Chapter Text
Rey gasped awake and sucked air. It trickled into her lungs. She choked and spluttered. Why couldn’t she breathe?
Why was everything white? The brilliance blinded, and her eyes slammed shut against the burn. Where was she?
Violent shivering spasmed her limbs. Cold. So cold.
The cryo-serum. Her teeth clattered. She remembered now. They had put her in cryo-sleep for travel to Coruscant.
The med-center must have resuscitated her.
Breathe, Rey. She forced panic aside and paced her inhalations. Everything is fine. In. You’re fine. Out. You’re exiting cryo-sleep. In. That’s all. Out. These symptoms are normal. In. Just breathe. Out.
Did this mean treatment was complete? She stretched her legs. The gnawing pain in her bones was gone, replaced with the tight stretch of muscles after laying too long in one position. Her lungs ached, but that was expected after disuse. She wouldn’t know if they repaired her eyesight until her vision returned.
How long was she unconscious? Weeks? Months?
The Force-suppression cuffs. She lifted her wrist and let her arm flop back onto the linens. She was no longer restrained.
That’s right. Master Luke wanted to prevent the dyad from shifting time. Years might have passed. Or more.
If Ben had succeeded, she wouldn’t be able to remember even this much. Her heart sank. But she was alive. That was something. Where there was life, there was hope. Was Ben able to continue searching the World Between Worlds for a portal to their happy ever after? Or had her final gambit worked and he had come to rescue her? Is that why she was awake?
Ben? She raised her head and called into the Force even as she felt for their dyad.
His Force-signature flared, strong and dark like rich caf, as strong as she’d ever known their bond when he resided in the Living Force.
Ben, I’m back. I’m awake. Come to me. She babbled in the vain hope that repetition would provoke an answer. He hadn’t been able to respond for decades—why would he now?—yet he felt so close, as near as her own heartbeat. Who cared if desperation made her beg? Please, Ben. Please, if you can hear me, please come. Please. I need you.
Rey, I’m here. A wave of comfort carried his words to her inner senses and washed through her soul. I’m coming, sweetheart. Hold on.
She collapsed back into the soft sleeper and tried to quiet her racing heart. At least the cold and shivering had subsided faster than she anticipated. Ben was coming. She could rest in that. He would have answers.
Steps pounded in the distance and increased in volume until they were sprinting across her room. Tile. The floor must be tile. She turned toward the sound.
“Ben?” Her voice rasped. If she could hear physical footfalls, did that mean he wasn’t a Force-ghost? Or maybe it meant that she was?
“What’s wrong?” The deep timbre that registered in her ears was as real and vibrant as his presence in the Force. “I sensed your panic.”
“I can’t see you.” She lurched upright and groped for where he ought to be. She needed to feel him. “Hold me, Ben. Please.”
“You’re awake. That’s good.” His inflection conveyed both relief and genuine concern. The mattress dipped and a solid arm braced behind her back. His other hand rubbed her cheek. “Why are you crying?”
“I’ve missed you so much.” She sank into his side and slid her arm along his waist. He was thicker around the middle than she remembered. To Chaos with the timeshift, she couldn’t bear being parted from him. “Please don’t leave me again.”
“I was in the kitchen distilling some caf.” The sleeper groaned as his weight shifted. “Let’s see if your vision requires a medic. Do you have a headache?” The loss of heat hinted that he pulled away a little. “Look at me.”
“Can’t.” She shook her head as she chased his warmth. “It’s just hibernation sickness. It will pass.”
“Hibernation—?” In their bond, his confusion mirrored hers. “Rey, open your eyes.”
Every sense said he was real, from the firmness of his side (although softer than she recalled) to the rhythm of his breathing to his scent—like he’d been outdoors on a sunny day. Maybe it was all a masterful illusion, and he was only a Force-ghost.
Still, she tried to peek through her eyelids. Radiance seared her vision.
“Hurts.” She squeezed them closed again, tucked her head beneath his chin, and mumbled into the hollow of his throat. “Have I joined you in the Force? It’s so bright. Are these the Halls of Light?”
“Joined me in the Force?” His hand at her shoulder set her apart and prevented her from leaning into him again.
She mewled her objection.
His voice grew somber. “Rey, I’m not a Force-ghost. You must have been dreaming.”
He wasn’t a Force-ghost? Then, where—
Rey squinted through slits in her eyelids. A shadowy silhouette took shape. With each blink, the brilliance abated and the blurriness resolved until she was looking into Ben’s beloved face, not limned in the transparent blue of a Force-ghost but solid and clear. She gasped and pressed her fingers over her mouth.
