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Ben shouted with rage as he raced blindly out into the driving storm. Wind whipped wildly around him, stinging his face with icy needles of rain. Thunder rolled ominously close, and peals of lightning cracked the black sky into glittering fragments.
The furious young man kept his arms held before his face, trying his best to keep the water from further irritating his already tear-swollen eyes, but the rain found its way in anyways, as he ran through the rocks and trees.
‘That’s the last time that they will mock me, those stupid little bastards!’ he thought, with growing malice burning hot in the snarl of his lips. He swiftly leapt over a small collection of rain-slicked boulders and down a small incline. ‘I will make them pay for what they did to me... I was always better than they will ever be!! I will-’
Ben was lost deep in his angry, vengeful memories when suddenly his thick khaki tunic became snagged and tore itself on the sharp point of a jutting gray stone. The force of his forward momentum swung him down around hard to his right knee and into a pile of sharp pebbles.
The young man snatched at his now openly bleeding knee and cursed it for its weakness, before continuing onward into the darkness with a slightly more awkward gait.
Betrayal, hatred, fury, embarrassment, disrespect.
Those were the words that drove the raven-haired youth put deep into the storm, and had put a wedge between him and his fellow padawans forever.
Earlier that day, several of the other Jedi students had played a seemingly innocent prank on Ben; the students always seemed eager to prank him, in part because his somewhat hysterical overreactions were an amusing break from the tedium of their dry lessons.
The other children had greased the soles of the leather shoes that Ben always wore during battle training, which resulted in him slipping and falling comically with a very loud 'thud' right in front of his master, his uncle Luke, during his final swordsmanship tests.
This blatantly immature, petty little insult was simply one bridge too far for the already troubled boy to forgive, and he would never let them live this down.
He would make them pay.
Lightning shattered the young man's train of thought as it cracked down on a single snag with a deafening scream some fifty yards out. The burst illuminated the skeletal hands of the leafless, wind-blown trees and cast terrifying shadows all around. The ground lit up like a thousand arc-welder’s torches firing at once, illuminating the inky-black world with a faintly violet-toned white light.
The sharp taste of ozone burned the air with a caustic bite, and Ben paused in momentary fright and awe at the violent display of nature’s wrath. The youth altered his direction to avoid the now smoldering corpse of the struck tree, and he headed farther into the deadwood forest.
Where exactly he was headed, he did not know, however he wished simply to get away from themin order to plot his revenge.
Ben ran his bitterly cold hands through his rain-soaked locks, pushing his hair back out of his eyes with numbed fingers and a grunt. His tiring breath came now in coarse pants, but he did not feel yet far enough away from them to stop his flight.
In spite of his fear and his pain, his body was beginning to lose its grasp with the world due to the beginning stages of hypothermia. His once-confident and sure feet felt decidedly less sure now, and his legs grew shaky as he traversed a series of thick roots and stones with outstretched hands to steady his descent down a narrow hillside.
Without warning, a gnarled white root somehow caught the tip of his right foot, sending the lanky young man tumbling end over end down a short embankment, directly face first into the trunk of a tree.
Suddenly the roar of wind violently accelerated, as if ten-thousand black-winged birds had flushed and taken to the air at once; a cacophony of turbulence and frantically escaping breezes coalescing into a massive, chaotic singularity.
The sky roiled gunsteel gray and black, howling like a gutshot beast against an unseen enemy. Lightning came now in strikes nearly too frequent to differentiate one from another and the bitter smell of ozone permeated the violent night with an unnatural chemical bite.
Ben clutched at his injured knee with his skinned left hand and rubbed his bleeding forehead with his right hand. He drew himself up into a sniffling ball at the base of the dead black tree, his rain-soaked sixteen-year old body just as cold and as furious at the world as the damnable storm itself.
The storm…
Ben lifted his hot, tearful eyes up to the heavens, and witnessed the sky tearing itself apart. He could not recall ever seeing a storm this terrible in all his years at the Jedi school. The planet itself was a cool, temperate, marine-climate world, with its fair share of sea-borne thunder and windstorms, but nothing quite like this.
