Author's Note: I know it's been a while since I updated! My apologies! Please be patient with me, I have not forgotten about this story.
Disclaimer: I don't own Star Wars. Never have, never will. I simply play in their world.
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"Come as you
are to me,
heavy,
shattered,
and lonely,
and inside my arms
fall in love with
the feeling of air
spilling from your lungs;
painting my chest with
sorrow."
-Christopher Poindexter
Kylo Ren
"Ap'Lek report."
The blue hazed image of my Knight appears before in miniature and I lean back in the chair, the conference room empty except for myself now.
"Lord Ren, we've encountered Resistance sympathizers but no sign of the Millennium Falcon. Our interrogations of the sympathizers has yielded results."
"What results?"
"The pilot Dameron appears to be leading the Resistance. Last sighting of General Organa six months ago. Sighting for the scavenger were spotted two months ago. Leaving Onderon for Mimban following another report of Resistance seen in the region."
"Proceed. I want the crew of the Falcon alive and in my custody in the next twenty-four hours. Don't disappoint me."
"As you command Lord Ren."
The holo-image fades and I turn my attention to the view before me.
The new Star Destroyer from Exegol hovers in the void but my thoughts are elsewhere.
General Organa no longer leading her Resistance?
Has she finally realized the futility of her cause against me?
No, my mother would never simply give up her precious Resistance. Not after all these years of fighting.
Not after all the sacrifices made.
This was something else entirely.
I tap out a sequence of commands into the interface on the table and Force lock the doors and shut the blinds so that no one can see what I'm doing.
I pull off my mask and set it aside.
The holo-image of Leia Organa Solo appears before me.
This image was captured shortly after our battle on Crait, leaving the Naboo system.
Her hair is pulled up into a style I recognize as a traditional Alderaan braid of mourning. Her face has aged since I last glimpsed her and I find that I am...disquieted...to see how old she has become. Grief has cast a terrible beauty over her features.
Her soul still burns just as brightly but the shell of her body has become unbearably fragile.
My hand lifts in response to the sorrow I know I put there.
"Mother." The word is barely a whisper beyond my lips and I clench my fist against the pain that tears into my soul at seeing her.
I shut down the image immediately and calm my breathing.
It's nothing. Just remnant feelings of the man who used to be her son.
It. Is. Nothing.
"Supreme Leader, your presence is needed on the bridge."
The comm is a welcome disruption to my volatile thoughts and I erase all the data downloaded into this interface.
I pull the mask back on, certain now that I made the right choice in having it reforged. The face staring back at me in the reflected glass is not that of Ben Solo but of Kylo Ren.
A flicker of power and the door unlocks and the blinds retract, once again the Sith Destroyer in my purview.
Soon this galaxy would belong to me and I would no longer be distracted by images of the past.
Of a life I no longer lay claim to.
"Report Allegiant General."
Pryde turns in my direction, a nod of his head to my presence as I take the bridge.
"Supreme Leader, Admiral Griss has finished his inspection of the Sith Destoyer. He estimates that with these new Destroyers combined with our own fleet we should take total control of the galaxy with forty-eight hours of deployment."
"Agreed. Focus the first wave on Coruscant, Naboo, Mandalore and Kashyyyk."
"As you command Supreme Leader. I trust Emperor Palpatine is in concurrence with this plan?"
As if I needed to ask permission of a decayed corpse how to rule a galaxy.
"Do you question my authority General Pryde?"
A quiet pall falls over the bridge and my general quickly grasps the situation he has now put himself.
"My apologies Supreme Leader. I do not doubt your leadership. Relay instructions to Admiral Griss and General Parnadee. Prepare the fleet for invasion."
A scream echoing through my soul...terror thrumming in my veins and my vision blurs with the overwhelming fear it produces.
Cold sweat down my spine as my muscles lock into place.
These emotions...they are not mine.
Rey. She's in pain, her soul crying out to me.
"You have the bridge."
I turn away from the stunned faces of my crew and leave without preamble. My pulse is in fluctuation, a vice around my lungs as the mask I wear now feels suffocating despite the ample air it provides.
