The night beckons. Trees sigh against the turned down sides of lonely buildings and the wind calls the lost. Sky deepens in shade from a blush to an empty embrace while stars begin to share what light they may so that there may still be light. The smell of storm a hint behind a powerful aroma of dry damp and faint smoke. A kind of silence takes root in all the sounds that do not comfort. The door creaks and flaps in tune to despair slowly crawling through dry leaves at your feet.
And up your spine.
The night beckons. Regret aches in the bend of the willow pushed right to the point where the wood would crack and splinter, but doesn’t. You wish it would crack, you wish it would split open and make evidence that things are what they are. An outward sign of an inner turmoil. A culmination of an experience. An end.
Though the willow was made to bend, you wish it would break. And the night beckons.
The cool lapping water feels almost warm against your skin until you lose yourself deep within it. The warm feeling of first contact disguises the way surrender saps your strength, the way it eats you alive. The water is cold and by the time you realize it you’re drowning. Lost beneath the surface, aching for the wind, with muscles too stiff to find it.
The night is home. The place where quiet things go to die.
A hung head stood in front of the farmhouse door, his cheeks caressed by a careless wind as his murderous hands clench by his sides. The walls had long come down, the roof collapsed all in one corner. The windows shattered, the garden a patch of burnt ground. The farmhouse reeked of a life ruined, a family gone.
Solus lifted his head long enough to catch a glimpse of shadows that were not shadows but physical manifestations of his sins. They crept along the neglected paths around the house of his shame, easing like the noose he wore around his neck. A real reminder that atonement would be unpleasant, for Solus surely needed atonement. The shadows gathered on all sides shoulder-to-shoulder, a dark forest effigy waiting for a signal of the frenzy that would come like rocks sliding down a mountain.
When the Jedi had come for him he had surrendered to their cool peace. An inviting, lapping pond of serenity.
When the Empire had come for his family he held strong to the ice that had sealed him away from his soul. He watched as conflict was not avoided.
The Jedi did not counsel intervention.
The force is larger than any one person.
Larger than any one family.
The night beckons like a familiar friend lifting a tear-stained cheek from underneath its quivering jaw, a feeling not unlike the desperate hope one clings to when death is the only thing left.
Solus felt the wind sigh out of his chest. The Empire would remember who had lived here, long ago. The Empire would know that like any victim of trauma the thought of this place would gnaw a pit through his stomach until the only thing left for him to do would be to return. And as the night beckons like the gentle pull down-stream, regret waxes and widens the call into an unimaginable flow. An irresistible call. A desire for an end.
Like the moments after a small death the squad of Stormtroopers stood transfixed by both the culmination of accomplishment and the rarity of culpable ecstasy. They had been trained for one purpose, and tonight that purpose would be fulfilled.
The hung head, alone in their circle, clenched his murderous fists. He had surrendered. He had killed his family. He had betrayed, and had been betrayed.
Like the warbling cry of a warning siren a single tear fell from the face of a man waiting to die. The Stormtroopers raised their blasters in unison. A million force-sensitives across the galaxy felt a knot take root somewhere deep. Solus used to play a game where he would hold a blaster to his head and rest his finger on the trigger just to see how gently he could pull it without it going off. This is what would have happened if he had ever pulled too far.
The night fell.
And then became day.
Somewhere in the distance a bird called out like the voice of a distant god keening. The last Jedi fell to the floor, burnt and shattered. And as his breath pushed past his lips for the last time the knot that had so suddenly grown in so many people - a knot that had always been rooted within each and every one of them, unnoticed, released. And was gone forever.
The force was never larger than any one person. The force was each person, large. And for now, it had fled.