![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
FIC: Yesterday’s Sunrise [Star Wars, Leia & Luke & Ben]
Title: Yesterday’s Sunrise
Author: Omnicat
Spoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge: George Lucas & co’a Star Wars: Episode I through VI, though nothing specific, and J.J. Abrams & co’s Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens and Rian Johnson & co’s Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi.
Warnings: Canon-typical.
Characters & Relationships: Leia & Luke & Ben
Summary: If Leia Organa has to travel back in time to punch her brother in the face and keep her son from falling to the Dark Side, so be it. // 2103 words
Author’s Note: The italicized opening paragraphs are straight from the TLJ novelization. This fic assumes Luke didn’t tell Han and Leia what really happened the night Ben fell, because A) a lot of things in both TFA and TLJ just make no sense to me if he’d ever come clean about his culpability in the incident before, and B) I refuse to believe Han would have put all the blame for what happened at the temple on his kid and said Luke only “felt” responsible if he knew the truth.
Enjoy!
Yesterday’s Sunrise
Luke Skywalker looks down at his nephew Ben Solo – no longer a boy but not yet a man. He has come into his chambers, at night, and now stands over him. The Jedi Master’s eyes are closed. The Force is aboil with danger. Worry shadows Luke’s face as he extends his hand, reaching out with the Force – reaching into the sleeping Ben’s mind.
The boy remains still, his face untroubled. And Luke’s eyes remain shut. But he can see: fire, and ruin, and the sightless eyes of the dead. And he can hear: screams, and the howl of lightsabers, and the roar of explosions.
Darkness – expanding from this slim, dark-haired boy to shroud everything – and the cacophony of terror that will accompany it. Luke draws his hand back, as if burned. The Force around Ben has always been shot through with veins of darkness, but what he’s seen is beyond anything he’d feared to find.
Luke removes his lightsaber from his belt andignites the blade, his eyes grave.
– and he sensed something that, in his preoccupation with Ben’s future, had crept up on him unnoticed. A presence that was at once delightfully familiar and frighteningly –
Luke whipped around and had a split second to take in his sister’s form, backlit by moonlight, her hand reaching for his shoulder... before her stance shifted, her other fist came flying at his face, and he stumbled back amidst an explosion of pain. The momentum from Leia’s blow sent him tripping backwards into and over Ben’s bed. The next he knew, he was flat on his back on the other side of it, with his legs up in the air and Ben’s eyes meeting his. Ben’s dark, expressive eyes, so much like his mother’s, wide with confusion and fear...
Oh no.
Then Leia turned on the light. By the time Luke’s eyes adjusted and he could see again, she was standing over them both, vibrating with barely contained fury, and he had bigger things to worry about than his nephew recreating his father’s reign of death and destruction.
“You,” she said to Luke in a voice that could have made the windows ice over. “Out. Now.”
“Leia, I –” he started, but he couldn’t think of what to say to her. He couldn’t think of what to say to himself. So instead he asked: “How did you get here?”
“Time travel,” she snapped. “Don’t make me drag you away from my son, Luke, because you have no idea how much I’d like to.”
Time travel?
...oh no.
All the blood drained from Luke’s face. “Does that mean – ?”
His sister had enough enraged mother strength to bodily hurl him out of the room, was what it meant.
“My child, Luke, my only child!”
“Leia, I –”
“How could you even think, for even one second –”
“Leia, will you please –”
“I trusted you to take care of him, to help him, and what do you do?”
“I –”
“Oh, you changed your mind before you could go through with it? Well, fat lot of good that did, huh?”
“At least tell me what you’re talking about!”
“Not until I’m finished. Try to interrupt me one more time and I will punch again. Do you have any idea how badly I’ve been wanting to do that the past couple of months? But you were dead, so I felt guilty about it. Well, you’re not dead anymore, so don’t expect that to stop me now!”
“Dead?” Ben whispered.
Leia didn’t hear him.
“And you know what the worst part was? I didn’t want to believe her at first. Part of me actually hoped the poor girl had misunderstood and you were blaming yourself for something that wasn’t your fault at all, even if it meant all the blame stayed with Ben. I didn’t want to believe that you’d run away and let me believe the worst of him for so many years. I didn’t want to believe that I came so close to giving up on my own son because you didn’t have the spine to admit he didn’t turn on you out of nowhere. Or maybe you simply didn’t think that little detail mattered, Mister ‘I appealed to Darth Vader’s love for his family so hard he promptly turned back to the Light Side’? Your childhood fantasy of having a heroic war hero for a father was a good enough reason to try to bring him back home, but my Ben running away because you almost murdered him in his sleep wasn’t?!”
