He is walking alongside Rey through a lower corridor when he feels it, a bulging pressure at the base of his neck, and Ben turns crisply on his heel just in time to watch the fired blaster-bolt halt itself several inches from his face. It buzzes like an angry hornet, pushing against the grip his mind keeps on it.
The boy, locked into place with his weapon still raised and straining as though against iron fetters, is not faring much better.
He is perhaps fourteen or fifteen years of age, with a wide jaw and gray eyes and broom-colored hair that sticks up at the back like tail feathers when it is not combed properly. Ben recognizes him, although they have never met in person.
He steps politely around the hovering blaster bolt as if entering late into a private party conversation, pulling his elbow out of Rey’s grasping reach, and notes that four guards at the hall’s far end have not come any closer. The boy’s eyes are innocent-wide.
“You are Lieutenant Cassio Eventide’s son,” Ben pronounces, walking forward until they are within arm’s reach of each other. “Aren’t you?”
The boy flinches as though he has been struck. His finger where it holds steady on the trigger has turned so white with useless effort that it is beginning to look brittle. The uniform coat he wears is slightly baggy about the shoulders, rolled up twice at the sleeve cuffs, clearly tailored to fit a larger man.
“Yes,” the boy gasps. “And you’re Master Kylo Ren. They told me your – your knights were the ones who killed his squad.”
“They were,” Ben answers. "I'm sorry."
"You think I give a damn?"
He had not killed the lieutenant himself, once he was finished extracting whatever information Supreme Leader Snoke required, but this fact is immaterial. The boy's face had appeared among his father's memories, buried in the furthest and safest place inside his mind - it had come as a quick, bright flash between the images of a gray-eyed woman combing her hair, potted flowers in a windowsill, an unfinished cup of caf left forgotten on a ship's console somewhere.
“No,” Ben answers.
The boy’s teeth grit together. His thoughts are an incomprehensible, helpless tangle, his vision tightening around him so that he can see only what is directly in front of it. Ben is very familiar with this process.
He takes a half-step backwards.
Behind him, Rey moves a step forward in turn, but Ben nods his head to her and she stops.
“I’m going to release you now,” Ben says. The boy blinks in surprise. His finger eases off the trigger. “I won’t blame you for whatever happens next, but I’d advise you to be certain you can live with it.”
“I – ”
He lets go easily, gently, as though relaxing his grip finger by finger, and the boy’s body sags. The blaster bolt continues its harmless path forward to create a large hole in the duracrete wall, blowing dust and shards and plaster nobody pays the least attention to.
The boy keeps his blaster raised, his arm and his chin both trembling, scowling down the barrel as he is pulled apart by the widening gap between ability and desire – then he changes his hold with an efficient flick of his wrist and smashes the gun’s stock across Ben’s right cheek in a wild, swinging backhand. Something makes a dull crack.
Rey gives a sharp and wordless exclamation, tries to move forward again.
(“Wait,” Ben tells her, sending the thought out as his ears ring. “Wait.”)
She does. Nobody else moves.
And with what he would like to imagine is a solemn, sovereign dignity, such as that of a man finally setting his neck down on the executioner's block, Ben turns his head aside to offer the unmarked left cheek as well.
“Now, tell the truth,” he says. “Did doing that make any difference?”
The boy pales in humiliation, the blaster now hanging limp from his split-nailed fingers. His spine curls back, the tendons stand out in his neck, his mouth pinches closed as though around the taste of something bitter.
“No,” he answers, finally. “No.”
“Good.” Ben straightens his head again. “Then you’re already a stronger and wiser man than I am.”
The boy’s next breath turns into a sob, followed by another and another and another. His nose beings to run, dribbling mucus down his chin along with the spit and tears, and Ben decides abruptly that he will kill the first person who laughs at this sight.
Fortunately, none of the guards do. One even comes forward to put an arm around the boy’s narrow, shaking shoulders.
(“Why are you weeping, boy?” Snoke had asked him, once, because even hidden beneath the helmet Snoke could always see Kylo Ren’s true face. “Has anything given you cause?”
“Nothing, Master.”)
Rey does not take Ben back to his cell immediately after this. Instead she sits him down atop the counter, in an empty refresher that she ducks them into as they leave the boy’s keening, cleansing wails behind. One of her hands becomes covered in a soft light while she scans it over his bruising face.
He has seen her whole body covered in this same light, as well, moments before she took off his Master’s head in one brutal stroke – like killing a ripper-raptor lizard, she'd explained. Same principle. Ben's mind had held Snoke in place while she did it.
