The Force Bond Tying Me To My Enemy Never Broke, And Now I Have To Find Him To Save The Galaxy

The air on Ajan Kloss was thick, a humid blanket woven from the scents of damp earth and decaying leaves. It clung to Rey’s skin as she knelt on the mossy ground, her focus narrowed to a single, smooth river stone suspended in the air between her and the small Twi’lek boy sitting cross-legged before her.

“Patience, Kaelen,” she said, her voice a soft murmur against the jungle’s symphony of chittering insects and distant cries. “Don’t try to force it. Just… feel it. The life all around us. It’s in you, too. Let it lift the stone.”

The boy’s young face was a mask of concentration, his small lekku twitching. The stone wobbled, then dropped to the ground with a soft thud. He sighed, discouraged.

Rey smiled. “That was close. We’ll try again.”

She closed her eyes, preparing to guide him, to show him the flow of the Force as it moved through the vibrant jungle. But as she reached out, another feeling bled into her senses, sharp and unwelcome. A sudden, stinging grit flooded her vision, and she flinched, her eyes watering instinctively. Sand. Hot, fine, and abrasive. It wasn’t the soft soil of Ajan Kloss; it was the harsh dust of a desert world, carried on a wind that felt scorching even through the bond.

Ben.

She pushed the sensation away, a familiar act of mental defense she’d been forced to practice daily. The phantom sting receded, leaving only the damp jungle air. She opened her eyes, blinking away the moisture. Kaelen was watching her, his large, dark eyes full of concern.

“Are you alright, Master Rey?”

“I’m fine,” she assured him, forcing another smile. “Just lost my focus for a moment. See? It happens to everyone. Let’s try one more time.”

She guided him again, her will a gentle nudge against his. This time, the stone lifted a full foot from the ground, hovering with a slight tremble. Kaelen gasped, his face breaking into a triumphant grin. A wave of pure, simple joy washed through the Force, and Rey let herself feel it, a brief respite.

Then, the other feeling returned, far stronger this time. It wasn't physical. It was a crushing weight that settled deep in her chest, an abyss of self-loathing so profound it stole her breath. Guilt. His guilt. It was a cold, heavy thing, layered with regret and a sorrow that felt ancient. It was the feeling of standing under the unforgiving glare of two suns, utterly alone, with nothing but ghosts for company. The force of it was so intense that her hand went to her stomach, and for a terrifying second, she felt her own knees might buckle under the borrowed burden. This was the other side of their dyad, the part that wasn't a shared strength in battle, but a constant, raw nerve connecting her to his endless atonement.

He gritted his teeth, forcing the wave of her presence down, burying it under the familiar weight of his own shame. He was on Tatooine for a reason. Here, under the glare of the twin suns, the ghosts were honest. The wind whispered his grandfather’s rage. The heat baked his mother’s sorrow into the cracked earth. Every grain of sand was a monument to the failures of his bloodline, and he had come here to drown in it.

Ben Solo wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of a grease-stained glove, his knuckles scraping against the rusted hull of a Zygerrian slave transport. He was tearing it apart, piece by piece, with his bare hands and a few scavenged tools. It was slow, punishing work. Every sheared bolt and pried panel was a prayer of atonement. He surrounded himself with the physical evidence of his past, seeking not forgiveness, but a fitting punishment. The desert offered no comfort, and that was why he’d chosen it.

A sudden, jarring sensation cut through the oppressive heat. It was the feeling of cool, damp air on his skin, the scent of wet earth and something alive, blooming. It was her. Ajan Kloss. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to block it out, but the connection was a part of him now, an open wound. Through it, he felt a surge of bright, uncomplicated pride that was not his own, followed by the soundless echo of a child’s laughter.

The feeling was so pure, so alien in the desolate landscape of his mind, that it was physically painful. It was a light shining into a place he wanted to keep dark, illuminating the filth he had chosen to live in. Hope. She was radiating it, a steady, patient warmth that felt like a brand against his skin. He felt her gentle encouragement, the quiet satisfaction of a teacher.

