Rey awoke strapped to an interrogation chair that smelled like Ben. Thick walls of sensory isolation steel encased a detention chamber large enough to fit a medical ward in. This must have been for high-priority targets who would be subject to horrors that took an entire team to inflict.
A field-view window showed a thin strip of interstellar void, as if to suck the hope out of the prisoner subjected to it. And seated by that window, gazing at her through a sightless Stalker helm, was Starkiller.
"Where am I?" she demanded. His calm aura absorbed her anger like solar waves.
"Aboard my ship, The Finalizer, a new power in the Galaxy."
"At least until the Republic gets to you. Now they know you're here."
"...Good."
His voice was monosynthetic, filtered through an audio vox that dropped the resonance to a deep baritone. For its demonic choir, it was almost tender.
"You wish to kill me," he said. It wasn't a question.
"I'm being hunted by a creature in a mask. Wouldn't you?"
"We all wear masks, some less obvious than others. The murders, traitors, and thieves you call friends wear the most pronounced."
"Oh yeah? Take off your helmet."
A long pause, thick silence. He reached around the back of his helm and depressurized the seal. In a careful maneuver, he slid the mask over his head, setting it by his side.
His face was a calm vestige of hydrogen skies, with eyes like indigo nebulas ringed in a deep charcoal pallor. Fine features on a flowing jawline and a religious attention to military grooming gave off an air of wise power, he looked not much older than she was. A hard man, a deep man, but a cruel man would sport an uglier mug.
"You won't be needing those," he said as he waved a subtle hand, and the seat locks on her wrists released.
She sat up as he rose, presenting himself to her.
"Who are you?" she glared.
"To the Empire, I am a nameless shadow that stalks the apex of deep space. To the Republic, I am the ghost of Darth Vader returned to reap vengeance for his murder. But to my father, and to you, I am Galen Merek."
"You're Darth Starkiller? You're a terrorist and will stand trial for your crimes."
"Perhaps, but not tonight."
He went to a holo-projector in the center of the room, a dark invisible aura shrouding his steps like a black oil-cloak in his wake. She leapt from the chair to put a wall at her back defensively. A geographic star map danced on the durasteel walls like golden ley lines as Starkiller spoke to Rey in a velveteen voice.
"You wish to know me? I will oblige. I grew up on Korriban, the ancestral home world of the Sith. When I was a very young boy, Republic and Imperial forces chose this planet to hold a great clash. My entire village was desecrated, while I alone survived by means I would discover later. The Empire was victorious in that battle, and their commander, a powerful Sith Lord, became my adoptive father—Darth Vader.
"He raised me in his image, perhaps to replace the son he'd given up, and taught me the truth of the Force. But as I grew, I began to question his teachings. I sought out their source, a legendary Sith Warrior known as Darth Revan, who lived thousands of years ago. I was desperate to know the true way, as eons mean nothing in the depths of dark space. Thousands of years could be as recent as yesterday in the quantum stream of time. I set out for the Outer Rim in search of this Dark Lord Revan."
"And did you find this illusive Sith Lord?"
Starkiller's eyes trained on Rey, looking on her through downturned brows as if he knew something she did not.
"Yes."
Rey cocked her head.
"How? No one has ever been able to reach the Outer Rim in a lifetime, and someone who lived thousands of years ago—"
"Forget everything you know about life and its measures. A true mastery of the Force will forever elude any who seek to understand it through the tangible and the concrete. The Universe is a sentient entity of which we are all microcosms of potential, aimlessly drifting in a rift of ignorance. I transcended the boundaries of space and time by leaping to hyperspace through a supermassive black hole, the first and only astral explorer who has ever attempted such a maneuver and succeeded—twice."
"Congratulations, I'm sure the Republic will award you the Medal of Sciences from your prison cell."
He chuckled, sashaying in a regal stride toward her.
"And how might I have the pleasure of addressing my honored company tonight?"
A long pause. Her suspicious glare trained on him like the arced moon-daggers of the tribe that raised her.
"I'm Rey."
"Rey? Of course. You would be."
"What does that mean?"
"It means that I know more about you than you could ever know about yourself. The Dark Side is strong in our kind. We are very much alike, you and I."
"You don't know a damn thing about me!"
"Do I, Rey? The memories you see every night in your dreams, of being abandoned on a strange desert world. Those are in fact your memories, but they are not of Tatooine…"
A gasp. Images flooded her vision, cold anxiety seizing her by the throat. She stepped back as he stepped forward, advancing on her through the building dread of denial.
"Yes. Let it flow, let the past float back to you..."
As he stood in her shadow, eclipsing her darkness, that knowing stare bore into her like the bane of absolute truth.
"You were born on the Outer Rim, an illegitimate child to a powerful Jedi who sold you into slavery to keep you a secret. If word of your existence spread, your father would have been excommunicated. You escaped, you survived, you became strong. You trained at the Jedi Enclave with a man named Malak, your closest confidante, who betrayed you, and you slew him for his treachery. To escape your despair, you froze yourself in carbonite, and drifted for many light years in deep space where time ceases to exist, aboard your ship, which crash-landed on Tatooine…twenty years ago…"
Her eyes widened against his gaze like ice-picks, his words like serrating saber light. He stepped into her space like a planet eclipsing its small moon, impending dread closing in like a fallen meteor.
"It's you, Revan. The cryostasis will have taken many years to degrade enough to thaw you, and no doubt you've been wandering in a state of amnesia ever since."