“Mom!” Ben cried out, tearing her attention away from Luke. His expression broke her heart all over again. “Did – did I kill Uncle Luke? In the future?”
She took his face in her hands and said, with every fibre of conviction in her body: “Sweetheart. What happened in the future doesn’t matter anymore. You haven’t killed anyone and you never will. Not if I can help it.”
But Ben, her son, this beautiful stranger who’d grown from an awkward, gangly boy to a strong, tall young man without her, searched her eyes and said: “So I did.”
Leia forced back her tears and nodded.
“Please don’t lie to me,” he rasped, shaking beneath her hands.
So she told them everything.
Ben hadn’t cried, but it was such a painfully close thing Leia was sure they would both have felt better if he had. His mouth and jaw trembled, his frantically blinking eyes were bloodshot, and his skin was almost shockingly blotchy, deathly pale and bright pink in turns, like a Felucian mixed fruit salad. He wouldn’t look at her, or Luke. There was a thrashing knot of pain and conflicting emotions in his chest that, even as a mere echo across the Force, took her breath away. But he’d sat next to her on the bed throughout the whole story and he was returning her hold on his hand with a death grip of his own, which was more than she had dared to hope for in the months it had taken to get here.
Even as she laid out his older self’s deplorable actions, Leia wondered how she could have misjudged the boy he had been – the boy he was again – so badly.
Luke lifted his head from where he’d slumped down further and further against the wall of Ben’s cabin, his face in his hands. “I’m so sorry. Ben, I – I don’t what to say.”
“Then how about you just don’t say anything,” Ben spat, barely holding onto his temper.
Leia put her other hand over their clasped hands. Ben’s eyes flitted up to hers, down to their hands, and away again, his scowling face downturned.
“I’m not sure there’s a lot left to say for now,” she said. “It’s the dead of night and they’re a long ten years to take in. Maybe we should sleep on it.”
“I’m not staying here,” Ben said immediately.
Leia couldn’t help but agree. All the work and preparation that had gone into her trip, and still she had almost been too late. Oh, she knew logically that nothing irreversible would have happened if she’d been a few seconds late, or even a few minutes. Luke would have come to his senses, Ben’s defensive actions would merely have knocked Luke out, and the situation with the rest of the temple’s inhabitants would have taken a while to escalate. But watching her brother draw arms on her defenseless, sleeping son had awoken something feral in her that bared its teeth and snarled at the thought of trusting her child’s safety to reason and restraint and the bone-deep goodness she knew Luke to have.
“No. Let’s not. I brought a ship. Gather your things, sweetheart. I’m taking you home.”
Ben’s rush of emotion at those words – ‘I’m taking you home’ – nearly bowled Leia and Luke over. It felt too big for words like ‘relief’ or ‘gratitude’ or ‘homesickness’ or ‘love’. It felt too big for one person to contain.
“Luke, with me,” Leia ordered through the lump in her throat, and they left Ben to his task and to the tears that were finally starting to fall.
They walked out into the moonlit night, Leia taking point and Luke following, neither quite together nor apart, until she stopped and turned on her heel to face him.
“Did you feel that?” Luke asked with awe and something like ruin in his voice.
She nodded.
“Did you see what it did to him?”
She wasn’t sure what Luke meant by that, but she had an inkling – a hope, a wish.
“‘I’m taking you home,’” Luke echoed, scrubbing at his face. “All this time, it was that easy to turn him away from the Dark Side? From this – this Snoke figure?”
“Seems like it,” Leia said. She wouldn’t cry. Not when she had her impossible, miraculous second chance. Not when she might finally get to keep them all.
“Leia, I...” Luke started, but again he didn’t finish.
She had stopped him before he could cross the line he would have ultimately drawn himself back from. In the original version of events, he’d at least had that knowledge to hold onto through it all. Now he only knew that he had been in the process of doing something that would set in motion the very darkness he’d feared. It was a terrible burden to have to learn to bear.
“I know, Luke. You don’t have to explain. I understand. It’s just...” She choked up a little, and raised her hands in front of her as if cupping something. “Do you remember how small he was?”
Luke let out a watery laugh. “Yeah, I do.”
