Grave-Song

Luke picks his way up the hillside after morning chores – the days are rapidly growing shorter, and his legs aren’t what they once were. No amount of meditation will fix that, only dislocate him from it for a little while. But the goats still need to be milked, and the cistern needs to be emptied, and – all these things he meant to do before dying,

He can feel what awaits him at the top of the next ridge. The presence of another is obtrusive, he can feel Ren’s defenses before he can feel him – barriers built on barriers until the final product was clumsy but solid. Walls built on top of old boundary-stones. The lightsaber ignites, and the sound of it rends the air like a peal of lightning. The smell of the blade scorching the air is unmistakable. Luke would know it anywhere – he knows it in his dreams, he has woken from nightmares with it lingering in his clothing like woodsmoke, like charred metal, like flesh cooking.

The blade is warped, it looks wrong, it sounds wrong – it isn’t stable. The hilt will shatter in his hands one day, or worse. If his own apprentice lost a hand to his own recklessness there would be an odd symmetry to it, but Luke can’t seem to appreciate it just now. His mouth is dry.

Even in desolation, he had known this would come, and that it would be no more than he deserves.

He can still save himself. He can force away his hand or repulse him with a single strike, he can knock him down flat or bully him off the cliff’s edge – he can toss rocks at his helmet and antagonize him into a swift beheading and not a protracted dismemberment. Foolish thoughts, however natural.

But the time for saving himself is long gone. Inwardly, Luke counts out their names – an incomplete list, he knows. It begins with Owen and Beru – people who would be alive if it weren’t for Luke. The names haven’t stopped since then.

It would hardly be a fair fight. He’s unarmed, after all – as if that would stop the Jedi-Killer in his tracks when he’d cut down children as they ran. He could jump and wrangle and make a fool out of himself, trying to eke out his life a little while longer with Force-assisted acrobatics.

Unarmed, and an old man.

The sun is high, the sky is stark-white. The tall figure is cut out in stark impassive black, torn cloak hanging from one shoulder. There is nothing to be read in the way he holds his head, or the matte-black smoothness of his mask, except for readiness. A pillar of stony darkness against the morning sky – and still he could never hope to stand as tall as Vader.

More machine now than manflashes through Luke’s mind as an intact phrase. There was little enough of Anakin left in the end, a bald scarred husk trapped inside the outsized scaffolding of metal and plastic on which he had become dependent – no, he had not become, he had been made made that way by design. To Luke he had seemed like a giant until the end, but Anakin had been ashamed – of his own ugliness, smallness, weakness, heavy with the memory that he had once been beautiful. His shame had been palpable, radiating off in waves to the point of pain – he had let Luke hold him that way while the life ebbed out of him.

At the last – Luke had been there at the last, and there had been peace for him like he’d never known in nearly fifty years of life. Luke is older now than his father was then.

Kylo Ren raises the lightsaber and the blade flares incrementally brighter, red plasma guttering. It must look fearsome, in the dim light of other planets and other cities – the last thing many have ever seen, not the blade but the flicker of red plasma as the blade comes down.

Luke is very tired. Ben stands alone. The others will be coming soon, Luke does not doubt it, but here Ben stands.

Luke waits for the blade to fall.

*

The blade does not fall. The only reasonable thing is to go on living until it does – to do the milking and harvest tall mosses and check the moisture traps, to meditate with the insistent press of another presence threatening to intrude like a bad memory. He is intimately familiar with the whole gamut of unwelcome remembrances – he has made an effort to integrate them in his routines and to welcome them wherever possible,

These thoughts follow him everywhere. When he is warming his intact hand over the pot he boils water in – you could have saved them, indelible as a scar – or lying down to sleep, with the long metal bones of his prosthetic cutting lines against his cheek, why didn’t you do something sooner.

With that precedent it isn’t so difficult to go about his routine in this lonely place with his apprentice stalking the pathways like a ghost. Luke could almost believe it was an apparition if not for the profound awkwardness of it. It’s hard to make sense of a ghoulish vision of the bygone past whose boots creak and whose cloak trails in the dirt.

