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“Girl? What girl?!”
*
Kylo Ren knew who she was the second he sensed her Force signature. Of course he did.
Rey. Daughter of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, and Kylo’s half-sister. He could never forget her even if he tried and oh how he tried.
He had practically raised her up until she was five years old (up until he threw his life away...but he didn’t believe that, he didn’t. Falling was the best thing that ever happened to him.) That minuscule part of him that clung to the Light (that clung to her after nearly two decades away from her) ached at the fear he sensed in her when he stole her away from the Ileenium system for the knowledge she possessed (and because his weak heart demanded it of him. Because she would be safe with him. Because the general was going to blow up the planet and she would not die with it, not on his watch). It ached more when he showed her his face back on the ship and she didn’t recognize him.
(He didn’t know what he’d been expecting. She’d been five years old the last time she saw him. That was too young to remember much of anything.)
She had grown up so much, he thought. She must be nearly twenty years old by now.
In hindsight, it was stupid to rely on her memory for the map. No, it was more than stupid, it was harebrained. Rey was Luke Skywalker’s daughter. She was Force-sensitive out the wazoo. Kylo knew that.
It was apparent, though, that she had had no training, seeing as he was able to use the Force to hold her still and knock her out back on the Ileenium planet. He was not, however, able to pull the map from her memory. Through the sheer force of will she used to hold him off, to protect those she loved, she managed to discover she was Force sensitive. Luke’s daughter she was indeed.
The fact that she had to discover anything made his brow furrow. A scavenger she was now, that had given him pause originally, though confusion had faded to mild happiness. Perhaps she hated their family as much as he did. Perhaps she had left them and maybe she would return to him now… But that didn’t make sense, seeing as she had been at a Resistance base fighting for Han Solo. But she remembered nothing. How long, he wondered, had she been on that Force-forsaken wasteland of Jakku?
Rattled less by her claim that he feared he would never be as strong as Darth Vader (a fair hit, nevertheless) and more by what he saw in her mind (come back come back! Theyleftmetheyleftmetheyleft—), he left her alone in the interrogation room. He left for a moment to breathe and calm his ever fraying nerves (because he left her all those years ago, he did. Over his dead body he had sworn he wouldn’t but he had anyway, he had abandoned her) and seek guidance from his master because a master was supposed to help him, supposed to tell him what to do when he had no idea. But then again, when had masters ever lived up to his expectations.
When he returned, she was gone. He had lost her. Again. He tore the room apart in anger (his mother always said it was a secondary emotion).
And he searched for her, but found Han Solo instead.
“Come back, son,” his father said, and part of Kylo shook while the other raged, blinded by his fury at his father for the fundamental lack of support he had shown him when he needed it most and paralyzed by the way he had seen Han through Rey’s eyes: the man he had always hoped to see but never had.
“I’m being torn apart,” was what he said and he had always wanted to believe his father was a good man who gave a damn about him and wanted what was best for him.
The problem was, it wasn’t true.
Even so, igniting the blade was the hardest thing he’d ever done (except for the part where it wasn’t). He heard Rey scream from somewhere above him as his father raised a hand to the side of his face.
Ben, his father thought at him. I’m so sorry.
Kylo Ren blinked, a single tear running down his cheek. Me too. I’m sorry it had to come to this. He steeled himself as he watched his father fall. But that was too little too late.
Somewhere also above him, he heard the familiar roar of a Wookiee, and through the Force he saw the agony of losing a best friend, a devastating feeling of betrayal, and bitter rage. In the split second before his Uncle Chewie fired the bowcaster, Kylo Ren accepted that he would die where he stood. He was completely and utterly stunned when the shot blasted half the flesh off his hipbone and he survived it.
From there, rattled to the core, he wasn’t entirely sure how he made it outside, how he found her. And he wasn’t entirely prepared for how much she hated him for killing Han Solo.
She lunged at him and he pushed her out of the way with the Force. He cut down the traitorous Stormtrooper and then she was there, fighting him, and she was good, but not better than him. How could she be, having never held a lightsaber before?
“You need a teacher,” he told her as she fought him. Come back to me. I’ll protect you. I’ll never leave you again, I swear it. His intentions made no difference.
Kylo was so, so tired.
Pain was supposed to make him stronger, Snoke often told him. So he slammed his fist into the wound on his side to make himself stronger (or to keep his eyes open as blood loss and emotional trauma made him drowsy). Pain, he realized and not for the first time since he fell, did nothing of the sort. Because he was in pain, he was always in pain, and all he ever felt was weak.
Even so, he could have beaten her. She was good, clearly had experience with a handheld weapon, but he’d been doing this longer than she’d been alive. He could count a million openings where he could have killed her. Hell, he could have just snapped her neck with the Force if he’d wanted to. But he hadn’t wanted to.
He played defense, trying and failing to convince her to join him, and the hatred in her eyes and the memory of his dead father’s eyes sapped his strength.
Later, as Snoke ordered him beaten bloody, he would tell his master that she was strong in the Force and that his injury weakened him, something, anything. He would tell Snoke whatever he wanted to hear, anything but the truth.
Because the truth was, he’d let her win. He couldn’t kill her. He just couldn’t.
*
He should have been thrilled at the concept of a new sibling, half or otherwise. He’d always wanted a younger sibling. Someone to look out for, to teach, to confide in. At first, he’d been excited.
He wasn’t anymore.
His uncle Luke was pregnant (as was the capability of some male Force users, Ben included). And that —as one might expect seeing as the other parent was Han, who happened to be married to Ben’s mother, Leia, who was decidedly not his Uncle Luke— caused a great deal of strife between his mother, uncle, and father. Infidelity and all that.
It was all a bit much for ten-year-old Ben to understand at the time. All he knew was that no one was happy about his unborn sibling. It wasn’t long before Ben was included in that. All his parents ever did was fight and now they did it even more. Everyone was always angry. Ben went out of his way to pretend like he didn’t exist in an attempt to avoid their ire, but his parents still managed to find fault in him for something he wasn’t even involved in. Even at ten, he understood that their anger at him was misplaced. His uncle Luke, who he had normally gone to for support, was also embroiled in those fights. On the off chance that Ben found him when he wasn’t, he was closed off and despondent. Things had been bad before, but now they were horrible. And as far as Ben could see it, it was all the fault of his unborn sibling, who he grew to hate more and more with each passing day.
At least until he held her in his arms.
*
Han Solo deserved to die for either abandoning his child on a desert planet or for losing her and failing to find her. Whichever it was, Kylo didn’t care. In killing Han Solo, not only had he completed his training, but he had done the universe a public service.
Yes, something like that.
Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.
And he had gotten to be quite good at the whole killing part.
He had been pondering it as a medical droid had been repairing the slash in his face when Rey was suddenly standing right in front of him and shooting him in the chest before disappearing into thin air.
Force projection, his mind supplied upon realizing he had not in fact suffered a fatal blaster wound to the heart. Or any wound at all, for that matter.
He sat back in the chair and let the medical droid continue its work as his hands shook from the unneeded adrenaline pumping through his veins.
He had never been so happy to see someone alive and well.
*
Rey’s birth hadn’t been easy.
Luke had gone into labor early while on a mission off-world, and they had raced to collect him and deliver him to a hospital in time. They hadn’t made it.
The Millennium Falcon was not a large ship, and Ben had never felt its small size more than on that day. It had taken him months to get the sight of blood out of his head and even longer to (mostly) forget the sound of his uncle screaming.