“I know I won’t stay mad at you. I know it was just a stupid momentary impulse and you wouldn’t have gone through with it. But he’s my baby, Luke, and I hadn’t seen him for years and then he just disappeared, and I need...”
She wasn’t this mad at Luke for what he did while only feeling protective of Ben despite what he did for rational reasons. There was her long resignation to Kylo Ren’s existence versus the fresh revelations about Luke, the risk she’d known Han would willingly be taking on Starkiller contrasted with the safety they’d thought giving Ben to Luke had meant, and she knew much of it was simply the enormity of her grief talking; overwhelming pain carving strange paths through her mind to travel. Part of her already felt guilty for not being unfeelingly fair and practical, but –
Luke cupped her cheek, and his tenderness almost undid her. Force, she’d missed them both so much. “You don’t have to explain. I understand.”
“Holo me in a few weeks,” she made him promise. “I have missed you as well, and I’m sure Ben will have calmed down a little by then too. And I’ll need your help for what’s to come.”
He gave her his word, and she squeezed his hand, and then she went to ready her ship.
Ben was waiting for her below the ramp with only his lightsaber at his belt and a cloth sack slung over his shoulder.
“Is that everything?” she asked.
“I don’t want the rest of it,” he said.
He never wanted to come back to this place, Leia realized, and she regretted ever sending him away all over again. They’d barely managed to bring her mind back this far with her memories intact, but oh, the fantasies she’d had between Rey discovering the secret to this Force technique and the two of them figuring out its limitations...
Ben’s eyes were clear about what he did want, though, even if he might not be able to make himself say it yet. And that was fine. They had plenty of time again to get themselves worked out. Leia had brought an itemized list of changes she intended to make to the timeline from here on out, as well as one of things she wanted to remember to do and people to help even if they no longer crossed paths naturally. But that could wait; her schedule was clear for the foreseeable future. Her first priority now was bringing clear skies back to her own family.
She reached up and hugged Ben to her tightly, and pretended not to notice the shivers that wracked his frame before he could melt into it and squeeze back.
“Where’s dad?” he asked in a small voice.
“I don’t know. The Mid Rim somewhere. But last time, he dropped everything to come here the moment I called. Wanna go get him?”
“Yes.”
So that’s what they did.
Author: Omnicat
Spoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge: George Lucas & co’a Star Wars: Episode I through VI, though nothing specific, and J.J. Abrams & co’s Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens and Rian Johnson & co’s Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi.
Warnings: Canon-typical.
Characters & Relationships: Leia & Luke & Ben
Summary: If Leia Organa has to travel back in time to punch her brother in the face and keep her son from falling to the Dark Side, so be it. // 2103 words
Author’s Note: The italicized opening paragraphs are straight from the TLJ novelization. This fic assumes Luke didn’t tell Han and Leia what really happened the night Ben fell, because A) a lot of things in both TFA and TLJ just make no sense to me if he’d ever come clean about his culpability in the incident before, and B) I refuse to believe Han would have put all the blame for what happened at the temple on his kid and said Luke only “felt” responsible if he knew the truth.
Enjoy!
Yesterday’s Sunrise
Luke Skywalker looks down at his nephew Ben Solo – no longer a boy but not yet a man. He has come into his chambers, at night, and now stands over him. The Jedi Master’s eyes are closed. The Force is aboil with danger. Worry shadows Luke’s face as he extends his hand, reaching out with the Force – reaching into the sleeping Ben’s mind.
The boy remains still, his face untroubled. And Luke’s eyes remain shut. But he can see: fire, and ruin, and the sightless eyes of the dead. And he can hear: screams, and the howl of lightsabers, and the roar of explosions.
Darkness – expanding from this slim, dark-haired boy to shroud everything – and the cacophony of terror that will accompany it. Luke draws his hand back, as if burned. The Force around Ben has always been shot through with veins of darkness, but what he’s seen is beyond anything he’d feared to find.
Luke removes his lightsaber from his belt and
– and he sensed something that, in his preoccupation with Ben’s future, had crept up on him unnoticed. A presence that was at once delightfully familiar and frighteningly –
Luke whipped around and had a split second to take in his sister’s form, backlit by moonlight, her hand reaching for his shoulder... before her stance shifted, her other fist came flying at his face, and he stumbled back amidst an explosion of pain. The momentum from Leia’s blow sent him tripping backwards into and over Ben’s bed. The next he knew, he was flat on his back on the other side of it, with his legs up in the air and Ben’s eyes meeting his. Ben’s dark, expressive eyes, so much like his mother’s, wide with confusion and fear...
