his last tendrils of awareness, Ben Solo reaches out, fighting to hang on to life, their bond, anything. The Force churns around him, but his surroundings just keep getting darker until all he’s aware of is Rey, the burning pain in his side, and the stone floor beneath him.
No, not stone. Sand.
As his foggy vision clears a bit, he notices others with Rey—the former stormtrooper, the cocky pilot, and Chewie—all with weapons trained on him.
He tries to diffuse the situation, but he has no hands to raise, and his words come out as a loud hiss.
“Serpent! Serpent!” a hysterical metallic voice cries. What’s Threepio doing on Exegol?
Ben backs away . . . and up, rising higher and higher until he dwarfs Rey, Threepio, and even Chewie. His head is perched atop a thick column of flesh that coils along the ground like an enormous, compressed spring.
He had wanted to stay with Rey, but reincarnating as a giant snake in the guts of a Sith temple wasn’t what he had in mind.
The others act like he’s a monster, but Rey looks at him like a puzzle. Gently pressing the pilot’s gun down, she hands the Skywalker lightsaber to the trooper and cautiously approaches.
Ben lowers his scaly head to her level, trying to look a little less threatening. He can’t resist trying to say her name, to tell her it’s him, but all that comes out is another hiss. He lets out a howl of frustration.
“I’m gonna blast him,” the pilot mutters.
“Don’t blast him,” the trooper says, giving Ben a curious look.
Rey keeps easing forward, never taking her eyes off him. As if her heart says he isn’t a threat, but her scavenger instincts warn her to stay vigilant, just in case.
She steps over one of his massive coils, then another, then kneels to place her hand against an ugly gash on his side.
Now it’s Ben’s turn to panic. She must still be weak from their battle with Sidious, and he knows how taxing Force-healing can be. He keens at her to stop, but Rey is undeterred. She’s used to staring down monsters. Her life force flows into him, sharpening his senses and quenching his searing pain. He rasps a sigh of relief.
A low rumble echoes through the cavern as the colossal snake glides away into the darkness, leaving Ben’s spirit behind. It’s nice to be human-shaped again, but he’s just a hazy apparition. When he kneels in front of Rey, she looks straight through him at a sunny opening the snake uncovered in the cave wall.
She seems all right, but she looks weary. Like the healing cost her more than she expected. The BB unit rolls to her side, warbling a question, and she glances down at him.
“I just transferred a bit of life; Force energy from me to him,” she answers, absently rubbing her hand like it hurts a little. “You’d have done the same.”
Would he? Would anyone give as much as she does?
Rey turns back toward the light, then the Force shivers and Ben finds himself alone in the cave. Peering through the bright opening, he sees rocky outcrops rising from a sea of shimmering, golden sand.
This isn’t Exegol. Where is he?
When is he?
***
Somewhere nearby, Ben senses growing tension in the Force, like some cosmic tug of war. He wonders what could be at the crux of it, then the universe tilts and suddenly he’s on a First Order transport. It’s flying upward at a steep angle, engines straining, confusion and terror rampant among the crew.
Heaving currents in the Force wrench the shuttle to and fro—determined dark grappling with frantic light. The conflict feels oddly familiar, and with a jolt Ben realizes he’s back on Pasaana, in a shuttle that’s about to meet a very violent end.
Sure enough, Force lightning surges through the ship, screaming anger and fear and . . . Rey. Ben draws as much of it into himself as he can. This is no gentle healing—it hurts like crazy—but beggars can’t be choosers. He’ll take whatever energy Rey and the Force will give him.
Ben’s thoughts come into sharper focus and his spirit feels more substantial, but the same power that revitalizes him kills the crew instantly and fries the ship’s circuits. The whole thing is ablaze, and dropping like a stone. He may not be alive enough to die when it crashes, but he doesn’t dare take that risk. He needs to jump somewhere else, fast.
His first impulse is to go to Rey, but this Rey still thinks he’s an enemy, hounding her and pushing her to the breaking point. At best she’ll mistrust him; at worst she might find some way to kill him again.
Reaching out further in the Force, he senses a familiar presence and his soul instinctively leaps toward it.
