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“Reveal yourself.”
Kylo knew better than to protest when the order came. He fumbled with the release mechanism, pulling the mask free and setting it down beside him. He looked back up at his master’s vast and shimmering form, swallowing hard as he anticipated the next order.
“Kneel.”
Kylo hesitated for no more than a second, but that was enough. His eyes betrayed him, as they always did.
“I see your fear,” the Supreme Leader remarked, a smile wrenching up his cracked lips, “and it is good.”
“My fear is good.” Kylo echoed the words quietly, as he had been taught, lowering his gaze to the floor and moving to kneel. He had done this many times before, but always resented the hard chill of the polished floor pressing against his folded knees. He kept his head bowed, flinching as he felt a familiar tug at his mind. The sensation escalated until Kylo could feel the full mass of the Force pressing in. He swayed slightly from the dizzy sensation, closing his eyes for focus. The invasion was a sensation and a sound, a beating pressure matched by screaming discordance. Kylo gritted his teeth against the pain, and was shocked when it vanished suddenly, dispelled with a single stroke against his cheek. With the contact, the Force seemed to fall silent around him.
Kylo was about to question the change when Snoke’s phantom fingers began to caress his hair, following an old, familiar pattern. Kylo’s breath caught at the gesture. It couldn’t be. He couldn’t know this.
Kylo emitted a low moan of fear as a voice – not his master’s now, but his mother’s – began to hum. The blackness peeled back to reveal her kind, smiling face. Her hair cascaded down into his crib in long, brown waves, and he reached up small, chubby fingers to snatch at it.
But instead of grabbing hair, he found himself grasping the air. His mother’s lovely face was gone, replaced by the endless white expanse of the nursery ceiling.
The tune had gone with the face, but there was a rumbling in the distance. Thunder? No, not thunder. An engine.
“You ready, kid?”
“Yes!” The voice sounded so happy. It was barely recognisable as his.
“We’ll be back before Leia even knows we were gone.”
The engine roared, only for the sound to dip and distort, splitting into two tones, two voices–
“What were you thinking?”
He could only see a slim slice of the world from his vantage point – his father slumped in a chair, his shirt still stained with engine oil. His mother stood behind him, her arms folded and her mouth set in a tight line.
“Let off, will you? He begged me!”
“That’s no excuse. You know how important it is that he’s protected.”
“I had to encourage some life in him – he’s too quiet. It’s not right.”
“He’s sensitive. You’re not helping him by taking him along to a freak show. I can’t even imagine the impact seeing those monsters will have had.”
“That’s Lando’s freak show you’re talking about. And what are you saying, Leia? Are you saying I don’t know how to raise my own son?”
“You haven’t shown much evidence that you can.”
“Fine. If that’s what you think – if that’s what you really think – I’m going away for a while.”
There was a solid silence until a door clanged shut, the echo swiftly distorting into sobs. A door swept open, and the world sagged along with his mattress.
“Don’t cry, baby.”
“I made Dad go, didn’t I?”
“No, don’t think that! He’ll be back soon. Don’t be frightened. It’s okay. Mummy’s here.”
But there was no mother in the next vision. He was sitting at his desk in his schoolroom, staring curiously at his hands instead of his teacher. The veins beneath his skin were lit from beneath, the routes of his blood clearly visible – they had seemed to be a dull, sickly blue before the colour had deepened, becoming a vibrant, pulsating red. His pale skin filled with colour as the new brightness flowed through his body. His pallor had gone, and he felt stronger for its absence. He turned his hands over slowly, marvelling at them as the colour deepened with the motion.
A voice spoke from the deepest part of his mind. He was unsure if he knew it, uncertain even if it belonged to a man or a woman, but he liked how it sounded. It murmured of strength, power and blood, and it made those words sound like the sweetest he had ever heard.
The murmur became an incantation, the words now pulsing in his mind:
Strength, power, blood. Strength, power, blood! Strength, power, blood!
His own blood pulsed with the rhythm of the voice, the red of his veins flaring to fill his vision in the moment before the world toppled sideways.
The red faded into a mere tint, his parents’ forms gradually coming into view. For the first time, they seemed old. His mother’s beautiful face was creased with worry, her once-soft hand tough as it brushed against his brow. His father didn’t touch him, slouching back – his face in shadow – against the wall.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“No one’s been able to give me a proper answer to that question.”
“But you know, don’t you?”
“I think he has it.”
“You mean the Force? He has the Force?”
The ensuing silence was unbearable. Ben’s body twisted, a wretched moan escaping his lips. His mother’s soothing tongue shushed him, her thumb stroking his sweat-sodden hair.
“You haven’t just realised this, have you? You’ve known all along. You just didn’t tell me.”
“We’re not having this conversation here. Look at him – he’s your son. That’s all that should matter.”
“Maybe I could have done a better job if you’d told me! Didn’t that cross your mind?”
