A/N: Hi everybody, hope you're doing well! Thanks for your continued readership- you all are the best:) I can't believe this is chapter 50...it doesn't seem possible haha. It's a little shorter, but hopefully you all enjoy it anyway!

Alrighty folks, here we go: chapter 50 (aka: I'm just a soul whose intentions are good. Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood)

Luke found him standing there, quiet and subdued, some time after Anakin left. Ben heard him scrambling in through one of the viewports, but he didn't turn to meet him. His eyes were fixed on the empty air where his grandfather had been, his mind far away. Only when he felt his uncle's hand on his shoulder did he at last look up.

Luke was staring at the device Ben held, a contemplative expression on his face.

"So this is what I spent so many years searching for," he said. "And all this time it was right here."

Ben gazed down at the wayfinder, the weight of it seeming to grow heavier. It was Rey's birthright, as the one she sought was his. Turning it slowly in his hands, Ben studied it a little closer, tracing the etchings with his fingers. The glass glowed red beneath them, and he felt a faint chill that had nothing to do with the temperature. It drew him and repelled him in the same way the holocron did, and he recognized the danger it held for him. The temptation.

"You look just like my father," Luke's voice said from behind him, hard and bitter. "Just like Vader."

Ben turned to find his uncle glaring at him, his features twisted in disgust and anger. An answering anger rose in him, stoked by the cold creeping up his arm from the wayfinder. The darkness that it brought with it reminded him too much of the night he'd destroyed Luke's school, but he didn't fight it. He let the dark sea rush over his head, drawing up old memories. Words burned on his tongue like acid, refusing to be swallowed.

"What would Rey think of you now?" said Luke.

For one heartbeat, everything went deadly still inside Ben. And then his fury roared up to deafen him, and the words poured out of him like bile.

"Did it ever cross your mind, even for one instant, that I didn't want to become my grandfather?" he snapped. "Or were you so afraid of the power I held that you were willing to assume the worst of me from the start?"

The expression on Luke's face slid into shock, and his mouth opened as if he were about to speak, but Ben cut him off.

"I was afraid of becoming Vader," he continued. "I was terrified of him. My mother used to tell me the stories of the horrors he would commit. Did she tell you how hard I cried the day I realized that I could move things without touching them? Did she tell you about the dreams?"

He paused, closing his eyes against the memories that rose in his mind. When he spoke again, his voice was low and rasped in his throat.

"But she wouldn't have, would she?" he said. "She was always busy with her work in the Senate. When you asked her to let you train me, I begged her to let me go. I thought that you might be there if she and my father couldn't be. I thought that you could help me. I should have known better."

"Ben, I-" Luke began, but Ben rounded on him before he could say more.

"You knew me since I was born," he cried out. "I trained under you for years. I was by your side day and night, learning from you. How did you not see? How were you so blind and deaf that you did not feel Sidious creeping into my mind? Did you see my pain? My terror of the voice that spoke to me in my nightmares? Or did you only see what you feared most: a new Vader?"

"I did see my father in you," Luke admitted quietly. "I saw the same darkness growing in you that I had seen in him, and I was afraid. I was blind with it. It wasn't until the moment I raised a weapon against you that I saw clearly again."

Ben didn't reply. The memories he had struggled to push down for so many years were rising to fill his mind. His jaw went tight, clenching against remembered agony. His uncle's apologies did nothing to ease the pain that still lingered, or quiet the chaos of his mind. Only Rey and the light that clung to her had managed to do that.

"Tell me what happened that night," Luke murmured.

"You know what happened," Ben spat back at him.

"Not all of it," said Luke, an expression of pain replacing the anger on his face. "What happened to you…"

Ben looked away and bit his tongue to keep the words from spilling out. What good would they do? But the memories pressed closer behind his eyes, and his body ached with an old pain that it had never quite forgotten. He could smell lightning on the air and feel cold rain on his skin. And the dam inside him finally burst.

"I woke up to you standing over me with your saber drawn," he said, his fists clenching at his sides, "and I was suddenly faced with the truth that in spite of everything I had done, every second that I had struggled, I had become exactly what I feared. I thought you were going to kill me for it."

Ben's eyes slid to the saber at Luke's belt, seeing its green light shining in his memory. He closed his eyes again and tried to turn his mind away from the darkness that had surrounded him ever since that horrible night. Somehow, it made speaking easier.

"I crawled out of the rubble thinking that you were dead. That I'd killed you. I was angry and confused, and terrified, and I wasn't thinking clearly. The voice was louder than it had ever been, telling me that I couldn't go back. That everything you had taught me was a lie. The next thing I knew there was a storm above me. I think it was my fault."

Ben shuddered, the memory of thunder cracking like an echo in his ears. His hands trembled and his muscles tensed as if to run. The blue white streak of lightning branched through his thoughts, blinding him.