Something about the ferocity of the blackened skies bordered on the eerie and unnatural; electrical storms of this intense nature were simply unknown to this region. In fact even on his home world Ben had never born witness to anything this extreme. Yet the storm raged on unabated; all of its raw, terrifying, primal glory on deafening display.
*snap*
Ben’s head flicked towards the abrupt sound of a brittle twig breaking, his Force-sensitivities lending somewhat more aid to him than his ears for having heard the miniscule noise over the maelstrom of wind and thunder.
His wide, deep honey-brown eyes scanned the darkness for the source of the sound with a mixture of revulsion, anger, and fear; they cannot possibly have tracked him this quickly in this mess of a storm!
But no matter; he knew he was in no position to fight with them, but he would not ever be going back… he wouldn't allow them to disrespect him ever again.
His nearly numb fingers plucked the saber hilt from his sash and slipped over the ignition button as he tensed, awaiting the moment to strike out at the threat…
“I have come a very long way to find you, young master Solo.” a voice whispered in the dark.
His eyes and his Force-abilities reached out and searched for the owner of voice - there.
A burst of nearby lightning silhouetted a black-cloaked, hooded figure standing perfectly still some thirty feet away. It was shorter than he by at least half a foot, and bipedal; likely a human or humanoid alien species.
“I know why it is that you have run tonight… and I am here to save you from the path you are on.”
The voice was startlingly feminine and smoothly confident... and certainly not one he had heard before.
With a tiny resurgence of energy, Ben slid his back up against the rough dead tree, steadying himself against it. He raised the hilt of his saber aggressively towards the figure, and hissed through his shivering as the rain pelted his tired face.
“I don’t know you, and I don’t need saving from anything. Get away from me!”
The unidentified female stifled a half-snort and began a slow, calculated approach through the rain towards the young man with his back pressed up against the tree trunk. “Hah… You are exactly what I expected to find. You are still so weak, however you speak with the confidence of one who’s never had his limits truly tested before. I wonder if you even are ready for this?”
The woman’s long, slender black leather clad legs were intermittently illuminated by the crashes of lightning, revealing her heavy battle-scarred boots and powerful stride through the puddling rain.
Ben noted that she stopped just outside of the reach of his saber’s range; it was clear that she was at least familiar with the capabilities of the ancient weapons. Her pause gave him a moment to flick his Force-sense over her, his brain furiously trying to glean any piece of information regarding this mystery - he received conflicting readings from her, which unsettled and frightened him.
Power. Age. Darkness…
...then abruptly, he sensed a deep sense of satisfaction from within her.
The sickening emotion seemed to pulse in a grotesque sense of pleasure in the face of a terrifying finality, a sense of accomplishment at long last, like that of a condemned man facing the gallows with his life’s tasks all completed – a sure end to a life, but with all of the possible loose ends tied tightly.
This woman was somehow experiencing great pleasure in thoughts of death and annihilation. Oblivion. Darkness.
Ben recoiled slightly at the revolting emotions coming from the woman; however, he found it incredibly strange that could sense no malice or anger within her, at least none towards him.
Whose death was she feeling such horrifying satisfaction over?
Could it be... his??
The young man’s mood suddenly flipped to thoughts of personal defense, and he ignited his phosphorescent green lightsaber with a crack-whoosh as a deafening peal of thunder rang out overhead with a resounding blast.
The woman threw her hood back with a hushed laugh, revealing her smooth skin, long shining hair that flowed down her back, and sparkling, mischievous eyes that reflected well the glint of the green saber held in his pale hands.
Ben swallowed and his breathing grew louder in the cold – he definitely did not recognize her, however she was visually stunning. Beautiful even.
She was older than he had expected; perhaps in her mid-thirties, with a fierce wound – a blaster wound? – stretched across her left jaw from her cheek to her ear.