Ben had found the spot on the ship farthest away from his laboring uncle and had covered his ears and hummed any tune he could think of to block out the noise. It hadn’t helped, and he hated his soon-to-be-born sibling for causing his uncle that much pain.
It had gone on for hours. Luke nearly died giving birth to Rey, had very nearly bled out on the bed he was laid on, but Leia managed to save both him and his daughter. Just barely.
Ben had raced from his corner at the sound of his mother frantically shouting his name. Upon entering the room he had seen...everything.
His uncle, white as a ghost and terribly still on the blood soaked bunk. His father, shouting “Kid, c’mon! Stay with me, please, LUKE!” His mother, covered in blood, shoving a tiny baby into his arms.
“Take her!” she shouted before shutting the door in his face.
He had no idea how long he stood there staring at the door, bodily fluids soaking into his shirt as his baby sister wailed in his arms.
He had never held a baby before.
Ben would never forget how his Uncle Chewie had swept in then, finding a blanket to wrap her in and cuddling both Ben and her in his arms to keep them warm until they arrived at the hospital.
Ben would only make note of all that later. In the moment, shaking in his Uncle Chewie’s arms, he only had eyes for the baby girl Luke would later name Rey. He had never felt anything quite like he had in that moment. Such pure, uncomplicated love and a fierce need to protect.
“I’ll never leave you, I promise,” he had said to her later at the hospital, staring though the plastic side of the incubator they had placed her in. “Over my dead body will I let anything happen to you.”
*
He tried to make her give up Luke Skywalker when she appeared in front of him again. She wouldn’t.
Had training, have you? So you have found him.
She hated him. He supposed he understood why. There was no way she knew the full story of what had happened years ago at the Jedi Temple. And the edited version no doubt made him look like the monster he was now, but hadn’t been then.
You’ve gotten so big, he thought as she raged at him. I used to be able to hold you in one arm.
Who was he to say whether the Dark Side was good for her. Hell, he couldn’t even say whether the Dark Side was good for him, but if she turned, she would be back under his protection. It was obvious he couldn’t trust anyone else with it. And it wasn’t as if serving the Light had ever done him any good. In fact, it had done him nothing but harm.
*
The term postpartum depression was one Ben wouldn’t hear for several years after Rey’s birth, but Ben had known from the very beginning that there was something wrong with his uncle.
Soon after Rey’s birth and a blowout fight with Han over a great deal of things (Ben had eavesdropped on the whole thing without meaning to. He had been holding Rey in her nursery at the base when Luke and Han had stormed in, so Ben had taken his sister and hid in the closet. Their fight had drifted from each other’s character flaws to their extramarital affair to the history of the Jedi to how they would raise Rey in a completely incomprehensible fashion), Luke had up and left to finally begin training that new generation of Jedi. (After Han had left Rey’s nursery in a huff, shouting about how he was leaving an never coming back —something he did every other Tuesday and occasionally on Fridays— Luke had opened the closet door and looked down at Ben and his newborn daughter with wet eyes. “We’re leaving,” he’d said, exhaustion permeating his voice. “Are you coming?”)
Ben had gone with him. (His mother had sent him away. Sent him away because the others told her Ben was too much like his grandfather. Ben didn’t know anything about his grandfather at the time, but it was obvious that was a bad thing. Sent him away because of his nightmares, his anger issues, his ever mounting anxiety. The Dark Side, people said, and nearly two decades later Kylo seethed. Snoke wouldn’t prowl into his mind for years after that. It hadn’t been the Dark Side doing all that to him, but rather his unstable home life. That had weakened him and left him vulnerable to Snoke’s manipulation.)
It was frightening, leaving everything and everyone he’d ever known, but he knew he needed to do it. For Rey’s sake. And his own.
He had heard it said once that anything is better if what you had before was shitty. And the constant fighting had been shitty. At least with only his uncle, there would be none of that.
As it turned out, not everything is better.
*
“I don’t want to be doing this right now.”
“Yeah, me neither.” He had work to do, and she dredged up too many things he would rather not think about.
Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.
But he couldn’t kill her, now could he?
She called to the Light in him. He couldn’t bear it. And he couldn’t bear to hear her talk up Han Solo or his uncle as if they were saints when really they were anything but.
“Ask him what really happened that night,” he told her, turning back to his work.
*
Ben soon learned that his uncle had two faces: the one he put on for training the students, and his real one.
The fake one was a false sense of serenity and quirky jokes that were just this side of too dry. The real one was irritable and exhausted and devastated to his very core.
Ben couldn’t blame him then and Kylo couldn’t blame him now, given what had happened. With the strife surrounding his pregnancy, the trauma of her delivery, and the instability after her birth, anyone would be rattled. But he could blame Luke for not asking for help when he knew he was in trouble. And Luke had known he was in trouble. He just didn’t care.
When he stopped being able to care for himself, let alone his students or his newborn daughter, he should have asked for help. But he didn’t, and Ben hated him for it.
As Luke fell deeper and deeper into his depression, much of the Padawans’ day to day needs were beginning to be unmet. Food, cleaning, things went undone. So Ben, being the oldest, learned how to do it all. Life at the temple had always been a group activity, but eleven-year-old Ben still found being in charge to be a bit if a learning curve. After all, he was taking care of not only himself, but twelve students, his master, and his infant sister.
He had grown up fast. Too fast. And that weakened him even more than he already had been, making it all the easier for Snoke to get it.
*
He sat in Rey’s dingy little hut as an Force projection somewhere in the world as she reached out to him, trying to convince him to turn back to the Light. He barely heard a word she said.
When you took your first steps, it was towards me, he thought, eyes running over her face. She looked so different, yet exactly the same. Your first word was my name.
I should have protected you, but I didn’t.
*
When they ran out of money, when the heater broke and they couldn’t fix it, when Ben couldn’t pay for everyone to eat dinner that night (say nothing for himself, more than once he had skipped a meal so everyone could eat something, and as far as he knew, Master Luke hadn’t eaten in three days), he asked for help. And he lived to regret it.
He had been reluctant to ask for help, to tell someone that something was wrong with his uncle for fear that they would come and disband the school. That the Padawans would get sent home, some to planets less than accepting of Force users. That they would take Rey away from his uncle, and therefore away from him.
Han Solo and Leia raced to the Jedi Temple at Ben’s call, astounded at the conditions and how much Luke’s health had deteriorated in the year and a half since Rey had been born. Others came in and made a similar fuss. It was chaos.
Padawans cried and ran to Ben for comfort. At one point he found Rey screaming in her crib in need of a bath, a change, and food. With no money for diapers, the old shirts he had been trying to use didn’t work very well, but Ben was not yet thirteen and doing the best he could.
He cleaned her up as much as possible before cuddling her to his chest and moving to the doorway to peer out into the chaos, unable to do anything about the food because everyone was too focused on thoroughly berating his uncle rather than providing him with the help and supplies he and the students so desperately needed.
He never had gotten used to seeing his uncle cry during the many months he’d been sick, but when Han and Leia and so many others Luke adored and who adored him came in and accused him of abuse, neglect, and malicious intent, who said truly vicious things to someone who may be guilty of neglect but was so obviously terribly ill, Ben couldn’t bear to watch as his uncle folded to the floor and sobbed.