"There was lightning," he continued, swallowing around a familiar tightness in his throat. "I saw it strike the temple, and I saw the fires start. I heard the others screaming…"

His eyes burned and he looked down at his feet, dragging a hand over his face to brush aside the tears that had begun to run down his cheeks. A high, keening cry echoed in his mind- his own wail of anguish as he'd knelt, huddled on unforgiving stone, sobbing so hard that he couldn't breathe. Even now, the pain constricted his chest until it was all he could do to draw air into his lungs.

"I tried to get to them," he whispered. "I tried, but there was an explosion and the front of the building collapsed. I remember seeing Jai and Corann staggering out with their hair and clothes burning. They still have the scars…"

He flinched and looked up at the warm hand that rested on his shoulder. To his surprise, Luke had not turned away from him. His uncle had drawn a step closer, reaching out to touch him. Ben fought the urge to pull away, anger flaring and dying in the space of a heartbeat. This was the uncle he had needed as a boy. The uncle he needed now.

"I never wanted-" Ben started, his throat closing around the words before he could speak them. He took a deep breath and swallowed. "I ran. I did what I could for Jai and Corann and ran as far and as fast as I could. The voice in my mind drew me farther away from everything you'd taught me and everything I'd known. Eventually, it led me to Snoke, and I learned that he had been the one speaking to me for all those years. He sent me to train with the Knights of Ren to prove myself, which I did. Cy, Mela, and the rest found me there, and joined me. In time, they passed the tests as well and joined me in my training under Snoke's eye. I had long since taken up the name Kylo Ren, and Snoke soon found a use for me."

"You became his executioner," Luke said.

"He sent me to kill other Force sensitives," Ben said. "But I couldn't. I…I kept hearing the screams of the other students in the fire. I couldn't do it. The others couldn't either, so we smuggled out those we could and hid them away to teach them what we knew. It was the only rebellion we could manage."

Ben fell silent under his uncle's gaze, images and voices crowding close in his thoughts. The chill of Snoke's voice- Sidious' voice- ran through him and the hair on his neck rose. He glanced at the throne room that surrounded him, and it was as if he felt his master's eyes on him.

"What did he do to you, Ben?"

At the question, Ben's heart began to pound in his ears. His fingers clenched and unclenched at his side as he battled back the sound of Sidious' whispering. That horrible voice that had kept him awake for years and manipulated him with every single one of his doubts and fears. His jaw locked around the answer to Luke's question.

"Ben?"

"You mean besides the torture?" Ben asked, a cold anger rising again to freeze him to his core. "Besides the lightning, and days without sleep or food? Or did you want to know about the time he pushed me off a cliff and told me to use my fear to survive the fall? Or did you want to hear about all the times he hit me?"

"Ben, I…"

"But that wasn't even the worst of it," Ben said, without slowing. There was no stopping the words now. "No, the worst part was that he was always there, and there was nothing I could do about it. When he wasn't sorting through my thoughts or perched in the back of my mind, he used to think it was amusing to test my loyalty to him using my weaknesses. My father was one of those tests."

"Han?" Luke asked. "How was Han a test?"

"Sidious knew I still loved him. So, he sent me after him. How could I refuse him with three ships full of younglings? If I had, he would have pried deeper. He might have found out what I had done and where I had hidden them. Besides, he told me that if I killed my father, my training would be over and he wouldn't force himself into my head anymore. I could be free."

"So, you killed him," Luke said. "Not only to save yourself, but those you had rescued."

"And it did nothing," Ben said, his voice hard and bitter with regret. "Sidious lied, as he always has. I wasn't back for a day before he was picking at my thoughts again, twisting them to form something he could make use of."

"And he claimed to have connected you to Rey?"

"If he did, I could almost thank him," Ben said with a humorless laugh. "It was his one mercy, though I know he only did it to suit his own ends."

"She told me you found her on the day of the Hosnian Cataclysm."

"I did. Sidious sent me after the piece of the map that was supposed to lead us to you. I found her instead."

"What about the Hosnian system?" Luke asked in a low voice. "It would seem that you stood by-"

"I did not stand by," Ben snapped. "It was Hux's idea to make an example of them and to destroy the government. Snoke agreed."

Ben's jaw was tight, and his words came through clenched teeth. Even if Hux hadn't tried to kill Rey, the use of Starkiller Base was enough to eliminate any guilt Ben might have felt for killing the man. He could remember the cold anger that had frozen him to the spot as the streak of red light reached across the galaxy, splintering into many separate beams to strike the Hosnian system. He remembered a sudden and terrible emptiness in the Force where there had been the presence of billions of living things but a second before. It had been the same kind of absence he'd felt the night of the temple's destruction.