For a moment there is only the dripping of a leaky faucet, a clinking of the chains on his handcuffs.
“You didn’t deserve that,” Rey says.
“I most certainly did,” Ben answers, assuredly. “I should count myself fortunate that he elected not to spit in my face.”
“He’s lucky he didn’t. I would’ve choked him with my bare hands.”
The light works its way through his skin, pushing the fractured orbital bone back together. Then here is that same insistent, staccato request, passing from her mind to his, but again Ben keeps her out.
It is a skill he'd needed to develop hastily, while trying to shield his thoughts from Snoke during those final stages of the war, although this blocking tended more towards redirection – moving his Master’s increasingly violent entreaties along other channels and pathways, away from thoughts of his family and the resistance and the future, usually towards memories of Rey as they fought.
It was the best he could do, considering how keeping Snoke out of his mind was not something he had ever really tried before.
“Ben,” he hears her say, earnestly, “there are some things nobody deserves.”
Ben considers the fact that he is sitting with his back to a mirror, that if he turns around and looks hard enough he will be able to see his father’s features half-hidden inside his own scarred face.
(“Han Solo. I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time.”)
“That’s true,” Kylo Ren answers.
…
The problem requires a bit of creativity, but its answer comes to him at last with the weightless and easy simplicity of a remembered word or the solution to a complicated mathematical equation – the air vent, naturally. The air vent.
Its grate is held in place by four tiny screws, one on each corner, so Kylo Ren must stand with his eyes closed and his forehead pressed against the wall in concentration while he imagines them unwinding. Delicate, detail-level work was never his specialty, but the grate drops free and Ren catches it soundlessly before it hits the floor. The time is 2300 hours.
He lays this aside and stretches his mind up through the dark, narrow, shaft until it reaches the fan.
One of its curving metal blades, about the length of his index finger, lifts off the mounting as though of its own volition and is guided slowly back out into the light. Its edge is as sharp as the point of a new-struck nail.
Ren has to put this aside too, though, if only temporarily, because his heart starts thrashing like a drowned swimmer inside his rib cage. It had done this same thing before he led the Knights to massacre Luke’s students, all older than he by several years and all laughably less powerful. It had beat this way before his duel with the former Master Kylo Ren, whose name he had taken after he took his life. It had beat this way before he turned around to meet his father on the bridge, above a chasm of red light, before he had helped Rey kill the man whose voice had lived coiled up inside his head since he was four or five years old.
Whatever the mind’s position on such matters, the body always resists transition between one life and the next.
But, Ren tries to reason with it, he can promise that this will be the last time.
(What had brought the change, finally? He knows very well. He had looked into Snoke’s mind, during an idle moment, and glanced his plans for the conclusion of the war – a public execution, of course, General Leia Organa brought to her knees while a crowd looked on.
“Ha,” Kylo Ren had thought, though he had not been Kylo Ren as he thought this. “My mother will never kneel for them. They’ll have to break her legs first.”
There, right there. That had been it. That had been where it started, or ended, depending on your definition.
"Come home. We miss you.")
He paces back and forth through the bare, white cell until his pulse finally slows again.
Really, this should be easy. This should feel effortless, the natural conclusion to whatever tale of cowardice and rage and selfish hubris he no doubt has turned himself into by now. Ren would prefer it if they not go quite that far, though, when this is all finished – it is somewhat dispiriting, when you are at the point of releasing yourself into history and hearsay, to know you will be transformed into the monster parents tell their children about at night.
Well, he concedes. It will be acceptable so long as they don’t come up with something too absurd, like the notion of him actually fitting under a bed well enough to hide there.
He laughs at this summoned mental picture while rolling up both of his sleeves and exposing the pale skin beneath. This is going to make a great, lashing mess, and no doubt the sanitation workers will curse him for it because blood is so very hard to scrub out of cloth and stone. He ought to leave them a note about the virtues of cold water and peroxide.
Then he picks up the fan blade and tips it onto its thinnest edge. He has killed enough men to know where all the appropriate pulse points and veins are located.
And his hands are steady now, Ren is pleased to observe. He would hate to slip or waver in this task – it will be the only pure, good, truly just thing he has ever done as a man.
He must attempt to do it correctly.
(“I’m being torn apart. I want to be free of this pain. I know what I have to do, but I don’t know if I have the strength to do it. Will you help me?”
“Yes, anything.”)
He gives a long, low sigh.
…
(“Thank you.”)
…
End Notes: Well, that was more depressing than I thought it was going to be. This wouldn't all fit into three posts, so there's a bonus coming as well. I hope you're sort-of happy, OP.