Holding Rey tight to his chest, he stepped out and screamed at them. “Can’t you see he’s sick? He’s been sick this whole time!” Ben pushed aside his anger and bitterness at his uncle and continued, “He wanted to take care of us! He tried for a long time, but he got too sick! It’s my fault things got so bad, I’m the oldest, I should have called for help!”
Han rolled his eyes and pushed Ben back with a hand on his shoulder. “Stay out of this, kid.”
Ben rubbed Rey’s back as gently as he could manage as he roared at his father’s back. “Can’t you see he needs help? He needs medical care, not all of this shit!”
No one heard him.
He retreated back into Rey’s room. “Shhh, baby girl, I’ve got you,” he murmured, rocking her gently. “It’s okay, I’ve got you. I’m here. Nothing bad’s gonna happen to you.”
She continued to scream in his ear, her tiny fists holding tight to wayward strands of his hair, upset by the disturbance in the Force.
He kicked the open door shut with the Force and did his best to comfort her as he tried not to listen to the madness outside. Rey continued to cry into his hair and Ben shed more than a few tears himself as the malicious voice he’d been hearing for weeks —Snoke, he would later find out— crooned in his ear.
It was his mother that finally set them all straight, that finally set aside her pain and anger and confusion and actually helped them. Uncle Luke went to the hospital and got what Ben understood to be some intensive treatment when Leia looked after the Padawans at the Temple and straightened things up.
Han, on the other hand, threw up his hands and left. Like he always did.
When Luke finally returned, the first thing he did was drag Ben into his arms.
“I am so, so sorry Ben…” he whispered.
Ben trembled. “Are you better?” he asked, staring at nothing over his uncle’s shoulder.
Luke pulled back. He looked so, so old, Ben noted absently. Older than he had any right to, but then again Ben could relate. After a long moment, he nodded slowly. “I’m…I’m getting there. And I won’t ever let it get that bad again, I promise.”
Ben looked into his Uncle’s face and watched it slowly blur before he burst into tears.
Luke hugged him again, running his fingers through his nephew’s hair as Ben bawled into the front of his robes.
“You saved it all, Ben,” Luke murmured. “Everything I worked so hard for. I threw it away and you saved it all.”
Part of Ben, the part that was far too mature for a thirteen-year-old boy, wondered at what cost.
Help me, Ben mouthed into his uncle’s tunic as Snoke pressed down hard on his brain. Help me please.
No one heard him. Perhaps it was because he didn’t speak a word.
*
It broke his heart to do it, but he wasn’t going back to the Light Side. What had it ever done for him but caused him pain? (The Dark Side had caused him more.) So, Rey had to come to him. She had come to him after Luke told her a revisionist history account of what had happened the night Kylo fell. After Kylo corrected her and Luke shattered their connection. She had come to him with a bright smile and a heart full of good intentions and it took everything in Kylo to turn away from the escape pod and leave her to the Stormtroopers.
As he brought her to stand before his master, she called him by his given name and looked at him with such hope in her eyes that he almost acquiesced. Almost. Perhaps, in a way, he did, considering he killed Snoke for her.
(He had brought her to him in hopes that Snoke could convince her to turn. That he would convince her to give up Luke Skywalker and turn her to the Dark Side and she would be safe with him forever. What little respect he had left for his master turned to bitter hatred the second he expressed a desire to kill Rey after extracting the information he wanted from her.)
Over my dead body!
Imperial guards brought down, he offered her her rightful place beside him as they ruled the galaxy. No one had ever taken care of him, so it was only right that he hold this seat. He had had to figure everything out himself. He knew how to struggle and fight and fly by the seat of your pants (so like Han Solo). He would make a good Supreme Leader. And by some turn of events he would likely never know, Rey had suffered the same fate. She deserved a place beside him. The two Skywalker children, ruling the galaxy together.
He held out his hand and told her what she suspected to be true. That her parents were no one (that mattered). That they were dead (either literally or in a sense).
(Later. He would tell her the truth later, when he was sure she would listen to the whole story.)
When she rejected him, what was left of his heart shattered.
He had a hard time remembering the rest of the day. They had fought over Ben’s old lightsaber, ultimately breaking it in half. The shockwave of shattering kyber had knocked him out cold and when he awoke, his sister was gone.
At that point he assaulted General Hux, forcing him to support him as Supreme Leader before walking out, listening to the general project thoughts of mutiny after him. But that was future-Kylo’s problem.
Current Kylo’s problem was the Resistance holed up on Crait. Or what was left of them anyway.
If he had been in a better mood he would have laughed when he saw the decades old speeder flying towards them. This would be simple, he thought, basking in the power of the Dark Side to drown out the agony of the day. They were merely an annoyance.
(Through the Force, he recognized at least half of the people flying those blasted speeders from his time living on bases. One, the commander, demanded his attention more strongly than any of the others. The bitter pain of a nearly two decade old rejection simmered into white hot anger as he ordered them shot down).
Then Luke fucking Skywalker appeared in the middle of the battlefield.
General Hux thought he was batshit crazy. So did everyone else on the ship when he order all fire concentrated on one man. And a lot of fire at that.
“That’s enough,” the general murmured in his ear after a good deal of firepower had been discharged. (There may have been a time when the general’s barely noticeable non-Galactic Basic accent might have calmed the worst of his nerves, but that time was no more.) When Kylo ignored him, the general roared to the troops, “That’s enough!”
And they listened to him, too. They listened to the general’s orders over the Supreme Leader’s. If Kylo had been in any better frame of mind, he would have shot the general dead where he stood with his own blaster. But he wasn’t in his right mind.
Hux turned and looked at Kylo with raised eyebrows. “Do you think you got him?” he snarked.
Kylo’s lip curled and he threw him into the wall with the Force in retribution.
His temper soared when Luke Skywalker walked back out of the mist and brushed off his shoulder like Kylo had done nothing but throw sand at him. That was the last straw.
His uncle’s face was unreadable as Kylo came to stand before him, trembling with fury.
“Did you come back to say you forgive me?” he snarled. “To save my soul?”
“No.” Luke looked at him with a look of such pity that it made Kylo rage. And he launched a series of attacks, and they were strong and fast and should have done something, but they didn’t. Luke remained completely unscathed. Quite a feat, for a man his age.
“I failed you, Ben,” his uncle said, lightsaber held aloft. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sure you are!” By the stars, Kylo hated how his voice shook as he roared. “The Resistance is dead! The war is over, and when I kill you I will have killed the last Jedi!”
Luke shook his head, never once breaking eye contact. “Amazing,” he said with an infuriating smirk. “Every word you just said was wrong. The Resistance is reborn. The war is just beginning, and I will not be the last Jedi.”
Kylo snorted, trembling, frozen in place. “Rey, you’re talking about Rey? And why would Rey side with you, hmm? You, who clearly didn’t even tell her who she is. You may be her flesh and blood parent, but I’m her only real one! I cared for her, I clothed her, I fed her, I took care of her! In the end she was more my daughter than she ever was yours!”
Luke could have laughed at him, berated him, done literally anything and it wouldn’t have burned as much as the look of pity and sympathy his uncle gave him then.
“That’s true. I don’t deny it. I regret it more than I regret anything, but I don’t deny it. I wonder sometimes if I had supported you better, maybe you wouldn’t have been put through hell. Maybe you wouldn’t have made some of the choices you did, could have avoided some of the situations you ended up in. Even if you had, maybe you would’ve at least felt like you had a place to have your baby, and maybe then you wouldn’t have fallen.”