It was too much. The contrast was a chasm that threatened to swallow him. Her world was teeming with life, with a future she was actively building. His was a graveyard, a self-imposed exile where the only future was the slow erosion of his past. He stumbled back from the transport, his breath catching in his throat. He could feel her, a phantom presence at the edge of his senses—the soft fabric of her tunic, the weight of her hair tied back from her face. It was an intimacy he hadn't asked for and felt he had no right to.

He pushed back with all his will, flooding the bond with the grit and the heat and the crushing weight of his guilt, hoping to sever the connection, to drive her away. For a moment, he felt her recoil, a flicker of shared pain. Then the vibrant green of her world receded, and he was alone again.

The silence that rushed back in was heavier than before. The two suns beat down on him, merciless. He was left with nothing but the rasp of his own breathing and the ghosts of this forsaken world. But the echo of that child’s laughter lingered, a fragile, unbearable sound in the vast emptiness.

The work on Ajan Kloss was endless. Inside the cool cavern that served as their makeshift archive, Rey was carefully cleaning the delicate pages of an ancient Jedi text when a persistent beeping from her comm unit broke the silence. She set the text aside and activated the receiver. A flickering blue hologram of a junior New Republic officer materialized, his face pale and strained.

“General… Rey,” he corrected himself. “We received a distress signal from the Felucian system. A farming colony on the moon of Ithor B. The transmission was… degraded. We’re patching through what we could recover.”

The officer’s image was replaced by static, then a woman’s face, her features distorted by fear. Her voice was thin, laced with panic. “…came from the mist. They don’t speak. The ground… it’s turning to dust wherever they walk. The fungi wither, the animals… they just lie down. My son… he’s so cold. There’s nothing left inside him. They’re draining us. They’re draining the world…” The transmission dissolved into a final shriek of static.

Rey’s blood ran cold. She closed her eyes, reaching out with the Force, trying to find the source of this horror. She extended her senses across the stars, past the familiar hum of Ajan Kloss, past the distant, burning ache of Ben’s presence on Tatooine, and toward the Outer Rim.

What she found made her gasp.

It was not the passionate, fiery anger of the dark side. It was not the living warmth of the light. It was a void. A patch of absolute nothingness carved into the fabric of existence. A chilling, parasitic vacuum where life was supposed to be. It felt hungry, unnatural, like a wound that did not bleed but only consumed. It was an anti-Force, a silence that actively devoured sound. The sensation was so profoundly wrong that she felt a wave of nausea.

Across the galaxy, under the searing light of two suns, Ben Solo dropped a heavy hydrospanner to the sand. A sudden, deep cold had just settled in his bones, a cold that had nothing to do with memory or the dyad. He froze, his head tilted as if listening to a sound no one else could hear. He felt it, too. A hole. A dead spot in the universe, silent and terrifyingly empty.

It was a stillness that was not peaceful, but predatory. He had felt the rage of the dark side, the pull of the light, the chaotic energy of life itself. This was none of those things. This was an absence. He knew, with a certainty that bypassed thought, that this was not a feeling coming from Rey. This was something new, something alien.

And through the dyad, in that precise moment, he felt her recoil from the same unnatural abyss. Their shared alarm was a sharp, silent spark between them—not a thought, not a word, but a simultaneous jolt of recognition. The connection that had been a source of conflict and pain for months suddenly became a shared viewport into a new kind of darkness.

Rey opened her eyes, her heart pounding against her ribs. She looked past the frantic officer’s hologram, her gaze unfocused, seeing only the vastness of space that separated her from Ben. His exile was over. She knew it as surely as she knew her own name. Her solitude was, too. This was not a threat for the New Republic. It was a sickness in the Force itself. And to face a void like that, she could not be only half of a whole.