Mirror, Mirror
A gift fic for ichoosepazuzu
They make him kneel at the foot of her throne, forcing him down so hard his knees crack against the shining durasteel. They make no move to secure him, concerned only with escaping their mistress's serpentine gaze. The door hisses closed behind them and there is silence in the vast chamber.
Ben does not look up, but he can see her nonetheless in a distorted reflection on the floor.
"You've run for so long, Ben," her voice wheedles and caresses, "Why? You knew I would find you. Remember? I told you that."
She stands and sidles closer, hand slipping into his hair, sending shivers running from scalp to toes. He knows those fingers, that hand, almost better than he knows his own.
"Tell me what I told you," she coaxes him with an upraised palm. The Force flows from her so effortlessly that he rises with the gesture. For the first time, he meets her eyes. They are colder than he remembers.
"Surely you recall. Tell me what you said, when you left me to die on Starkiller Base."
He fights the tendrils of influence that infect the spider's web of his synapses. Always she knows her way in, always she slips past his defenses. For ten years she studied with him alongside Master Luke; the same Master she had murdered in cold blood the night of her rebellion.
Her power is so far beyond his now that he can't even conceive how her body contains it.
"Tell me," and now there is such pressure on his throat that he can hardly breathe.
"'We're not done yet'," he spits out, gasping as she releases her hold.
"Hmm," she walks around him, slowly, appraising. His eyes follow the silken hem of her void-dark robes. "Not quite the answer I was looking for. If you remember, that was hardly the last thing I said."
Her hand in his hair again, jerking his head so he bends backwards to meet her gaze. The livid scar that bisects her face doesn't seem to have healed at all in the months since he inflicted the wound. It's ragged and rough, running from beneath her high collar to the graceful fall of her nut-brown hair.
Her breath whispers across his skin. "I said you needed a teacher," she lets him go but holds him in place with the Force, ignoring his futile struggles as she bends ever closer. "Would you like me to teach you, Ben?"
Her lips brush his and he sees—through their wide-open connection—all the sun-drenched memories she cherishes still from their childhood. Their picnics overlooking the ocean, their sparring matches...stars, she even remembers that stupid faulty saber he built! And their first kiss, bumping noses on the mats—
Despite himself, Ben leans into the warmth of the past. Surely, if Rey still thinks of all this, surely she can't be wholly gone?
Such is her skill with the Force that the next 'memory' she presents nearly fools him. They stand together, on a platform overlooking a pale ocean of stormtroopers, clad in robes of an Order long since passed. Ben looks at his own face—withdrawn, haughty, cold—and watches it turn to Rey's, drawing her into a kiss that sears him to behold.
"No!" he gasps. The adrenaline of denial and rejection seals his mental pathways and the visions break off.
"This would be so much easier if you'd just admit the truth," save for the lilting laughter he hears behind her words, her voice might almost be the same. "Don't you want to be with me? We could have everything. Together."
Now her pale lips pout; it's obscenely childish underneath those jaundiced eyes. "You used to want that. You used to want me."
"Your Supreme Leader," he sneers, reaching for his father's oft-used trick of bravado to cover his fear, "would keep us apart. Leave him, and maybe we can be together."
She laughs. "You don't know anything about Leader Snoke. He's not like the Sith Masters Luke used to tell stories about. He sees no purpose in the old ways of one Master, one apprentice. Why should he?"
"I'll never join you!"
Not you, he rages. Not the woman who killed my friends and my uncle, not the woman who betrayed us all and was seduced by the Dark. Not the woman who left—
"Why not?" she goes to her knees before him and takes his hands in hers. He does not try to resist; it would be pointless.
"I know you don't understand. I didn't either, at first. But joining Snoke makes everything we have ever wanted possible. The Old Republic and the New...don't you see they were timid and inefficient? Letting each planet have its say, drowning in democracy and due process!"
There is a fervent, passionate light in her eyes that is not counterfeit. Ben knows that expression all too well. How often had she taken his hands—just as she does then—to persuade him...persuade him to try harder, coax him into breaking the rules, tease him into—
His blood freezes. Tease him into joining her.
"Ben," she hasn't stopped, "Ben, Leader Snoke is going to change the galaxy. His will be the last, first, the only Order, and we will be his generals.
"Think of it," her fingers dig into his, hard enough to bruise, "Don't you remember how furious you were after the separatists tried to assassinate General Organa?"
He jerks. She holds firm.
"If Master Luke hadn't stopped, what would you have done to those men?"
He does not answer; he will not answer.
"You would have hunted them down and murdered them," she provides it regardless. "You told me so yourself. Now imagine; under the Supreme Leader's rule, such actions would be punishable by death. By us. Ben—"
Rey brushes his chin with fingers calloused yet gentle. "We could right every wrong. Forever."
It is her influence or his own hatred and fear that makes her offer so tempting? For a moment of madness that stretches to an eternity, he imagines what could be. He follows the thread of her words to a future where they are the sole arbiters of right. Where they are free to be what in this world, now, they could never be.
It is not the Jedi Code that keeps him in the Light. Nor any axiom of Master Luke's. In an instant of clarity, Ben realizes; her betrayal cut so deeply that he cannot consider doing the same.
"No, Rey," simple words that nearly break him in the saying. "Never."
"Then I am sorry," and she looks it, she really does, "I didn't want it to come to this."
In a swirl of black silk she whirls back to perch on her throne. A quick tap on the console sends in the security detail; they haul him upright and drag him away.
The moment before the door slides closed, he hears her whisper.
"But I am your Master now."