Kylo’s breath caught in his chest and his free hand unconsciously rose to clutch at his chest over his heart as it howled with pain at the long-suppressed memory. Kylo shook his head very slowly, nearly blacked out with rage. “Don’t…don’t you speak of that. Don’t you dare!”
Luke adjusted his grip on his lightsaber, eyes steely. “In the end, though,” he said, “Rey hid from you. She came running to find me and tell me what you’d done to my school and my Padawans. She chose me over you then, and she will again.” Luke cracked a small smile. “And seeing as she’s not here with you, it seems as if she already has.”
Kylo ran at him then, surprising even himself, and didn’t even feel it as his blade cut clean through his former master’s waist. He skidded to a halt and stood, frozen for a long moment, absorbing what he had done. Then he turned, to take it all in, only to find…
An astral projection. A trick. A trap.
Don’t let your personal feelings get in the way, the General had said.
He screamed his throat raw.
*
Ben was fourteen years old and he was pregnant. The father was the son of Rebellion fighters, close friends of his mother. Poe Dameron was his name, and he was three years older than Ben, but he didn’t know that. Ben had told him he was sixteen. Poe had believed him. Ben made sure of it, utilizing a bit of Force-suggestion to make it convincing.
No one knew about their relationship. Ben made sure of that, too. If anyone who knew Ben found out, they would tell Leia and she would ruin everything. Or worse, they would tell Han. Enough said.
He had told Poe that his father would freak out if he found out Ben was gay, and that they had to keep it quiet. As it happened, very few knew that Han Solo was the father of Luke Skywalker’s daughter, so such a lie that someone as hot-headed as Han Solo might blow a gasket over a gay son was believable. Poe believed it anyway, and he was the only one who needed to considering no one else knew about them.
Save his Uncle Luke at least. How he had found out, Ben had no idea.
He’d sat down next to Ben in the meditation gardens one hot summer evening after Ben had just returned to the Temple from base.
“So, you and Poe Dameron, huh?”
Ben had nearly shit himself. “Who told you that?!” he had said entirely too loud, blowing all his chances of convincing his uncle otherwise.
Luke calmed him with a simple look. “No one.”
Ben believed him.
“Fourteen and seventeen is a pretty big age gap,” Luke went on.
“It’s three years. There’s ten between you and my mom, and my father,” Ben bit back.
Luke nodded slowly. “That’s true, but 33 and 43 is a lot different than 14 and 17.”
“How so?”
“Maturity.”
Ben snorted and glared at the ground. “I took care of fourteen people by myself for a year and a half when I was twelve and thirteen. I’m plenty mature.” He regretted saying it like that almost immediately as he felt a pang of regret from Luke through the Force. “That came out wrong…” he backtracked quickly. “What happened wasn’t your fault.”
“It was,” Luke said simply. “And I’m sorry I put you in that position.” His uncle cracked a quick smile. “You did a wonderful job raising Rey thus far.”
Ben clenched his teeth hard enough to make his jaw hurt. Thus far, he seethed. That was one thing he had had a terrible time adjusting to since his uncle had been back. Now he was taking care of Rey and Ben was expected to act like a kid again. He hated it. Rey was his responsibility. He had raised her thus far and he wanted to keep doing so.
“Yes I did,” he snapped. “I might not be an adult on paper, but I am one in any other sense and have been for two years! If I could successfully make decisions for twelve kids, one adult, and one infant, then I can make decisions regarding my own body.”
“Ben, there’s no need to rush into this, you’re just a kid—“
“I am NOT a child!” Ben was shouting now. “I can never go back to doing child things!”
Luke regarded him sadly. Ben hated it. “Maturity with regards to sexuality is something that only comes with age and time. I didn’t understand it at your age either, but I do now. Wait until you’re ready.”
Ben glared daggers at his uncle. “I am ready. My body, my choice, my business!”
“Does he know how old you are?”
“Yes.”
“No he doesn’t. And you didn’t tell him because you know he’ll think you’re too young.”
Ben stood up and dusted himself off. “I’m not too young, he knows how old I am, and he doesn’t care.”
“And that’s why no one knows, right?”
“Am I not entitled to privacy? Especially privacy from Han Solo?”
“Ben—“
He walked away.
And now he was pregnant, and he understood what his uncle had been trying to tell him.
*
Palpatine was…batshit crazy. Then again, Kylo supposed he probably would be too if he spent three decades tied to a machine in a damp cave with nothing but Sith chanting to listen to. (Seriously, it was already giving him a migraine.)
Saying that Rey was his granddaughter? Not bloody likely. Kylo would never forget her very distinct Skywalker Force signature, nor would he confuse it with another.
However, he realized after the shock of learning Palpatine, the fucking emperor, had been behind Kylo’s entire Dark Side training had worn off that the former emperor’s mistaken belief offered Rey protection.
He wanted her dead, Palpatine said.
Bullshit, Kylo thought. Despite Snoke’s —or rather, Palpatine’s— mistaken belief that Kylo had been a shoddy student, Kylo had in fact been a very good one. He had figured out how Sith power actually worked not long before he’d killed Snoke. It was how he’d figured out almost immediately that Snoke was not the current Sith Lord.
Sith apprentices invariably killed or were killed by their masters. Why? Because a dead Sith’s power was transferred to the Sith Lord, as was that of all the fallen Sith. That’s what made them all so damn powerful. It wasn’t just anger or hate. It was compounded power of souls.
And Kylo, after killing Snoke, decidedly did not have that, so there must be another. Not long after he realized that, he learned that Palpatine lived. So he carved a path of destruction through the galaxy to find him.
And now here he was, and forget whatever he said, Palpatine in his dilapidated state did not actually want Rey dead. He wanted her to be the new Sith for the same reason he had been so interested in the Skywalker bloodline. Because Sith power transferred very well down family lines.
Kylo told himself it was his own want for power that made him recoil at the thought. So he thought better. Palpatine could turn her. With all the power of the Sith, she would be unstoppable. She would be safe.
…Would she, though?
He silenced the thought, agreed to Palpatine’s terms, and went to find her.
*
He stared at the pregnancy test in his hand, alone in the fresher (he felt alone in the world). He suddenly felt unbearably young.
The gravity of it was overwhelming. It shouldn’t have been. He had taken care of and entire school of Padawans as well as his infant sister. He already had experience caring for a child. But, nevertheless, something made this different and he couldn’t take it. (A decade in the future, Kylo Ren would understand that what made it feel so different was the stigma and social pressure. He had been lauded for the care he had shown his sister. He would be shunned for bearing his own child at his age, and that was too much for him to bear).
So he picked himself up and first thing the next morning walked himself to the nearest abortion clinic.
The Toydarian woman behind the desk fixed him with a judgmental eye as he tried to check in. “Name?”
“Ben.”
“Full name.”
“Just Ben.”
She narrowed her eyes. “How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“I’ll need to see some ID.”
“I don’t have ID.”
She snorted. “Minimum age is eighteen. Come back with permission, boy.”
Ben cursed himself for not checking the rules as he walked back to the Temple, paperwork in hand.
He couldn’t look Luke in the eye as he handed it to him.
It was a long time before his uncle spoke. “Ben, have you thought about this?”
“Yes.”
“When did you find out?”
“I’ve made up my mind, just sign it.”
“You need a parent to sign this.”
