#lightsaber tech

Just as time is a fluid and uncertain thing, so too are the destinies of those carried along with its flow. And the longer the time that passes, the greater the drift between the unique signatures in the Force created by every life that exists within it. Each brilliant flicker, caught in collisions of Light and Dark, is governed by a disparate fiction, and no matter how bound those fictions seem to be, they remain distinct, untamed, individual. Given a long enough timeline, all things must give way to one fate or another. Given a long enough span of single moments, bridged across the ages, every conceivable result can be perceived.

Come. Bear witness.

Four months after the destruction of the First Order fleet, the organization known as the Resistance disbanded and ceased to exist as a military or governing entity. Its officers and soldiers went their separate ways, leaving behind the ghostly shell of a base on the remote moon of Vedic III. The official story of the fate of the Resistance is one left to speculation, as no records remain—

Four months after the destruction of the First Order fleet, the organization known as the Resistance reintegrated itself into the military command structure of the New Republic. General Poe Dameron was granted the new rank of Field Marshall, and given authority over the policing and peacekeeping of the Mid and Outer Rims. The base on Vedic III, so recently occupied by former stormtroopers, was eventually abandoned, serving only as a temporary waystation between the past and the future of the galaxy—

Four months after the destruction of the First Order fleet, the organization known as the Resistance accepted thousands of former stormtroopers, refugees from the Battles of Taris and Naboo, into its ranks. It did not align itself with the military structures revived by the New Republic, but instead remained an independent paramilitary organization, and a force for local governance in the largely unsettled region surrounding Vedic Prime. General Poe Dameron maintained his rank and authority, but devolved the role of the position to that of a liaison between existing galactic political entities and the newly organized Vedician government.

The base on Vedic III gradually converted from a temporary military installation into a proper settlement, and was renamed Organa Spaceport. Structures originally meant to facilitate the military operations of the Resistance were requisitioned and repurposed to serve first as administrative centers, then utilitarian spaceport facilities, and, finally, official greeting and customs gates.

After the first few weeks, the population had ballooned enough for a few enterprising former stormtroopers to organize an informal plebiscite. None of the new residents of Vedic III knew anything about parliamentary rules or democratic tradition, and so it was that Kaydel ko Connix found herself first assisting the process, then advising it, and, finally, running it. The first meeting of the Organa Civil Assembly, chaired by Connix, and attended by most of the settlement, voted Finn as Speaker by acclimation.

“Everyone,” Finn had said, standing in the round of the former war room, hundreds of eyes on him, “I’m honored. And more than a little freaked out. To be honest, when people first started suggesting me to be a leader here, I’d decided to turn you all down.”

Before the crowd could drown him out with shouts of protest, Finn quieted them, steady hands stretched out, palms down, a silent call for calm and order. And, seeing his reaction, the crowd did quiet, and Finn resumed.

“I’d decided to turn you down because you’ve all been lead and directed and ordered since before you could remember. And I wasn’t going to be a part of that.” He paused, scanning the faces of the men and women that stood all around him, looking for guidance and security. Looking, he thought, for hope. “But then I found out what title you wanted to give me. Speaker. And I thought about what that would mean. Well, I figure it means you don’t want to be lead. Or directed. Or ordered. You want a voice. And that— that I’ll do. Gladly. I won’t let you down.”

Applause went up in the chamber. An air of celebration took hold as the evening mist clung to the ground, and the pale grasses sprinkled about the surrounding hillsides swayed in the gentle breeze beneath the dreamlike blue of Vedic Prime. Something old had passed into memory. Something new had been born.

And time flowed on.

***

Rose hadn’t been on the Falcon for at least a month. When she saw Rey or Ben, it was always out in the spaceport. With the new structures going up, and the airfield practically alive with activity at all hours of the day and night, there was never a lack of engineering disasters to address.

There was the electrical grid, which had begun as a patchwork assembly of half rusted transformers plugged into a refurbished starship hyperdrive. Rose had been forced to shut down the whole grid, scrap the base level transfers, and redesign everything from scratch. The result had been two weeks of brownouts and surge-damaged outlets, but the growing pains had been worth it. Rose’s redesign had utilized a combination of solar and geothermal energy sources in concert with more conventional methods of power generation and distribution, and the result was a grid that was robust and self-sustaining for the first time since the base had been established.