Her glittering eyes slowly made firm contact with his and wordlessly enticed his stare to follow hers along; the woman's gaze traveled playfully down to her right hand – an elongated, cylindrical object was held there? – when suddenly a fiery red lightsaber roared to life as she simultaneously charged at him and struck with a speed and fury that Ben had never anticipated.
He raised his green saber with a weak, surprised squeak to defend himself… and watched in horror as the soft jade light of his weapon winked out as the cold metal hilt in his hand fell away in two separate pieces, and down into a dark puddle with a splash.
Ben lifted his dumbfounded, horrified expression to meet her face; she was smiling a malign, devilish grin, her teeth and lips glowing red in the illumination provided by the snarling, sparking weapon she held just under his chin.
“I thought you might try something like that. Akways so stubborn.” Crimson sparks from her growling saber danced up and fell to the ground before his eyes, hissing and spitting out like embers in the downpour.
Ben glanced briefly at the weapon that was sure to end his life, for it was unlike any he had seen before outside of ancient manuscripts.
A snaking fork of predatory ruby fire; the snarling, crackling lightsaber consisted of three blades, one long central one and two small side quillions that glowed with the same intensity as the main blade.
In a detached moment of thought, he could not recall ever seeing a red lightsaber before… at least not in the flesh. And yet here it was, aimed directly at the throbbing veins in his neck.
Ben shivered with a newfound fear and kept his eyes fixed forward, his slight shivering movements and pounding heartbeat sent large rivulets of water rolling down his face and into his already soaked tunic.
The woman suddenly held her left hand up to the terrified, defenseless young man, but kept the saber locked at his throat. “Touch my hand. Now.” she commanded.
His large brown eyes widened as he choked down a lump; this was not what he had expected her to do.
Ben – oddly enough – still did not detect any ill-will from the woman before him, and having no other viable options, shakily reached up through the pouring rain with his right hand and touched the skin of her smooth, warm palm...
A flood of memories and emotions poured in through their skin-to-skin contact. The force of the sudden onslaught of data struck him as hard as if he had been sucker punched in the gut. The air left his lungs as he bore witness to what the woman wanted him to see...
Images of fire, raining ash, and death… He saw the woman who stood now before him deep in the heat of a battle; she was standing alone while waves of white armored men roiled around her – was she commanding them? Fighting them?
In this moment, he felt emotions of anger, hatred, loss pumping through her – and suddenly love.
An intense, fiery sense of love and passion boiled hot from her mind, which in this blood-soaked battlefield seemed impossible to possess.
Starfighters of all sorts roared violently overhead; an intense war raged both on the ground and in the air as a hail of blaster fire rattled in all directions.
The woman's eyes flicked upwards to the smoke-blackened sky as she ignited the fire-saber and charged into the melee with a scream like a hellbound eagle.
A massive triangular battleship-grey spacecraft, bleeding white smoke from its many points of damage, twisted in the sky like a kite caught up in a fierce wind as it came hurtling nose down towards the scene of battle, bursting into a thousand tiny suns of flame as it died.
A deep sense of satisfaction ebbed through the connection; the woman had been pleased to watch the ship perish... She had been searching for it specifically, and it made her smile to see it brought to its demise by her efforts.
The woman then raced headlong into the bowels of the dying ship; was she searching for someone? No some thing. An object. A means of salvation... An atonement?
The vision suddenly cracked into what Ben could feel was an earlier and even more distant memory; it felt fragmented and tenuous, like a distantly remembered dream been retold to another.
A large, porcelain pale hand stroked the woman’s face lovingly, her eyes closed in obvious happiness. She threw her head back and laughed at an unheard joke as she flipped her long hair behind her; it was suddenly made obvious that she was naked, although he could not see anything particularly private.
The beautiful woman was laying down on someone; as the vision held steady for a moment, Ben could see that she was laying atop a man’s chest that was broad and muscular, with the same light skin tones as the hand.
Her eyes made hard contact with the unseen man's once more as her face sweetly screwed up into a silly smile. She slowly leaned forward and presented a sweet kiss to the owner of the pale hand and masculine chest and torso.
