…And came out in Hell.

The Falcon slowed out of warp inside a neutronic supercell, stratovariant micro-explosions assaulting the deflector shield.

"Where the hell are we?" Finn exclaimed as a silica cloud jammed their sensors in a thick pallor of red fog.

Ben grit his teeth as the Falcon jerked a hard right and flew over the scanners.

"I think you just answered your own question. Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking. Please fasten your seatbelts as we are in the Hell Nebula."

Technicolor mushroom clouds swirled all around them, circumpolar storms twisting in solar cyclones. Asteroid debris pelted the Falcon's siding like bullet-spray as the world bent around them incoherently.

"I don't understand, why can't we just fly through it?"

"Dark Matter. Turns anything it hits inside out, it's all over this cloudburst. We fly into a microcell and we'll be wearing our intestines as fashion statements."

Ben banked around a dust swirl to find another one ready to swallow them. Like phantasmic jaws of mistral Minotaurs, the holochasmic solar cloud meticulously entrapped them in a multicolored maze.

"It's closing in too fast! How do we get out of here?"

"Don't worry, this ship made the Kessle run in less than twelve parsepts, remember?"

"Did you do it?"

"Well, no, and neither did Dad, but—"

"Move—"

Rey shoved him out of the pilot's seat and sat down at the helm. Ben, flustered, ambled into the co-pilot's chair as a deathly focus exuded from Rey's eyes.

She guided the Falcon in a wide swooping arc, down the shaft of a collapsing cyclone, accelerating at the base to ride the gravity burst back up. Ben held his breath as he coached from the co-pilot's seat.

"Just let it go. Don't go with the flow, flow with the go. Wherever your mind says to go, that's where you go…"

Electromagnetic lightning shocks corroded the energy shields to curtains as they whipped through negative space in a gyrating anti-particle accumulation. Ben reached over and clutched her hand.

"…You got this."

He felt a psychic tug in his mind at Rey's touch, and an evil smile crept across his face. He knew they were going to be alright…

Rey hit the jets in a sudden burst of speed that forced everyone against their seats. Swerving around swirling winds like molten chocolate, she hugged the edge of static clouds with an exacting clairvoyance that surpassed the ship's computers.

Visions of riding the Ribbon filtered back to her in monochrome, the Falcon's controls like her devilstick ripping across the sand. She was one with the ship, and the storm, and space as a whole was her mind.

A break in the nebula shown in the aft view window like a ray of hope. Finn pointed to it frantic.

"There's an opening! Hit warp!"

"Are you crazy? Hitting warp into a dust particle will cause a nuclear explosion!" said Ben.

Rey beelined straight for the gap.

"Easy…" Ben warned,

Electric blue particle clouds reached for them like phantom hands, pure dark matter. Rey accelerated to full jets, flipped the Falcon on its side and sliced through the narrow opening to outer space.

"YEEEEEAAAAAHHH!"

Rey gasped as they exploded into hugs and wild celebration. The big wookie roared and they jumped all over him. Out in the safety of open orbit, they paraded into the common room for a well deserved breath.

Recounting the event in excited chatter, Ben broke out a hidden bottle of alien liquor from a smuggling compartment and they all took shots for a job well done. Recreating Rey's flight-patterns in animated hand movements, they bragged as if they'd just defeated a Kryat Dragon.

Settling down, their thoughts returned to the task at hand.

"Alright!" Finn exclaimed. "...Now what?"

"The Republic…the war has started," Rey declared. But Finn put his hands up.

"Whoa hold on, we can't go to the Republic."

"Why so hesitant all of a sudden? You were willing before. What did Ben mean by defected?"

A finality cornered Finn in a moral dilemma that he'd already made a decision about. He stood up tall, true, facing Rey with all he was in life.

"Look, I'm not a Republic fighter. I'm a Stormtrooper. I ran away from the Empire because I know what they do. You haven't seen it but I have. Fighting them is futile, they kill everything in their path, always have. The Republic got lucky last time but that won't happen again. I know who leads them this time. We have to run far, and never stop."

