Brilliant, on a curve of Skywalker

It was all over, or at least as over as it was going to get for a while. Their Fandom friends and the Jeesh returned to their separate universes after Jaina's wedding. Allana's identity was no longer a secret, Wynn Dorvan was running the galaxy, the Jedi were leaving Coruscant permanently, and Luke, well. The meddroids said that Luke would never fully recover from his attack on Abeloth. Ben tried not to think about that.

Ben was trying not to think at all.

He was clearing out the last of the stuff in his room when a hollow ache started to build inside, and then his vision narrowed and went completely black. He thought for a minute that he might be passing out--he'd certainly done enough of that recently--but there was no dizziness or nausea to suggest that the vision change was the result of a concussion. He braced a hand on the nearest wall and stood waiting for his sight to return.

Instead, stars and nebulae began to appear in the darkness, rushing toward him at extreme velocity, but with no noticeable red-shift and without spreading apart as they drew closer. He began to feel apprehensive and disoriented, as though he were traveling through a galaxy far different from the one his parents had known.

He saw Coruscant mottled by patches of flickering red flame and black banks of drifting smoke, and beyond it there was a legion of dark silhouettes rising from a shadow-cloaked world, fanning out across the galaxy to meet a much smaller force of luminous shapes.

He saw a pair of tiny disembodied eyes floating through the darkness, collecting wisps of drifting gas and specks of loose dust, in its endless patience swaddling itself in the stuff of cold matter.

And Ben saw his cousin Allana, a young girl sitting cross-legged in front of a white throne, playing with her pet nexu while a small circle of Jedi fought a desperate battle at the foot of the dais, holding off an endless onslaught of beings. There were dark silhouettes and bejeweled women and horned aliens, and every so often a gray tentacle, which would appear on the steps to the dais and attempt to slip past unnoticed before a lightsaber descended to send it skittering back into the darkness.

Ben felt a sudden, overwhelming, flash of anger. All of the pain of the last few years--the last month--and nothing had changed. The Jedi would forever fight the darkness, Abeloth would go on feinting and parrying, the Sith would peek back out from whatever rock they'd gone to ground under...it was pointless.

He glanced at the faces around Allana, looking for familiar ones, and to his surprise didn't see his father. Luke fought the darkness as easily as he breathed, and a Jedi Order without Luke Skywalker was one that, while inevitable, still took Ben's breath away. Ender had pointed out many times that the Order needed to refocus, learn to work without a Skywalker, but a vision of that as reality was both painful and a bit of a relief.

His vision gradually returned to the here and now instead of the future, and he was still feeling off-balance and angry. Why did they fight so hard and lose so much when it never changed anything?

He glanced down at his lightsaber and a thought occurred to him. He could change himself...

( Let's have a heart-to-heart with Ender! )

( Four years of Ben's life have led up to this moment. )

[OOC: Borrowed, then modified, from Troy Denning's Apocalpyse. Preplayed with the fabulous endsthegame, and concluding our two week spam of your flist!]

The quarters were a little more cramped on the Falcon than they were on the Shadow, and the addition of two more people and a nexu cub was helping Ben feel a little caged in.

It wasn't helping that Luke hadn't called yet to let him know where to rendezvous to continue on with their mission. His father wasn't dead--Ben would have felt that--so Ben was trying to wait patiently for his comlink to go off, rather than calling and demanding to know what was going on.

After a few hours of staring at the comm and mentally demanding it to ring, Luke finally called in. The Sith had left the planet having captured most of the Nightsisters of Dathomir, but Luke had Vestara as his prisoner aboard the Shadow and was using her as collateral in his new pact with the Sith.

Ben's yelped "WHAT?!" at that news had echoed through the ship.

Luke's second bit of news--that the Sith claimed their young people were going through the same Force psychosis that had plagued the Jedi--was harder for Ben to believe, and the final piece--that Luke would prefer Ben head to Coruscant to warn the Council personally about the Sith rather than meet up with his father to head back into the Maw--was greeted with absolute silence, then a nod of acquiescence.

Ben was being left behind again. He was fine with that. Really. He curled up on his bunk after he wished Luke luck on his mission and stared at the wall.

See? Totally fine.

[OOC: For the guy with him, phone calls or emails!]

A few minutes—or a lifetime—of meditation with Rhondi and Ben felt himself slipping free of his body. He had a thousand questions about what was happening to him, about how long they had been gone and what would happen to his body. But when Rhondi appeared next to him, looking more refreshed and beautiful than she ever had, he had only one thing to ask her: “How do we find my father?”

She extended her hand. “Take my hand and walk with me into the light.”

At any other time, Ben would have had a comment about how walking into the light sounded a bit ominous, but right now Ben did as she instructed, and together they walked into the crackling purple radiance beyond the viewport. He was instantly filled with an eternal, boundless bliss beyond anything he’d ever experienced. He became one with the Force, melted into it and was filled with a calm joy as vast as the galaxy itself. How long he and Rhondi hung there together, Ben would never know. It was less than an eyeblink, long as eternity.

And suddenly Ben was looking out on a narrow black mountain lake with a surface as still as glass. From one shore rose a sheer granite face, sloping toward a domed summit lit with the light of a blue sun. Along the other shore lay a boulder-strewn meadow. Directly ahead was his father standing next to Ryontarr and the Givin, looking toward a half-hidden female form floating in the silver mists that concealed the far end of the lake.