Then there was the ventilation system, which had been voted on as a priority from day one of the Assembly. The former troopers only had to be on the planet for a few days before the oppressive heat had become a major issue. It had taken over a month, but, after essentially reinventing urban planning and civil engineering as vocations, the dozens of buildings ringing the spaceport were now connected into a central ventilation network. The climate controls had to be arranged into a hierarchy of sequestrations, and then reprogrammed into individual thermostat units that coordinated overall with the building, block, and superstructure controls.

All of this had been more or less handed to Rose to solve, as the corps of Resistance engineers had been decimated after Crait, and the former stormtroopers had arrived with few skills beyond combat training and rudimentary field survival. It made for long work days, often stretching through several Vedician day-night cycles, and Rose found herself worn out and exhausted more often than not.

Luckily for Rose’s sanity, the most pressing concern that faced the spaceport at present— the water grid— was something she didn’t have to oversee. About a month earlier, a transport filled with First Order officers who’d defected during the Battles of Taris and Naboo had arrived, and among them had been water resource engineers previously stationed throughout the galaxy.

For all the chaos that attended the administration of a new settlement, populated as it was with people who had never before lived on their own, things were running smoothly enough. That was largely because of Rey and Ben. With all the necessary repairs, engineering schemes, and building projects taking place all over the settlement, having two incredibly powerful Force users living on site was an invaluable convenience. For their part, Rey and Ben always made themselves available to move one enormous component or another, to perform simple repairs that couldn’t easily be reached by droids or other tools, or just to help with the basic work— the Force always seemed to have useful insights when it came to simple things like planning or safety.

Now, having been able to sneak away from her duties for a few hours, Rose stood in the common room of the Falcon— which had been admirably cleaned and repaired since the last time she’d been in there— with Rey, who’d just handed her Ben’s lightsaber.

“Wow, this thing is heavy,” she said, balancing it in her hands, shifting its weight and turning it over slowly. “How does he just swing it around like he does?”

“He’s really,” Rey said, pausing for emphasis, “really strong.”

“Okay,” Rose said, shaking her head and smirking, “that’s enough, cool down.”

It was still such an odd thing, Rose thought, to see Rey blush. In every other aspect of her life, the young woman was so much older than her years. Fierce. Brilliant. Powerful. Even wise. But a few words about her personal life with Ben, and she seemed to immediately transform into a person she concealed from the outside world: a twenty-year old girl in love. It made Rose feel like blushing, too, if she was being honest with herself. It’s not like she didn’t know how Rey felt.

“Does he know we’re doing this?” Rose asked, suddenly feeling strange holding the saber. “He knows we’re doing this, right?”

“All he knows is I said I wanted it for the afternoon and he didn’t ask any questions.”

“Is this one of those... Force... things... you guys do, where you don’t actually have to talk, you just, uh, I guess, think at each other?”

“It doesn’t quite work like that. We can show each other thoughts, but only if we both want to.”

“I’m going to be honest,” Rose said, setting the saber hilt down on the workbench. “It gets weird sometimes. When the two of you go quiet and just look at each other like that.”

Rey laughed, a quirk of a smile settling on her lips.

“You want to know what’s really weird? Sometimes, we’re just looking at each other.”

Rose couldn’t help but laugh at that, especially considering the mischievous look in Rey’s eyes as she, too, started laughing. It took a few minutes to get the nervous energy to dissipate, to stifle the giggling, because here they were again, about to build a lightsaber, and the thrill in the air was something Rose couldn’t quite define.

Lightsaber tech was unlike anything Rose had ever encountered. It involved a kind of irrational set of rules that followed their own logic, separate from and unrestrained by typical restrictions of the laws of physics. And that’s what made this special. Rose spent her days “behind pipes,” as she’d always liked to say. Her typical concerns were about circuit breakers and blown outlets and overheated electrical exchanges. Today, she was going to make a laser sword. And, unlike most people who hadn’t had any Jedi training, it wasn’t the first time.

“All right,” Rose said, taking a deep breath. “Has he modified it at all since you healed the crystal?”

“He’s always tinkering with it, but he’s left the plasma vents and quillion emitters alone.” Rey motioned to the beam shrouds on the side vents, and Rose noted how discolored and heat warped the metal looked. “That’s what gave me the idea in the first place.”

“So, just so I’m clear,” Rose said, “you want to overcharge the superconductors, destabilize the field just enough to cause a feedback overflow, and have that overflow vent out the sides.”

“Yes,” Rey replied, her hands dropping to her hips as she took a half step back. “Just, without the crystal being damaged—“

“You’re worried about the power regulation.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“Could we put a stronger power cell in the pommel?”

