Trigger warning for brief (non-descriptive) mentions of abuse and self-harm in this chapter (contained in the long, italicized section).
"Drink, traitor." Finn wakes to cold water splashing over his face, charging down his nostrils, burning his throat. He gags and hacks.
He wonders what Rey felt, what Poe felt, when they were chained to a chair like this, at the mercy of the First Order. He thinks back to all the prisoners he saw marched out of this room to their deaths.
I deserve this.
No. No, he doesn't.
I just want to get away from the First Order.
Well, now he's back with them. Their prisoner, at the mercy of his fellow stormtroopers, one of whom kicks Finn in the groin.
Shit.
"I don't even know why they're keeping you around," jeers one. "You're a worthless traitor, you know that? That's all you've ever been. First you betrayed us—" He kicks Finn again, and Finn's head swims with agony. "And now you've betrayed your bloody Resistance."
What?
"We'll get Luke Skywalker," sneers the stormtrooper. "And when we do, everyone will know that you're just like all the other pathetic, weak Resistance fighters we've captured. We'll get the one you rescued, too—the pilot."
Poe.
Finn has no memory of giving Kylo Ren anything. Is that how this mind stuff works? Did Poe remember the actual moment Kylo Ren tore the map's location from his mind? Did Poe experience this crushing shame, an anguish that surpasses any abuse this stormtrooper can inflict?
"Not that you'll be around to see it. You're outliving your use already, but I hope Ren makes you suffer." The stormtrooper aims an electric blaster at Finn, and Finn gasps despite himself.
Coward!
"What are you doing, L5-34?" Kylo Ren glides into the room.
L5-34 stands at attention. "Giving the prisoner some water, sir."
"And taking matters into your own hands." Kylo Ren ignites his lightsaber. "He is not yours to play with!" he roars in a voice so terrifying goosebumps shoot up Finn's arms.
L5-34 cowers, hands raised. "Sir, I—"
"Get out!" Kylo screams, and the stormtrooper scurries away. Kylo hacks at the walls, screaming. "And if anyone enters this room without my express prior commission, I'll take his head!"
"I'm that valuable?" Finn quips, partially hoping Kylo will run him through, end all this, and partially because he knows he has no value.
Kylo withdraws the lightsaber, peering at him through that inscrutable mask.
"What gives you the right to think you have access to anyone's mind?" Finn blurts out, enraged. "To Rey's—to Poe's—to mine—is your goal just to humiliate us before we die?"
"My goal is to win, Finn."
"Your goal is to—" Finn blinks "What did you just call me?"
Kylo waves his hand, and black curtains collapse over Finn's world.
"Finn okay?"
"Yeah."
Poe passes her a plate of instant bread and some vegetables. "Thanks."
"You're welcome."
"Tomorrow we'll have Finn back," Rey says, trying to lighten Poe's demeanor. He scowls.
Rey goes back to chewing quietly. BB-8 sidles up to her and squeaks. He's just sad.
"I know he's sad," Rey whispers.
"Wait, what? BB-8! Come on now."
"Poe, really I just had to look at your face," Rey points out. The bread is bland, but soft and filling.
Poe tinkers with the navigation. "I just feel guilty."
"About what?"
"General Organa. She'll be furious. She's like—" Poe tears off a piece of bread and pops it into his mouth. "My mom died when I was eight, okay? She served the Rebellion, as a pilot. And she never brought up her time in the war. And then after she died and I became a pilot and left the New Republic to serve the Resistance, it was like I'd make her proud, you know? And General Organa feels—"
"Like a mother?" Rey's heart aches. She thinks of all her nights on Jakku, spent hoping that any of the ships she heard landing were her mother, her father, coming back for her.
But they never came.
"Like my hero," Poe corrects. "And I'm letting her down."
"She'd have done the same, though, wouldn't she?" Rey persists. "For Han?"
A ghost of a smirk flickers on Poe's face. "Maybe."
"Finn's worth it, right?"
"Of course. I do wish we had a better informant, though."
"Yeah, well, being Force bonded to him isn't exactly my first choice either." Rey picks at a limp vegetable. "But it's worked out for the best. We can get Finn back."
"And after?" Poe asks her. "Will—he—just go back to slaughtering innocent planets on their brand new and improved Starkiller? Which you can tell him we'll just blow up again, by the way."
