@lectorel, who requested [redacted for story purposes]. @lectorel, I tried not to spoil anything; let me know if you’d prefer I take it down? Also, warning: I have not seen Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
Eclipse
He comes to her in the mornings, when the dawn scours the dark and casts the shadows into sharp relief.
“I’m sorry.” He tells Rey. He always tells her this - a thousand mornings, a thousand sunrises, and he always, always tells her. “I’m sorry.”
A thousand dawns and more, and his daughter has never heard him. That’s - not fair, he supposes. But then again, what in his life ever was fair?
The morning is cold. He wraps his arms around himself and stands, watching her. The temperature cannot touch him - not now, not that he has passed beyond death and into the Force, but he watches as she shivers, and wishes bitterly to do - something.
He doesn’t hear footsteps behind him. He doesn’t need to. More then a decade of thrust and parry, attack and retreat - he knows.
“She can’t hear you, little brother.”
He doesn’t take his eyes from his daughter. “I know.”
“And your self-flagellation serves no purpose whatsoever.”
“I’m still sorry.”
“For what?”
“For fucking everything!” He turns on his heel, staring into a face that he knows as well as his own - it’s identical to his own, and if there’s one thing he hates about this new existence is that the scars that once distinguished them have been washed clean. He doesn’t want to share his brother’s face. He doesn’t want anything between them to be the same. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there! I’m sorry I died! I’m sorry I left her, okay!”
His brother - doesn’t smile. "If I recall correctly, I was the one who killed you.”
Silence.
“Of course, you killed me.” His brother - JCK-058 - continues thoughtfully. “Then again, I had abducted your daughter. But you had killed - “
“You didn’t give a damn about that, and you know it.” He snaps back. He can’t - he can’t think about that. Not now, and maybe this is a fitting punishment after all.
“No.” His brother’s incorporeal gaze is pitiless. “But I killed everyone else.”
They’re here, now. All of them, in the Force, but the pain is as fresh and vivid as the day it first occurred. The memory has never really faded. “You did.”
“Father understands, you know.”
“Father loves us.” And hadn’t that been a surprise.
“Oh, he does. But love isn’t necessarily synonymous with understanding. You can love someone and not approve of what they did. You can care for someone, but not understand why they did it.” 58 pauses. “...I was surprised that father offered both to us.”
He doesn’t have the patience for this anymore. He never really did - well, once. Perhaps. Back in the beginning, when they’d been children working on a school project together. “Is there a point to this?”
“Just one.” 58 tucks his hands into his sleeves. “Your pity-party serves no purpose whatsoever except to indulge your own guilt and self-hatred. You did everything you could. Grow up, JCK-068.”
“She’s my daughter!”
“And you would have been a spectacularly bad parent.”
He would have. It’s the truth, after all - towards the end, there were times, bad days, when he wasn’t really coherent anymore. He’d wake up, not knowing where he was, when he was, he’d drink desperately just to feel something, anything, to forget...
He’d loved his daughter, the best he could.
His brother is less then the heat-haze off the rocks as he departs.
“I’m sorry.” JCK-068, Ven, tells his daughter. “I tried.”
