Chapter 4
The mask lay long forgotten beside him as the tall man sat with his head in his hands at the table, the most impressive of few pieces of furniture in the dark room that he found himself alone in often lately. He had taken the mask off as soon as he had felt the solitude of the room where he knew few would disrupt or bother him after the conversation with Supreme Leader Snoke. Snoke had not been happy with the turn of events, and he was least pleased with Kylo Ren's actions. In that moment, however, he was more, felt more, like Ben Solo than he did like his adopted name and persona than he had been and had felt in a long time - potentially since he decided to leave all he had ever known in the fight for power. Anyone else seeing him right then would have said he was just a boy, no matter how desperately he tried to be a man.
He squeezed his eyes shut tightly against the warm sweatiness of his palms as memories and flashbacks raced through his brain. He saw the last crooked smile of his father, the same one as the one he saw if ever he smiled - something he hadn't done in a long time - then the expression morph in an open-mouthed grimace. He felt the small shock in his wrist as the lightsaber struck through a human body, the body of his father, again. Grasping his wrist with his other hand roughly, he tried to control the shaking he felt in it until his knuckles turned white, effort rendering useless as he felt it more in his mind than his physique. Feeling his cheeks tingling darker with effort to suppress emotional and physical memories of his father's murder, he at last slammed his shaking hand down flat on the table to try and still it, slamming his head down on it repetitively, needing to feel numb, needing the feelings, the emotions, to go away. He tried his best not to think of Han Solo as his father, but his mind was playing tricks on him. The harder he tried to push it away, the more persistent the memories from another lifetime came, where Han Solo had taught him how to walk and talk with his proud mother by his side, the words 'Daddy' falling from his lips so that Ben could repeat after him, connecting the sound with the person and the words in his head.
"I can't be weak!" he screamed at the thin air, barely hearing the echo of his angry voice bounce off the walls before it was deathly quiet again.
Supreme Leader Snoke had made it quite clear that weak was the exact word the First Order used to describe him after hearing that he had had to let his younger sister win the fight for the force in the forest. The fact that he had killed his own father with a trick and a lie in cold blood did nothing to change everyone's opinions about Kylo Ren. His stomach still hadn't un-sunken from the meeting an hour earlier, during which Snoke told him that he was a stupid fool, to let a girl get the better of him, and most of all for not realizing that the woman he had fought was his own, long-lost younger sister - the one he hadn't realized carried the force just like him - the one he hadn't killed when he should have, before she grew as strong as she was now.
Hearing that the woman had been his sister had sparked a momentary overwhelming urge of feeling, and when he wasn't thinking about his father and about said man's last moments, his mind ran through childhood memories of himself with Jaina. Jaina sitting beside him, playing with tiny pieces of scrap metal and saying his name repetitively, as if it was the most fun thing to say in the world. Jaina running after him on short legs as he played ball with his little friends. Jaina whacking books against his head without even touching them as she sat on the opposite side of the giant book shelf they had had in their library. It was only now that he realized, after Snoke's explanation - although it had been more of a reprimand than anything else - that it must have been the force she played with and commanded in her own way as a small child, rather than her pushing against the side of the bookcase as he had described it to back then. How could he have been so stupid? How could a female have managed to take control of the force better without him noticing it? He had never thought she would be a danger to him or his power.
Ever having been a bit of a pretentious know-it-all, his brain meddled with by the First Order, the thought of Jaina having become stronger than him with little to no training made him more angry than ever, his dark round pupils gaining a red glow in the dark.
Kylo Ren finally blinked up and cast his gaze aside, letting it fall on the mask past his own. Getting up, he walked over to the only remainder of his grandfather, the powerful Darth Vader. Pressing his hands against the burnt remains, he whispered, "Please give me the power to show those who need who is strongest, grandfather."
Curtly turning his face aside, he extended one of his hands and forced the force to pull at the surrounding air beside the mask that was his, pulled it, reeled it in until it rested in his palm. 'Kill Leia. Kill Jaina.' That is what the Supreme Leader had asked of him, and that is what he would do, he said to himself as his face hardened and he strode from the room with confidence.
If only he had properly realized what he had requested from his ancestor.