Re: The Sword of Prince Hector (3/3)
He is walking alongside Rey through a lower corridor when he feels it, a bulging pressure at the base of his neck, and Ben turns crisply on his heel just in time to watch the fired blaster-bolt halt itself several inches from his face. It buzzes like an angry hornet, pushing against the grip his mind keeps on it.
The boy, locked into place with his weapon still raised and straining as though against iron fetters, is not faring much better.
He is perhaps fourteen or fifteen years of age, with a wide jaw and gray eyes and broom-colored hair that sticks up at the back like tail feathers when it is not combed properly. Ben recognizes him, although they have never met in person.
He steps politely around the hovering blaster bolt as if entering late into a private party conversation, pulling his elbow out of Rey’s grasping reach, and notes that four guards at the hall’s far end have not come any closer. The boy’s eyes are innocent-wide.
“You are Lieutenant Cassio Eventide’s son,” Ben pronounces, walking forward until they are within arm’s reach of each other. “Aren’t you?”
The boy flinches as though he has been struck. His finger where it holds steady on the trigger has turned so white with useless effort that it is beginning to look brittle. The uniform coat he wears is slightly baggy about the shoulders, rolled up twice at the sleeve cuffs, clearly tailored to fit a larger man.
“Yes,” the boy gasps. “And you’re Master Kylo Ren. They told me your – your knights were the ones who killed his squad.”
“They were,” Ben answers. "I'm sorry."
"You think I give a damn?"
He had not killed the lieutenant himself, once he was finished extracting whatever information Supreme Leader Snoke required, but this fact is immaterial. The boy's face had appeared among his father's memories, buried in the furthest and safest place inside his mind - it had come as a quick, bright flash between the images of a gray-eyed woman combing her hair, potted flowers in a windowsill, an unfinished cup of caf left forgotten on a ship's console somewhere.
“No,” Ben answers.
The boy’s teeth grit together. His thoughts are an incomprehensible, helpless tangle, his vision tightening around him so that he can see only what is directly in front of it. Ben is very familiar with this process.
He takes a half-step backwards.
Behind him, Rey moves a step forward in turn, but Ben nods his head to her and she stops.
“I’m going to release you now,” Ben says. The boy blinks in surprise. His finger eases off the trigger. “I won’t blame you for whatever happens next, but I’d advise you to be certain you can live with it.”
“I – ”
He lets go easily, gently, as though relaxing his grip finger by finger, and the boy’s body sags. The blaster bolt continues its harmless path forward to create a large hole in the duracrete wall, blowing dust and shards and plaster nobody pays the least attention to.
The boy keeps his blaster raised, his arm and his chin both trembling, scowling down the barrel as he is pulled apart by the widening gap between ability and desire – then he changes his hold with an efficient flick of his wrist and smashes the gun’s stock across Ben’s right cheek in a wild, swinging backhand. Something makes a dull crack.
Rey gives a sharp and wordless exclamation, tries to move forward again.
(“Wait,” Ben tells her, sending the thought out as his ears ring. “Wait.”)
She does. Nobody else moves.
And with what he would like to imagine is a solemn, sovereign dignity, such as that of a man finally setting his neck down on the executioner's block, Ben turns his head aside to offer the unmarked left cheek as well.
“Now, tell the truth,” he says. “Did doing that make any difference?”
The boy pales in humiliation, the blaster now hanging limp from his split-nailed fingers. His spine curls back, the tendons stand out in his neck, his mouth pinches closed as though around the taste of something bitter.
“No,” he answers, finally. “No.”
“Good.” Ben straightens his head again. “Then you’re already a stronger and wiser man than I am.”
The boy’s next breath turns into a sob, followed by another and another and another. His nose beings to run, dribbling mucus down his chin along with the spit and tears, and Ben decides abruptly that he will kill the first person who laughs at this sight.
Fortunately, none of the guards do. One even comes forward to put an arm around the boy’s narrow, shaking shoulders.
(“Why are you weeping, boy?” Snoke had asked him, once, because even hidden beneath the helmet Snoke could always see Kylo Ren’s true face. “Has anything given you cause?”
“Nothing, Master.”)
Rey does not take Ben back to his cell immediately after this. Instead she sits him down atop the counter, in an empty refresher that she ducks them into as they leave the boy’s keening, cleansing wails behind. One of her hands becomes covered in a soft light while she scans it over his bruising face.
He has seen her whole body covered in this same light, as well, moments before she took off his Master’s head in one brutal stroke – like killing a ripper-raptor lizard, she'd explained. Same principle. Ben's mind had held Snoke in place while she did it.