Her face pulled back out of the kiss as she laid her head on the man's broad pectoral muscles, and drew little circles on his skin with the tip of her fingers; her gaze soft and tender.
Here with this man, she was happy. At peace. In harmony. Her connection radiated sincere, bottomless love... And a desire to return to this blessed moment again at all costs.
The memory abruptly came apart at the seams as the tension holding the obviously fragile pieces of the vision together snapped. In its wake, only fragments of wispy emotions and fleeting sensations – the feeling of soft hot hands on hips and skin, the blinding throes of orgasm, velvety warm lips touching gently, the perfumed scent of hair and the animal musk of human bodies, the happy visceral pain of uproarious laughter, and the soothing closeness of two souls lying as one.
Ben was vaguely aware of the sensation of his physical body swallowing back a tight lump; his boyish cheeks flushed pink as an unexpected smile broke out across his rain-cooled lips.
These feelings, all of the varied experiences that this woman had had in her life was now simply flooding into him at full bore, like a faucet turned on all the way. Oddly, he even felt some of them as if they were his own, and those sensations burned deep into his veins like scalding fire.
Ben had of course practiced with sharing minor feelings and thoughts with other students as part of his Jedi schooling, however nothing that he had ever borne witness to was at all like this.
In fact, he could not recall anything like this being mentioned in any of the old books. This strange connection that he now had with this woman was no less than unfettered access into another person’s life, all at once.
Every smell, taste, sound, thought, touch, memory; she was giving them all to him as fast as she could, letting him virtually relive her entire life through her memories.
Images of childhood, of awkward adolescence, first kisses, first heartbreaks, battle, arousal, death, joy, pain, love, sorrow…
Ben suddenly felt the woman’s palm clench, the sudden loss of some of the mental connection jolted him partially back to the present.
The woman’s eyes were pressed up tight in deep pain, even through the driving rain he could see hot tears trickling down her face. She had something else, something extremely important to show him, however whatever this memory was held a lot of sorrow and pain for her, and she was having obvious difficulty forcing herself to make it surface.
Having almost entirely lost his fear of her now through having experienced her essence and memories with the Force connection, Ben decided he would help coax whatever this painful, important memory was out of this beautiful, tormented woman.
The woman detected his sudden shift in emotion; her now tear-reddened eyes slowly opened and focused softly on his gentle brown eyes that reflected the dancing fire of the angry red saber.
The ghostly hint of a smile crossed her lips, and she unclenched her hand, allowing it to extend loosely into his.
Ben cracked a softened expression through his dripping black hair, and intertwined his cold fingers into her warm left hand.
The woman’s silk-soft hand closed tightly around his, and the mental connection flared white again, even stronger than before:
“They’ve found us! Run!!”
Heavy footfalls and blasters firing sounded off close by; images of racing feet charging down hollow gray durasteel halls and dodging red and green laser bolts flew past.
“Shit… we’ll never get past those blast doors. What can we do?” The woman flicked her eyes up questioning an unseen partner – her emotions indicated that this was her lover from the previous memories – and she nodded an affirmative.
“Alright, I don’t like it one bit but it’s the best we’ve got. We have this one chance to end this now. You’ve go on ahead, I’ll be right behind you!” she shouted.
The woman leapt into the center of the hall, simultaneously igniting a bright red lightsaber – a single bladed one – and began deflecting blaster fire back at the men who were firing at her. Her anger was peaked; she knew she would protect him from the enemy at all costs.
“YES! Don't wait- YES YOU CAN!! Go… Just GO! DON’T WAIT FOR ME, JUST GOOO! END THIS!!” she screamed over the fray towards her male partner.
He was strong enough to take him on alone, he didn't need her help, she thought to herself.
Old prophecies aside, this ended TONIGHT. The dark master would fall, and her and her lover would bring order to the galaxy at last. She smiled to herself, smugly.