Officers scatter in my wake and I make it back to my quarters as I rip the mask off, my skin soaked in sweat.
"I'll be good! I'll be good!"
I lift my head to see a child in my vision, sable hair pulled into messy buns, amber eyes filled with terror as tears soak the collar of her clothing.
She's caught in the grip of man who I can't see...and I realize what I am looking at.
Rey caught in the nightmare of her past, fracturing her mind in an endless loop that somehow she's managing to project onto me.
If this continues she will break beneath the pressure...
"Rey!"
The galaxy shifts around me, my senses realigning and I am no longer seeing the vision of Rey as a child.
The woman is now before me, head thrown back her mouth open in a silent scream as the muscles around her neck stand out in sharp relief to her rigid terror.
Eyes of hammered gold stare unblinking at the ceiling, seeing nothing. Her body is locked into one position, the veins in her arms visible as her hands are hooked around the armrest of her chair.
"Rey!"
I grab her shoulder but she doesn't react and the moment I touch her I know what's happened.
She's in a Force trance that she cannot escape. Something that she buried from long ago has broken free.
A fragment of her past, forgotten until now.
Our connection allows me to see those memories as if they were my own but I am not caught in the loop, only an outsider looking in...
A woman with eyes of liquid topaz, haunting and full of despair...hair that is paler than the child she holds in her arms, more fire than shadow but with the same flowing waves the child would one day have as an adult.
"Be brave Rey...my sweet girl..."
She is whispering the words to the crying child and I know what I'm seeing.
This is Rey's mother. The one she could never remember.
The one I told her had abandoned her all those years ago on Jakku.
She looks up and I see the despair disappear behind a desperate kind of courage.
It is the look of a mother who will never see her child again and something inside me is shattering to glimpse the fierce love in her gaze.
This is not the face of a woman who would sell her child for drinking money.
She is whispering words I can no longer hear but Rey is crying and a man drags Rey from her mother.
"No...let me go! I'll be good! I'll be good!"
It's the same words she screams in her nightmares and they are caused by this man.
I stare at this stranger with eyes of hammered gold.
This man is her father and I watch, fury igniting in my blood as he slaps he across the face to stop her crying.
I've seen enough...
I snap out of the trance but Rey is still caught in the nightmare that shaped her life.
"Enough! Stop!"
She cannot hear me and if I try to use the Force to break the connection I don't know what it will do to her mind.
There is only one other way to break a trace this deep.
"Forgive me Rey."
I grasp her left shoulder where it curves into the neck and dig my fingers hard into the pressure point.
Her flesh yields before my unforgiving hand, applying cruel pressure to induce enough pain to break free her mind.
A shuttered gasp from her lips seconds after I take hold.
Her head lifts, a soft groan and eyes flicker open.
No longer the hammered gold from before, but crystalline amber that refracts the light of her soul.
She is staring up at me with such vulnerability it threatens to bring me to my knee's.
The incomprehension in her gaze tells me that she has no idea what just happened.
"B-Ben?"
I jerk my hand away before I can give into the impulse and pull her into my arms and soothe away her nightmares as I have done in the past.
The skin around the juncture of her neck and shoulder has turned a mottled red, the exact shape of my hand.
I had no other choice but I am disgusted with myself at having to hurt her.
She is suppose to be mine to protect, not harm.
She is out of the chair, reaching for me but I fear the memories I now hold inside me will spill into her and I won't hurt her again.
We've done that far too much lately.
If only I could tell her how I...
The galaxy shifts on me...but no before I glimpse the place where she is at...
...and I'm back in my quarters with the knowledge that she is on the Falcon. I would know the inside of that ship anywhere.
I'm not likely to forget as I spent half my childhood exploring her, my father's promise ringing in my mind that she would one day be mine.
That we would make the Kessel Run together and I would beat his legendary score.
Another broken promise, like all the other ones he could never keep.
Memories of Ben Solo bleeding into me and I snatch up the mask and shove it back onto my head.
Rey is fine and I now know that she is out of hiding. Traveling through the galaxy and it will only be a matter of time before the Falcon is spotted.
She cannot hide from me any longer.
I will always find her.