"Running won't solve anything. They'll catch you sooner or later. We have to stand and fight."

"No we don't, Rey. We have to live. Come with me."

"Ben, what do you think about all this?"

Ben mulled in a lounge chair, feinting nonchalant. His hard thoughts were for hard times, and he sighed up at Rey.

"I can take you both as far as Taris. Rey can get a transport to Dantooine and Finn, you can come with me or go wherever."

A shocked look crossed Rey's face. She froze, like she couldn't believe what she was hearing.

"What are you saying?"

"I can't go back to the Republic. Sorry."

"War is at hand. If we don't warn the Republic, millions of innocent people are going to die! Does the holy moral code of the Jedi mean nothing to you?"

That jolted him to his feet. He stood up ready to fight, but caught himself. Temperance was a trait he'd learned but slipped a lot. A wagging finger warned Rey.

"Don't start talking about things you're not ready to finish talking about."

"Why did you leave the order? Or did the order cast you out?"

"None of your business!"

"I can see why. Honor isn't a valued trait among smugglers."

Ben took it. He stood before her like a solid, emotionless wall.

"You know what, I like you, and even though you're tearing my balls off now, I'm actually a pretty decent guy. So listen when I say you are way better off coming with me and Finn as far away from that psycho on the little-dick starship, because you have no idea what he will do to you. Or go home, whichever."

"Do you know where I'm from? I'm from Tattooine! That's right, the backwater rock where slavers get their stocks. That's how I learned to fight, and I refuse to wither away and die in the desert. I'm never going back!"

"Well I'm not going back to the Republic either. Who are you going to get to take you?"

Chewbacca stepped up to Rey's side with a hard look that put Ben down.

"Hey, don't take her side!" Ben protested.

"AUUUuuuuwwRRra."

"You go back, Chewie! You tell the Senate the Empire has returned. I'll leave the Republic and maybe Darth Starkiller will follow me."

"RRrwwawwhhraawaa."

"He won't turn me! I don't give a damn! If I wanted anything to do with the Force I'd just got back and be a Jedi! Besides, it's not me he wants, it's my Master."

"WRarp AARph harruumAAW."

"Why do they need me? Dad can handle it, just like last time, big war hero, whoop-de-doo…He doesn't need me."

Chewie took something from his belt, given to him in confidence by an old mutual friend for when the time was right. That time was now. He held his Master's lightsaber out to Ben.

"No! I don't want that! It's not mine and never will be!"

Ben stepped back, but Chewie uttered a single hard word that demanded his respect.

"Destiny? What if I want to control my own destiny? What if I don't want to go back? No one cares what I want! No one cares about me! I'M DONE!"

He knocked the lightsaber out of Chewie's hand and stormed off. It sailed to the ground in a slow-motion cyclone that seemed to bring the entire galaxy to a halt, rolling to where Rey stood motionless.

The cylindrical hilt laid at her feet, while a soft sound like mournful trumpets hummed throughout the Falcon.

"Damn that music again!" complained Finn. "Where's it coming from?"

He went off to find the source.

Rey stared at the floor for a long while, magnetic traction pulling her soul in a conflicted tangle. Her hand moved on its own to take the weapon, and as soon as she touched the cool metal, visions assaulted her senses…

She was ripped into the Apeiron of human consciousness, surrounded by screaming apparitions. She was small, a child, reaching through tears to a figure who walked away. Flashes of deserts, of forests, of deep oceans assailed her, coming to focus on the mouth of a cave.

She was whisked through the darkness, taken before great battles of lightsaber-wielding warriors. The mythical Skywalker—a boy her age—fought the galactic terror Darth Vader in the last rebellion.

She was torn away, further back in time to when Vader himself was Ben's age—turned by anger and sorrow—to when he stood a black phantasm astride the last emperor, and at his side, his son.