What are you going to do? Rey asks.
I never did that, Kylo's voice cuts through. I never supported the Starkiller Base operation. I still don't.
You didn't stop it, she answers. So you were still a part of it.
"He could defect," Rey says to the man in her head and the man in front of her.
"Hell no," Poe vetoes.
What are you planning to do? Rey persists. Continue to train with Snoke? Your heart isn't in it, and you know it.
She feels fear swarming him, and doubts, and all kinds of accusations: weak. You'll never be what you could be now. It's in your blood, the weakness, the sentiment. The voice speaking isn't Kylo's—it's hollow, ghastly and scrapes against Rey's skull.
I could run, he offers.
That's rich.
"Great," Poe says. "I'll leave you to your mental telepathic conversations with a mass murderer." He grabs her empty plate, clattering it against his own as he moves away.
Come and help us. Help the Resistance, Rey pleads.
I can't. The Resistance isn't any better than the First Order. You kill in the name of your cause, too.
Rey groans and leans back. BB-8 whirs curiously. Your mother misses you. Unspoken, she wonders if her mother ever missed her, whoever she is, wherever she is.
If she's worth anything as a mother, she did. Or does, Ben says to her, brushing aside her comment about his mother.
Why did she leave me? The only thing Rey remembers is her mother's voice calling her "sweetheart," promising to come back.
I might know the answer to that, he tells her.
Rey sits upright, peering out the windshield, between the stars. What? You? How?
When I—when I killed, or helped kill—when the Knights of Ren turned on Luke and destroyed the Jedi academy, there was a lot of fear. People might have thought it was another Order 66. Rey, if your mother—your parents—knew you were Force sensitive, they may have tried to hide you.
Rey can't believe what she's hearing. She slams her hand down on the chair.
"Is he hurting you?" Poe hollers.
"No!" So you—
He doesn't say anything, but sorrow rages, and she realizes that for all his bravado, he's drowning in regret.
So you care about me?
It's hard not to when you're feeling someone's emotions, he retorts. The snippy tone sounds far more serious than Rey's guessing he intends.
What happened to you? she asks, curious.
Snoke showed me the power of the Dark Side. I wanted to be powerful.
Why, though? She's asking because she cares.
He hesitates, and then it's as if a curtain's been lifted, and he lets her in.
"Don't make me! I'm scared." Four-year-old Ben hides behind his mother's legs.
"There's nothing to be scared of, Ben."
"Just an old, orange person with crazy eyes," Maz Kanata, his father's friend, agrees. She removes her goggles and offers them to him. Ben shakes his head.
"Well, I'll do it," proclaims his father, crouching down and putting the goggles on his own face. Ben laughs and peeks out at Maz again. She still looks scary. But also, kind. Father slips the goggles over Ben's eyes.
"I can't see!"
"Neither can I," Maz jokes as Ben lifts them off his head.
He steps out, and Maz puts her small hand on Ben's head. "This child is strong with the Force. Like his mother and your father before him," she says to Mother.
"Like Uncle Luke?" Ben asks.
"Exactly," Mother says.
That night, Ben closes his eyes and, even as he dreams of chasing Chewie around the Millennium Falcon, there's the distinct feeling that someone is watching him.
"He wasn't fully bad, Ben," Uncle Luke tells the five-year-old child sprawled at his feet. "He thought what he was doing was right. It just… wasn't."
"But you beat him!" crows the boy, staring up at his uncle with eyes of awe.
"And then he saved me." Luke's face, brave and young and full of hope, breaks into a grin.
"Where'd you see his ghost again?" Ben asks.
"Endor."
"We should go there," Ben declares, sitting up, hair falling over his eyes. "Sometime."
"The Ewoks would probably sacrifice you," teases his father as he strides in, grabbing Ben by his waist and lifting him high in the air. "To 3PO!"
"Oh, dear," sighs the droid.
Ben wraps his arms around Father's neck as Father starts to tickle him. Ben laughs and squirms, and then the next thing he knows, he's on the ground and his father is too, and Ben's screaming because he didn't mean to Force push his father so hard.
"I'm all right, kid," grunts Father. "You didn't kill me."
But even at five, Ben sees a scrape on his father's face and stares at his hands, wondering what he's done, what he could do, and he's afraid.
