Chapter 2: Hands Clasped in a Storm

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What nightmares he had, they did not last, nor did they linger in memory, burned away by the discomfort of waking. The throb in his limbs could have been blamed on his own self-neglect, but the hot pressure behind his eyes was new. The spikes of dizziness were more pronounced, and accompanied now by spikes of pain. He craned his head in search of water and found he had woken before his first meal. A surge of despair stilled his lungs and left him blinking back tears, frustrated with his own reaction. It was only water. He'd live until it came or die and be done with all this. There was no sense in weeping.

Ben pressed his aching skull to the floor and tried to will himself back to sleep. Nightmares would be preferable to the monotonous torture of wakefulness. Sleep, under normal circumstances, was not a thing that came easily or often, but this time it sucked him down as eagerly as it had so often eluded him. This time his dreams were vivid, memories of battle and pain and lives ended by the flash of a saber. Victories that felt like surrenders, one after another, faces and deathstrokes jumbled as if they had all been a single event. It went on and on until he wanted to scream at his dream-foes, to tell them to run, to throw his lightsaber aside just to make the cycle stop. He would have turned his blade on himself, but couldn't. The dream forbade it. He could sense the uselessness of it before he tried.

When next he woke, it was with a jolt, heart thudding rudely against his ribs. He could still feel his father's hand on his face.

"Shhh. Lie down."

The hand was not his father's, but it was just as familiar. He knew it as surely he knew that voice. Fingers moved from his face to press against his chest, urging him back down, and he obeyed.

Even in stillness, the dizziness persisted. It took a valiant effort to see past it and register the change in his surroundings. He had not been removed from his cell, still boxed in by the same gray walls, but the surface beneath him was soft and giving, warmer than the floor. Someone had moved him to his cot while he slept. Ben blanched at his own carelessness, then remembered that it didn't matter. If it had been an assassin come to finish him off, he would have welcomed it.

Something cold touched his forehead. His senses told him that it had been there before, dislodged, probably, by his waking. It was a waste of effort to treat him, he thought, but he lacked the strength to argue. His mother would not have listened anyway. He remembered many such battles over fevers and bed rest when he was a child.

"You brought this on yourself." Her voice was as grave and weary as her brother's. Even so, some instinctive part of him reacted—some remnant ghost of childhood not yet lost. His breath came deeper. The tension in his chest eased. His head lulled. His mother's voice was an empty promise, but he let it soothe him, if only for the moment.

"Not eating. Sleeping on the floor. I didn't know anyone could be more stubborn than your father."

He knew one person more stubborn than Han Solo. She was sitting at his bedside.

"They've already had a medical droid in here. I don't know if you noticed." He hadn't. "The fever's not serious, but you need to eat. I don't know why you're doing this to yourself." Surely she did, though. She must. He squeezed his eyes tight as she dabbed at his face with the coldpack. "I'm still working on the council. They're not going to kill you. Not unless they go through me." There was nothing humorous about the words, and nothing false. Her staunch determination was palpable. It crackled in the air around her and infused each breath she drew, laced each word she spoke. Ben hated it.

This was wrong. She shouldn't forgive him. She shouldn't even try. His eyes stung behind closed lids and a different sort of tension grew inside him—a small, hard knot that made him grimace and turn away from her. He pressed his face into the padding of the cot to spare her the sight of his tears. His shoulders shook once before he clamped down on that too, but not fast enough. They had betrayed him. He could feel the solemn recognition in her, a heavy settling in the Force. He felt her lean forward, felt her hand on his shoulder, felt the breath she held back, saved for words that did not come. What could she have said? Words were pebbles thrown at the brick wall of the past.

Leia must have reached the same conclusion. He felt her draw away. He thought that she would give up and leave altogether, but instead, with a gentleness that made him wince, she put her hand on his head and curled her fingers through his hair. Delicately, painstakingly, she began to work out the tangles. Ben couldn't move. All he could do was struggle to keep his breath even. He was embarrassed, suddenly, by the fact that he hadn't shaved in days, let alone bathed. It was a small, laughable, pathetic matter, but he hated for his mother to see him like this.