Oh no.
Then Leia turned on the light. By the time Luke’s eyes adjusted and he could see again, she was standing over them both, vibrating with barely contained fury, and he had bigger things to worry about than his nephew recreating his father’s reign of death and destruction.
“You,” she said to Luke in a voice that could have made the windows ice over. “Out. Now.”
“Leia, I –” he started, but he couldn’t think of what to say to her. He couldn’t think of what to say to himself. So instead he asked: “How did you get here?”
“Time travel,” she snapped. “Don’t make me drag you away from my son, Luke, because you have no idea how much I’d like to.”
Time travel?
...oh no.
All the blood drained from Luke’s face. “Does that mean – ?”
His sister had enough enraged mother strength to bodily hurl him out of the room, was what it meant.
“My child, Luke, my only child!”
“Leia, I –”
“How could you even think, for even one second –”
“Leia, will you please –”
“I trusted you to take care of him, to help him, and what do you do?”
“I –”
“Oh, you changed your mind before you could go through with it? Well, fat lot of good that did, huh?”
“At least tell me what you’re talking about!”
“Not until I’m finished. Try to interrupt me one more time and I will punch again. Do you have any idea how badly I’ve been wanting to do that the past couple of months? But you were dead, so I felt guilty about it. Well, you’re not dead anymore, so don’t expect that to stop me now!”
“Dead?” Ben whispered.
Leia didn’t hear him.
“And you know what the worst part was? I didn’t want to believe her at first. Part of me actually hoped the poor girl had misunderstood and you were blaming yourself for something that wasn’t your fault at all, even if it meant all the blame stayed with Ben. I didn’t want to believe that you’d run away and let me believe the worst of him for so many years. I didn’t want to believe that I came so close to giving up on my own son because you didn’t have the spine to admit he didn’t turn on you out of nowhere. Or maybe you simply didn’t think that little detail mattered, Mister ‘I appealed to Darth Vader’s love for his family so hard he promptly turned back to the Light Side’? Your childhood fantasy of having a heroic war hero for a father was a good enough reason to try to bring him back home, but my Ben running away because you almost murdered him in his sleep wasn’t?!”
“Mom!” Ben cried out, tearing her attention away from Luke. His expression broke her heart all over again. “Did – did I kill Uncle Luke? In the future?”
She took his face in her hands and said, with every fibre of conviction in her body: “Sweetheart. What happened in the future doesn’t matter anymore. You haven’t killed anyone and you never will. Not if I can help it.”
But Ben, her son, this beautiful stranger who’d grown from an awkward, gangly boy to a strong, tall young man without her, searched her eyes and said: “So I did.”
Leia forced back her tears and nodded.
“Please don’t lie to me,” he rasped, shaking beneath her hands.
So she told them everything.
Ben hadn’t cried, but it was such a painfully close thing Leia was sure they would both have felt better if he had. His mouth and jaw trembled, his frantically blinking eyes were bloodshot, and his skin was almost shockingly blotchy, deathly pale and bright pink in turns, like a Felucian mixed fruit salad. He wouldn’t look at her, or Luke. There was a thrashing knot of pain and conflicting emotions in his chest that, even as a mere echo across the Force, took her breath away. But he’d sat next to her on the bed throughout the whole story and he was returning her hold on his hand with a death grip of his own, which was more than she had dared to hope for in the months it had taken to get here.
Even as she laid out his older self’s deplorable actions, Leia wondered how she could have misjudged the boy he had been – the boy he was again – so badly.
Luke lifted his head from where he’d slumped down further and further against the wall of Ben’s cabin, his face in his hands. “I’m so sorry. Ben, I – I don’t what to say.”
“Then how about you just don’t say anything,” Ben spat, barely holding onto his temper.
Leia put her other hand over their clasped hands. Ben’s eyes flitted up to hers, down to their hands, and away again, his scowling face downturned.
“I’m not sure there’s a lot left to say for now,” she said. “It’s the dead of night and they’re a long ten years to take in. Maybe we should sleep on it.”
“I’m not staying here,” Ben said immediately.
