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They don’t start out as nightmares, of course – few things ever do.
In the beginning Ben dreams of vast deserts and hazy blue horizons, staircases cut into living rock, bright forests where the moss is so thick underfoot that a person leaves no footprints and dark forests made quiet by falling snow. He describes each one to Leia with the precise and delighted detail of a first-time traveler.
Sometimes he dreams about a woman, dressed all in white, a sword of pale fire held up high in both her hands.
“You mean a lightsaber?”
“No, fire. Like from a big star.” Ben stretches his hands as wide apart as they will go. He is seven years old. “Then we danced together along the edge of the world, and she cut out my heart, but I wasn’t too upset because she put it right back in again when I told her how much I needed it.”
Leia stares down at a holodocument she’s preparing for presentation to the New Republic Senate, a formal statement of opposition to their proposed military disarmament act. Her fingers pause over the keys.
“I hope you asked her politely, at least,” she says. “I’ve heard bringing someone back to life can be very hard work.”
“Oh, right. Yes. I said please and thank you and everything.” Ben is too short for the chair he sits in, which he has carried into her office so that he can offer his numerous opinions and suggest an occasional synonym. He taps his feet together where they dangle off the seat’s edge. “She didn’t say anything to me, though. That was sad.”
“Can you remember what she looked like?”
“No. She had a mask on.” He reaches back, grabs his shirt collar in both hands, and tugs it down over his forehead like a hood. He throws his voice as deep as he can make it. “So did I.”
Finally Leia looks up at him, directly, at the dark eyes set deep in that candle-pale face.
The problem with Ben – this is how his teachers put it, this is how everybody puts it, alongside the popular triumvirate difficult, distracted, and disturbing – is that he’s never in one place at a time; that he always says too little or too much; that he circumvented the lessons of walking as an infant and went directly to running, though what exactly he was running from is still unclear; that sometimes he will arrive home with bleeding cuts, bruises blooming on his arms, insensible to the pain and with no notion of where or how he’s even hurt himself.
(Once Leia found him standing in the middle of a fire, a smoke pit with its still-hot coals left to burn down unattended while the Life Day celebration went on elsewhere. His eyes had been shut, arms loose at his sides, a ruddy light trapped just beneath his skin like someone’s fingers held up close against a glow-lamp. Flames swirled around his legs.
She had sprinted straight across the red-gold embers to him – then Leia reached down with both arms, and in one heaving motion she had grabbed her son up and held him fast and kept on running straight through the fire without a single damn given for whatever suicidal logic might’ve stopped her.
“What’d you do that for?” Ben had asked. He’d been five at the time. “I’m not hurt. They say that’s what happened to Grandpa. He was burned all over everywhere, but they put him back together so he could become somebody else.”)
“…What about all those flying dreams you had, last week?” Leia asks, at last. She returns to her typing. A chronometer on the desk reads 1100 hours, although she’s caught Ben setting this back more than once to forestall his bedtime. “Any more of those?”
“Not yet. But! But, I was thinking –” he always uses his hands while speaking, their bones hollow-frail as a bird’s “– I was thinking, and I had an idea. I know Uncle Luke just calls it lamentation, but if I jump off the roof and concentrate hard enough at the same time I would probably –”
“No. Absolutely not.” Leia frowns. “And you mean levitation, not lamentation.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Well. I suppose one lifts you up while the other holds you down.”
“Oh.” He frowns in mimicry. “But you’d need both, wouldn’t you? Otherwise, how could you ever come back?”
So he likes the dreams, at first.
Some mornings he’ll be restless, yes, dark shadows pooled beneath his eyes, but he’s never really had a habit of sleeping all through the night anyway because this would require staying put for too long.
The bones of his face may develop a martyr’s startling clarity, when viewed from certain angles, but then he already has the long, stubborn jaw of a half-broke gambler – all Han, there – and a nose Leia repeatedly promises he’ll grow into someday.
One morning she observes him trying to lift his cereal spoon, and his left hand is so stiff that he must use his right hand to bend it. At other times he will pause in the midst of what he is doing, his body strained to attention like a listening dog. He never sits with his back to an open door.
She discovers a dead song sparrow buried in the flowerbed, its neck painlessly and mercifully broken. She smoothes the black earth flat again, washes her hands three times, and decides it is not something Han should ever need to know.
(Leia tells herself this quite frequently.)
Then, one night – or just before dawn, to be more precise, the air turning pearl-gray outside – Leia wakes to a quiet weeping in her heart. She rises from an empty bed and lets this sound light her along the darkened hallways, as though she is following a taut silver thread. She arrives to find that her son has left his bedroom door ajar.
The room is antiseptically neat. There is a bed, a clothespress, a chest of mechanical toys and a low bookshelf stacked with datacards on military history, each one chronicling a different ideology carried to its final conclusion. Nothing else is large enough to cast a shadow on the wall.
A muffled sob comes from the closet. Leia opens it, keeping the other hand on her hip for effect.
“Whatever are you doing in there, young man? Dusting?”
Ben shakes his head.
He’s got himself folded up in a corner, his shirt soaked down the front with tears and down the back with sweat. Both hands are pressed over his ears. He is shaking so hard that she nearly mistakes it for convulsions.
(He was born in absolute, dutiful silence, Leia often remembers, so motionless that for a moment they thought he was dead – and there’d been something thin and membranous over his face, as though he were wearing a shroud or a mask.
“It is a caul, madame,” the midwife droid had explained, without malice. “In certain cultures it may promise future greatness. Others name it ‘The Veil of Tears.’ You are free to decide which superstition you will believe.”)
Leia kneels down and finally coaxes him out. They sit on the floor together, his fever-warm body collected in her lap.
“I saw – I thought I saw a long bridge,” he manages to tell her, when his breathing settles. “In my dream. It went over deep hole with lots of red light at its bottom. I was standing in the middle.”
“Did you know what you were doing there?” Bridges, Leia thinks. A beginning or an end, depending which side you’re on. “Did you want to get across?”
“No. I was waiting.”
“For who?”
“Someone who hated me.”
“Why would someone ever hate you, Ben?” Leia asks him this in her most composed, level voice, the one she uses over a communications unit to pilots tail-spinning through the stratosphere. “Could you see who it was?”
His body tenses inward, a steel cable being twisted tight, and then he forces out another long sigh.
“No.”
“Shush, then. It was just a nightmare, wasn’t it? There’s no reason to cry.” She runs a hand through his disheveled hair, while her own falls like a curtain around them both. “You’re safe.”
(Leia holds him this way until the sun rises, until he falls asleep again, and many years later she will realize that these were first two lies they ever told each other.)
…