The General did not speak again, but she stayed until her job was done. She could have asked for a brush or a comb to use. There was a guard in the room with them, and it would have made the task go faster. That, he supposed, was why she didn't.

He dozed off again under her ministrations, though he would blame it on the fever. Her departure roused him for a little while and he lay half-aware, wondering if the whole encounter had been delirium.

When his dreams returned a third time, they were kaleidoscopic and meaningless.

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The guard, when she brought his next meal, went to the effort of shaking him awake—a questionable courtesy he'd not been shown before. When he sat up, dazed, she retreated with a brusque comment about making sure he ate it hot. "General's orders."

On the tray, beside the cup and the customary roll of bread, was a bowl. Steam rose from it in curls and the meaty fragrance conjured daggers in his stomach. He staggered off the cot and sat down hard on the floor, slopping broth over the sides of the bowl in his hurry to pick it up. What hadn't spilled, he gulped down, refusing to think about why. A measure of it went the wrong way, searing, but it was only liquid and the coughing fit passed. The discomfort was nothing to the abatement of hunger. Ben found, in those fleeting moments of sheer physical relief, that he had a new sympathy for Rey. Starving himself had been his own doing, but to live like this without choice, for years... Her tempered perserverance had been forged there, he was sure of it.

He wiped his mouth on his dirty sleeve—not something that was his habit, but perhaps an unintended mimicry of the girl in his thoughts. Thinking of Rey had renewed the pangs of loneliness. Sating one hunger made way for the other. He put the bowl back on the tray and sat where he was, ruminating at an empty space in the air before him.

He wanted her back.

If they wouldn't let him die, then he wanted her near him, near enough to fill that haunted, empty space—to bleach it out with her light. The strength of his own desire was alarming. He had no right—far from it— but oh, how he wanted. He ached with it. It didn't matter if she never touched him, never spoke to him again. To have her nearby would be enough, he told himself. They were a match in the Force. They resonated in a way even Snoke had never been able to replicate. Rey knew it. He'd shown it to her. He'd tried to use it to turn her. She must have felt it too. If only they had met under different circumstances... If only he had been wiser from the start. If only he had listened... There were so many times he should have listened...

Why hadn't he listened?

It was with a sigh that he dragged himself away from that line of thought. Daydreaming about her was worse than not. There was only so much solace one could gain from pining over might-have-beens, and the hollowness that followed was a bitter price to pay. Despair was a thing he was used to. Despair he knew how to cope with. Hope and desire were a greater cruelty. Desire and hope for something he could not have, did not deserve? For something he had likely ruined all chance of… The only kindness that could give him would be to stop his heart.

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He spent another day and night in brooding lamentation, his fever forgotten before it passed. The void left by his slain master was a dull, stone-like weight. The roles had reversed. Now it was Snoke's absence that reminded him of Rey.

He ate mechanically, forced himself to sleep on his cot, but his anguish had taken on a nervous tone—the sense of missing a chance, not in the past, but now—right now. The sense that if only he were out there and not locked in his cell, he could do something about it.

It smoldered in him until he lurched to his feet and paced, three long strides one way and three the other, until pacing wasn't enough and in one fierce sweep he snatched up his meal tray and flung it against the wall. It clattered raucously, but it did not satisfy, and there was nothing else to express himself with. Picking the tray up to throw it again would have been ridiculous even by his own standards.

He sat down and counted his breaths. Later, when he was able, he bullied himself into a fretful nap.

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The beacon, when it came, was like a newborn star, lancing golden-white across his inner skies. His breath clung in his throat. His eyes locked on the door minutes before it opened. She'd come back. She'd come back for him. She could not have been on the planet long or he would have felt her sooner. She'd returned from her assignment and come straight to him. Why?

His chest swelled with a feeling he dared not name.