Fear is common. Fear invades his dreams regularly, until a tall creature, somewhat like a human and somewhat not, comes to banish all the nightmares.
"Don't worry," the creature says to him. "You're just dreaming."
And then Ben is six, and he's sick of the New Republic senators taking up so much of his mother's time, and he smashes their plates at dinner in Cloud City. Lor San Tekka gets a glass splinter in his chin and there's blood and Ben flees to his room, hiding under his bed until Chewie comes to him, pulls him close as they wait for the inevitable judgment from Ben's parents.
"Promise me," Father says to him that night, kneeling down and forcing Ben to look him in the eye. "That you won't ever use the Force to hurt people again."
Ben nods, tears throbbing behind his eyes. "I promise."
That night, the tall creature drifts into his dreams again. "Why did you do it?"
Ben knows it's no use to lie to his sleep friend. "I was angry. They forget about me sometimes. They think—."
"They think their missions are more important than you?" The creature bends down to look at Ben. "Anger can be a good thing, you know. You can use anger to do many things, powerful things."
When Ben is seven, he dreams of his father falling, of blackness so thick and invasive it's chewing him up, swallowing him in pieces, and he wakes up screaming for the first time in years, because no one showed up to chase it away. He screamed for the dream man, whose name he doesn't even know, but he didn't come.
"The Force can't be worth this, Leia!" Father yells.
"It's not the Force!" Ben defends—defends what? The Force? Or himself? Are they even distinct? "I like having the Force! I want to be like Mother, like Uncle Luke, like Grandfather! You just don't understand because you don't have the Force! I don't want to be like that! I don't want to be like you!" And then Chewie howls, and Ben buries his face in the blankets covering his bunk because he knows he's said a terrible thing.
"Great," his father says. "Did you hear that, Leia? The kid just told me he doesn't want to be like me."
"Where were you?" Ben asks the next time the man walks through his sleep.
"I was busy," the man replies curtly. "What happened, child?"
"I said something bad to Father, and he went away again, and I'm scared he won't come back." Ben's crying, and the man wipes his tears with small noises of disgust, because he's always tells him to be brave, never to cry. Forget your tears.
And Ben is eight, and begging his parents to take him with them, and they've agreed. "Just promise not to create trouble," Mother warns him.
"I won't!"
He doesn't, until trouble finds him in the form of a gross senator Ben's heard Mother saying she doesn't trust. Ben follows him, telling himself he's not really breaking his promise to Mother as deluded dreams of finding the man's a traitor, being hailed a hero and impressing Mother and telling Father it was the Force that led him instead of just curiosity, silencing that criticism forever, pull him along.
And the man finds out he's being followed and traps Ben in a room, and all his bravado sinks away.
"Are you following me?"
"Don't tell my parents," Ben begs the man.
"If I keep your secret," the man says. "You have to keep one for me."
And Ben knows it's wrong and knows he could use the Force to stop him, but if he does and Mother finds out, if Father finds out he used the Force to hurt someone again…
He doesn't stop him, and afterwards, Ben's nightmares return worse than ever, and he never asks to go on a journey with his parents again. They worry for his nightmares, Mother blanches when she finds Ben scraping his forearms raw with a tree branch because isn't that what he deserves, but he can't tell them.
He tells his dream friend, though, who tells him that he knows how to make sure Ben never gets hurt again. And Ben knows he's talking about the Dark Side, and runs away, waking up screaming worse than ever.
Only Mother comes in to comfort him, and then she leaves the next day to go back to the New Republic, to meet with more senators, and Ben hates them all.
And Ben is nine, and his mother is telling him not to practice the Force anymore, that it's too volatile, and Ben realizes that he's not like Uncle Luke—he's weaker, or else Mother would encourage him.
And for the first time in almost a year, he calls out to the man who used to walk his dreams, who returns the instant he asks.
He's ten, and Mother's sending him away to Luke's academy after several explosive fights with Father, the last of which ended with Han storming out of the house.
"Be brave," Mother encourages him. "Make your father proud. Make both of us proud."
He learns Snoke's name that year.
And Ben's eleven and asking Luke about gray Jedi, as Snoke suggests, and although Luke brushes him off at first, he eventually tolerates, even encourages, Ben's pursuits. Until Ben's thirteen and refuses to speak to his parents unless forced, because in his heart he wonders if they even love him, and Luke cracks down, ending the gray Jedi pursuit. So Ben learns to hide.