"And why did you take Rey? She told me about the interrogation."

Ben flinched, the memory of that day raising a wave of shame to rush over him. He could remember the disgust in her voice as she'd called him a creature in a mask. And against every second of his years of training; every instinct that screamed for him to obey his master's orders, he had taken off his helmet. In that moment, he had wanted nothing more than to be seen. Not as a monster, nor as a slave, but as the man he hoped was still beneath it all. The man he was sure his master had killed long ago. He could remember the moment she had seen him clearly for the first time, and he remembered the way he had frozen for the span of a heartbeat, caught in her gaze. Something about her had captured him then, though he hadn't known it. Captured him body and soul.

"I was trying to find you on Snoke's orders," he said quietly. "The droid escaped, so I thought I could use her instead. Better to sacrifice some insignificant girl than displease my master again. Or at least that's what I thought at the time. But then I realized what she was, and something in her…something about her… She got inside my head and she never left."

"She told me that you were afraid that you would never be as strong as Darth Vader," Luke said. "How do I reconcile that man with the one you claim to be?"

"Think of me what you will. But I'll tell you that in her brief glimpse into my thoughts, she saw only part of the truth," Ben said, lifting a shoulder in a half-shrug.

"And what is the truth?" Luke asked with his arms crossing over his chest.

"That my mother told me more about my grandfather than you did," said Ben, swallowing hard. "She told me how he sacrificed himself to save you from Sidious. The truth is simply this: I am afraid that if it comes to it, I will not be strong enough to make the sacrifice he did for those he held most dear. That I will pass into Chaos knowing I have failed those it was my responsibility to protect. Those I love."

The words seemed to take part of him with them as he spoke and he was left empty, swaying beneath Luke's widening eyes. His uncle was staring at him, pale faced and silent. Ben saw tears shining on his cheeks but said nothing. What was there left to say?

"There hasn't been a day that I haven't wished I could go back and change that night," Luke said with a long sigh, "but I have never wished I could change it as badly as I do right now."

Ben remained quiet, looking away from his uncle to gaze out through a shattered viewport to the gray sea that stretched to the horizon.

"If I could-" started Luke.

"You can't change the past, Uncle," Ben said in a low voice. "If it were possible, I would have done it."

"I know you would," said Luke. "And I know that you're a different man than the one I thought you had become. Will you forgive me for my blindness?"

Ben watched the waves crashing against the ruins of the Death Star, the sound of their breaking coming faintly to him on the wind. He'd held onto his anger against Luke for so long. He wasn't sure who he would be without its constant chill. He glanced to where Luke stood, watching him with something almost like hope on his face.

If you remain who you are now, the darkness will consume you.

The echoes of his grandfather's voice whispered to him from somewhere deep inside, filling the hollowed-out space in his chest. Ben could see Anakin's face in his memory, somehow young and old at the same time, etched with the same memories of pain he himself carried. But Anakin had returned to the man he should have been. Was it possible that Ben could find his way back too?

Help me, grandfather.

Drawing a deep breath, Ben turned to fully face his uncle. He raised a hand, stretching it out through the distance between them, and it seemed to him that years flowed by beneath his fingers. He was standing before Luke on a grassy slope he remembered from his childhood, staring up at him with his hand extended, the palm small and pale in the sunshine. Luke stared at it for a long moment, then reached out to meet it, clasping Ben's arm with his warm, rough fingers. The touch drew Ben back out of his memories and he found himself standing face to face with his uncle.

"I forgive you."

The words tasted sweet and strange on his tongue, and though the pain of years was still there, the bitterness was not. It wasn't Luke's fault, no matter how many times he'd tried to convince himself it was.

"I would ask for your forgiveness too, Uncle," he said, "for the pain I caused you. I've made so many mistakes. I'm s-"

Luke didn't wait for him to finish. His strong arms wrapped Ben in an embrace that was so tight he struggled to breathe. Ben tensed, uncertain, but Luke did not release him. Slowly, cautiously, Ben slid his arms around his uncle's shoulders. The rough scratching of Luke's beard against his cheek was familiar and comfortable, and memories rose again in his mind. Long days of training disguised as games. Meditation at sunset. Stories of Luke's adventures, and hugs before he crawled under his blanket for the night. All the precious moments he'd forgotten.

"I forgive you, Ben," Luke rasped, his voice thick with tears. "I forgive you."

With Luke's words, Ben felt something shift inside him. Something that had broken long ago began to mend; frayed threads of himself being knit back together. Healing. A long sigh of relief shuddered out of him, and he wrapped his arms a little tighter around Luke, clinging to his uncle as he had when he was a boy. It was then that Ben heard Anakin's voice again, coming as though from a great distance.

Don't be afraid, Ben. Trust the Force. Whatever comes, it will be with you.