When he saw her, all his desperate excitement crashed inward.

There was a ragged, weary look about her where there had been vivaciousness before. There were shadows under her eyes and a scabbed cut on her brow. As relieved as he was by her presence, Ben struggled with the mad urge to scold her. Why hadn't she rested before coming to him? She didn't owe him that much. The Resistance was plainly pushing her too hard. Just because she'd saved their lives a few times, they must have thought they could rely on her to solve all their problems. It was typical, predictable, and pathetic. His hands fisted. His palms itched for a lightsaber. The gray walls would look better with a few molten streaks of red, he thought—a feeble stand-in for whoever had done this to Rey.

Rey, for her part, was frowning down at him. Her furrowed brow pulled at the scab on her forehead, revealing a trace of pink scarring underneath. Had she not even asked for a bacta patch? Hadn't anyone offered one to her?

"The guard said you've been eating more." Her tone was cautious, moreso than the question deserved. She was testing his mood, not his appetite.

He didn't feel like playing games. "Where did they send you?"

"One of the Knights of Ren was still alive." Her answer chilled him. "Not strong enough in the Force to match a Jedi, but he was giving the Resistance fighters trouble."

"Where is he now?" Spiny, ice-cold fingers were digging into his heart and creeping up his throat, turning his words into a growl. He made no effort to mask it.

"I killed him." She said it stoically, almost blandly, but he could feel the unease she was trying not to show.

"Was this Luke's idea of training?" That she'd had to fight one of his, and been injured... It made his blood boil. It made him want to shout, but he had no target deserving of his fury. There was only Rey.

"It wasn't training." She was getting snippish. That was his fault too.

"The Republic is short on Jedi," he scoffed, "so they send an apprentice into needless danger." He was glaring at her, but he was seeing the dregs of the broken Republic in her place, foolhardy and headstrong and useless as ever.

"I beat you," she pointed out.

Ben ran a hand over his face, pressing his fingertips into the scar. Habit and a short temper inclined him to keep bantering, but a cold, lonely feeling in his gut warned him against it. The last thing he wanted was to make her his enemy.

He had never wanted that.

Exhaling harshly, he dropped his gaze and the argument with it.

Rey didn't let the silence last. "Why do you care about me?"

Ben hesitated, searching her with his eyes, but it was not for lack of an answer. It was that he had too many. Some of them he had yet to find words for. Others he refused to admit, even to himself. He settled for a half-answer, and one that she already knew. "I made a mistake." He'd made several, but she would get the point.

It was Rey's turn to linger over a response. He watched her lips part and her breath stall, but the words were slow to come. "... What will you do if they let you out of here?"

"They should kill me."

"Why?" There was a sharp-edged aggression to her tone. "Will you become Kylo Ren again if they let you go?"

He was not going to dignify that second question with an answer. "People will want recompense."

"Snoke is dead," she said this dismissively, as if that were the end of it. "Compared to him, why should they care what happens to you?"

"Why should they bother to let me go?" He tried to echo her tone. His voice was raw, though, and it crackled shamefully over the words. "Wouldn't it be better to contain the threat?"

"The Republic needs Force users."

Ah, and there was the kick. Again it came down to his power. His ability. He should have known. They didn't want to forgive him. This wasn't about justice. They only needed him for what he could do. They wanted to use him like they were using Rey. At the bottom line, the Republic wanted him for the same reason that Snoke had wanted him.

And the bitterest part was that he owed them. How could he claim to regret his actions but refuse to serve the people he had wronged? He should agree whole-heartedly to whatever they asked. He should throw himself at the Republic's feet. He should burn himself out repairing the damage he'd done. That would be fair. That would even, perhaps, sooth some of his guilt.

But it wasn't what he wanted. It wasn't a life he had any desire to live, and he despised himself for his own selfishness.

Rey startled when his fist hit the floor. His knuckles tingled, then throbbed, but the pain helped him center himself. "I've been used before. It's not something I care to repeat."