“Or guardian! You’re my master, you count. Just sign it.” Please, I just want this to be over.
Luke sighed heavily. “As your master, it would be remiss of me if I didn’t make sure you knew what all your options are.”
Ben grit his teeth. “Adoption, abortion, or have it. I won’t send away a Force-sensitive child, and I can’t keep this baby. So abortion it is. Sign it.”
“Ben, look at me.” With difficulty, Ben looked up. HIs uncle’s expression was kind, but stricken. “If you want to have this baby, we’ll figure it out. I won’t leave you do do this alone. I’ll make your parents understand. Anything you need, I’ll support you. We’ll figure it out, if you want it.”
And, for a moment, Ben swayed. Then he thought about the blood, the screams, his uncle’s depression, Rey crying and no one —no one— who cared and he couldn’t bear it…
“I’ve made up my mind.”
Luke signed the form.
*
Kylo did not regret his decision, given the circumstances. He only wished the circumstances had been different, so he could have made a different choice.
But that was all in the past now, and none of it mattered anyway, because Rey had just shoved a lightsaber through his liver.
He had expected dying to hurt, but it didn’t, not really. Maybe that was because the plasma blade burned off the nerve endings and cauterized the wound. But he wasn’t paying much attention to it, all he cared about was that Rey had dropped down to his side and was staring at him like her world was ending too.
Kylo wondered if she remembered.
He didn’t know where he was going to end up when he died, but he was fairly sure it wouldn’t be on the same side as Rey, so he drank in the sight of her face like he would never see it again. Because he wouldn’t.
Rey toddling her first steps before falling into his arms, giggling and laughing.
Rey babbling ‘Ben’ as he held her propped up on his hip during a trip to the market.
Rey crawling into his bed as a small child and burrowing into his chest to hide from the nightmares. Him walking around the Temple soothing her back to sleep at three in the morning.
Even after her parents came back to care for her, how she would still run to him when she fell and scraped her knee (oh how that had pained Luke to see, but it had lifted Ben out of a soul deep depression).
Even if she didn’t, he remembered everything.
Then she put a hand over his wound and he flinched at the uncomfortable feeling of flesh knitting back together as she healed him. He stared at her, stunned.
“I did want to take your hand. Ben’s hand,” she said before she got up and stole his ship to fly off to try and kill Palpatine, bolstered by a ton of unearned confidence that would inevitably lead to her failing spectacularly.
He tried to get up and follow her, but he was just so tired. He wished, briefly, that she had let him die for all that he’d done and he considered, briefly, finishing the job for her. He was staring into the cold water swirling below him (he knew it was cold because he was soaking wet with it, and he was so cold) when a familiar voice knocked him out of his thoughts.
“Hey, kid.”
He turned to see none other than Han Solo.
“You’re not really here,” he murmured, staring at the man he had murdered in cold blood.
Han shrugged and smiled sadly at his son. Kylo’s heart ached so badly he reached a hand up to hold his chest as his father spoke to him.
Falling to the Dark Side had hurt, but falling back to the Light was agonizing. Because that’s what he was doing, wasn’t it?
“I know what I have to do,” he bit out in the end. “But I don’t know if I have the strength to do it.”
“You do.”
Kylo blinked hard as another figure suddenly appeared a few feet to the left of his father. A young man with curly blonde hair reaching his shoulders, a scar over his right eye, and a metal hand, even in death. Another Force ghost, if Kylo ever saw one, and one that Han glared at just this side of viciously.
“I’m Anakin,” the ghost said with a small smile. “Your grandfather.”
Kylo stared, speechless.
“You’ve got hard shields to crack, I’ve only been screaming at you for fifteen years,” Anakin went on, looking his grandson over. “The Force really put you through the ringer. Glad to see my other grandkid’s worn you down.”
“Grandfather…” Kylo stuttered out, feeling dizzy. “I’ve tried…so hard…to finish what you started—“
“Oh, fuck that,” Anakin scoffed. “My son, your uncle, had to save me from my own stupidity when it came to ‘what I started’. All I started was an age of death and destruction. All I did was ruin my life. You’ve repeated enough of my mistakes, don’t expand on them!”
Ben’s head spun harder than it had the day he fell. “I-I don’t understand…”
Anakin sighed. “Ben, I regret what I did. The only thing I don’t regret was following my son back to the Light. You need to do the same.”
Kylo grasped harden at his chest as he was sure his heart was failing, that Rey’s healing had failed and he was dying for real. “I aborted my child at fourteen.”
“I know, and I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about Rey. You raised her. You were the only real parent she ever had—“
The Force ghost of his father took offense to that. “Hey—“
Anakin silenced him with a glare. “If I had been around when my kids got involved with you, I’d have skewered you!”
Amazing, Han shrank back, just a little. Kylo was going crazy, he was sure of it.
His grandfather rolled his eyes, swearing in a language Kylo didn’t recognize, and turned back to his grandson. “You’re still conflicted? For a while there it looked like you’d inherited Obi-Wan’s good sense, but it seems like my idiocy won out after all.”
…Well, there was not enough time to unpack all that currently, so Kylo raked his free hand back through his hair to get it out of his face. “But, the Dark Side—“
Anakin’s face darkened. “Now listen here, you little shit!” he nearly roared and Kylo shrunk back, just a little. Darth Vader he may no longer be, but Anakin Skywalker clearly hadn’t lost his ability to intimidate. “You wanna finish what I started? Go after your sister and help her kill Palpatine. You know, the one who ruined my life and yours too! Now you know what you have to do, so get off your ass and do it!”
Kylo threw his lightsaber into the roiling ocean and felt a weight lift off his chest as he did.
*
Don’t swim for two weeks. Avoid penetrative sex for two weeks. Use heat to relieve pain. Come back if you experience heavy bleeding.
The woman was utilitarian, but non-judgmental, which Ben appreciated. She asked him if he had a ride back home, and he lied and said yes. He had walked here that morning, and would be walking back. He needed to clear his head.
His stomach ached more and more with each step he took back towards the Temple. He should have taken the woman’s offer to call him a cab. It didn’t matter now, he was almost there.
The Temple came into view from the tree line and Ben had half a mind to turn around and walk back into town, because none other than the Millennium Falcon was sitting out front. He could hear the yelling from all the way out there.
He would have turned around if a furious “BEN!” hadn’t reached his ears. He thought about pretending he hadn’t heard it, but that would only make things worse. So he rolled his shoulders out and resolved to take whatever was coming to him like a man, beginning to feel like he was far to young to feel so old.
He nodded his greeting to a few Padawans as he entered, ignoring their drawn, sympathetic faces. A flare of anger rose in Ben’s chest. There was no need for these kids to be embroiled in his family’s mess.
One Padawan motioned towards the kitchen, so that’s where he went. Inside he found his Uncle Luke sitting at the table, head in his hands, his mother leaning against the counter, his father pacing, and his Uncle Chewie scooping Ben up into his arms.
You could’ve told me, he started to say before he paused and sniffed, letting out a sorrowful whine and continuing, I would’ve gone with you! He set Ben down gently and looked him over. Did you walk back here? You shouldn’t have walked back—
Ben cut his uncle off, turning to Luke. “What happened to whatever I told you being between us?”
Luke sighed but gave no response. His mother looked over at him and smiled gently. She opened her mouth to say something, but was interrupted by Ben’s father.
“Who do I have to kill for doing this to you?” Han snapped, looming over his son. Though not by much anymore.
