Kylo wandered out into the main room of his quarters. Luke leaned out of the doorway to the kitchenette holding a jar of opaque liquid.
"It's out of date, Ben," the Jedi master wrinkled his nose. "You'd better stock up before you ship off."
"I hate you."
"Master Yoda can be an acquired taste," Luke ignored him. "But he taught me almost everything I know."
"That's not exactly high praise."
His uncle rolled his eyes. "Yoda lived longer than most of the crew of this ship combined. His wisdom is invaluable. But he doesn't give it freely. It took me a long time to see that. Certainly longer than a single night."
"Tired. Of dealing with unwanted visitors."
"Oh, but you're already halfway there! And you might just like find you have something in common with my next friend."
He very much wanted to go to bed. But a warm glow from the chamber suggested he wasn't done yet.
Two more ghosts.
"Is that Kylo Ren? Come in, come in! I want to get to know my namesake a little better."
Inside Ren's room was an old man in a brown robe. His beard was white, but streaked through with occasional strands of orange.
"Another friend of my uncle's?" Kylo said dejectedly.
The man smiled. "A friend of your grandfather's actually, though I did briefly know your uncle. Master Yoda deserves most of the credit, but I was his first tutor. Obi-Wan Kenobi, though when I died most knew me as Old Ben."
"The Jedi who saved my mother from the Empire. She told me stories about you when I was a boy." For once the boy actually had a glimmer of light in his eye. "You were a hero in the Clone Wars."
"I played my parts. Though in the war all of us were actors upon Darth Sidious' stage. I try not to dwell on that part of my life, for the past is full of sorrows."
"Hn. Maybe you don't know me after all. You wouldn't win in a contest of tragedy with me."
For a brief moment the Jedi Master's eyes flickered with emotion, but the Supreme Leader didn't notice.
"Well, what have you come to show me? Yoda thinks that repeating the past will be my downfall. I'm inclined to agree. That's why I've taken control of my own destiny."
The old man's eyes regained their twinkle. "I've come to show you that you're ignoring your present as well as your past." And with that the room once again faded out of view.
"Where are... oh, no."
They were in a room made almost entirely of dark wood, with a deep green carpet. As the rest of the room came into focus Kylo Ren tensed up. He recognized this place. How could he not? He visited it once a year. This was the home of Chewbacca, where he and his family celebrated Life Day.
"I've never had the opportunity to visit this world," Obi-Wan looked out the windows of the living room at the impossibly tall forest beyond. Tree trunks thicker than starships stood upright like a vast spaceport of mottled brown and green.
"It loses its appeal after a while," Ren said flatly.
"Still, that doesn't stop some people from visiting," the Jedi motioned for the boy to turn around.
The living room was now full of people, most of whom Ren recognized as being members of the Resistance. The pilot he interrogated for the map to Skywalker was admiring Lumpy's model starfighter collection. The wayward Storm Trooper who confronted him in the forest on Starkiller Base was asleep with his nose in an old, thickly bound book, while a blonde woman read another with a disinterested look in her eye.
And on the couch, nodding patiently as she listened to an ancient white haired Wookiee, was the girl.
Ben lurched forward. "You have to let me out. I need to send a division to Kashyyyk immediately."
"Please, be calm, Ben. By the time your troops would get there the Resistance will have already left."
A young woman with short dark hair entered the living room from the kitchen. "Connix, Poe, Finn. General Organa wants us out on the porch."
The blonde woman jabbed FN-2187 to wake him up, and the pilot went over to join them. "Should we bring Rey along too? She probably deserves a break."
The first girl made a quick motion towards her neck indicating it would be a bad decision. "She said she wants to teach us some sort of 'Life Day song.' Her words, not mine."
The four exited with a look of grim expectation.
"My mother is here, then," Kylo said to no one in particular.
"Right now our entire presence is from within the Force. It may not be possible for you to discern individual beings."
"Hn. Fine. I don't care. What is this meant to teach me? That I was right about"
"Family. Friends," Kenobi began. "All these things the Dark Side takes from you. This is your current life, a life you have chosen."
"I have friends," Ren shuffled his feet. "And I thought the Jedi having families was a rule Anakin Skywalker broke."
"It is. And it's a rule I would have broken as well. But it was not the will of the Force. My love was taken from me."
"What happened to her?"
"She was slain. By an adherent of the Dark Side."
Ren slouched miserably. "So that's it. You look at me and you see her killer all over again. I was given your name and I became a monster."
"I'm through making such rash judgments," Kenobi said. "I have been wrong about a great many things, but most chiefly was I wrong about the Dark Side of the Force. For my entire life I believed that the Dark Side was a downward slope, too long to ever reach the bottom of and too steep to climb back up. But now I know that the Dark Side, just like the Light, is a matter of choice. Of one's conviction. I'm not sure I believe that anything we know about the nature of good and evil is true."
Ben looked at him, surprised. "What caused you to change your mind so drastically?"
"Part of it was my old master. He had an... unconventional idea of the Force that I probably should have given more notice too. But mostly, it was Luke and Anakin Skywalker. Few Jedi of the Old Republic would wager that one as strong as Vader could be turned. Luke made that wager, and he won. Somehow he pierced that metal exterior and found something inside the Emperor's apprentice that the Jedi long ago stopped valuing in their students: compassion. I wonder, would any of this have come to pass if the young man who became Darth Vader was shown any compassion by the galaxy? That, I think, is my great shortcoming. The way in which even a Jedi's sight is unrefined."
Kylo Ren looked down steadily. And for the first time since that moment in the cockpit of his TIE, guns trained on his mother, he questioned where his path had taken him.
"I..."
When he looked up, he was standing in a corridor of the Star Destroyer, and Obi-Wan was nowhere to be found. Kylo wheeled around, trying to find any trace of his guide.
"Kenobi! Where did you go? Kenobi!"
"He's gone, Ben." It was Luke, now materialized behind him. "It takes a lot of concentration to interact with the living through the Force. For some, more than others."
Kylo collapsed to the ground. "Why... why did it have to be you? I can't see my mother when we visit her though the Force. The old man can't channel enough of the Force to remain for more than an hour or so at a time. I can no longer see her. Why does the Force blind me to everyone else, yet it keeps bringing you back into my life?"
Luke sat down next to his nephew. "I know it's hard, but it's part of the healing process. You're connected to me. You have Skywalker in your blood. You're connected to all of us."
Kylo Ren's face darkened. "You were never the Skywalker I wanted to know."
Then the corridor went black. And then the breathing started.