Space is silent and shuddering and blackened with the weight of everything he has done and will one day do.

Perhaps in some other time, or some other life, Ben Solo would have been a lighter child—less morose, happier, stronger, better able to bear the weight of the galaxy on his shoulders, well-suited to his bloodline and all that came with it. Perhaps. But the numbness in Kylo Ren's soul as he sits in the cool 'cycled air of his TIE/vn space superiority fighter leeches into his bones and whispers the truth he has always known: he has never, not once in his life, been strong enough to follow through on all the promise inherent in that mighty Skywalker blood.

He is orbiting Jakku. He'll leave in a few moments, he tells himself, he's only going to set eyes on Jakku a few minutes more, he just happened to be passing through the sector. It was automatic. The specialized TIE/vn advanced navigation system, designed by First Order engineers who are still waiting for a report on its cross-galaxy time-saving capabilities, routed him this way. Everything is in place. His lightsaber and belt, left in the center of that drafty room on board the Finalizer, will be found soon enough. So will the room.

At that he smiles. Not happily, not in any kind of glee—more in grim satisfaction.

Strike me down in anger and I'll always be with you, Skywalker had boasted on that hideous mineral planet, the light of two suns reflected in his eyes.

Uncle Luke's final lesson. Ben Solo was a poor student, but Ben Solo is dead, and Kylo Ren has learned from the ashes of that sad child.

To say that Kylo struck at the heart of the First Order in anger would be a mistake. One he intends to ensure that the galaxy makes. A few deliberate furrows in the durasteel walls, scorch marks on the floor, sliced-up clothing and cauterized wounds on a cadaver or two—it's criminally easy to incriminate a monster in a man's skin, possessed of a bad temper and an itchy 'saber hand as he is known to be. The First Order may try to regroup, but he has been very careful to do a proper job of beheading it; it will fall, easily, especially when the Resistance catches on to the internal rot that's been eating at the structure of the Order since Snoke's time.

Terror, sharp and sudden, stabs at his beating heart. Kylo sucks in a breath and steadies his shaky hands on the controls of the fighter.

Snoke is dead. Skywalker, too, is dead.

It's time to let old things die—

Another breath. He centers himself as he eases the ship out of orbit, into the depths of the darkness, and enters the rest of the coordinates into the navigation system. In another time, in another life, he'd have reached out to the Force to guide him; perhaps he would have whispered a prayer—stay with me—as he wove his consciousness into the glittering sea of hyperlanes, rediscovering paths long since lost to time with no one to tell him he would be standing on the shoulders of giants. But here, now, in the present, there is only Ben—Kylo—and the vast, empty vista of a thousand uninhabitable stars, crowning Jakku's night with the only sight worth seeing on the whole miserable dust ball of a planet.

It's a shame he doesn't have time to touch down and lay to ruin all that would have harmed her.

Harmed Rey.

He punches in an affirmative answer to the nav system's confirmation prompt a little more violently than is truly necessary and pulls the throttle back.

The stars blur into lines. The past fades away with them.

Kylo Ren is never going back.