When Luke stands in the doorway, he is keenly aware of his own smallness; when Kylo Ren stands in the hall, his frame fills it entirely. It’s the figure from a nightmare, a bad dream.

Kylo Ren, Master of the Knights of Ren, gives a stilted bow. He turns on his heel and is gone. Like some outer-rim shuttle pirate shaking down a hostage – sleep well, I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.

 

*

When they next cross paths, there are questions to be asked.

Ben – Kylo Ren, he has done more than enough to earn the title, perhaps his fellow knights are close on his heels and will be less sentimental about doing the job – his former pupil, at any rate, makes a gesture in front of his own masked face with a black-gloved hand. It’s an oddly familiar gesture.

Ah, yes. The beard. Luke has to suppress laughter. “You don’t approve?”

“It doesn’t suit you.”

That’s pretty rich, but he’ll let it go. These are the first words his apprentice has spoken to him in fifteen years. Luke is being haunted. It is no more than he deserves.

*

If he’d done better by him the first time around maybe they wouldn’t be in this mess.

Reaching out in his mind, they are alone, just two men on a little island set in a dark sea. Out of the corner of his eye he’ll catch the ripple of dark cloth at the edge of a doorway, or at a distance he’ll catch the sound of heavy footfalls crunching in the gravel. Ben’s habits have grown unrecognizable in the intervening years, conforming to some other pattern of discipline than what his mother and uncle tried to teach him. His reluctance to eat in front of Luke is mildly irritating – he’ll retreat to the flinty roof of Luke’s workshop or the caves along the shore rather than risk being seen maskless. He must be doing these things – eating, sleeping – but Luke can’t quite work out when or why.

Passing him in the narrow lime-washed corridor, with his head nearly scraping on the ceiling, Ren snarls, “Move or I’ll move you.”

Luke steps aside and watches him go past. He’s beginning to understand Yoda’s sense of humor now. If he had a cane he’d whack him with it.

*

Luke watches him from the shore.

Ben is barefoot, in water that reaches his ankles. The water’s cold enough to be smarting to the touch (cold enough – Han’s voice is in the back of his mind, you’ll freeze your balls off,) and there’s all manner of shoreline wildlife that won’t appreciate the intrusion.

All clad in gray-black, his long narrow feet white with cold. He’s using the pain to center himself. Had Snoke taught him that? Had Luke? He is going through his forms – sweeping out heavy blows and savage strikes in the empty air without even a token suggestion of defensive maneuvering. He’s no good, Luke realizes. Half-hobbled by injury, half-trained through negligence, half-wild and hacking at the air like it had done something to insult him personally.

Luke had assumed Ben’s defenses were meant to keep him out – a sensible precaution, under the circumstances. But it’s something else. If he had the permission of the First Order or if his little excursion was truly backed by the Knights of Ren he’d have come with more backing – even if the killing of his old master was allowed him as a personal indulgence, they’d surely have grown impatient when Kylo Ren didn’t manage it in an expedient fashion. They’d have come looking for the source of the delay. Ben’s buying time. He’s hurt, he’s weak. He’s vicious. He’s no good.

*

This is this monster Luke had a part in making. Luke’s hand rests against his side, he probes for wounds with the hand that is still flesh and blood, and Ben lashes out angrily.

Bringing him up out of darkness can only be like fostering a wild animal – feeding and watering a creature with full consciousness that it can and will bite.

“Leave it,” he snarls.

The smell of copper is in the air, strange and electric. Luke can’t feel surprise, only mild dismay. “I won’t let you bleed all over, now come here.”

He hasn’t seen Ben’s face since then, not even in dreams. In Luke’s dreams he is a voice, a presence, a shape – but never a face. The boy can’t be said to have grown up handsome, but his features are disarmingly boyish still, all the planes and contours retain their smoothness. He has his mother’s eyes.