Her emotions came through her minds eye and into Ben's in little snapshots; the sting of sweat, the weight of her weapon, her blazing fury, her cool confidence in her skills as she masterfully swung and countered the hail of gunfire, the pleasure felt in wanton destruction…
Suddenly she felt a hard jolt to her entire chest, as a crushing pain ran through her that was not caused by any external source. “No…”
She turned her head to face the source of the pain, and was caught across her left cheek by a blaster bolt that had made it through to her in her moment of distraction. She wiped an angry hand across the freshly seared flesh, and turned back towards the platoon of white armored men firing at her.
Fury. Anger.
The woman inhaled deeply, and narrowed her once beautiful eyes. Her pupils constricted to tiny pinpricks as she slowly, ominously raised both of her hands.
Hatred. Destruction. Death.
Vicious hatred and death collected and pooled through every cell in her body, fueling her with the unholy power of darkness. Cracks of white and blue flew from her fingertips, incinerating the squad of thirty soldiers who stood before her.
Their dying screams echoed off the walls like banshees wails, the steel hall dancing with the reflections of light and fire.
After it was over, she spun on her heels, momentarily wondering how she had been able to call lightning to her fingertips when she had not been able to before, as she darted into the room past the blast doors, which had been cut through by someone armed with another lightsaber…
She skidded to a halt as soon as she could see the center of the massive chamber.
A crumpled black mass lay in the center of the floor, a deactivated lightsaber hilt at the side of his slackly open hand.
“No… it's impossible...”
Tears pricked her eyes. She flew to the side of the fallen dark warrior and gently touched his stilled, blood spattered hand.
His chest was open from his collarbone to his heart; she could see past his black armor and into his raw, red chest cavity which had pooled up with nearly his body's blood volume.
Her face flushed hot and angry, as she realized that she could see the fatal wound itself – a lightsaber wound directly through the tight knot of cardiac muscles on his heart.
In horror, she put the scene back together to recreate what had happened; her lover had come face to face alone with his master for the final showdown, and his master – his malicious, twisted, evil master who had delighted in tormenting and controlling him throughout his entire life - had simply controlled his former apprentice one final time in order to drive his own lightsaber through his heart and chest.
Her lover had failed his final mission. His master was gone, escaped during the battle.
And the dark warrior was dead.
The beautiful black-clad woman knelt over the crumpled man and placed a pleading kiss upon his slightly bloodied lips. Her battle strained lungs took in a sharp burst of air; and she screamed out into the open chamber.
The woman did not simply cry out over her grief, but instead furiously poured all of her burning emptiness into a single heart-rending keening note of loss; for her, this was the loss of purpose, of stability, of reason for living. The loss of her soul mate, with whom she had shared everything with for so long. This was the mourning of the death of hope.
And it was all her fault for sending him to face his master alone.
The dark prophecy had come true.
Ben felt the connection lessen and fade as her hand gently released his.
The woman's eyes slowly slid open and fixed upon his, as she powered down the red lightsaber and lowered her right hand. A broken, defeated smile cracked upon her lips as she raised her head upwards into the pouring rain.
The young man watched her with a newfound sense of awe; this person who stood before him was clearly one of the most powerful Force users in the galaxy, yet she had just exposed her entire life - her innermost private memories, emotions, and her deepest secrets - to him. Why?
The woman lowered her head again and chuckled a fractured laugh, her voice barely a whisper. “For you. That’s why.”
Had she somehow heard his thoughts, even with no physical connection in place anymore? How was that possible-
Ben furrowed his brows together in confusion for a brief moment - right before the woman leaned forward and tightly placed her soft lips upon his.
Ben's startled, velvety brown eyes flew open wide in shock.
She was kissing him!! But why?
As Ben's mind raced with adrenaline and surprise, he felt the beautiful woman gently moving her lower lip against his; the swell of her plush, tender lips caressing his and imploring and encouraging him to return the gesture.
Unsure of himself, Ben tentatively returned a few unsure, shaky movements from his wet mouth to her soft, warm lips. His smooth white teeth clicked against hers with a pop, but she ignored his inexperienced blunder and coolly continued working her practiced mouth up against his.
