Interlude Pt. II – Ben
Ben learns quickly that leaving can be every bit as painful as being left. What begins as a noble intention, to protect the one he loves, quickly transforms into a self-enforced exile. The reports he sends to Luke are devoid of all but the barest details. How fares his search for the Knights of Ren, and to what reaches of distance space has the journey taken him? His true objective he hides. The Knights are but a trail of breadcrumbs leading him to the greatest threat in the galaxy: Snoke.
You must do what you failed to do, before, his grandfather tells him. Destroy him utterly, that you might keep young Rey safe.
He snarls at grandfather to be silent. In his waking moments, he does not suffer Rey to enter his thoughts. When the bond brings them together, he can read the betrayal and the grief in her silence. They've never needed words to communicate. But soon she becomes stronger than he, and refuses to acknowledge that precious, beautiful connection which first brought them together. It is as he demanded—they are severed from one another utterly.
Try though he might, he cannot match her resolve. When she averts her gaze, his eyes drink her in, like a man dying of thirst. She is pale, wan, but so very dear to him. On dark days, the thought of her is his only reason for carrying on.
At night, she comes to him in dreams.
As the years pass, his travels take him less frequently to the Core worlds, until eventually he secludes himself in Wild Space, searching for an enemy who desires not to be found. He breaks his second promise to Luke, and then his first. Among strange ruins he stumbles, gleaning fragments of a violent and startling history. Ghosts whisper to him; wraiths guide his footsteps or else bewitch him down meaningless detours with no end. To find a darksider, one cannot walk in the light.
And so, for seven long years, Ben Solo wanders in the dark, lost and losing himself.
A/N: buckle up, buttercups ;)