Luke reaches out to touch his sleeve, snagging only the loose folds of crimped fabric there and hardly grazing flesh – Ben slumps from him, one big red-knuckled hand flinching up to hide his face.

“You must have skipped out in a pretty big hurry, huh.” Self-consciously casual – Luke does his best to carry himself in that moment without the pretenses of authority. Not like a man who time has made wise, but like the young punk he used to be. If he’d been young when Ben was this age, or if Ben had been just some horse-faced scrapper of the Outer Rim when Luke was young and foolish and learning how well he could fly, they might have been friends and not one another’s predestined executioners.

“There were obstacles,” Ben says with brutal coldness. Too quickly Ben adds, “I cut them down,” as if otherwise Luke might not have made the connection.

“Don’t move.”

Ben doesn’t move, but he stiffens. Luke begins scooping palmfuls of water and rinsing his hair – washing away old blood, sifting out his dark curls in his fingers. His apprentice’s stiff-necked obedience is a little unnerving – they weren’t like this when Ben was a kid. Luke’s never been as touchy-feely as some, but he was never like that – never lie Ben ducking away

By the time the sun’s going down, Ben’s big black cloak is hung up to flap gently by the sea-coal fire – there’s never much fuel washed up these days, so this will have to pass for hospitality, Luke does what cooking there is by solar heat so the little fuel there is so gem-precious as to be functionally unusable. Nothing but the best for the man who came here to chop Luke’s head off. Ben’s hair is still dripping, twisted into long murky-smelling tangles, and Luke is reminded despite himself of Chewbacca. He reaches over, as unambiguous in intentions as he can be, and pulls the hair away from Ben’s forehead, probing the edges of a wound.

They’ve been here a long time, and neither of them has said much of anything. The word obstacles hangs between them, terrible and bloody. So much for the Knights of Ren.

Between them is a meditation path scratched into a stone – a single path, no dead ends, no false starts. Walls within walls. Ben could reach out through the Force and shatter it if he wanted to, hurl it like a toy out into the ocean. Luke traces it with his eyes.

“What makes you think she isn’t in my possession already? The girl.” Ben’s voice is like black pitch. He looks up at Luke from under his eyelashes, with eyes like oil drops.

“If you knew where she was you’d have killed her already. You’re too distracted.”

Two of them still remain, like distant lights in the unmoving dark – like twins, Luke thinks, and the bothersome cosmic irony in it isn’t lost on him. A girl and a boy. Stones in a stream that alter the current.

The soldier is restless, eager, bleeding with compassion, young – Luke’s seen him too. He had a vision of him once, or a vision associated with him anyway – the young man leveling a blaster on a woman with a child in her arms, but he can’t pull the trigger. Everything in his muscle memory tells him to pull the trigger, but he won’t. It’s only a simulation. Luke can only hope.

And the girl? The scavenger. What about her?

“You. You wanted to be found,” Ben says as he rises, withering disgust as palpable as the touch of a hand. He yanks his robes tighter around himself. “If you wanted to be lost to the ages you wouldn’t have left behind a map. You’d have done the honorable thing.”

(–Luke hadn’t left a map behind him because he’d never had a single map at all. He’d put together disparate pieces through research and effort, any other Jedi could have done the same –maybe one of them did, but Ren thought it more plausible that this was some elaborate game, and that Luke was leaving a trail of crumbs behind him out of whimsy. The work he had done reconstructing shattered holocrons – scrutinizing the physics of empty space, monitoring the fabric of the Force for the discrepancy that led the first Jedi there so long ago, like water pooling in a hollow.

The honorable thing, of course, would have been to die. Luke had deserved no such thing.)

Luke won’t look at him. He stares out at the horizon, at the lights in the sky, feeling plenty stiff-necked himself. “And that’s what you’re here for, right? To help me do the honorable thing?”

His apprentice is weaker than ever – he should have felt it sooner. He should have at least done him that courtesy.