They didn’t stop – the voices reaching a terrifying, buzzing pitch, their words suddenly undecipherable. He could feel nothing but the suffocating press of their emotions: the hatred a shriek, the anger a shout, the fear a sob. They smothered him with their strength, erasing every thought, every soft touch. He could only articulate the suffering with the spasms that animated his limp body, the feeble whimpers that slipped past his lips.
His whole body blazed with fever, his limbs jolting, and Kylo couldn’t distinguish the suffering of the past from the suffering of the present. He was only conscious that there was no escape from it. There would be no reprieve, no mercy–
But the words – strength, power, blood – sounded again, and the screaming stopped. A blessed chill settled upon his skin as rain began to fall, softly at first before building into a downpour, slipping past the protective confines of his cloak to wet his face. His mother’s hands rested upon his shoulders, lax and poised to slip back. His hand itched to seize hers, but he hadn’t let it. He’d resolved himself to distance from the moment he’d been told. Any and all contact was to be resisted or, when it could not be resisted, endured.
The four of them had gathered at the landing port of some nameless, non-descript world characterised by little beside its inhospitable climate. A miserable place for a miserable occasion.
His father and mother were behind him, his uncle ahead. The stranger’s weather-beaten face regarded him with kind but unfamiliar eyes; Ben turned his gaze away from him, looking off to the side.
“Ben, this is your uncle Luke. He’s going to help you.” His mother gave his shoulder a squeeze. Ben bit his lip, hard, and continued to look away.
“I’ll see you again soon, kid.” His father drew near, enveloping his wife and child in a broad, firm embrace. Ben was stiff in the midst of it, the only movements those of his parents – his mother sobbing into his tousled black hair, his father pressing a quick, guilty kiss to his rain-wetted forehead. It took concentration on the rain beating down upon his back to remain still.
When they finally withdrew, extracting themselves from him, Ben turned and moved away. He walked past his uncle and boarded the ship. Only when they had taken off and he was alone in the passenger cabin did he allow himself to cry. The sobs came with ugly, heaving gasps, and his fingers quivered from the shame of it. His blood flared, but he could take no comfort from the vivid colour now. The throbbing only made him wince and ache for an end to the pain. He searched the cabin for a distraction, something to focus on beside the sensation. His gaze found the window and he looked out at the slate-grey form of the planet they’d left behind, watching as it shrunk, receding into the star-scattered blackness of space.
The stars began to shrivel, their brightness fading as they transformed into particles of dust suspended in the air. The memory has gone, the void filled by the faintly glittering gloom of Snoke’s audience chamber. Kylo was still gasping, conscious that his eyes were still wet.
“Look at me, Kylo Ren.”
He turned his face upwards. His master was still smiling, and Kylo swallowed, his breath settling. He had done well. There would no punishment today.
“You have known cruelty. You have known injustice. What will do with them?”
“Use them to strengthen my body; escalate the power of my mind; honour the glory of my blood.”
“Very good. You may go, and reflect upon your lesson.”
That night, Kylo murmured the incantation to himself as he knelt before his shrine. “The strength of my body. The power of my mind. The glory of my blood.” He spoke them feverishly as he recalled the sufferings of his childhood, ashamed of his tears even as he permitted them to fall upon the warped metal of his grandfather’s mask.
Later still, as he lay flat upon his bed, he continued the incantation. The memories were painted red as he reflected upon them, the same brilliant shade as his blood. He was on the verge of sinking into the crimson abyss when another shade glimmered in the corner of a memory that Snoke hadn’t seen. A memory he could never see.
This was a later memory, a memory of summer. It was filled with a brilliant blue sky, a stretching expanse of grass beneath it. He was climbing to a hilly peak, breathless but happy. He carried a weight, but it was a burden he was glad of – small hands were fisted in his hair, his own larger ones holding little legs. He couldn’t recall her face – not that, never that – but he could recall her voice.
“C’mon! What’s taking so long?” she’d pulled at his hair, and he flinched and shifted his shoulders, smiling wickedly as she squealed in protest.
“You! You shouldn’t have stuffed your big mouth with flatbread this morning. You’re fatter than a baby Hutt.”
“Put me down!” she demanded, and Ben knew better than to disobey, picking her up off his shoulders and setting her down beside him.
He looked at her face and saw a featureless smudge, her displeasure conveyed solely through her folded arms. The absence made his heart ache but sent a pulse of relief through his body. She was untraceable. She would never be found.
But the thoughts of what he’d had to do evaporated as her arms dropped and she turned to sprint up the hill, pounding her little legs against the grass as she raced towards the peak.
He’d stood back and watched her clumsy run before bounding after her, a grin on his lips.
He would curse himself upon waking, punish himself for his weakness in remembering. But for now he allowed himself to rest, wrapped in the warm, sunny glow of his last happy memory.