After a few hesitant, nervous moments to gather up what little confidence he possessed in himself, the young man pressed his quivering lips to hers with a bit more force than he had before, and he leaned into her kiss with a soft breath.
As he moved himself against her, a deep fiery heat exploded in his chest like nothing he had ever experienced before. His body bloomed and quivered with white hot fire and invisible arcs of electricity that danced along the surface of his pale wet skin.
The beautiful woman ran her fingertips along his freezing cold face almost reverently; somehow he could sense that this moment, this kiss, was unspeakably precious for her in a way that he could never fully understand.
Ben could feel her intensity, her bottomless love and smoldering passions bleeding up through her and into him… but something bothered him. He didn’t even know her name, yet he could feel the great depths of smoldering, passionate emotion that burned within her body for him... And only for him.
But why had she chosen him?
She was a powerful Force user, a vengeful angel in battle who commanded the lightning of the darkness with her fingertips and brought starships down from the heavens.
Why should someone as powerful as her feel so strongly for him, an inexperienced, angry boy who had ran from his training due to embarrassment brought on by other children?
Feeling his confusion and realizing the impropriety of her current passionate physical and emotional state with a soaking wet sixteen year-old boy, the woman drew herself back. She released his plush lips and breathed out a puff of hot air in a sensuous exhalation, but not before taking a moment to admire the young man's innocent, bewildered facial expression with a sweet smile.
Rain had tamped his long black curls tightly to his forehead, and his slightly too-big nose and lips had not yet grown into his boyish face. His smooth baby-plump cheeks were flushed pink with an embarrassed blush.
He still had those same beauty marks and freckles though... 'Some things always remain the same', she guessed with a half laugh.
He was so young, with so much life still ahead of him. His large hands clenched and unclenched with nervousness as he watched her, and his big feet shuffled awkwardly beneath him. The tall, lanky boy was clearly not used to being the target of anyone’s affection, let alone feeling such intense things like what she had allowed him to feel through and with her
Ben's eyes watched her with all of the intensity of a dark star; his expression was blank with disbelief and shock, but it was underwritten with an unspoken desire to continue. He suddenly feared to reveal his latter emotion to her - or his embarassing state of physical arousal - for fear that she would come to her senses and realize that she had actually confused him for another, and discontinue her amorous dalliances with him.
The beautiful woman simply smiled as she gazed upon the confused, wordless young man. 'Oh, if only I had more time here, I would teach him about so many things... That innocence... I remember it so well...', she thought to herself, with a slightly lusty smirk.
The thunder rolled ominously, and lightning illuminated a distant darkened hillside.
Ben contained watching her silently with his large black-brown eyes; his brain was still reeling and replaying the last several seconds over and over again as he tried to make sense out of the emotional chaos that he had just experienced.
The young man's blush suddenly deepened into a brilliant rose color as he realized that he had just had his first kiss. It was not at all what he had imagined it to be.... This was better. For although it had been with a mysterious, beautiful stranger, his first kiss had been more intoxicating, exhilarating and passionate than he could have ever imagined.
And Ben suddenly realized that he liked the way her kiss made him feel... And he wanted more than anything for her to do it to him again.
As he fixated on this novel experience, an odd flare of light pricked his brain, like a match tossed into the darkness. He focused down hard to understand the cause of and the source of the tiny light when without notice, he realized that the light was actually an opening, a connection to another end that was not himself.
He followed the thread to its end, and raised his right hand... Which softly came to a rest on the face of the beautiful, yet now equally rain-soaked woman standing before him.
His dark brows suddenly pinched together in understanding as the impossible became reality; his pink mouth fell slightly agape at the very crystal clear recognition of himself, seen through her eyes... as a fully grown man.
“That man in your memories... Was me.”
She smiled and placed her left hand on his, her fingers gently tracing the bones of his hand through his skin. ”Yes. He was – and is - you. For what to me was very long ago, and what to you has not yet been.”
Ben stroked her face with trembling fingertips, his nervousness somewhat soothed with the lifetime of memories that she had provided with the palms of her hands, and now with her kiss providing the first faint flickers of an unbreakable Force-bond that if left to grow, would build a permanent and unbreakable juncture between their souls.