"Your mother doesn't want to use you. Luke doesn't."

"Luke wants me alive to ease his own guilt." It stung to say it, but he didn't think he was wrong. He had always been a burden to Luke. Always. Uncle or not, how could the man love him? Undoubtedly Luke wanted to save him for Leia's sake, but that was not the same.

There was truth to the old sentiment; only a mother could love a monster.

Her master was one of Rey's weaknesses. He knew that. He'd used it against her before. He had not meant to use it now, but her eyes flashed with familiar fire all the same. "Is that something Snoke told you?"

"No." But was it, though? He doubted himself, suddenly. Snoke had been speaking to him for as long as he could remember. How much of that vile whispering had passed unnoticed? How much had been heard only by his subconscious? How many of his thoughts and beliefs had not belonged to him at all? Ben hung his head, bared his teeth at the floor. The storm was rousing again. He wanted to shout at Rey for bringing it back. She was supposed to be his salvation, but here she was torturing him as surely as he did himself. Did she not realize that?

He wanted to Force the door open and throw her out. He could imagine what it would feel like, that sudden release, the hard satisfaction of using his power. He could have done it with a sweep of his hand. He wouldn't even have to stand up. It was a measure of his mother's trust or the Republic's ignorance that he had been placed in this cell to begin with. He could have left any time he wanted.

That trust, however, held true, at least for the time being. He did none of those things. They would have accomplished nothing but a momentary relief, and barely even that. He would antagonize Rey, which he reminded himself was counter-productive. She would leave him or she would stay and shout him down, and either way the storm would rage.

"You're shaking," she told him as if he hadn't noticed. He felt her reach out, felt her brush the edges of him and then draw back. He couldn't be certain, after the fact, if it had been her hand that touched him or her mind. "Should I get Luke?"

"No." He didn't want to see Luke. He didn't want Luke to see him. He was still reeling from the question she had raised, the reminder of a thousand other questions... Everything he had made of himself was from Snoke, Snoke's teaching, Snoke's poison. He didn't know who he was without it. Everything he believed, every thought he'd had since he was a child...

He remembered his first day with Snoke, suddenly. Vividly. His first real day, after leaving Luke. He remembered the despair and the sick anger, the darkness and the restraint and the panic. He felt again the nausea of deluding himself, and knowing it, and knowing it was the only choice he had.

Rey crouched down in front of him. He saw the cast of her shadow on the floor and heard the sigh of her breath. "Can I help?"

It was difficult to breathe again. "No."

She tried anyway, and he didn't have the focus to shut her out. He was mentally spreadeagled, drawn and quartered by the conflict between memories and self-taught lies. Snoke was not responsible for every falsity that had paved the way to Kylo Ren. That was the conundrum of it. Snoke had given him the bases on which to built, and had done so generously, but it was Ben's traitorous imagination that had filled those lies with substance.

He knew this. Logically, he knew, but he had lived under those lies for so long, done so much in their name, and taken shelter in their comforting sharpness. The lies and Snoke were the same. Without them, he wasn't suited to live. He didn't know how. Without them, his burned out husk of a heart was laid bare to the elements. Like an animal with its skin burned off, it would fester and die.

The walls of the cell were groaning. The joints that fused the cot to the wall creaked, then bent sharply, rendering the bed at a broken diagonal. Ben's eyes opened wide and found Rey's staring back at him. The storm was no longer inside him.

He had lost control before, but not often, and not without Snoke. For the first few heartbeats, he was paralyzed, caught in the spell of her wide eyes. Then a cold fear spurred him and he pulled the energy back on himself, in and away from Rey, as much as he could take.

The pain was not merely an inner turmoil. This was real and crushing, a vice on his head, a choking thickness in the air. This was the Force, wild and dark and turned back on its user. It was a blessing that he had no fear of death. If he were forced to crack his own skull in order to save Rey, he would do it, only let it come quickly—

What happened next was like watching a dawn break over the horizon, a single spark that grew into a blinding, fiery radiance. Rey's newborn sun had become a supernova. It sliced into the uncontrolled darkness and sundered it, sending it spinning off in useless threads of smoke.