“What are you thinking?” Rey asked, still looking pensively at the saber.

“You’ll probably think I’m crazy,” Rose offered, and she really meant it this time.

“Try me.”

“Coaxium.”

“You’re right,” Rey said, her eyes widening. “I think you’re crazy.”

“Hear me out,” Rose said, working through the process as she spoke. “It’s not the most stable option, but stability is what we’re trying to upset here, right? We need to make the field unstable enough to require venting. A few nanoliters of unrefined coaxium in the electrolyte would force a massive amount of initial energy through the crystal.”

“So, the overcharged beam would pass the energy lens,” Rey said, nodding. “We’d have to increase the negative polarity of the flux aperture, and install more efficient superconductors—”

“But not too efficient.”

“Because we need the excess to vent out the sides.”

“We’d have to put some dampeners in the housing to keep the radiation from leaking. And it would make the hilt heavier. But if you’re right about him being that strong—“

“Shut it.”

“It should work. If we don’t blow up half the spaceport trying.”

Rey nodded again, and smiled warmly. Rose could tell she was nervous and excited in equal measure. She looked down at the saber. At the intersection of the hilt and cross guard, there was exposed circuitry, and a single red wire soldered to the outside of the housing. Rose could discern pretty quickly that the purpose of the open panel was for easy access— having such an unstable power flow would have required frequent modifications and repairs. The wire was more puzzling.

“Honestly, though,” Rose said, lifting the saber again to more closely examine the craftsmanship, “how has he not blown his hand off before now? You sure meant it when you said, ‘unorthodox.’”

The smile on Rey’s face faded a bit, and her gaze settled on some indistinct point past the workbench.

“I suppose,” she said softly, her voice touched by tenderness and the shadow of old pain, “if you convince yourself you don’t care if you get hurt, then it’s harder to let it bother you when you do.”

Rose almost left it at that. But a feeling welled up inside her that she couldn’t ignore, and she asked what she’d wanted to know ever since the four of them had been in the focusing chamber of the First Order’s kyber weapon on Naboo.

“The crystals. How did you heal them? You promised you’d tell me one day.”

“It’s hard to describe,” Rey started, her expression becoming drawn and serious. “It’s... hope. But shared. It wasn’t enough for me to hope for us both. He had to have it, too. Healing my crystal was something that— it felt natural. It felt right. Healing his— well, I think it’s that some hope is harder to find, harder to believe in, than others.”

“Did he— Did Ben bleed his own crystal?”

Rey closed her eyes a moment, as though she was trying to summon a lost memory, and gave Rose a gentle nod. A feeling of loss and regret began to take shape in Rose’s mind. She considered the pain it had to have taken to do something so desperate. She didn’t fully understand how the crystals bonded with their users, but she knew it was something like family. And her sister’s face, and her voice, and the way she used to smile and tell Rose it would all be okay one day, visited her waking thoughts. She wondered what she would do— what she would give— to restore what she’d once thought lost forever.

Rose set her jaw, gripped her hands tightly around the saber hilt, and took a determined breath.

“Let’s do this. Let’s make this right.”

***

Ben holds the saber hilt in his hands, testing the heft of it. He lifts it up to eye level, feeling the balance, staring down the emitter coil. He turns it over thoughtfully, running his fingers down its length, regarding the new finish, the clean solders, the durasteel rivets covering the panel of previously exposed circuitry.

“It’s heavier.”

Rey stands a few paces from him, and can’t help but wring her hands in anticipation. Even though she can sense his mood, and knows he’s in the thrall of curious excitement, she isn’t able to suppress the nervousness that quivers deep inside her. And it occurs to her: she’s never actually given anyone a gift before. She wants him to like it. She wants him to love it.

“Is that— I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“No, it’s— I’m trying to guess what the two of you have been up to.”

His eyes dance with wonder. He seems transfixed by the newness of his saber. And Rey can perceive a feeling blooming across the bond: gratitude.

“Well,” she says, swallowing harder than she intended, “are you going to ignite it?”