Maybe the med-center had corrected her vision. That would explain the clarity and sensitivity to light, but it didn’t explain how he seemed so real. Or the curious sense of déjà vu.
Dark hair brushed his neck in careless waves. She lifted her hand from her mouth to tuck a stray lock behind his ear. He shook it free, never having liked his ears exposed, but he didn’t object to her wandering fingers. Silver accented his temples, even though he wasn’t supposed to age in the Cosmic Force.
Hadn’t she seen this moment before, a lifetime ago? The first time their fingers met, she glimpsed his future. This future. She assumed his death on Exegol meant it could never be, but somehow, some way, they were here.
She mapped the moles scattered across his cheek in wonder. Dark stubble pricked her fingertips. Lines fanned from his eyes, creased his brow, and dipped above his nose. Her thumb caressed the new facial hair—coarse whiskers on his upper lip and chin—and traced the deep groove etched beside his lips, which had turned down in a frown. Oh, how she longed to see him smile.
He didn’t oblige, even though he must have overheard her thoughts. His anxiety spilled across their bond; he was worried for her. Had been for some time. Purple shadows smudged beneath his long lashes.
“You look tired,” she said at last.
He caught her probing hand and massaged the flesh at the base of her thumb. “You gave us quite a scare.”
Who was ‘us?’ Did he mean the med-center? Better start from the beginning. “Tell me what happened.”
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
She told him about med-evac from Ahch-To’s Temple and Master Luke’s plan to thwart the timeshift through cryo-sleep and Force-suppression. At first, his doubt was a tiny spark, but her words acted as so much tinder, until his disbelief grew into a conflagration.
“Rey.” He massaged her hand with enough pressure to be painful, but he didn’t notice and she didn’t complain. “Nothing like that has happened. We’re at Convergence. There was a sailing accident on the lake. You were knocked unconscious and drowned.” The knob in his throat bobbed. “I brought you back, but you’ve been in Force-sleep for three days. I couldn’t wake you.”
What was he talking about? Where was Convergence? She didn’t know how to swim, let alone sail a boat. After the trials of Kef Bir and the mirror cave in Ahch-To’s dark nexus, she’d been content to keep her feet firmly planted on the island and watch the ocean from high above on her meditation stone.
“Convergence is our home on Naboo. Your ancestral home,” he added. “Do you not remember?”
She shook her head.
He lifted her hand and held his lips to her knuckles for a long moment before speaking. “Then how about you show me what you do remember?” He didn’t release her fingers. “Show me in the bond.”
So she did.
Rey was immobilized, her limbs strapped down. Her interrogator removed his mask to reveal a younger Ben.
They dueled in the snow, lightsabers sparking and clashing. She split his face. But he wore the scar like a badge and reached across lightyears to touch her hand.
She traversed lightyears to find him. Together they defeated a formidable Darksider, shattered a lightsaber, and shattered their hopes.
He chased her across the galaxy. They battled through their bond and on the half-sunk remains of an artificial moon. He refused the offensive; she impaled him on his saber. Then she healed him.
In the bowels of a Sith planet, she destroyed a deathless emperor at the cost of her life. Ben restored her life at the cost of his.
Years passed as she trained New Jedi and his Force-ghost visits grew less frequent. They agreed to use the power of the dyad to shift time. And never saw each other again.
Until this moment.
“Did it work? Ben, tell me.” She squeezed his fingers. “Did you find the decision node? Did you shift the timeline?”
Fine muscles in his jaw rippled. She didn’t try to untangle his churning thoughts.
“The Force must have granted you this vision. But why?” He asked himself more than her. “Do you remember how we met?”
An image sprang to mind: his saber blistering blood-red in the verdant forests of Takodana. A modulator turned his voice mechanical as he froze her with the Force.
“I’ve never been a Darksider. I would never bleed my kyber crystal,” he said. “I did suspend you in the Force on the day we met, but you were a senator and the Jedi had assigned me as your bodyguard.”
Who was this man and what had he done with Kylo Ren? She blinked at him. “You were a Jedi?”
“We both are.”
She scooted back to put some space between them. Maybe it would help her think. “I don’t understand. It’s so real. I was orphaned on Jakku. I raised myself scavenging the Imperial wrecks. I watched you ignite your saber through Han Solo’s heart.”
He sat back, his horror scorching their bond. “Dad died years ago—from old age. You were there. He lived to see his great-grandchildren.”
“We have children?” She stared, incredulous. How could she forget having children?
“And grandchildren.” He didn’t elaborate. “You said you were from Jakku?”
She nodded.