Ben released Rhondi’s hand, no longer consumed by the same sense of urgency that had been troubling him on the station. True, his father had grown perilously weak over the last few weeks, and true his own life was also in peril since the Mind Walkers were still trying to kill them. But Ben had left such mundane worries behind with his body. He’d swum in the incomprehensible infinity of the universe, and now he understood: life and death were the same because moments did not vanish, could not be consumed like air or water or nutripaste. They existed once and forever, spread across the entire continuity of the universe. Just as atoms gathered together to make matter, moments gathered in packets of minutes and hours, which mortals perceived as time passing.

But those packets were no more the essence of time than sunlight was the essence of a star, heat the essence of fire. They were simply the perceptions through which the mind of finite beings experienced the infinite. When he had time to think about it, he wondered how this would change his perceptions of his vision of Jacen, or the view of the future he’d experienced with Ender.

Now—for the given value of now—he had to talk to his father. “That was some trip,” he said with a smile.

( Where Ben and Luke go on an extremely trippy...something )

[OOC: Taken and modified from Abyss by Troy Denning. Contains gratuitous icons of Christian Bale and happens at the same time as this. NFB, NFI, OOC is love.]

Ben wondered if he should have had a sanisteam and something hot to eat before attempting what he was about to do, but it was too late now. He trudged slowly to the spot where he, Luke, and Ender had spent so many days learning from Tadar'Ro. It all looked as it had before, the time-smoothed stones warm from the sun, the taller stones casting cool shadows. But didn't feel the same to Ben.

Here was where Tadar'Ro had taught Luke, and Ender, and Ben, and Jorj Car'das.

And here was where Tadar'Ro had taught Jacen Solo.

( Hello again, Jacen. )

( Where Ben has a long-delayed nervous breakdown )

[OOC: And we're done with Christie Golden's Omen. Many thanks to endsthegame for the preplay on this one. NFB, NFI, OOC given donuts. Man, I want a donut.]

Normally, Ben had a very defined routine on Mondays: run, lightsaber practice, classes, lunch with Ender, then an afternoon of either research or socializing.

Today he stuck to classes, and then returned immediately to the dorms without stopping for food. He wasn't sure if he was supposed to head down to the cabins again, and he felt safer in his own room at the moment.

...And its fascinating, fascinating ceiling. Which he'd been staring at for hours now.

But he was fine.

The door was firmly closed.

Ben had been going through his normal morning routine when his comlink went off. He frowned when he saw who the message was from--his father wasn't generally one for random communications--and the his breath was sucked from his lungs like he'd been sucker punched.

Thinking of you today. Miss you. --Dad.

His eyes flew to the date and he felt even worse. It was the anniversary of Mom's death and it had completely snuck up on him. Shaking off memories of flying over Kavan--of the sudden, gaping loss in the Force--with difficulty, Ben shrugged into his Jedi robe and headed to class.

It was going to be a very long day.

Ben normally had a fairly accurate internal clock, but he had absolutely no idea what time it was by the time he finally made his way to the dorms. He'd carefully shut himself down in the Force--he wasn't ready to face either Jaina or Tahiri yet--and made his way slowly up the stairs to his room.

In his head, the litany of the names of the dead and wounded repeated over and over and over again. Zekk, missing. Jaina, in the clinic for the foreseeable future if she wanted to walk again. And the dead: Shevu. Prince Isolder. Most of the Hapan court, including little Allana. Jacen.

Ben hadn't cried. He didn't see the reason to.

He walked past Ender's room and paused. Might as well let him know that he wouldn't be inheriting droids...

He rapped quietly at the door, intending to stay for only a second. He didn't want to wake anyone up.

[OOC: for the other emo boy...and contents are going NFB.]

Ben followed the sound of Han's whooping and wasn’t surprised to see everyone he wanted to in the same place. He loitered in the doorway and watched as Jaina stood in the grass and concentrated hard enough to shatter a disk of lightsaber-proof beskar with her mind. He didn’t blame Han for being excited at all.

( He's baaaack! )

[OOC: I swear I'm almost done. Dialogue snagged from Troy "Why Yes, I Might Hate All of These People" Denning's book Invincible. NFB, NFI. OOC is love.]

Weeks passed. The Jedi base was packed up, most of the equipment and ships airlifted to their new location, and Luke finally returned from Fondor, walking through the vacant halls with a stony expression. Ben caught rumors of a dogfight with Jacen (and really. Like Jacen had a shot against his dad), Niathal and Jacen turning warships against each other, and Pellaeon being murdered for refusing to keep his ships on Jacen’s losing side. Ben had some deeply uncomfortable suspicions about who might’ve been responsible for that.

( And then, because things couldn’t get much darker, really, he got a secure comm from Shevu. )


[OOC: I just keep beating the kid up, don't I? Dialogue tweaked from Revelation by Karen Traviss. NFB, NFI, etc., etc.]

The ride towards Centerpoint Station was eventful in the way that only missions planned by Luke Skywalker and conducted by some of the most dangerous—and yes, a little bit crazy—people in the galaxy could be.

( The plan was deceptively simple, and very Jedi: Let the enemy do the work. )


[OOC: Cut for ass-kicking, scenery chewing and more Skywalker family dysfunction. Dialogue adapted from Aaron Allston's Fury. NFB, NFI, void where prohibited, etc.]