This time he’s prepared for the tilt, but not for what he sees when he arrives. He had sensed his honorary uncle in the skies above Exegol—bold and vibrant, just like Ben remembered. But this version of Lando seems careworn and completely adrift, a mere shadow of the dashing rogue Ben once knew.
As the beat-up vehicle they’re standing in rumbles across the desert, Lando sways in time with the hanging jars and odd trinkets. His eyes stare out the barred window, but his mind is somewhere else.
A guttural, alien voice calls something from the front cabin, and Lando peers up into the sky. “I see it.”
The abandoned ship Rey and her friends somehow managed to revive is soaring up into the sky. Fleeing Kylo Ren and his Knights.
Lando’s surly driver barks a question at him.
“I’m retired, remember? Besides, why would I want to leave the garden spot of the galaxy?”
His question has the ring of an inside joke, but his smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
Ben has a vague memory that Lando and Uncle Luke went looking for something here on Pasaana years ago, but Luke never mentioned what his old friend did after that. Maybe Lando wanted it that way.
“Why are you still here?” Ben murmurs, mostly to himself. Even if Lando was Force sensitive, Ben doubts he could hear him.
To his surprise, Lando mutters, “The Resistance doesn’t need some old-timer who’s been rusting in the desert for years.”
Oh, come on. “They don’t need a pilot with your experience? Your connections?”
Lando just shakes his head. “I know a losing bet when I see one. There’s no way they can win against those odds.”
“Never tell me the odds.”
His father’s favorite comeback is out of Ben’s mouth before he realizes who he’s quoting. It rattles him a bit, but Lando just laughs.
“All right, quit haunting me, you old pirate,” he chuckles. “You’re never going to stop dragging me into this mess, are you?”
If his father’s ghost really was the one haunting him, what would Han Solo say to his old friend?
“Good luck,” Ben answers. “Don’t get cocky.” Sound advice, even if his dad rarely followed it.
The Force ripples, and the view outside the treadable’s window becomes a blur of hurrying figures and lengthening shadows. From somewhere across the galaxy, a voice tenderly whispers Ben’s name and he immediately dives into the Force, following the sound back to its origin.
He knows what’s coming next, and he doesn’t have a moment to spare.
***
She’s lying on her bed, looking regal as ever, but so much older than Ben remembers. His heart twists at the sight of his father’s old medal in her hands.
The light in her eyes is already fading. Reaching out to her lost boy on a derelict Death Star cost nearly everything she had left.
Ben can barely feel the floor beneath him, or the bed he’s kneeling next to, but somehow he can feel his mother’s hand. Her fingers curl around his.
“Mom . . . I’m so sorry. I’m sorry for everything.”
I know, Angel, she whispers into his mind. I’m just glad you’re back.
She squeezes his hand, nudging the last of her life force into him, then she’s gone. Distantly, he can feel his past self’s grief and the burning pain of a lightsaber wound. He senses Rey’s heartache too, compounded by horror that she just impaled the other half of her soul.
Back at the cavernous, makeshift base, the Resistance gathers to mourn their fallen general. Tasks forgotten, terminals abandoned, they quietly drift to her bedside. Even in death, Leia Organa draws everyone into her orbit.
No one so much as glances in Ben’s direction, except for a small, wizened figure at the front of the crowd. Maz Kanata’s eyes bore into him, then she heads for the mouth of the cave, motioning for Ben to follow her out into the rain-soaked jungle.
“Why do you Solo men take so long to come home?” she asks, heedless of the storm Ben can’t feel.
“Too good at burning bridges, I guess.”
Maz doesn’t dispute that. “What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know,” he admits. “I’m just trying to go where the Force leads me.”
“Good,” she says. “You’ve learned that lesson younger than most.”
They come to a clearing littered with downed trees—severed by a lightsaber, from the looks of it. The place shivers with Rey’s fury, doubt, and desperation.
“Lately, I’ve felt the Force swinging wildly out of balance,” Maz says, crossing her arms and surveying the devastation. “Skywalker is gone, and that leering gargoyle in a black hood is threatening the galaxy again, while those who should be allies treat each other like enemies.”