Faster than it had started, it was over.

Ben clutched his head and tried to breathe. It came as a mixed comfort that Rey looked as winded as he was. "I'm sorry," he gasped out. "I wasn't..."

She waved off the apology, but if she were going to answer, it was interrupted by the door opening and the guard barging in. It was a man this time, and his expression upon seeing the damage was almost comical.

Rey surging off the floor to put herself in front of Ben was not.

Ben could only gather enough strength to hold his head up and watch.

"What happened?"

"He didn't mean to! He lost control..." She sounded frantic and fierce. "He's not well, and I don't think keeping him in here is helping."

"It's not my decision to make, ma'am."

She was balling her fists, his unlikely defender. Ben's heart was beating too fast. "I know, it's just... He needs help."

"Well, believe me, I hope he gets it." The guard was plainly trying to diffuse the situation. Ben couldn't blame him. He had a firecracker in the shape of a girl on his hands, and she looked perfectly willing to burn him. "Are you sure you're alright?"

"I'm fine! He protected me. I told you, he's not going to hurt anyone. Not on purpose. Except himself."

Ben wasn't sure what to think of her defense as it continued. She hadn't sounded like this when she spoke to him. She had sounded restrained. Conflicted. He'd assumed it was a struggle to be kind to him now that she didn't need his help anymore. Where was this intensity coming from?

"Alright. Do you need me to call the General? Or... your master?"

Rey exhaled slowly, taking measures to regain her composure. "No. Not yet. Let me talk to him first."

The guard took another look around the cell. Lastly, he let his stare linger on Ben. He seemed to think that he could see right through him—a task better left to Rey.

When the door was shut and Ben was sure he wasn't going to faint or lose control again, he took a quick, shaky breath and demanded, "how did you do that?"

"Do what? Talk the guard down?"

"No, the..." He waved a hand at the room, impatient. "How did you stop it?"

She looked at him like he was an idiot. "I used the Light."

Ben could have snarled at the vagueness of her reply. Trust Rey to be difficult when it mattered. "I know that, but how?"

"I don't know, I just did!" She had no trouble paying back his waspishness in kind. "Ask Luke."

He shook his head. He didn't meet her eyes. "Luke's never taught... anything like that to me."

"Well, maybe you left too soon."

"Maybe he doesn't know everything." He'd meant to snap at her again, but it came out flat. He was too drained to keep fighting.

Predictably, she picked up on that. Rey had a knack for reading the moods of others. "Maybe we should stop arguing." He dared a glance upward, but she was looking around the cell now, searching. "I guess I came too late for a snack."

His lips twitched in a not-smile. Trust the scavenger to always think of food. "It won't be long. You can wait if you want to." He straightened his spine, crossed his legs, breathed deep, assuming a long-ingrained meditation posture. He was afraid of how Rey would respond to the offer. She had every right to leave. It was a relief when she sat down instead, claiming her usual spot.

"We should try that again."

"What?" he asked. "Arguing?"

Rey rolled her eyes. "No. The Light thing."

He made his face deceptively bland, ignoring the pounding ache in his skull. "I would prefer not to repeat the experience."

"Not right now. Later. Maybe with Luke. It would be useful if you keep... having fits, or whatever it is that's happening to you." Her tone was gentle, sensitive, and that made it worse. It was disgusting to be so helpless.

Ben had nothing else to say and Rey fidgeted in the silence, tugging at a corner of her shirt, then coiling a strand of her own hair around her fingers. He wondered how she had survived the monotony of desert life, as restless as she was.

The fact of the matter, if he let himself think about it, was that it was terrifying to wonder what might change if Rey mastered her Light trick—if she could control the storm, or chase it away for good. It was one of those dangerously hopeful things he would do better not to think about.