“When he died,” Luke says. “I was there. At the end of it. I was there. He changed. And you know it.”

“Sentiment.”

Ben makes a disgusted noise deep in his throat, and slinks off.

*

Havoc in the night like a sudden risen storm, scenes lit in red. Luke is having another vision, battle scenes and Leia at the controls,

Luke wakes with a tightness in his chest that reminds him he’s an old man, after all, and with a thickness in his mouth, and with the terrible nearness of Kylo Ren brought to bear against him like a heavy weight.

This is it. Here it is. His apprentice has come to kill him, here in the night like a stranger and a thief – and hasn’t he thought before why it was that Ben killed his classmates by broad daylight? Why was it so necessary to see their faces? Why did it have to be like that? They were children, they were only ever children, and none of them will ever be a day older–

He welcomes death now, if this is how it’s going to be, this is how it’s going to be. Ben’s heavy body drawing up close to him in the dark, the heat of his unmasked cheek against Luke’s shoulder.

Has this always been what he wanted – has Luke been so blind – so ignorant? Ben wanted him, and even if Luke had known he would never have acquiesced. He would never have bunked down with his brilliant sister’s brilliant, fragile only child. Ben had Leia’s towering temper but none of her responsibility, her sensitivity. Han used to say he had Chewie’s temper. Han used to say–

Han is still alive, but he won’t be much longer once Ben does what he’s here to do. His new master wants him to cut a path. He’s going to kill everything he ever loved, and cut it out of himself. His new master wants a sacrifice.

His terrible body is so close and so foreign to Luke now, all the familiar parts of it are transformed. It would be easy to surrender – Luke might not like it, but it would be easy, and it would be fast. He’s earned much worse than this. But Ben isn’t crawling into bed with him to enact some ancient lust – Luke knows that now when he feels him shake under the covers. Ben is terrified. He fears contamination, he fears competition, he’s certain that he can’t turn back, but he knows now that he can delay.

Luke holds him in the dark, chest against chest, shoulder against shoulder.

*

“Think about it, Ben.”

He’s just like his grandfather – fleeing from a name. In the morning his eyes are swollen and sickly, shot through with red.

“I know what I must do.”

Must. Words of obligation – Vader had talked like that too, in the pompous language of despair, like a man from myth who no longer controlled his own destiny, instead of a man who stood swathed in an unbroken chain of choices. Could he have saved his own father – if he’d found him sooner, if someone had found a way inside that shell as it was forming, could they have undone it together? What’s written and what isn’t?

“And you can’t do it, can you?”

His apprentice sobs. An ugly, rasping sound. That’s an answer.

“Can you change?”

Luke kisses his forehead and Ben drags him down.

*

They go down in the belly of the ruins together. The steps leading down into the ruins are broad and shallow, thick with mossy growth and rubble. Ben halts on the third step, face twisting in a grimace.

“I shouldn’t be here,” Ben rasps.

“You were trained to be a Jedi, just like I was.” Ben’s face pinches a little, unreadable. Luke wants to reach up and hold on to his shoulder, to knock him on the side of the head softly with the side of his hand, to do any of the things he could have done twenty years ago. “I just wish I could have made you a better one.”

Any obstacles here they’ll face together. So maybe this is the way back.

The Jedi Temple on Coruscant had been gutted for Imperial use by the time the Empire fell – and even before then it had looked little like this place, this hole hewn from the rock. The first Jedi temple – a tangle in the threads of the Force, a dense place, the lowest point where water collected. They go down into the muffling darkness, but not alone.

Kylo Ren will kill him here, or he will not. Luke will die here and return to the ground, or he will not – he’ll scatter into the same stuff that harmonizes all this, the stuff that sings through these stones and threads through living matter. He’ll slink away into luminous nothing or he’ll rot away down to bones. Kylo Ren will take his own life and become Ben again, or he will not, or Ben will die here retaken by the light of the Force. Swept away and pulled under.

Luke can feel him in the dark, a roiling spark burning away. They proceed.