She nudges a smashed training remote with her foot, then glances way, way up at him. “A pendulum can only stray so far from the center before it starts swinging back. When it gets back to the middle, do you suppose someone will keep it there in peace and balance, or will it go careening off to some other extreme?”
“People have been trying to balance the Force for centuries,” Ben replies. “If it was possible, I’m sure someone would have done it by now.”
“Nothing ever changes, yet every day is different,” Maz counters, “and they say with a firm place to stand you can move a whole world. Where will you choose to stand?”
Ben doesn’t have an answer for that. He’s been living (or reliving) this day minute to minute, just trying to get Rey and himself through it alive. He’s given no thought to what might lie beyond it.
Before he can think what to say, he feels another disturbance in the Force—a vergence of the mortal plane and the immortal one. Hoping it’s a gateway out of this limbo he’s stuck in, he hurtles across the galaxy toward it.
***
He’s never set foot on this craggy, windswept island, yet he instantly recognizes it from memories he callously rifled through on Starkiller Base. It’s the island Rey used to imagine on Jakku, when she was lonely and desperate to sleep.
The whole place radiates Force energy, but it practically blazes from two figures on the ledge nearby—ghostly Uncle Luke extending a hand toward the ocean, and Rey clutching a Sith wayfinder, watching awestruck as a seaweed-draped X-wing rises out of the sea.
His Jedi uncle looks older, scruffier, and more peaceful than Ben can ever remember seeing him. Luke sets the X-wing down with a soft thump, then Rey climbs into the still-dripping relic of a ship. Against all odds, its engines roar to life. Fastening on an old Rebel helmet, she guides the starfighter up through the clouds toward her destiny on Exegol.
Far away on the ocean moon of Endor, a frantic Ben Solo is scavenging a relic of his own, combing through the Death Star wreckage for a TIE scout he can coax back to life. Little imagining that he’ll soon have to perform the same miracle on Rey.
Or that a spectral version of him is standing on a rocky, twilit beach in the Unknown Regions, wondering what to say to the uncle who pulled a lightsaber on him seven years ago.
For better or worse, Luke talks first.
“I meant what I said on Crait,” his uncle says, eyes still on the sky.
"That you'd see me around?” Ben asks. “Did you orchestrate all this?”
"No," his uncle laughs. "No, I didn't see this coming." He turns to face Ben, his weathered features creased with a rueful smile. "I mean I truly am sorry. The instant I ignited my saber that night, I regretted it."
Ben shrugs a mute acceptance of the apology. A day ago he would have raged that no penance could atone for that kind of betrayal, but death—his own and Luke’s—seems to have taken the edge off his old anger. Besides, if he can forgive Rey for fatally stabbing him, he should probably forgive his uncle for considering it.
"Even if you hadn’t, I’m sure Snoke would have lured me away eventually,” Ben admits.
"But you might not have fallen so far, so fast,” Luke says. “It's hard to see the Jedi as the good guys when the only one you know tried to murder you.”
“That certainly didn't help.”
Luke glances at the still-smoldering wreck of Ben’s TIE Whisper, its charred hull and blade-like wings at stark odds with the island’s tranquil beauty.
“I taught you to resist fear and anger because I wanted to spare you the pain they caused in our family, and for the entire galaxy,” his uncle sighs. “I should have taught you the flip side of that coin: that when we stumble into the shadows, we can always come back to the light. If Darth Vader could do that, any of us can.”
Yeah, that lesson might have saved everyone a lot of grief, but at this point, it is what it is.
“Neither of us can change the past,” Ben says.
“What do you want your future to look like?” Luke asks.
"I want to save Rey, and then help her clean up the mess I made.”
“Well, I can help with at least one of those,” his uncle says, putting an arm around Ben’s shoulders and steering him toward the thin air at the brink of their ledge. “Come on. She’s going to need us.”
***
The Force swirls around them, and the soft greys of twilight give way to the harsh, lightning-slashed darkness of the Sith temple on Exegol. Sidious and his acolytes are intent on the battle high above them, on their imminent triumph. They pay no heed to the fallen Jedi lying in front of the Emperor’s throne.
