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You wake up, tears weighing down your eyelashes. “It was a dream,” you mutter to yourself, voice cracked. You tell yourself it is from the oppressive heavy bone-dry air of Tatooine, but I know that it’s not. I know that all dreams are nightmares right now—either the ones where I die or the ones where I live but you wake to a reality where I am gone.
You’ve always been good at lying to yourself. I can’t tell if I’m glad of that right now. It helps you through your days, but oh does it hurt you in those twilight hours between sleeping and waking, before the tears evaporate from your eyes, when you need it to be a dream, but it’s not.
*
It’s been twelve days since you reached Tatooine. Twelve days since you buried lightsabers, since you ignited your own for the first time. Twelve days and you’re still on another achingly dry, lonely planet. You tell yourself it connects you to Luke, because this is where he first learned about his destiny. You tell yourself it honors Leia, who briefly yet dauntlessly visited the system.
You tell yourself all these things to keep yourself from dwelling on the fact that you’re alone again, without a hand to reach through the stars to yours.
*
It’s hard not to get the sense that you are punishing yourself. That you are doing some kind of penitence for the fact that I’m gone now. You must be alone, you deserve to be alone. You could be with Finn, or Poe, or Rose, those friends who love you so fiercely but no—you are on a graveyard of a planet.
It never rains on Tatooine. Once a decade if you’re lucky, and once a century if you’re not. You have always loved wet places, have loved humidity others might find overbearing because the very air makes you feel less parched. Green and blue are your favorite colors because they remind you of lightsabers, of life.
Maybe that’s why you chose the dry planet. No lightsabers, no life—just loneliness and emptiness after I faded into nothingness in a dark blue cavern.
*
You do not leave. Oh, you do not stay at the burned down shell of what was once a home to Skywalkers, even if it is a name you have claimed for yourself. You head east, then south, following a trail that instinct splays across the sands for you. You aren’t sure where you are going, just that there is a slight pull on your navel, taking you somewhere that others have been before, places where others have left traces.
You have learned to follow these instincts. They make you feel less alone. You are one with the Force, and so you cannot be alone.
Right?
That is what you tell yourself over and over as your speeder buzzes its way across the horizon, kicking up sand in its wake. You are a conduit of the Force—one half of a broken dyad. But you have always been a fixer of broken things. Maybe whatever it is that’s broken—you can fix it too.
*
You gasp when you wake next, tears springing from your eyes like the seaspray on Ahch-To. You gasp as if your lungs have forgotten how to breathe, as though you, too, were dead.
Your lips curve soundlessly around a name you can’t bring yourself to say. For a soft name, it now cuts like a rusted screw. You do not speak but your thoughts echo loudly. There wasn’t even a body to bury.
I didn’t even get to say goodbye.
*
Goodbye is a strange word. I didn’t get to say goodbye either, though I am not sure that what we are now is a goodbye. I got to hold your lifeless corpse, I felt the flow of the Force through me, I, too, felt like one half of a broken dyad.
But I didn’t know how to fix broken things, I just break them more.
*
I worry when you run out of water. I worry because I am not used to deserts, but you are. Your body knows dryness and emptiness and heat better than anyone I’ve ever met. You aren’t concerned, though you should be. Dehydration will kill you far more slowly than the end you met on Exegol. But you have always been a creature of boundless faith. I think that’s why the Force is so strong with you. You believe the lies you tell yourself.
Your parents are coming back.
You will find more water.
If Ben brought you back, you can bring him back too.
*
Another night, another dream, another dream that is a nightmare when you wake.
This time when you sleep, there are moans. This time when you sleep, your hands travel on your body, cupping your breast, slipping between your legs. You let out a giggle, a gasp, a sigh, a “Ben,” and then a hum of release. I want so badly to be with you. It is agony to watch you and to know when you wake, you will be even emptier than before.
You do not cry when you wake; you do not have enough moisture in your body for it. Your eyes are red all the same—an odd contrast to the hazel—and you rub your freckled nose and cracking lips. “I miss you,” you whisper. It is the first time you have spoken while waking since you buried the lightsabers.
There are many you s you could mean by that. You have a glorious knack to make friends wherever you go. People brighten to your kindness, they admire your bravery. There are so many you s in your life.
But I know you mean me.
*
I come to worry that you are trying to kill yourself. You have stopped trying to find water, you are just following the Force. There are many ways to kill yourself without sticking a blaster in your mouth, and speeding across the surface of Tattooine without water is one of them.
Loneliness never addled you on Jakku, but you also didn’t have much to compare it to. Now, you have something to compare it to. Now, you have dragged yourself back to that empty prison. It was thrust upon you then as it is now, but you don’t have to be alone now. You aren’t trapped in the prison of your own mind, waiting for your parents to come back. You are a Jedi knight. You do not have to live your life waiting, waiting, waiting…
*
At sunset on the fifth day after you run out of water, your speeder breaks down. You kneel at its side as one would a trusted steed and see what the damage is, but then a prickle spreads across your neck and you turn.
You are at the edge of a red stone ravine, ancient sandstone lines striating texture before you, pointing you forward into a cave. It is a dry cave, a lonely cave compared to the one on Ahch-To, but it calls to you the same way. You step into the darkness and suddenly, you are not alone.
There are a million of you standing in a line, traveling through the cave without moving at all. You are not moving and yet you are everywhere. The cave is warm and dry, and when you speak it echoes. “Ben?”