Leia couldn’t help but agree. All the work and preparation that had gone into her trip, and still she had almost been too late. Oh, she knew logically that nothing irreversible would have happened if she’d been a few seconds late, or even a few minutes. Luke would have come to his senses, Ben’s defensive actions would merely have knocked Luke out, and the situation with the rest of the temple’s inhabitants would have taken a while to escalate. But watching her brother draw arms on her defenseless, sleeping son had awoken something feral in her that bared its teeth and snarled at the thought of trusting her child’s safety to reason and restraint and the bone-deep goodness she knew Luke to have.
“No. Let’s not. I brought a ship. Gather your things, sweetheart. I’m taking you home.”
Ben’s rush of emotion at those words – ‘I’m taking you home’ – nearly bowled Leia and Luke over. It felt too big for words like ‘relief’ or ‘gratitude’ or ‘homesickness’ or ‘love’. It felt too big for one person to contain.
“Luke, with me,” Leia ordered through the lump in her throat, and they left Ben to his task and to the tears that were finally starting to fall.
They walked out into the moonlit night, Leia taking point and Luke following, neither quite together nor apart, until she stopped and turned on her heel to face him.
“Did you feel that?” Luke asked with awe and something like ruin in his voice.
She nodded.
“Did you see what it did to him?”
She wasn’t sure what Luke meant by that, but she had an inkling – a hope, a wish.
“‘I’m taking you home,’” Luke echoed, scrubbing at his face. “All this time, it was that easy to turn him away from the Dark Side? From this – this Snoke figure?”
“Seems like it,” Leia said. She wouldn’t cry. Not when she had her impossible, miraculous second chance. Not when she might finally get to keep them all.
“Leia, I...” Luke started, but again he didn’t finish.
She had stopped him before he could cross the line he would have ultimately drawn himself back from. In the original version of events, he’d at least had that knowledge to hold onto through it all. Now he only knew that he had been in the process of doing something that would set in motion the very darkness he’d feared. It was a terrible burden to have to learn to bear.
“I know, Luke. You don’t have to explain. I understand. It’s just...” She choked up a little, and raised her hands in front of her as if cupping something. “Do you remember how small he was?”
Luke let out a watery laugh. “Yeah, I do.”
“I know I won’t stay mad at you. I know it was just a stupid momentary impulse and you wouldn’t have gone through with it. But he’s my baby, Luke, and I hadn’t seen him for years and then he just disappeared, and I need...”
She wasn’t this mad at Luke for what he did while only feeling protective of Ben despite what he did for rational reasons. There was her long resignation to Kylo Ren’s existence versus the fresh revelations about Luke, the risk she’d known Han would willingly be taking on Starkiller contrasted with the safety they’d thought giving Ben to Luke had meant, and she knew much of it was simply the enormity of her grief talking; overwhelming pain carving strange paths through her mind to travel. Part of her already felt guilty for not being unfeelingly fair and practical, but –
Luke cupped her cheek, and his tenderness almost undid her. Force, she’d missed them both so much. “You don’t have to explain. I understand.”
“Holo me in a few weeks,” she made him promise. “I have missed you as well, and I’m sure Ben will have calmed down a little by then too. And I’ll need your help for what’s to come.”
He gave her his word, and she squeezed his hand, and then she went to ready her ship.
Ben was waiting for her below the ramp with only his lightsaber at his belt and a cloth sack slung over his shoulder.
“Is that everything?” she asked.
“I don’t want the rest of it,” he said.
He never wanted to come back to this place, Leia realized, and she regretted ever sending him away all over again. They’d barely managed to bring her mind back this far with her memories intact, but oh, the fantasies she’d had between Rey discovering the secret to this Force technique and the two of them figuring out its limitations...
Ben’s eyes were clear about what he did want, though, even if he might not be able to make himself say it yet. And that was fine. They had plenty of time again to get themselves worked out. Leia had brought an itemized list of changes she intended to make to the timeline from here on out, as well as one of things she wanted to remember to do and people to help even if they no longer crossed paths naturally. But that could wait; her schedule was clear for the foreseeable future. Her first priority now was bringing clear skies back to her own family.
She reached up and hugged Ben to her tightly, and pretended not to notice the shivers that wracked his frame before he could melt into it and squeeze back.
“Where’s dad?” he asked in a small voice.
“I don’t know. The Mid Rim somewhere. But last time, he dropped everything to come here the moment I called. Wanna go get him?”
“Yes.”
So that’s what they did.