Rey looks almost peaceful as she gazes up at hundreds of ships raining from the sky, crippled by Sidious’s jagged bolts of pure evil.
“Be with me,” she murmurs. “Be with me.”
Ghostly figures in Jedi robes appear on either side of Ben and Luke, calling Rey’s name, urging her to rise.
“Bring back the balance, Rey, as I did,” says the brash-looking Jedi on Ben’s left. The Chosen One. The legendary grandfather he called out to—practically prayed to—for years.
He’s shorter than Ben expected.
Anakin Skywalker arches an eyebrow at him, then nods toward Rey as if to say, You gonna help out or not?
Exhausted Rey heaves herself onto her hands and knees, gasping for breath. Every inch she gains is a hard-won battle.
“You’re not alone, Rey,” Ben assures her.
“Alone, you have never been,” another voice agrees.
Has that been the Force’s goal in putting him through all this? To show him that his time is almost up, and she’ll be fine? She has friends who stand by her, the Force to strengthen her, and countless Jedi supporting her from the world beyond. She’s not alone, and she never will be.
And yet, her anguish when he slipped away from her came after all this. She has friends and mentors, but those aren’t the only things she needs.
“Rey, the Force will be with you, always,” Luke declares, then she’s on her feet, calling the Skywalker saber to her grasp, her eyes burning with grim defiance.
Ben’s been on the receiving end of that look before. Sidious doesn’t stand a chance.
The Emperor assails her with Force lightning and scathing contempt, sneering that she’s a mere scavenger, but Jakku couldn’t kill her and a zombie Sith won’t either. Rey stands her ground, blocking the malevolent energy with her lightsaber, then she summons the other saber and advances, reflecting Sidious’s hate right back at him until it scours him from existence.
His death sends a massive shockwave through the temple, shattering giant statues and bringing most of the roof down on his fanatical minions. The Jedi shield Rey from the blast and the cascade of rubble, then one by one they fade into the Force.
Rey looks around her in a daze, swaying a little on her feet. The lightsabers slip from her hands and she sinks to the ground, her strength utterly spent. Before Ben registers what’s happening, her light goes out.
It’s as if half his soul is ripped away, leaving a blank nothing in the Force where Rey ought to be. He starts forward, determined to stoke whatever sparks of life still burn inside her.
Not yet, Ben, his grandfather whispers in his mind.
On the far side of the ruined hall, a dark figure hauls himself up out of a chasm. Stumbling, half broken, Ben’s past self limps across the rubble-strewn chamber toward Rey’s lifeless form. Crashing to his knees just shy of her, he drags himself the rest of the way and then cradles her body in his arms. Her skin is even paler than her smudged white tunic, and her sightless eyes stare at nothing.
Ben remembers looking desperately around for someone—anyone—to help them. Of course, there had been no one . . . but there is this time.
If this works, will Ben merge with the past version of himself? Will he move on to some afterlife, or simply fade into oblivion so this other Ben can live and spare Rey that crushing grief? It doesn’t matter—he gave his life for Rey once, and he’ll do it again if he has to.
As his past self mimics Rey’s Force-healing on Endor, from the placement of his hand to the peaceful expression on his face, Ben places spectral hands on his shoulders. He pours everything Rey has given him into his past self, so he can give it back to her. Dark and light, healing and hurt. Anything. Everything.
His grip on mortality weakens again as he relinquishes more and more of the energy that tethers him to it. The world around him fades back into hazy shadow, until all he can see is Rey and the prodigal padawan trying to save her.
Ben has given all he has, but it’s not going to be enough. Rey’s vessel is so empty that even with everything he adds, it will cost his past self too much to bring her back. Her light is finally rekindling, but his is starting to flicker.
There must be more Ben can give. Something must still be tying him to this life.
There! Deep inside him, gleaming like a jewel—the life energy his mother gave him. Her love and hope called him back from darkness, and now she’s saving him again. Ben carefully passes on his mother’s final gift, then his sputtering flame flares to life.