(Ben?)
(Ben?)
(Ben?)
When you get no reply, you and a thousand other yous take another step forward, and then another, into the blistering, into the dark and deep.
*
A fizzle. A frisson. And stars and doors everywhere.
You keep walking and I tense.
I tense?
I wasn’t aware I still had a body.
Your footsteps echo off the sandstone as I flex fingers I’d forgotten about. One through ten, each of them as long as I remember them. I take a shuddering breath with lungs I’m fairly certain haven't breathed in more than a month. It hurts. I cough. It feels like I am full of dust, that I am made of dust.
I’d always heard that some dust was just dead skin cells, that it was the leavings of living things, the way that stardust is the shedded remnants of stars. I am dust and stardust, muscle and bone, tissue and sinew. And I have a heart that’s beating in my chest in time with your panting dry breaths.
“Ben?” you call again, and this time my heart echoes, instead of the cave walls.
And you—you hear it and go still.
*
My grandfather was born on Tatooine. A mysterious birth of a powerful man to a woman made of heart. This planet is my progenitor in its own way, and when the pulse of a heartbeat throbs around you, I think somehow you know that. You press a hand against the sandstone and close your eyes.
“Be with me,” you whisper. “Come on. Be with me . I know you’re here.”
You do?
I don’t even know that I’m here. I just know that I’m with you. Always.
“Ben, come on,” you beg the stone. “Please.”
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to do it. I feel like I used every drop of the Force I had to bring you back to life. But that broke everything, somehow. If we were two that should be one—the balance is off.
I’ve been able to reach out through the Force longer than I’ve been able to talk, but when I try, it’s like grasping air. There’s nothing for me to hold onto, there’s nothing to tweak or coax, nothing to control, nothing to flow through me and me through it.
“Be with me,” you plead.
So instead, I reach for you.
*
The stars fade, the doors open and suddenly—there is gravity.
I hadn’t realized that it hadn’t been there until the second it hits me, dragging me to the ground like durasteel chains. My legs shake, my arms shake, my ribs and lungs and heart shake as I gasp the dry air and my skin remembers what it is to feel.
It feels like dying all over again, the rebeing after unbeing. The torturous way my cells just happen again after they’ve dematerialized. I died in the cold in the dark and I live in the warm and the dark and the only thing I can manage to say as the light in my eyes—different stars, creeping unconsciousness—twinkle thicker and thicker is “Rey.”
*
It is a dream, but it is a good one, your fingers in my hair. I know they’re your fingers without opening my eyes, because no one has ever touched my hair like this before. You, who have always had such a reverence with broken things caress me like a prize. Your lips ghost my forehead.
It is a dream, and I dread opening my eyes. When I brought you back, I faded away. What if we are doomed to do this forever—one bringing the other back only to fade themself? And then the remaining one hunting down some Force-sworn corner of the galaxy to bring the other back before unbeing again?
I am so afraid, Rey. I am so afraid of what you will do to me if you are gone when I open my eyes.
But you have been so brave, so I must be too.
There are tears in your eyes now, precious liquid you don’t have the wealth to spend. They drip down your nose and onto my lips, and my tongue darts out to taste this gift you’ve given me. But unlike the tears I’ve seen in your eyes night after night, these ones accompany that brilliant smile of yours, the wide grin that makes me feel like I’m flying. You bend your head down to my face and kiss me—kiss me harder than you did on Exegol. Your fingers tighten in my hair as though you are worried that I will fade into unbeing again, as if clinging to me will keep me from going.
Your lips are a living memory, your breath shudders with a promise. You have always been so good at lying to yourself, but I never once believed that that stubbornness would be my salvation. Your refusal to be alone, to be left behind, to be unloved would bring me back from the dead.
I pull you down to me and hold you close—just hold you. I hold you so tightly while my dread calms. You are not fading. Your heartbeat is strong.
Your lips are still near mine, but you are not kissing me. Your mouth rests at the corner of my mouth as you shake in my arms. When was the last time you were held? When was the last time I was held? “I knew you weren’t gone,” you murmur into my skin. “I knew you were there.”
I don’t say anything to that, I just tilt my head slightly to kiss you again. You taste of sweat and joy, and your skin is so dry that it is cracking. Water . You need water. Water sometimes gathers in caves but this is Tatooine, an endless desert.
But you do not let go of me. Your hands rove my chest, cup my muscles, fingertips fluttering like butterflies over my heart which soars at every touch. I am greedy as I touch you, your rear, your neck, your hands, your breasts. I drink you in like a parched man as my fingers dip to the waistband of your pants, knowing that I will find a wetness there that I need more than anything I’ve ever needed in this short life of mine.
We hear a rumbling of thunder and go still. We lock eyes and then as one lift them to the cave’s ceiling.
There is a crack in the sandstone, a return to the ravine. We hadn’t noticed because there are no stars or moon overhead. Tatooine is unexpectedly cloudy.
Then lightning cracks, illuminating clouds overhead, thunder booming at the same time. We are at the eye of a storm, you and I, and rain begins to fall.
There’s always water between us—snow first, frozen water; then Ahch-To and its seaspray; then that rainwashed duel on Kef Bir. It rains once a century on Tatooine, so rarely that farmers harvest moisture instead of food. But it’s raining on us now and that’s how I know that this is all real.
Water is, after all, what makes life possible, what makes life worth living, and so are you.