He glances at her without turning his head, still holding the hilt at eye level. A smile tugs at the corners of his mouth, and he grips the hilt with both hands, bringing it down to waist height. His thumb drifts up over the ignition switch and nudges it softly, gauging its sensitivity. His eyes go to the emitter, the intensity of his focus sharpening

He takes a deep breath, and his expression hardens. Rey can sense that it’s still new to him, asking the crystal to trust him again, resisting the urge to command it to obey. It’s been so long since he actually flipped the switch. The first time after they’d healed the crystal’s wound, the ignition had taken him by surprise, and he’d switched it off almost immediately. The blade had come on, but was a single beam of pure white plasma, and the quillions didn’t activate— they didn’t need to, since the kyber field was stable. Rey can count the number of times Ben has ignited the blade in the last few months on one hand. And now that she’s taken it on herself to modify something he built, something so intrinsically a part of him, she feels both closer to him and more anxious than ever.

Ben’s eyes close. Rey keeps hers trained on him, watching as his fingers grip and ease around the shaft of the hilt, the muscles of his arms shifting as he flexes and relaxes them, attuning himself to the crystal’s resonance, aligning it in the cradle of the focusing chamber with the Force. Long moments pass as she senses him reaching out with feelings he’s still struggling to reconcile. The Light she feels in him is stronger and more brilliant than ever, and it resonates through the bond and into her body and mind as he and his crystal commune.

His eyes open. They shimmer with vitality and earnest desire. The smile that tugged at his lips returns, full and unreserved. He pushes the ignition switch. The blade leaps to life with a smooth, vibrant hum, and, a second later, the quillions erupt with sudden light, and a pair of brilliant white plasma beams blast out, bending back into the emitters to create a perfect cross guard.

“So?” she says, unable to conceal her excitement.

“I—“ he starts, the white blades reflected in long, curved glints against the dark hazel of his eyes. “There may not be words to describe how I feel about this.”

“Well,” she says, easing in beside him, slipping her hand around his waist, “lucky I can sense your thoughts.”

He depresses the switch, and the blades glide back into the hilt in one graceful hsssh.

“And what do you sense right now?” he says, setting the saber down and turning to face her, his hands settling on her hips.

She smiles at him, her eyes alive with mischief. He leans down and presses his forehead against hers.

“You’re welcome,” she says, and pulls him down to her embrace, but it’s only a momentary thing, because next thing she knows he’s lifting her off her feet and spinning her around.

She tries to say something, but who knows what that might have been because now she’s just clinging to his neck, laughing. He gives her a devilish grin and pulls her into him, kissing her softly as he lowers her to the ground.

“I love you,” he says, his smile easy and calm.

“You know I can sense that,” she says, her hands still clasped around his neck. “You don’t have to say it if you don’t want to.”

His eyes are deep, and the darkness in them richer for the light reflected at the edges.

“The fact that I don’t have to say it,” he says, never leaving her eyes, “makes it all the more important that I do.”

She smiles back. The bond between them blazes with light.

“I love you, too,” she says, and the spaces between them collapse.

And night falls. And the mist settles in around the buildings and the hills and the distant reaches at the edge of the sky. And the places that were empty are made whole again.

“It sheared completely in half,” he repeated back to her.

They’d gone back to sitting. Hours had passed, and unlike when they first connected earlier in the evening, they were close, their legs almost touching. Almost. They hadn’t yet tried contact since they’d both collapsed, sprawled on the floor. She wasn’t sure if it would even be possible. And part of her was afraid it was. The sheer power of what had passed between them was both terrifying and intoxicating, and made her simultaneously hesitant and impatient to see what would happen if they touched again.

“Yes,” she replies, forcing herself to focus again on the matter of her damaged lightsaber. “Am I going to have to make a habit of repeating myself?”

He ignores the rejoinder and looks to the side and down. She doesn’t even have to use the bond to know that this is his reaction when he’s puzzling through something.

“You could try to align the pieces in the focusing chamber. But then you’d have to construct some kind of secure mount to hold both sides in place without them moving. Even then, the power flow would be interrupted.”

“Wait, is the crystal generating some kind of plasma stasis field?” She doesn’t wait for him to respond. The gears are already turning in her mind, and she looks away, visualizing the interplay of the lightsaber’s components. When she starts to speak again, it’s an excited rambling. “Of course it is. The power flow is amplified through the focusing chamber and creates a feedback loop contained by the crystal’s field. It’s like a deflector shield, but with a frequency resonance tailored to hold the blade in place. But how—“

She stops because she’s met his eyes again and he’s staring at her with an expression communicating something between animal lust and bewildered awe.

“Sorry,” she says, feeling her cheeks begin to warm, “it’s just fascinating.”

“No,” he replies, never breaking his intensity. “go on.”

“How— how does the power flow self-regulate if the crystal’s integrity is compromised? If it’s anything like ray shielding, the field would become unstable and discharge.”