Ben seethed. “That’s none of your goddamn business.”
Han gaped at him. “Don’t you fucking swear at me!”
Leia tried to cut in, but was ignored.
“You understand that you are fourteen years old, right?” Han said very slowly, as if Ben were stupid.
“Painfully,” he hissed, glaring back at his father.
“You are too young for this! For a relationship, let alone getting pregnant!”
Ben shook his head miserably. “Whoopty-fucking-doo! I’m so glad you saying that now change the course of history.”
“You’re a child!” Han shouted.
“I haven’t been a child for four years!” Ben shouted right back before his voice dropped back to a hiss. “It’s my body. I will do with it whatever the hell I want and there’s not a damn thing any of you can do to stop me.”
Han snorted. “So what exactly do you plan on doing with an infant at your age? You can’t complete your training, can’t go to school, so what are you gonna do?”
Han, Chewie started to say, but Ben beat him to it.
Ben was so, so tired. “I got rid of it.”
“You can’t just leave a…wait, past tense?”
Ben nodded. “About two hours ago. I had an abortion, so you don’t have to worry anymore. I fucked myself over, then I fixed it. It’s not your problem and never was. I need to go meditate.”
He was just turning to leave when someone grabbed his arm. He didn’t know who, but he could guess it was his father. White hot rage blacked out his vision and he turned around and screamed, unconsciously reaching out with the Force and shattering every breakable thing in the room. He didn’t stick around to see the destruction or the looks on his family’s faces, and they didn’t follow him.
It only got worse from there.
The next time he was forced to be on base, he quickly found himself cornered in a supply room by none other than Poe Dameron. Despite everything that had happened, Ben still found himself smiling at the sight of his boyfriend.
“It’s been a while,” he said softly, reaching a hand out to the other boy, who drew back out of arm’s real. Ben frowned as he registered the drawn look on Poe’s face. “What’s wrong?”
“You lied to me.”
Ben kept his face expressionless. “About what?”
“Sixteen, my ass,” Poe snarled. “Do you realize that if I hadn’t caught this now, if we had been caught two months from now, I’d have gone to prison for statutory rape?!”
Ben bit the inside of his cheek. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Poe looked sick. “How old are you really? Fourteen, right?”
Ben contemplated sticking to his original story, but ultimately abandoned it as he felt Poe’s determination in the Force. He already knew the truth with absolute certainty. Lying would only make things worse. “I’m fifteen now, but when we got together I was fourteen, yes,” he answered cautiously.
Poe visibly bit his lip as he regarded Ben, tears in his eyes. “Eighteen. I’ll be eighteen in less than two months and I was sleeping with a fourteen-year-old child…” He looked completely and utterly repulsed and that, along with the word ‘child’ made Ben seethe.
“I might be younger than I originally let on, and you are right to be angry seeing as I didn’t consider the legal issues facing you, but I am not a child! I haven’t been a child since I was eleven!”
“Why, because your dad sucks?”
Ben stared at him, speechless. All this time, had he really not been listening?
It was then that Ben realized he had never actually told Poe or anyone else (save the people who had found the Temple in the state it was in) what had happened. A fatal error.
Well, no time like the present.
He tried, but Poe wouldn’t listen, thought he was dramatizing his role as the Luke Skywalker’s oldest student. (A decade later, Kylo Ren would understand that, positions reversed, he wouldn’t have believed the story either).
“Why should I believe you? Everything this relationship is built on is a lie. Why not this too? And even if that were true, as if it would make my sin any better! As if it would have held up in court! In fact, in fact that only makes it worse, I took advantage of an already traumatized child, stars—“
Poe left him there in the supply room, nearly hyperventilating and furious and not wanting anything more to do with him, no matter what Ben tried to say.
“Poe, please—“ Ben desperately called after him. Leave me if you must, but not like this…
“Leave me alone, Ben!” Poe hissed over his shoulder. “You’ve done enough.” And with that, he was gone, leaving his final words ringing in Ben’s ears.
You’ve done enough.
Ben barely managed to stagger back into the supply room and slam the door shut before he collapsed to the floor, one hand gripping his belly where the child he had aborted once laid, the other pressed over his face as he sobbed.
Before all this had happened, he hadn’t made up his mind whether or not he was going to tell Poe he’d gotten pregnant and gotten rid of it. It seemed as though his decision had been made for him now. What good would come of it? He’d already done enough.
*
Standing on Exogol, he was painfully aware how uncomfortable he was, permeated with a sense of I shouldn’t be here.
Fuck that. He had a sister to save.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he noted that he was completely weaponless running into a Sith stronghold having recently defected.
Fuck that, too. Rey needed him, if the battle waging above him or the trembling in the Force was anything to go by.
You know what they say; hell hath no fury like a parent scorned. And he would tear the place down to its component atoms to keep Rey safe.
He could sense her. Not that much farther, just around that corner—
It was then that he realized he had overlooked six other familiar Force signatures. His Knights of Ren. The same Padawans he had grown up with. The six who had gone wit him, anyway. The rest, well…
He had killed the rest.
*
Luke had given him his own little place after everything went down, recognizing Ben’s need for privacy and autonomy. Ben appreciated the gesture, but his heart ached all the same, because what he really needed was support.
And Luke…for the most part Luke just left him to his own devices.
Not even music could drown out the whispers anymore, even if he blasted it so loud his ears hurt. Ever since his abortion he had given up on meditating, as the whispering voice would never fail to go from soft to outright screaming whenever he tried. Whenever he shut his eyes at all, he heard nothing but the whispers telling him of the Dark Side, how he was too powerful for the Light on account of his grandfather Darth-fucking-Vader that was a rather serious hole to leave in the family lineage.
They’re scared of you. You’re too strong. Luke Skywalker is holding you back, he’s restricting you. Binding you.
With the Dark Side, you will never again be powerless. Never underestimated, brushed off. You will have the ability to make them listen. You will have autonomy, anything you could possibly desire…
Ben knew he should tell his uncle about the whispers, knew he needed help, but…
But what if what the voice said was true? His family had indeed withheld the truth about Ben’s family history. And they were scared of him, that much was obvious.
What would they do if Ben told him about this? Cast him out? Shun him? Disown him?
One thing was for sure, he couldn’t do this alone. He couldn’t fight this alone. And if they threw him out, would he ever see Rey again?
No, he couldn’t risk it. He would just have to fight this alone.
Looking back, it pained him how no one had noticed how much he was struggling. Near the end, he stopped sleeping, could barely eat, was therefore too tired to complete any sort of meaningful training. He grew thin and exhausted, and no one noticed.
(Rey had noticed he was sad and ‘bony’, but she was five years old and he was loathe to burden her with problems even he should have been still too young for).
Maybe that shouldn’t have surprised him, no one had noticed Uncle Luke struggling either. All anyone cared about was their stupid Republic, like they alone were the only ones capable of handling anything. Never having time for anyone else…
Ben wondered why his parents had bothered to have him at all.
The answer to that was simple, the whispers supplied. They didn’t want to. You were an accident. And you know all about those.
The dreams were the worst part. Dreams of labor, of him giving birth to the child he had aborted only to watch it disintegrate in his arms. Darkness, pain…
Ben didn’t regret his decision to abort, given the circumstances, but he regretted the circumstances more than he could put into words.