“There are no Imperial wrecks on Jakku—no Empire, for that matter—but it was the second planet to benefit from your initiatives in the Senate, following Hays Minor. You were working with Jakku when we met.” His heartrate accelerated enough to be perceptible across their bond. “The emperor in your vision, what was his name?”
“Palpatine,” she said and then lowered her voice in a strange reversal of their encounter within his starship’s hangar bay. “You were the one who told me. I’m his granddaughter.”
He gave her an odd look. “Except Palpatine was assassinated while he was Chancellor. Before my mother was even born. Our galaxy has never had an emperor—not in our lifetimes.”
A chill ran along her spine and raised the hairs on her forearms. She followed the course of his thoughts: that his grandfather witnessed the assassination, that Palpatine had hidden his identity as Darth Sidious, a Sith Lord.
“Anakin once told me that he almost joined the Dark side, but he didn’t,” Ben said. “What if he had? What if—”
“He did,” she said. “He became Darth Vader. You—Kylo Ren sought to be like him.”
His pale skin turned ashen.
This wasn’t the moment to dissect his shadow past. She pressed. “What if that was the decision node?”
His brow furrowed. “And our lives are the timeshift?”
“Except, if they are, then I shouldn’t be able remember anything from an alternate past. Your Force-ghost told me the timeline is singular. That means only one timeline can exist, either the one I remember or the one you do.”
“I like mine better,” he muttered. “If that’s so, then why aren’t you the same age as your vision? Why did you wake in our sleeper and not in a med-center on Coruscant?” He gestured toward double doors thrown wide to a stone patio. Sunshine reflected from the lake beyond. “Try to remember, sweetheart. For me.”
Images flowed from his mind to hers: adventures they had shared, battles they fought, losses they endured, joys they celebrated. Memory unfolded, revealing ever more detail, like a flower opening. As it did, her other past began to fade, thinning until it was only the echo of a memory, its reality no more substantial than an ephemeral mist.
A breeze fluttered in the gauzy curtains. When Rey hung them, she had laughed and told Ben they reminded her of sailboats. She had grown up boating, enamored with the sensation of flying across the water powered by wind alone.
That was the last thing she remembered: she was teaching her twin granddaughters to sail.
“Mira and Hanna,” she said and swung her feet to the floor. She needed to check on them. “Are they okay?”
“A little traumatized over knocking their Nana unconscious but otherwise fine.” He hummed, his assurance a steadying comfort in their bond. His arm curled around her back again and tugged her close. They had been married for a long time. They had been one in the Force even longer.
“Ben,” she said, “if our dyad has the power to shift time and we did it in Anakin’s lifetime, then everything since then is a consequence of that choice.”
“I know,” he said, those two simple words fraught with the gravity of implication.
“If we shifted time, then what I saw—what I remember,” her breath caught, “that wasn’t a dream or even a vision. That was our life. We lived it.”
They sat in silence, contemplating a sacrifice they had made in time beyond memory, for the galaxy and for each other. They had given up everything for the hope of turning the life they shared now into reality. What a bittersweet realization.
“If we were able to see our present lives from that side,” Ben said, “I can understand making that choice. Maybe it’s what motivated us.”
“Maybe.” Nothing suggested that was the case. On the contrary, her alter-ego had spent decades alone, in turn longing for Ben and dismayed by her glimpses of potential timelines—only to be betrayed in her final moments. She never realized she had seen the future that was still to be.
“I wish—” Rey dabbed moisture from beneath her lashes with the back of her index finger. “I wish there were some way to say thank you. To tell them that we’re happy. That it worked. That the galaxy is free. It seems so sad for them to end like that.”
His fingers wove between hers. “Except they didn’t end. We are them. Our life, our past, our future—that is our thank you to them and theirs to us.”
She swung her leg, brushing the ball of one foot across the cool tiles. Their life together was beautiful. Their dyad had accomplished much good in the galaxy, and their years weren’t concluded yet. A renewed weight of purpose settled over them.
Another gust set the curtains dancing around the doors, as if inviting them to step into their future.
“Rey?”
“Yes?”
“If we could shift time again, what would you change?”
Perhaps it was only natural to consider the pain, loss, and sorrow that might be reversed. But to start over would be to sacrifice their marriage and the children and grandchildren that adorned their lives like stars in the night sky. It would be to lose decades devoted to understanding their dyad and using their power to benefit others. It would be to forfeit character shaped through adversity. It would be to forsake the renewal of the galaxy they had given their lives to saving and serving, not once but twice.
Rey rested her head on Ben’s shoulder and sighed. “I wouldn’t change a thing.”