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Rey was absent again the next day, and no one came to fix his bed. The latter shouldn't have bothered him. He was accustomed to sleeping on the floor, but his head still hurt and it put him in a mood to be petulant. He spent a good deal of the day glowering at the closed door.

When the distraction of annoyance wore thin, it was loneliness that set back in. He knew Rey hadn't left the planet. He could feel her. She wasn't far, so why didn't she come? Had he pushed her too much? Had she changed her mind?

The question nagged him until he could think of nothing else, and neither did he want to. Her distance had him tense and fraying. He felt as if she'd strung a thread between them and pulled it too tight. Finally, when the thread felt near to snapping, he threw caution to the wind and reached...

His mental fingertips brushed the edge of her awareness. She reacted with a questioning thought, then mild surprise, and then a tiny breath of reassurance. He didn't ask her to complete the connection. He merely waited. It was of her own initiative that she caught him up and drew him closer, holding on loosely as one might hook their fingers around another's. He leaned on the link, basking in its rare, easy comfort. He had only the vaguest sense of her surroundings, but he could see Rey clearly in his mind. He could imagine himself standing beside her, though it was a pitiful indulgence and it embarrassed him. By some wonder, still, she allowed it.

She was giving him only a fragment of her attention, but it was enough. Wherever she was, she was listening to someone talk, or several someones. He could not hear what she heard, but he could pick up an impression of her thoughts. She was thinking about fairness, about forgiveness, and about him.

He let himself drift, holding her hand through the Force and dwelling in that singular place, apart from his own world of troubles. It was the nearest he'd felt to peace in a long, long time.

Then, too soon, she let him go.

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He was in the middle of meditating, or trying to, when the door hissed open. It was too early for his next meal, and it wasn't Rey. Instead, two of his usual guards stomped in and hauled him to his feet. The only explanation offered was a curt "time to go", and Ben couldn't form the words to ask where. His mind was blossoming with images of trial and execution. He stumbled as he was pulled ungently through the door, making a frantic effort to keep his footing. He would rather walk to his fate than be dragged. At least if the attitude of the guards was anything to go by, it would not take long.

A short, upward elevator ride gave him a chance to catch his breath. Then he was marched, not into a court room or a council chamber as he might have expected, but out onto a small docking platform.

The first thing he saw there was Rey. Rey standing in sunlight, dressed in jacket and boots and travel bag. Luke was a gray sentinel beside her, and the bulk of the Millennium Falcon served as their shadow. Ben wasn't given much time to wonder about the purpose of this gathering. Rey was already stepping forward, halting the guards by the expedient act of standing in their way.

"Did they tell you what's going on?" Her concern bewildered him, despite that she had shown him the same since Snoke's defeat. He mumbled an indistinct negative and she plowed into rapid explanation. "They held the trial without you. You've been exiled. We're going to Ahch-To."

"And let's not wait around for them to change their minds," Luke added grimly.

Rey's focus snapped to Ben's escort while he tried to find his bearings. "Are you the guards assigned to us?"

The one holding his left arm answered. It was the woman who had brought him his meals. "Yes ma'am. I'm Lieutenant Brell. That's Classen."

"Leia said she was going to hand-pick you..."

"She did, ma'am," the lieutenant assured her. "And she told me to tell you not to worry. Neither of us plans on assassinating the General's son under your nose... though he looks like he could manage it on his own, just about." She gave Ben a shake, not violent, but unexpected enough to make him stagger.

"Luke thinks we can help him," said Rey, and let that statement serve as the order to board. She turned and scaled the ramp in quick strides. The guards followed, maneuvering Ben between them, but he spotted Luke dawdling behind. The old man was acting as if distracted, or as if he were looking for something. Ben had the briefest chance to crane his head around and follow his uncle's gaze. Somehow, he knew already what he would see.

On a balcony above them stood a figure, staring down, hands tight on the rail, diminutive and gray-haired and tense.