The night it happened, he had cried himself to sleep alone in his little hut, whispering “help me, help me please” into his pillow. When he woke up, it had been to his uncle’s lightsaber at his throat.
Abject terror overwhelmed him as he blocked the strike and brought the whole hut down over their heads.
The voice had been right, the voice had been right thevoicehadbeenrightthevoicehadbeenright—
So he could only assume it was right about everything else.
The Jedi need to end, the voice whispered. Burn it down. Burn it all down.
“The Padawans…”
Bring them with you. Save them too, bring them to me and I will teach you all the ways of the Force.
“And if they w-won’t come?” Ben asked quietly, sure he already knew the answer as his feet carried him towards the Temple, lightsaber held tightly in his shaking hand.
Put them out of their misery, the voice commanded.
Ben did as he was told.
The blood of six students sizzled on his Lightsaber (his grandfather’s, so much death had been wrought with a single blade…) as he watched the Temple burn.
“Ben!” a little voice called from the bushes. Rey.
He powered down his lightsaber and went to scoop her out of the plants, feeling strangely disconnected from his own body. “It’s okay, baby, I’ve got you.”
The little girl clung to him fearfully, sniffling as he buried her face in his hair. “Ben, what’s happening? Where’s papa?”
Ben shivered as he rubbed her back, remembering the assault. Green, he hated the color green, and he always would. “Papa’s not here anymore, but it’s okay. We’re all going somewhere better.”
“But I want papa!” she cried miserably.
“But you have me,” he reminded her gently, possessively. My sister. My responsibility… My child. Mine. Not his.
The little girl nodded slowly and Ben shifted to hold her propped on his hip. He was just turning back to the six remaining Padawans (Padawans no longer, now they were apprentices of the Sith) when he felt Rey freeze. When he turned to look where she was looking, he saw the body of a Padawan who had refused to join him. One of the last. He had gotten comfortable with killing by then.
“What happened to him?” Rey asked in a small voice.
Ben blinked. “He refused to join us, so I put him out of his misery.” His voice didn’t sound like his. Ben wasn’t totally sure all of this was real.
“I don’t understand…”
“Don’t worry about it, I’ll take care of you now. Just like old times. You don’t have to worry about—“
“What’s wrong with your eyes?”
Ben frowned at her. “My eyes?”
She stared at him for a long moment and he watched terror dawn slowly on her face before she drove her tiny fist straight into his left eye. Hard. Hard enough to make him drop her. By the time he recovered himself, she was long gone.
He searched the grounds for nearly an hour, screaming for her.
“Ben please!” one of the other apprentices pleaded. “Leave her, we have to go!
“I will never leave her!” he roared.
“We’ll come back for her then, but we have to go now!”
If she is worthy, she will find her way back to you.
Ben went, though it pained him to do so, and in the window of the shuttle that picked them up he saw what had terrified her so. His eyes shone gold like a Sith’s.
Ben Solo is dead. Long live Kylo Ren.
*
“I was wrong,” he told the six Knights standing around him. “The Dark Side is nothing that it says it is. It has brought us power, yes, but nothing we could not have achieved with more training at the Temple! Perhaps it was easier, but what has it cost us? Pain! Nothing but pain and misery!”
“Traitor…” one of them whispered.
Ben shook his head. “No, not to all of you. Come back with me. We can still fix this!”
“Traitor…” another one said, and Ben would have to pay for his sins with even more blood, wouldn’t he?
“TRAITOR!” they all screamed, and Ben flexed his hands, ready for a fight.
He had no time to wonder how his old lightsaber managed to appear in his hands out of nowhere, but he was grateful, that was for sure.
Or maybe he wasn’t, he thought, as he killed all six of them.
How many had he killed in his short thirty-five years?
Too many to count. He would guess it was in the thousands.
*
A dyad, Palpatine had said as he tried to steal their souls. The first in many generations. It made an odd sort of sense to Ben. Yin and yang. Black and white. Light and dark. Brother and sister (but Rey didn’t know that yet and Ben found it odd that Palpatine hadn’t caught either).
Briefly, Ben regretted defecting back to the Light. If they were supposed to be so powerful, how could Palpatine still beat them? Because Ben was no longer strong in the Dark Side, right?
Fuck.
*
Stars, getting thrown off a cliff had hurt more than he had expected it to, and he had expected it to hurt a lot.
Another fall would kill him, he knew that much. It was okay. When he’d walked in, he’d gotten a sense that he wouldn’t be walking back out.
Ben had been through some hard times in his life, but he’d never felt exhaustion so strong as what he felt climbing out of that hole.
He wasn’t just climbing for his life, was he? No, he was climbing for his soul.
Upon reaching the top, it was apparent that Rey had succeeded in killing Palpatine. It was also apparent that…
No.
“No,” he whispered, lungs gulping in air from the exertion. He stumbled over to her, eyes blurring with tears. “No, no, no!”
Ben had seen so much death in his thirty-five years. He knew what a dead body looked like (so many, so many he had made look like that) and Rey…she was…
He collapsed next to her and dragged her into his lap, crying in earnest.
“Rey,” he whispered. “Rey!”
His fingered scrabbled at her neck, feeling for a pulse. Her chest was motionless, her blood still in her veins. He hugged her close, burying his face in her hair as what was left of his soul was crushed to pieces in his chest because he had failed, over his dead body would any harm come to her, he had sworn it! And he cursed himself for refusing to learn CPR when the general had ordered him to, no, no the Force was all he needed—
He froze, heart thudding in his chest.
The Force.
When Rey had healed him at the wreckage of the Death Star, he had wanted to throttle her. What she was doing was dangerous, using her own life force to heal people instead of simply channeling the Living Force like any experienced and sensible healer would…
She had given him part of her life. That was it. She had given him a part of her own life force. And now he would give it back.
He had been expecting that to hurt, too, but it didn’t. It was just…cold. So unbearably cold. But what was a little chill in the face of Rey’s life.
It all went away as she awoke gasping in his arms.
She stared at him, chest heaving as she reoriented herself, and Ben was dying and he knew it. There was so much he wanted to say to her, so much…
“Ben…” she whispered, sitting herself up and reaching for him. He reached back. “You saved me…”
“Of course I did,” he murmured, preoccupied with brushing the hair out of her face and dusting her off and, you know, dying. “Over my dead body will harm come to you, I swore it.”
She stared at him, stunned, hands frozen where they rested on his face. He didn’t remember her putting them there. “But…why?”
“Because you’re my baby sister.” Stars, he was getting so tired. But it was too early to sleep, much too early, there was still so much to say…
“B-but you’re a Solo…I’m a…a Palpatine…”
“Bullshit. That’s bullshit. I don’t doubt there was or is a Palpatine girl, but it’s not you. I raised you up until you were five, I would never forget your Force-signature, what you looked like…
A tear dripped down Rey’s cheek as she stroked a thumb over his cheek, speechless. And Ben held her face in his hands as he grinned at her like a lunatic, suddenly struck but the most peculiar memory…
*
It would end up being their last Yule together, just a few months before Ben would ultimately fall. He had been living in a fog ever since the abortion, and it seemed as if not even his favorite season could drag him out of it.
But it was Rey’s favorite, too, so he endeavored to be happy if only for her.
The base they were on at the time was hosting a party for the season, and Ben had bought his precious sister the dress she had been asking for using the money he made dong odd jobs around base.
She had looked at it in the window of a shop in town every time they went down to the market and oh how she had squealed with delight when he had given it to her to wear to the party that night.