Ben choked back his words as he realized a crucial problem with the current situation, “How is this possible? How do you have memories and experiences with me that have not yet happened?”
The woman smiled and whispered, “I’m not from your time; I am from the futu-“
She stopped abruptly; her look suddenly turned deadly serious. “…I am from one of many possible futures for you.”
The woman looked hard into Ben’s eyes, past them, and straight into his soul. “And if what I have done and shown you here tonight has done what I have hoped it will, then I will never exist in your time.”
The boy pulled his hand back in shock and pain, as his smooth face screwed up in hurt. “How could you show me all of this and make me-“ he paused, his nervous insecurities suddenly bubbling up and making him somehow still afraid to reveal the feelings he had felt for her during the kiss.
He continued, quickly avoiding admitting the truth that he had indeed felt something very powerful for her during their kiss. “If you aren’t going to exist, then why would you kiss me like that? Make me experience all of your feelings for him - for me - and show me those future memories from myself with you? Why would you do that to me just to leave me forever?” Angry tears began to pull at Ben’s lower eyelids as heat built in his icy cold cheeks.
The woman smiled warmly and whispered as she looked down at the hilt of the red saber in her right hand. “If things work out, then yes, I will not exist; not as I am, and not with the memories of my life. I knew that this was a one-way trip when I took it, but I had to do it in order to save you."
Her fingers idly traced the worn metal grooves where his fingers once spent many long hours as she spoke. "You must know, that somewhere in this galaxy, another version of me still exists. However, she has no knowledge of you, or us, or what has or might will happen. You must find her and show her what I have showed you; tell her the things I have told you. Teach her all that she needs to know, in order for her to help save you... from him.”
She palmed the cold steel edges of the lightsaber’s hilt, feeling its familiar shape one final time, before working it into Ben’s hand.
Her expression darkened suddenly. “Your master – the dark shadow who even now speaks with you in the nighttime hours – exists as well in this time. He will destroy you if you let him, Ben."
The woman's countenance burned with regret as she spoke. "You cannot defeat him without me, just as I cannot defeat him without you. We must do it together. That was the fatal flaw I committed in my lifetime, I sent you on ahead to face him alone... and he destroyed you with your own hand. When the time comes, and on the day that you face down your dark master, we must rise against him together as one force. If we do not we will fail, and we will be damned to repeat this cycle again and again, until we succeed... together.”
While Ben mulled over his turbulent emotions and the strange order to only fight his master alongside the black-clad woman's present day duplicate or fail, the woman’s eyes pressed themselves closed, suddenly weighted down with a great pain as she continued speaking.
“In my time, our enemy’s research department had just found a way to harness the power of temporal rifts. However, I stole their only prototype device in order to prevent them from using it, and in the process the machine was activated. The control panel was so damaged that it could never be activated again... I had mere moments to pick a destination time before the device's core exploded. But I knew you would be here, at this exact time, from the stories you had told me many years from now..." Her glistening eyes opened and focused hard on Ben. "...Stories about a mysterious stranger that you met in a violent storm that had changed your life forever.”
She looked down towards Ben’s skinned and slightly bloody left hand, her eyes distant in place and memory; the fatalism that permeated the thought that 'her Ben' - a man so much stronger and more powerful than this scared, fragile, rain-soaked boy - had somehow failed an earlier version of herself was a bitter pill to swallow, and the causality loop that it created terrified her.
With a quick push of her hand through her shimmering hair, she shoved away all thoughts of unbreakable paradoxes and fate and her mind raced back to the known facts of her current improbable situation.
”The time travel process... it is not perfect. It has some flaws; flaws in that the temporal displacement effect is only temporary for biological organisms. Metal, machines… they are not adversely affected like how life forms are. Life forms and the fields of energy that are emitted by living tissues cause problems for the space-time continuum that the scientists had not had time to fix or resolve before I destroyed their only device and arrived here.”
Ben raised one of his dark eyebrows in mild confusion. “Meaning?”