"…No…"
"We have seers and psychologists who will reverse your mind-wipe and restore your identity. I will give you your power back."
"But why help me?"
"…You have something to teach me, Master, and on my life I'm going to learn it."
She shook in bound delirium, the whole of space closing in about her. Tightness in her chest, blurred vision, arrhythmic heart rate shot ripping electric lines up her limbs. Starkiller whisked toward the door of the interrogation cell.
"Come with me. I will show you the true nature of the Force."
He commanded, she obeyed without meaning to, trotting to keep up with him in a whirling state of shock. They marched down the detention center corridor out into the common wing, where all personnel aboard the Finalizer went about their business.
"What the Jedi refer to as the Dark Side, or the Left-Hand Path, we know simply as the Truth," Starkiller said as they walked. "While the Jedi preach blind compassion, we follow a mantra of ruthless utilitarianism. We cull the weak and the unfit, mercifully, as their lives are painful otherwise and bring pain to others around them. In retrospect, this actually allows us to be more compassionate, for we know that when we extend our hand in aid, it is deserved and appreciated."
Stormtroopers bowed as they passed, but they were not bowing to Starkiller, instead they made it absolutely clear that they were bowing to Rey. She caught her breath as Starkiller continued his lesson.
"We do not treat others the way we would want to be treated, but rather how we would expect to be treated. This is the way of nature, against which all other philosophies fall to failure, and if embraced rather than resisted, ensures that you will not fail either. We all have within us the primal darkness of our primeval ancestors. Rather than repress this inevitable truth, the Dark Side teaches to accept it as part of ourselves, and work around it rather than against it. This True Way is the only way to order and harmony in the galaxy, against which the Jedi would deny their deceptive nature, hiding behind a guise of blanket humanism."
"But the Jedi are good, noble, protectors of light in the galaxy. Everyone knows this."
"You should ask your friend Ben Solo why he left the order."
"…He said his Master abandoned him."
"Of course. An order of Knights so noble as the Jedi would never stoop so low as to leave an apprentice behind. When my father took me in, he came close to killing me several times, but he never turned me out. Even when I ran from him, he never left me. The last thing he said to me was that he was always one inch away from me. I still feel his presence near me to this day."
"Sounds like an overbearing parent," she scoffed, to which Starkiller stopped in place. He stood broad-shouldered and tall, yet gazed at the ground, as if he could see the swirl of memories like galactic spirals before his waking eyes.
He looked up, baring his soul to the girl before him.
"I'm going to kill my brother for murdering our father. I am going to kill Luke Skywalker."
She eyed him with the cold awe of disbelief, still scrambling to wrap her mind around this velocosmic nightmare.
"You scour the star reach in search of a legend, now you quest to kill a myth. Are you living in your imagination or just pretending to?"
"I found you, didn't I?"
"I'm not who you think I am!"
She stamped her foot in frustration. There was no getting through to him, and he would not be sueded.
"You are Revan. You have no fear, even in the face of one of the most powerful Sith Lords in the galaxy. To prove it to you…"
He whisked down a central byway to an operations bay, throwing silent hand-signals to tech-officers in black uniforms who relayed instructions down the line. The Finalizer's mass-eyelet telescope aimed at precise coordinates in deep space, pulling the planet Tatooine up in the view field.
"…I've decided to give you a demonstration of this battle station's capabilities to jar your memory."
"Wait, no!" Rey lurched forward. "Someone's supposed to come for me there."
"You're confused, Revan. Your recollections were not of Tatooine."
"But if you tracked me down, so can he!"
A delicate finger grazed the side of her cheek.
"My lady, whomever you were waiting for on that forlorn world, you know in your heart, they are not coming back. It was thousands of years ago."
"I don't believe you!"
"You will..."
He threw a nod to the lead technician, who waved signals that relayed down an exacting chain of command in dangerous precision. Like clockwork, a double set of keys was inserted into a weapons system, a blah-code was input, and an alarm blared like banshee wailing.
Everyone anywhere crowded to windows and view screens. Rey saw a lithographic sheen engulf the exterior of the Finalizer, and at its apex where the sword tip resided, a marblesque pendant of neuromagnetic laser gathered in a culminating charge. The double keys were turned counter-clockwise, and a harrowing line of scorching light extended like the finger of a deity out into the vastness of open space.
Tatooine showed on the parascope projection in a bright circumference when the radiation strata hit. The planetary mass accelerated in orbit, cleaving along its fault lines in proto-angelic rays of firelight. Eruptions of molten carbon jettisoned into a panegyric atmosphere, and in a catastrophic burst of hyperboreal laser light, the planet exploded in a supernovic starburst.
Ray threw herself at the window in massive sobs, heaving in great wailing cries that echoed in the cold warship's steel hull. A ripping pain tore her insides asunder, crying for a long time against the pyroblast glass of the Finalizer.
She struggled to her feet with bleeding laser eyes trained on the looming Sith Lord. Her angry breaths and shaking hands held themselves back in a building fury as she shook her head at the dark commander.
"You can't keep me here!"
"Not with all the power of the Force could I bind you against your will. You're free to do as you like."
A pause. Surprise. Was he…letting her go?
Tentative steps, she eased her way past him, and he made no move to apprehend her.
"Come back, though," his voice stopped her. "I have the answers you seek."
Without acknowledging him, she took off running into the Finalizer.