Ch 8
Ben
I was watching myself fight a young woman. She was beautiful to say the least, and she was strong with the Force, stronger than anyone I knew besides Snoke or Skywalker.
Suddenly her name came to mind.
Rey...
This time there was no pounding in my head, and a smile spread across my face as I recalled the love that grew and that I felt when we kissed... Along with it came many other dark memories.
"I see the Force allowed you to remember her. I'm not surprised that she triggered it. You love her Ben. You are bonded to her through the Force like no one has been in centuries. Now tell me, what do you recall of this encounter?"
I squinted, trying to remember that day.
"Focus on yourself through the memory, try to home in to your thoughts, your feelings..."
I connected to the Force and began to feel things.
Anger. Confusion. Intrigue. Attraction
Attraction
"Ah... we've found the feeling... from the first day that girl held your heart. And you didn't even know it"
He was right, I could remember that day and how I couldn't stop thinking about how raw her power was. How beautiful she was. The way she danced with the lightsaber against me in the forest. She was clumsy and sloppy in the forest of course, having no previous training, but her natural abilities shined through. She was graceful and strong. She was the light, but in the forest, her darkness was extremely present.
The memory had moved on to where I put her to sleep and carried her back to the ship for interrogation.
I waited for her to wake up, I had never seen anyone look so peaceful, I couldn't force myself to leave her side in that moment.
"Grandfather... I remember... the conflict and confusion I felt... her light blinded me, but I couldn't understand how someone I considered so weak cause so much trouble. I remember carrying her and thinking I wanted to, no, needed to understand who she was. I now see I was just scared of what she meant, from the beginning she had me, just like you said, but I regret how long I took to admit it" he nodded and the memory moved on to where I held her prisoner. I was furious that she had been so defiant, so unwilling to cooperate, I wasn't used to someone being so resistant to my mind probing.
Eventually she woke up, her face full of confusion and she tried to mask her fear. To this day I have no idea why I sat there and waited for her to awaken. All I remember was thinking I had to stay, thinking if I didn't she would escape and losing her would result in punishment from Snoke. It was a pathetic excuse honestly.
She asked the usual questions, where she was, what I wanted...
I could sense her fear so easily, but I didn't want her to be afraid. I wanted her to... trust me.
That's why I took the mask off when she made a comment of it being easier to kill someone when they wore a mask.
I could still feel her defiance, it... angered me. The more I tried to get in her thoughts the more she would shut me out.
So I got close to her, thinking if I touched her the connection would be... more solid.
I could sense something deeper in her... rage... loneliness... disgust for me... I told her she was lonely, I read all her thoughts like a book.
"You dream of an ocean... and you see Han Solo as the father you never had..." Hearing my father's name in that moment pained me. I hadn't forgiven myself for that, I don't think I ever could. And yet through that pain, I felt hatred towards the scavenger girl. How dare she take what was mine...? My fathers love... no, not even that. I just wanted him to appreciate me for who I was, to say I was good enough and to not be afraid of me.
And yet... I couldn't help but feel tension and electricity run between her and I... my eyes took every inch of her. Her hair falling around her face, the way her skin seemed so smooth even after all that time on Jakku, and her lips...
But the wall came down in her mind once more, she grew stronger by the second.
I had eventually moved away and kept demanding she tell me of the map she saw. I tried to force it out of her but she put up as much of a fight as I did. That's when I felt it, the connection. I saw that her life and mine would always be intertwined but I didn't know how or why.
"Don't be afraid... I feel it too" I said as I pushed harder into her mind, I was straining my mental muscles to full capacity and was so distracted by the connection we formed that I didn't notice how she had managed to get in MY head.
"You're afraid..." she said, a new level of determination in her eyes "that you will never be as strong as Darth Vader" and something inside me snapped in that moment.
I couldn't believe she turned the tables on me. I was furious, it took everything inside me not to kill her then and there.
"Well, that's what I call a rocky start, next time I'll give you some pointers on how to ask a girl on a date. It's time for the next round of memories" he said as we walked back to the darkness. But a part of me couldn't help but look back at the broken boy who'd been bested by a scavenger girl from nowhere.