“Refraction through an occluded crystal causes an unstable field. A split crystal— I don’t know if it’s possible.” He furrows his brow, and Rey recognizes the thing he does with his mouth, moving his lips as though he’s caught the taste of something he wants to savor. “You could maybe reposition the housing and install quillion emitters, like mine has, but you’d have to be prepared for an explosion the first time you ignite.”

Now it’s her turn to feel a sense of awe. At his dedication to his craft. His studious attention to detail. She thinks back to handling his lightsaber in Snoke’s throne room. It was heavy, thick, and practically vibrating with frantic energy. Even in the dire circumstance of the moment, the technician in Rey had taken note of the oddity of exposed circuitry, and even more odd: on the outer housing, a single red wire, held in place by precise solders, running the length of the hilt like a vein.

Something stirs in her, and she is reminded suddenly of her surroundings. The exposed maintenance ducting. The bypassed safety components. The overclocked hyperdrive. And she looks at him with a tenderness she’s not felt before. Something deeper and more substantial, tinged with grief.

She can see he feels the shift in her, and a shadow passes over his face. Maybe it’s because she’s looking at him with fresh tears glassing her eyes. Maybe it’s because she just thought of his father. But she knows he can feel the resonance of the change in her, and she tries to bring herself back to the moment.

“Is that why your blade is all,” she pauses, searching for the words, but the way he’s looking at her isn’t helping, and she settles on, “ripply?”

“The crystal in my saber is cracked.” His voice is deeper, darker than just moments before.

“How did that happen?”

He doesn’t respond, but only looks at her, his intensity unwavering, and she can sense an encroaching misery just beneath the surface.

“Ben,” she says softly, “if it’s painful— I didn’t— you don’t have to tell me.”

“Yes, it’s painful. But sometimes pain is necessary. Sometimes it’s useful.”

Maybe she’s been moving closer to him. Or maybe he’s been drifting toward her. But he’s almost touching her again, his fingers gliding just above the skin of her arm, raising  the hairs there and sending chills, electric and soothing, shooting through her.

“You can feel the Force. You can sense what it wants.” His voice pulses through her. “But that doesn’t mean you know what it can do.”

He inches closer, hovering over her, his fingers still tracing ovals above the skin of her arm.

“You’ve beaten me. Three times. Overcome my will. That wasn’t the Force. It was you. Your strength. Your focus.”

She realizes that her lips have parted slightly, the grief she felt before heating to a smolder, and a sudden rush of emotion wells in her: old anger, that fury at his imperious fascination, at his compulsion to try to instruct her. But it’s linked and blended now with something else. Three times. In the interrogation room. During their duel on Starkiller. And just hours before. The memory of it sends a powerful tremor through their bond, and his eyes flash with excitement.

“Imagine what you could do.”

“Maybe you’d like a demonstration,” she says, her voice lower pitched than she’d intended, soft on her breath and sharp with menace. If anything, his gaze intensifies in response, and he leans in, and she can feel the same electric tingle brush against her lips.

“I might.”

“You think you know me, Ben Solo?”

She cranes her neck, and lets her parted lips drift over his, almost touching.

“Then you’ll know there’s one thing I’m better at than anybody,” she whispers.

“And what’s that?”

She holds there for a moment, so close to him that his warmth bleeds into and through her whole body. And then she drifts away, and settles back to where she was sitting before, holding his gaze.

“Waiting,” she says, and offers him a knowing smirk.

His eyes are devilish, dancing with mischief. And then something truly remarkable happens.

He smiles.

***

Rey awakens to the stuffy darkness of her cabin. She’d fallen asleep on the floor next to her bunk. Ben was gone. How long she’d slept, and how long they’d spent talking— of everything, of nothing at all— was anyone’s guess. She supposes it’s at least a good sign that the security hasn’t been overridden. She can picture it: waking to the sound of shouting and boots on grating, more concerned faces as the crew quarters door slides open, more doting and questioning and worry.

Mercifully, she is alone in the ship. She stands slowly, steadying herself against the wall, and takes in a sharp breath as she feels the sudden dizziness strike. There’s a faint ringing in her ears, but as she regains her balance, it fades and quiets, before disappearing altogether.

She favors herself a glance in the mirror. She is a mess: hair matted and half fallen out of her bands, clothes wrinkled and sweat stained, and in addition to the now yellowish-purple bruise on her head, she has new marks on her. Short scratches on her arms and neck. A small bite mark on her lower lip. Nothing too noticeable, but a visceral reminder of what had happened last night.