The woman’s shining eyes flicked back up to the young man’s, her Force-bond brimming with the black thoughts of death and demise again. “Meaning, soon the temporal distortion effect caused by my absence in my timeline will catch up to me, and the wrinkled fabric of time will right itself and smooth out flat once more. This version of me that is trapped in your time against the natural laws of the universe will become forever... unmade.”
Ben’s mouth fell slack in horror. “What?! ‘Unmade’? How!! When?”
The woman shrugged, silvery rain droplets sliding down the front of her cloak as the downpour slowed to a fine mist. “Soon… maybe a minute or so from now, from what I could tell from the calculations. I know don't have long here... And also I don’t know exactly what will happen to me when time rights itself.”
She peered up at the now furious young man with a calm, serene expression in her smile. “But… I want you to find me again. You've found me many times before after all.”
That odd feeling of satisfaction in the face of certain death returned, this time flowing back through the Force-bond into Ben. His nose wrinkled up as hot tears began to flow down his face. “I don’t know where to find you! How am I supposed to?! I don’t-”
She placed a single finger on his lips and inhaled deeply to speak.
A deep sigh escaped her lips instead of words, as she furrowed her brow and gazed deep into the young man's wide pools of tear-stained brown eyes.
Would this tempestuous, mercurial boy have the stamina and fortitude to follow her last wishes? Would he rise once more and become the powerful man that she knew and loved as her other half? Had she impressed herself and their love upon him well enough that he would seek her out, teach her to love him, and finally break the cycle by working together to defeat his master?
The distant echoes of a twice-removed memory reminded her that this was likely not the first time that her presence had been here in this very spot, speaking to this boy... But she believed she had succeeded, at least this time.
She, for the first time in many long years, finally held a fragment of hope in her heart.
Lightning cracked close, enough to make both of their heads jerk hard in the direction of the flash.
An ominous roar of sucking air increased in intensity and that bright, sharp ozone smell was accumulating again; something large and unnatural was coming back on the winds of the electrical storm.
The woman swallowed, her face etched with fear and uncertainty – and then after a silent moment of reassurance, she stilled her fears and narrowed her eyes bitterly at the storm with a new, hardened resolve. 'He will succeed. We will succeed this time.'
She turned back towards Ben, her eyes filled with that deep, vibrant love, one final time… and she smiled.
Wordlessly, she placed a hand upon his forehead and pushed his wet black hair away from his tearful brown eyes. Her fingers ghosted over the angles of his cheek and jaws, her eyes refusing to leave his as she leaned in one final time for a kiss.
Ben tearfully returned the kiss and wrapped his arms around her tightly, drawing her body up into his cold wet tunic, as if by holding onto her as hard as he could he could prevent her from ever leaving him. His soft mouth worked frantically against her warm lips, feeling as much of her as he could in the seconds that he had left.
“You will know where to go, Ben. You will know. Find me through the Force-bond. I’m waiting… for you.”
Ben suddenly felt his arms drop away - the warm weight of the woman was gone.
His tearful eyes snapped open in horror – absolutely nothing of her remained but memories and the hilt of that strange red lightsaber in his bruised left hand… the same one that had pierced his heart and taken his life in another lifetime.
After many long, silent minutes that rolled into hours, the terrible storm passed by.
/p>The rainfall slowly stilled and trickled into a quiet spattering of background noise, by which Ben could collect his thoughts and dry his eyes.
The dark haired young man slowly rose to to his feet, in spite of his cold, wet body and various minor injuries. He bit his lower lip and lifted his head skyward towards the tail end of the retreating thunderstorm.
His boyish, innocent face was now tinged with the haunted ghost of another life lived; his glittering honey-brown eyes reflected a drive and determination that hadn’t been there before.
Ben had work to do now, a mission… and a sense of hope, somewhere out there. He watched the fading clouds roiling in the distance and clamped his hand down hard on the cold metal of the lightsaber’s hilt.
“I will find you.”
The black storm rumbled its dark reply over the distant hills.