The dark knight in a stalker helm crossed sabers with his father, and ran away, far away, to someplace Rey was taken first. The visions swept her on a dire quest for truth across the vastness of deep space, beyond the Outer Rim where transmissions fell silent, and signals from the darkness were alien and lost.

In the abyss of dark aphelion, time ceases to exist, and life is a figment of cellular potential. Rey experienced this distal loneliness as a crushing paradox, kinetic energy that warped her to a new planet, a new star system with a new sun, and brought her before...

…A Sith Lord, slight and deadly, cloaked in robes of dark amaranth with a faceshield of moonlight chrome.

Fulminating dread engulfed her, and she knew that if she let herself look upon the entity before her, she would die where she stood. Pulling her psyche back from the Apeiron, back into the hold of the Falcon, she flung the lightsaber and ran.

A galactic pause seemed broken by her flight, a memetic trance receding back to the current date and time. With a solemn rouse, Chewie set the nav coordinates for home.

Bebe found Ben in his bunk wicking away tears. She started to project a hologram message, but he waved her away.

"Delete it."

She beeped and chirped a worried response, to which he sat up fast.

"I said delete it! That's an order!"

The little laptop-unit rescinded the hologram and rolled out of the barracks. She found Rey in the cockpit, slumped into a seat trying hard not to cry. The droid went to the computer terminal, plugged an apparatus into the mainframe, and used the nav's voice to communicate with her.

"Forgive me, my lady, I do not mean to disturb. In my data-banks lies a message that my keeper's Master left for him. My keeper has ordered me to delete it, but an admin-override is in place. A higher authority wrote a protocol into my programming that requires me to delete this message live, meaning I may play it one last time before it is gone forever. Would you oblige me, mistress?"

Rey sat up, a willing expression on her face as the droid projected the hologram of an old robed sage onto her lap.

In the common area, the lightsaber remained abandoned on the floor under the dining nook. Finn fished it out and held it in his hand. The nickel-plating was smooth and ornate, beveled with a craftsmanship that rivaled the most advanced weapons in the galaxy. A thin metallic plate extended along the length of the hilt up to the crystal casing. He wrapped his fingers around it, and something felt right.

A searing beam of liquid-light leapt from the hilt, making Finn almost drop the weapon. Humming in a tempered lull, the weapon wove the air around it's philharmonic plasm with an aural temperance, and Finn felt a smile creep across his face.

He could strike it.

He deactivated the blade and secured the lightsaber to his belt. If no one wanted it, he'd at least hold onto it for now.

In the cockpit, the hologram receded from Rey's lap and Bebe rolled away. But as Rey's eyes followed her out, she was startled to see Ben leaning against the back wall. She stood up to meet him, having no idea how long he'd been standing there. His eyes held the solemn weight of the universe in ethereal irises, the mark of one who communes with the Force.

But now he seemed sad as he gazed at her in somnolent stillness, a stoic void emanating from his aura into the space between their physical forms.

"Within the heart of every Jedi lies a cave. As a Padawan, you must enter this cave to complete your training, and face your true self and worst fears. But they're not just your own faults and fears, they're those of your Master—the one person most closely bonded to you. My Master wanted me to be strong enough to someday surpass him, to be able to face everything he did and fare better…I failed."

A terrible grief emanated from his spirit that Rey could reach out and touch, so close as if he wanted her to.

"…For three days I huddled naked in that cave, screaming in terror as my Master's nightmares assaulted me. I knew he would come for me, lest I die in that cave. He never came. I made it out alive…"

His brow furrowed to hold back terrible torment, rage beyond the luster of the solar system.

"…But what was lost in there didn't have to be taken. You don't need to lose your humanity in order to be strong. Dark side or not, I don't care anymore. I'm not going back. I'm done being set up to fail. Never again."

He left her with his soul laid bare, and she slumped back into the co-pilot's chair.

In deep space, the shadows are made by pure and adamantine starlight, supplanting the soul from the body. The past consumed by the nether, the future dark and illusive, Rey watched a meteor shower spanning into vantablack void toward the Republic, and war.