Ben did not normally consider himself to be particularly patient with anyone save the Padawans and his sister, especially his sister, but even she could try his patience every now and again.
“Put…put your arm in the sleeve…no, don’t take it off, the party started ten minutes ago! Rey—“
“But it’s so pretty! I wanna look at it!”
Ben took a deep breath. “You can look at it in the mirror and for the rest of time after the party, but let’s just finish putting it on, please!”
She flinched just a little at the harried edge to his voice, acquiescing to finish getting dressed and Ben’s blackened heart sank.
Finally finishing getting her dressed, he scooped her up and carried her over to the mirror, smiling slightly as she wiggled in his arms, running her hands over the sparkles on the skirt. She turned to him then and threw her arms around his neck.
“I love you, Ben,” she said, her voice partially muffled in his shoulder. “And not just for this! I know you’ve been sad, and I don’t want you to be sad! I love you because…because I do and you’re the best, so don’t be sad!”
Ben buried his face in the little girl’s hair, careful not to mess up the braid she had begged him to put in and willed himself not to cry as his heart swelled. “I love you too, Rey,” he whispered, voice entirely too weak for his liking.
She wiggled and he loosened his grip on her, smiling as her tiny hands scrubbed a few wayward tears off his face. “You need glitter. Why aren’t you wearing any glitter? You should have a dress like this, that’ll cheer you up!”
*
And she had spent the next fifteen minutes trying to spread her glitter glue all over the front of his best tunic, insisting it would make him feel better. Despite himself, it had (if not the glitter itself, then certainly his sister’s efforts to cheer him up).
His now very grown sister’s voice dragged him out of the memory.
“I remember you.”
He stared at her, unsure he’d herd her properly.
Rey nodded firmly. “I do. I remember you from when I was little.”
Ben nearly placed a hand over his heart to stop it from exploding out of his chest as pure unadulterated joy filled his exhausted body. His couldn’t feel his hands anymore, and his vision was growing murky and he was so out of breath even though he was sitting down, but he couldn’t care less.
He pulled her in and kissed her cheek like he used to ever morning and night and just held on to her as his life slipped away from him. He couldn’t give a damn what happened to him now. She was safe. That was all that mattered.
Don’t cry, he thought as he heard Rey screaming his name, his real name. I’m here, don’t cry. It’s okay…
It’s okay…
*
Rey walked out more confused and conflicted than she had been in her life. She had walked in with more questions than she knew what to do with, and had walked out with even more. Above all, a terrible sense of loss weighed her down like nothing else.
She held Ben’s robes tight in her arms. His body had just…disappeared after he’d passed (giving her back the life she had given him.)
‘Over my dead body’ he’d said, well did he ever consider what that would mean for her?
She sniffed and wiped a tear out of her eyes. He was her brother? He’d raised her? Then how had she ended up on Jakku? If her memories of her “parents” were false, then who was she? A Skywalker, apparently, but—
“REY!” And she was immediately bowled over by a very enthusiastic Finn and all questions left her mind for a long moment as she hugged her friends. Time enough for answers later….
So many were dead. Leia hurt more than anyone… After it was all said and done, Rey would rather face Palpatine again than go to another funeral.
She got her answers though, from Lando and Chewie.
She was Rey Skywalker, daughter of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo (she had two biological fathers, something she was not even remotely ready to unpack at this time). Ben Solo was her half-brother, and due to Han’s flightiness (Chewie’s words, not hers) and Luke’s illness, much of her care had fallen to Ben Solo.
Her dim memories of her ‘parent’ that she had clung so tightly to finally had a face and a name.
The Palpatine child was as of yet unfound, and would likely remain so, if you asked Rey. Lando proposed looking for her, but Rey disagreed. Wherever she was, if she was alive, best to leave the girl in peace.
How Rey had ended up on Jakku in the first place was something they couldn’t answer. When asked, Chewie had shaken his head sadly.
Ben fell, took six Padawans with him, killed the other six, and only you got away as the Temple burned, he said. Afterward, Luke left you in the care of Han and Leia, believing himself unfit to be a parent. Han left as well, angry and thinking the same. I went with him as I always did to keep him out of trouble.
Rey had swallowed hard. “So it was Leia? Leia left me there?”
Lando shook his head slowly. “I don’t know, Rey. I can’t believe she would ever abandon a child anywhere, let alone on Jakku, but…” He sighed. “But I don’t have an answer for you.”
Perhaps some things are best left to time, Chewie rumbled.
Rey couldn’t help but agree.
She was leaving, she decided. The Force was finally balanced, and it was up to her to learn how to keep it that way (the teachings of the grey Jedi seemed appealing, and she figured she would start there).
Chewie caught her before she could go and handed her something. A small piece of paper.
“What’s this?” she asked, frowning as she turned it over. hen she did, her heart stopped.
It was a picture, and an old one. It showed two people, and young man and a child, a little girl.
That’s you, Chewie said, pointing to the girl, when you were five. And that’s your brother, Ben. He pointed to the young man. Rey looked at the photo through misty eyes. Ben couldn’t have been much older than fifteen. He looked so young and thin. In fact, he looked so thoroughly wrung out and exhausted a light breeze could’ve knocked him over, but he was smiling, grinning even. In his rumpled, glitter-stained tunic he was smiling as he held her in a sparkly Yule dress. She had been smiling too as she held onto him, arms wound tightly around his neck.
Rey wiped a tear from her face.
Chewie whined sadly. That was taken a few months before he fell. Those last few months he only ever smiled for you. He adored you, fought your parents viciously for…essentially custody of you after Luke got better. He got it too, for the most part.
Rey smiled softly at the photo. “Thank you for showing me this, Chewie,” she said, holding it back out for him to take, but the Wookiee shook his head firmly.
Keep it. I have plenty of other pictures of my nephew.
She appreciated that more than she could put into words.
*
She buried the lightsabers on Tatooine near what used to be her father’s house. Perhaps one day they would be needed again, or perhaps it was time they stayed buried. The answer to that was future-Rey’s problem.
The new lightsaber she had built to replace Anakin Skywalker’s was yellow. She wasn’t sure what that meant yet, but she would find out.
A woman’s voice broke her out of her thoughts. “Don’t see many people ‘round these parts. Who are you?”
She stood and smiled. “I’m Rey.”
“Rey who?”
It was then that she noticed the figures standing behind the woman. Slowly, they came into focus. Force ghosts, she realized.
Her father, Luke, smiling softly at her (she couldn’t understand why he hadn’t told her back on Ahch-to…)
Her aunt, Leia (she didn’t leave me, she didn’t…)
And…and…
And Ben, beaming at her. A ghost of the Light Side.
Even so, she was tempted to say just Rey. Ben may have raised her until she was five, but after that she raised herself and her family lineage, as grateful as she was to have one and know it, was heavy. Did she want that?
She thought of the scratches on the wall of her old ‘home’ on Jakku in the bombed out fighter. Couning the days since her family left, until they would return. How she had wanted a family, any family. She thought of when Ben had lied to her aboard the Finalizer, saying that her parents were no one, how she had ached still to know their names, faces and stories despite the fact that they had left her to rot in exchange for a hit.
“Rey Skywalker,” was what she said in the end.
It may have been heavy, but it was still her family. The ghost of Ben Solo grinned at her, same as he had in the picture in her pocket. Rey smiled back.
El Fin