And he's fourteen and learning more about the First Order, this group Snoke is the Supreme Leader of, and sees visions of the Knights of Ren. You could be one of them, Snoke tells him.
Under Snoke's tutelage, even if only in dreams, Ben learns so much more than Luke teaches him. He learns that his anger, his pain, the things he thought were weaknesses—they can be strengths, they can be weapons, they can defend. Snoke shows him his grandfather as Darth Vader, for the first time without condemnation, and Ben revels in the revelation.
"Choose your own name this time," Snoke suggests.
Because Ben's not very creative, he takes letters from his grandfather's last name, and his father's. "Kylo," he tells Snoke the next time. "My name is Kylo Ren."
And he's fifteen and Snoke shows him how to craft his own lightsaber, flawed though it is, and authorizes him for his first mission. "You're ready." Ready to kill his peers, destroy the Jedi academy, and meet Snoke, his savior, in person.
"You," Snoke purrs. "Will carry out your grandfather's legacy."
The padawans he ate with, he laughed with, scream and flee and Kylo won't let himself give in to his fear as he slices them all down. Luke screams and screams, tries to stop Kylo, but he freezes his uncle as Luke bends over a padawan, clutching the girl's face. Rain gushes down, but what he's done can never be washed away.
Even though Luke escapes and disappears, Snoke appears pleased when Kylo Ren meets him for the first time.
"Let the name Ben Solo never be spoken again," Snoke proclaims.
Han Solo… you feel as if he's the father you never had. He would have disappointed you.
Han Solo can't save you now.
Rey leans forward, closing her eyes. Kylo—no, she'll never call him by that name again—Ben—is still there, a storm of emotions in her brain. I'm so sorry.
Why?
Ben—not all of that—that wasn't your fault—
Now do you see? he finally demands. Why I can't go back?
I see the reason you should go back, Rey says, her heart thumping. Can't you see? Snoke's been playing you. He's—he's using you for your power, and when he gets what he wants, he'll crush you!
That's not true! He sounds like a child clenched his fist around the idea of his dream friend, his friend who promised him great things, clinging to his dream even as reality tears it apart. He's a child scratching lines on a metal wall, fifteen years later.
Why is it so hard to believe you swallowed a lie? she hisses. I did! For fifteen years, I thought—I hoped—I believed they'd come back. She curls her hand into a fist, slams it into her own leg.
Stop it! Ben shouts.
Rey wipes at her eyes, abandonment still raw, still stinging. Is this a wound she'll carry forever? If you don't come, you'll never become all you could be.
I don't know whether I even want to, anymore.
The Resistance can protect you, she tries again.
By executing me? he scoffs.
You're not afraid of dying, and you know it, Rey snaps. You're afraid of facing your mother. She wishes he were more afraid of dying. His recklessness scares her.
Contact me again when you're in position, he says, and blocks her.
When he gets what he wants, he'll crush you.
Worse than the weight of so many memories? Kylo spreads his hands out, studies them as if he expects to see some sort of dark spot, a blotch, a stain. There's none. His fingers rise to his face, tracing his scar.
Ben's fate has yet to be completed…
He's never told anyone all of those secrets before, never let anyone in to see the memories that haunt him, the fear that scrabbles against his soul every moment that he's bad.
Promise me.
I promise.
He's hurt so many people with the Force. He killed his father for the Force.
Kylo upends the formerly sacred table, sending Darth Vader's helmet toppling from its shrine. He screams into his fist.
What made him share that with Rey? Was it sheer desperation? Did he want to absolve himself before her? Both? Both, with a need to trust someone, anyone, a need to not be alone like he's been these fifteen years, a need to let someone who can actually respond back—instead of a decaying, silent helmet—know the secrets hidden inside him?
And if they go through with this plan—if the Finalizer beams up the Falcon and they rescue Finn without all getting killed, what can he do?
If she dies, what will you become?
If she dies, what will you become?
Kylo drops to his knees, picks up the helmet and gazes at it. No one looks back at him.
Rey?
Ben?
Change of plans, he tells her. Get yourself to the coordinates I'll give you. I'll meet you there.