Fire consumed the world below. Mostly uninhabited, mostly uncared for, nobody would ever know what it was or what had happened here. Not an hour ago, it was a jewel of infinite shades of green, a forest world not unlike Endor and Rey’s favorite place in the galaxy. Rey had inhabited it. Rey had cared. She’d even tended some of the rarer plants that grew there, fussier varieties that required assistance to reach thier full potential.
So had what remained of the Resistance after the years of tolls this war had taken from them. They’d loved it, too, and they’d lived there. This base had become more than a base somewhere along the way.
And in the end, the First Order hadn’t needed anything nearly as powerful as Starkiller Base to destroy an entire planet—and the Resistance. They hadn’t even needed a Dreadnought. All they’d needed was a small fleet and the opportunity to rain down myriad volleys of laser cannon fire at the defenseless surface. Physics and chemistry did the rest. Though the barrage had ceased several minutes ago, explosions still dotted the scorched landscape, another copse of trees bursting into flame or one of the Resistance’s caches of weapons blowing itself to bits.
Rey felt the deaths of hundreds of her friends and loved ones, snuffed out in one of the most painful ways she no longer had to imagine. It was as though the flames flayed and peeled her skin and muscles from her bones, too.
And she could do nothing to stop it. There was no power in her that knew how to undo this damage.
She feared her heart would shatter into a million pieces as she watched, alone, her only companion the familiar, creaking hum of the Millennium Falcon’s engines. She feared that tears would obscure her vision, take these last moments from her. The Resistance had been her family; she owed it to them to witness this.
On Jakku, most deaths went unwitnessed. Unless you were killed in a skirmish at Niima Outpost, your body would weary itself in the sands, it would fail you. You’d fall in the sand and find yourself blanketed immediately. A creature of one sort or another might eat your flesh or the heat might dry your skin, preserving it for millennia. Many years later someone would perhaps come across your bones and wonder about you.
And that was if you were lucky.
What would happen here in the years after this conflagration? Would anything remain of the people Rey had considered her family? The temperature was staggering, frightening. The Falcon’s sensors measured it as it climbed and kept climbing.
“Come after me,” Rey said, her hands clenched against the control panel as she leaned closer to the viewport. Her ship was right out in the open. There was no way in any of the Sith-spawned hells of the galaxy that he didn’t know she was here. She felt him. She knew his every thought. He knew she was here. She was certain of it. “Come after me, you bastard.”
She had been worried that her heart would break, but all she felt was emptiness as cold and vast as the unforgiving cosmos that surrounded her. It consumed her heart and everything else in her, collapsing into a heavy tangle in her chest. Ice-sharp, it scraped and ravaged whatever remained of her. The annihilation calmed her.
Her hand wrapped itself around the main controls of the ship. Poe had told her once about what Vice Admiral Holdo did all these years ago, the both of them half-drunk on the swill that Snap and the rest of his crew brewed in the shadows of starfighters. It was impressive. It was brave.
It was, more importantly, effective.
She couldn’t remember what they were mourning that night when he told her or why. But she supposed it didn’t matter now. What mattered was retribution, revenge, winning. The Resistance was supposed to defeat the First Order. That was how these things went.
She wouldn’t let Poe’s story die with this beautiful nothing of a planet. She wouldn’t let any of their stories die.
It was the First Order that would die today.
Her hand removed itself from the controls. Her breathing steadied. She sat in the seat Han had once occupied, that still belonged to him in her mind even after so long. When she closed her eyes, she saw darkness. That void inside of her grew. It expanded to fill the cockpit, the ship. She would fill the entire damned universe with this void if she had to.
Into that void spilled a Force she knew intimately. It had called to her in the cave on Ahch-To and she hadn’t resisted it then.
She didn’t resist it now either.
And it wasn’t just an answer she asked of it, no. She asked for more. In fact, she asked it for the one thing it had always wanted to give to her, the thing she’d never accepted.
The bond she’d thought dead sprang to life in her mind, filled her brain with shame and regret and vindication, hard-won relief and unhappiness and dread. These belonged to Ben—to Supreme Leader Ren. He’d gotten everything he wanted except the one thing that mattered to him.
He never got her by his side; he never would now.
Come after me, she thought, snarling. Come after me come after me come after me.
His fear spiked and she felt him turn as though she was the one who turned. Disbelief crashed over him and so much desire, longing, pain. He loved her still. He wanted her still.
“Rey?” he said, hopeful, and how dare he have hope now.
He was a fool.
From aboard the Supremacy II, he looked at her. She saw herself reflected in his eyes and she was beautiful to him. He could be nothing to her; she refused to allow it lest she be unable to do what she had to do. With her senses, she stretched out, touched not only his mind, but the minds of his officers around him, the stormtroopers that marched across the shining floors, the pilots who lazed in the hangar bay awaiting commands that would never come. They weren’t needed, after all. Every Resistance pilot who could fight was dead.
Each and every person under Kylo Ren’s command felt the same devastation she felt and in that devastation they turned toward each other. They turned and turned. Turned throughout the ship.
Turned and found one another in the dark.
Turned and tore one another apart.
The weaponized sorrow of an entire galaxy filled their heads. What could they do but rend the flesh from one another’s bodies in response to something that unfathomable? Nobody could withstand that kind of pressure.
Nobody except Rey.
Nobody except Ren because Rey willed it so. His subordinates, raving, ravaging things that they were, steered clear of him.
He was hers to rip apart.
She heard the same screams that Ren heard, tasted the same iron, thick and heavy, in the back of her throat, but she did not flinch the way Ren flinched. Because nothing could outmatch that yawning emptiness that screamed inside her head and heart. It demanded more. It demanded everything. And she would give everything to it. Happily. She would trade even the last precious thing she had, this thing that had betrayed her in the end.
What else could she do?
“Come after me,” she whispered, an invitation now.
This time, Ren heard her. He understood.
He came anyway.