For a moment there is only the dripping of a leaky faucet, a clinking of the chains on his handcuffs.
“You didn’t deserve that,” Rey says.
“I most certainly did,” Ben answers, assuredly. “I should count myself fortunate that he elected not to spit in my face.”
“He’s lucky he didn’t. I would’ve choked him with my bare hands.”
The light works its way through his skin, pushing the fractured orbital bone back together. Then here is that same insistent, staccato request, passing from her mind to his, but again Ben keeps her out.
It is a skill he'd needed to develop hastily, while trying to shield his thoughts from Snoke during those final stages of the war, although this blocking tended more towards redirection – moving his Master’s increasingly violent entreaties along other channels and pathways, away from thoughts of his family and the resistance and the future, usually towards memories of Rey as they fought.
It was the best he could do, considering how keeping Snoke out of his mind was not something he had ever really tried before.
“Ben,” he hears her say, earnestly, “there are some things nobody deserves.”
Ben considers the fact that he is sitting with his back to a mirror, that if he turns around and looks hard enough he will be able to see his father’s features half-hidden inside his own scarred face.
(“Han Solo. I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time.”)
“That’s true,” Kylo Ren answers.
…
The problem requires a bit of creativity, but its answer comes to him at last with the weightless and easy simplicity of a remembered word or the solution to a complicated mathematical equation – the air vent, naturally. The air vent.
Its grate is held in place by four tiny screws, one on each corner, so Kylo Ren must stand with his eyes closed and his forehead pressed against the wall in concentration while he imagines them unwinding. Delicate, detail-level work was never his specialty, but the grate drops free and Ren catches it soundlessly before it hits the floor. The time is 2300 hours.
He lays this aside and stretches his mind up through the dark, narrow, shaft until it reaches the fan.
One of its curving metal blades, about the length of his index finger, lifts off the mounting as though of its own volition and is guided slowly back out into the light. Its edge is as sharp as the point of a new-struck nail.
Ren has to put this aside too, though, if only temporarily, because his heart starts thrashing like a drowned swimmer inside his rib cage. It had done this same thing before he led the Knights to massacre Luke’s students, all older than he by several years and all laughably less powerful. It had beat this way before his duel with the former Master Kylo Ren, whose name he had taken after he took his life. It had beat this way before he turned around to meet his father on the bridge, above a chasm of red light, before he had helped Rey kill the man whose voice had lived coiled up inside his head since he was four or five years old.
Whatever the mind’s position on such matters, the body always resists transition between one life and the next.
But, Ren tries to reason with it, he can promise that this will be the last time.
(What had brought the change, finally? He knows very well. He had looked into Snoke’s mind, during an idle moment, and glanced his plans for the conclusion of the war – a public execution, of course, General Leia Organa brought to her knees while a crowd looked on.
“Ha,” Kylo Ren had thought, though he had not been Kylo Ren as he thought this. “My mother will never kneel for them. They’ll have to break her legs first.”
There, right there. That had been it. That had been where it started, or ended, depending on your definition.
"Come home. We miss you.")
He paces back and forth through the bare, white cell until his pulse finally slows again.
Really, this should be easy. This should feel effortless, the natural conclusion to whatever tale of cowardice and rage and selfish hubris he no doubt has turned himself into by now. Ren would prefer it if they not go quite that far, though, when this is all finished – it is somewhat dispiriting, when you are at the point of releasing yourself into history and hearsay, to know you will be transformed into the monster parents tell their children about at night.
Well, he concedes. It will be acceptable so long as they don’t come up with something too absurd, like the notion of him actually fitting under a bed well enough to hide there.
He laughs at this summoned mental picture while rolling up both of his sleeves and exposing the pale skin beneath. This is going to make a great, lashing mess, and no doubt the sanitation workers will curse him for it because blood is so very hard to scrub out of cloth and stone. He ought to leave them a note about the virtues of cold water and peroxide.
Then he picks up the fan blade and tips it onto its thinnest edge. He has killed enough men to know where all the appropriate pulse points and veins are located.
And his hands are steady now, Ren is pleased to observe. He would hate to slip or waver in this task – it will be the only pure, good, truly just thing he has ever done as a man.
He must attempt to do it correctly.
(“I’m being torn apart. I want to be free of this pain. I know what I have to do, but I don’t know if I have the strength to do it. Will you help me?”
“Yes, anything.”)
He gives a long, low sigh.
…
(“Thank you.”)
…
End Notes: Well, that was more depressing than I thought it was going to be. This wouldn't all fit into three posts, so there's a bonus coming as well. I hope you're sort-of happy, OP.