What had happened? She had expected a vision when she took his hands. But the Force apparently had had other plans, and the resulting cascade of emotion and desire had swept both she and Ben to a place neither of them knew could exist. Now they were joined in a way that was beyond the ability to ignore. Even as she stands in the dim light of the crew cabin, she feels him near. At the same time, he’s never felt farther away, and though she hasn’t felt this relieved and calm in months, she’s now aware of a new and distinct emptiness in place of the confusion that haunted her before.

But, as the world begins to sharpen into focus, she can also detect a bright thread of energy woven into the infinite latticework of the Living Force extending out from her, and she knows that if she just follows that thread, she’ll find him on the other side. The thought is calming, and as she begins to shrug out of her soiled clothes, she can’t help but smile.

***

Hours later, after having used the ‘fresher and applied some fresh bacta to her bruise and newer marks, she’d gotten dressed: a fresh, light tabard, mid-length trousers, and short cloth boots. The standard day cycle was only half gone, though the onboard computer informed her there were only two more hours left of sunlight outside.

The day-night cycles of Vedic III were hell to calculate. The moon was slung around Vedic Prime once every seventy-two hours, seventeen of which were spent in the gas giant’s umbra. But Vedic III also rotated on its own slightly tilted axis once every sixteen hours, and Rey had long since given up trying to predict when the sun would rise or set. As she had taken a seat at the instrument panel, checking the orbital position of the moon, it dawned on her that the sun had just been passing behind the planet when she closed the Falcon’s boarding hatch. If what she was looking at was right, it’d been at least twenty hours.

Maybe there would be concerned faces and questions after all.

Standing up, she walks back to the crew quarters and opens one of the storage bays. Inside are the vellum and leather Jedi texts, a few other mementos of Ahch-To, and the wreckage of her lightsaber. Thinking back to her conversation with Ben the night before, she lifts the severed halves, one in each hand, and crosses to the makeshift workbench in the corner.

She flips on the overhead light and studies the ancient weapon. There’s a grace to its design: smooth and chromed, with a stylishly ridged grip and a flared rim above the emitter coil. Someone had taken a great deal of care in constructing it, and that care was borne out in its elegance and utility.

Someone, she thinks. Anakin Skywalker. Darth Vader.

She remembers first grasping the hilt when she found it in the antique chest in Maz Kanata’s castle. It had called to her. No, that wasn’t right. The crystal had called to her. Just as the crystal had answered her summons in the forest on Starkiller Base. Just as the same crystal had refused to obey either her or Ben as they tore it in half in Snoke’s throne room.

Grasping a pair of long nosed pliers, Rey removes the broken halves of the kyber crystal and lays them on the desktop. They shimmer a pale and iridescent blue, and Rey can hear the gentle singing that surrounds the two halves. It’s a seductive tune, and it seems written just for her. And it’s then that she understands finally that this isn’t Anakin Skywalker’s crystal; nor is it Luke’s. It’s hers. As the crystal had chosen Anakin, and later chose Luke, it had chosen her.

But it would not choose between her and Ben. It broke rather than make that choice. And the two halves, apart, could never be what they were meant to be. Separated, they would remain as they were now: inert, alone, and purposeless.

She cups the two halves in the palm of her hand and closes her eyes. The broken crystal has no visions to show her, but she does feel echoes of the past: victories and losses, sorrow and elation, pain and longing. And, sheltered deep within, a chilled numbness cocooning the remembrance of atrocity.

And all at once the happiness she had felt just hours before bleeds away. She had been able to find Ben in the darkness, and bring him to her. She had been able to help him find some shimmer of hope, and, in doing so, had restored her own. But he was no closer to coming home, and she hadn’t really considered what that homecoming would be.

She puts the crystal halves down on the workbench and retrieves a small toolbox from a storage bay. She empties out its contents into a larger container, making a mental note to apologize to Chewie later. Unfolding a cloth rag, she gently wraps the lightsaber and the broken crystal, and secures the contents in the box. Latching the lid, she puts the box back alongside the ancient books, and closes the drawer.

Tidying the workstation, she clicks off the light and heads toward the boarding ramp. She disengages the flight lock, punches the release, and the pneumatic pistons hiss as the ramp lowers and the harsh white of the Vedician day momentarily blinds her.

She takes a few hesitant steps, then lengthens her stride. It was time.