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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I’m so, so sorry in advance for how dark this is. I love Kylo and just really need to cry a lot.

Kylo has returned to the light side and Leia has decreed that he won’t be executed. Certain people* within the Resistance are very angry that he’s been ‘let off easy.’ They really, really want him to suffer and die, but they can’t do anything about it openly. So they decide to drive him to the point where he does it for them.

This gang of people harasses & abuses him—including raping him—for an extended period of time without anyone knowing. They hound every insecurity he has—that he’s evil, a monster/freak, ugly, unlovable, that he was never wanted, that he doesn’t deserve to be redeemed. They tell him that no one will believe him if he tells anyone, and if he fights back in any way it’ll be his word against theirs as to who instigated it.

He becomes convinced they’re completely right about how he’ll never be worthy of redemption/love and kills himself.

+Rey has been helping Kylo with his rehabilitation and she knows that he’s starting to mentally deteriorate again, but doesn’t know why because he prevents her from accessing his thoughts.
++When Rey feels him die she gets hit with a flood of his feelings and realizes what’s been happening.

*Please do not include any of the heroes in the group torturing him.

/Sorry again :|

THIS RIGHT HERE THIS MANNNN

I really love this prompt! I would def write it, myself, but don't think I could bring myself to kill Kylo off. Oooh it would be utterly heartbreaking though...

OP here: prompt was getting long so I didn't include too many bonuses/alternatives, but the story doesn't absolutely *have to* end with Kylo dying. There could be a nearly-successful attempt but Rey or someone finds him in time.

I like this end better

Yeah...I was going for maximum sadness but I like Kylo alive too.

Different anon, with this bonus I might also take a shot at this.

OP again - really excited that people are interested, so just wanted to add: I would love to see Kylo's friends' love for him, in contrast to how he feels about himself. Any pairing is ok (including Rey/Finn/Poe/Kylo), or they can all be platonic. Just their grief at seeing all the progress he'd made sabotaged and almighty fury at the people who did it, and if he survives their determination to keep helping him. Hux can even be there if you want.

...

A lifetime spent mostly inside the minds of other people, or else listening to another voice inside his own, has given Ben a philosophically suspicious eye for anything that has been previously deemed impossible – still, he must try very hard not to look surprised while the judge delivers his sentence.

“Kylo Ren,” he says, leaning forward in his stately chair, “it may interest you to know that there are many sane, law-abiding citizens within this republic who’ve told me you should be chained to a pillar and whipped to death. Would you call that justice?”

“Yes, your honor,” Ben answers, although the judge has not addressed him by name yet. Standing beside him, Leia frowns. “I would.”

“But we are not going to exercise justice today, Kylo Ren. I think I’ve seen enough blind justice practiced to fill a lifetime or two already – so in light of General Organa’s eloquent testimony, and your somewhat belated contribution to the First Order’s downfall, this high court has chosen instead to move in favor of mercy. Tell me, what’s the difference between those two ideas?”

Ben swallows to wet his throat. He locks both knees so that they will not give out beneath him, keeps his eyes aimed levelly forward, and he suddenly aches along the still-healing pathways his dead master’s lightning had taken as it scorched through his body.

“Mercy cannot be earned,” he answers.

“No, it cannot.” The judge settles back again, regarding him with the patient, hooded interest of a vulture. “You are living strictly on unmerited and gifted time – never forget that for an instant.”

“Thank you, your honor. I don't intend to.”

The terms of his probation take a full half-hour to read, framed at both ends by the condition that any violation will result in an immediate reinstatement of his capital sentence. Afterwards, Rey hurries him along an empty corridor towards the private upper flight deck – she never walks with her back toward him, a habit for which Ben cannot fault her, and a hum of anticipation surrounds her at every corner they turn – as shouts from the impatient crowd outside reach his ears.

Ben halts before a window to listen.

“How can we possibly expect to have peace while that murderer’s still alive? Don’t they realize what he’s done?” The stranger’s face has gone florid with a bellowing, breathless rage. The courthouse spokesperson looks pale by contrast, and Ben guesses they drew straws to decide who would come deliver this displeasing news. “Butcher him like the animal he is – it’d be a better death than he gave his father.”

"If he were really a changed man, he'd ask the judge to let his death sentence stand. That's my opinion, anyhow."

"Yes, yes, that's right. That's exactly what I was saying before."

“Cut off all his limbs, first,” a woman adds. “If he really wants to emulate Lord Vader so much, I’m sure he’d thank you for it.”

This sets off a wave of laughter that rolls up the tall stone pillars and through all the hollow places inside him. Ben notes that the woman has a young child balanced on her hip, who glances blankly upward and pops one soggy little fist out of its mouth to wave at him.

“I’m rather sorry to have disappointed them,” Ben remarks. “The press could’ve called it the historical event of a generation, for a week or so.”

“Well, now they’ll just have to find something else they can brag about witnessing.” Rey peers down as well, squinting into the afternoon sun, and then points to a large ATS septic tank on the courthouse roof. “If it’s drama they want, though, I can probably make that thing explode if I think about it hard enough – then they can all claim how they were there that one miraculous day when it rained shit. How would they like that, you think?”

“You truly are a consummate disciple of the sacred arts, Master.”

She snorts. The child has gone on waving, so Ben moves to raise his hand in recognition. It seems like the least he can do, for these frustrated spectators who have come out expecting a celebratory execution and have instead been handed some maudlin, wildly implausible explanation about second chances.

(Kylo Ren – they will always call him Kylo Ren, he knows, and so he will always be Kylo Ren, though he might tell them it was a won title rather than an actual name – does not truly believe in this himself, but saying such a thing aloud would be selfish considering the efforts of everyone involved.)

“Poor General Organa, though,” begins another, older man. “Her family deserved so much b – ”

Then Rey snatches his arm and gives it a forceful yank. They keep moving, although the muscles of his left leg become stubbornly unresponsive for a moment and he staggers. Rey’s jaw is clenched, her eyes sparking-sharp, probably in disgust at being forced to touch him.

He cannot fault her for this, either.

("You're a monster.")

“...Don’t look back, all right?” Rey advises, when Ben turns his head to hear whatever the man planned on saying next. “That’s not the way you’re supposed to be going.”

...

End Notes: I've read the additional bonuses, OP, and I'll be sure to include other characters in here as I go (I need to write it in parts because I don't think I can emotionally do it all in one shot, and I felt like I needed the set-up), but I'll admit a strong partiality to Reylo/ReyBen that I'll keep platonic if it's not totally your thing. Let me know what else you want to see, if anything, and if this is somewhat like what you wanted.

Nerd points to anyone who gets the title reference.

OP: *heavy breathing* *muffled screams* *wailing* *falls off chair*

Ohh my Godddd. Firstly, thank you so much for filling. People seem to like my prompts but I pretty much never get fills for them. I sat on this prompt for a long time because it's so off the rails dark and has so much sensitive stuff in it and I felt so weird for wanting it.

Writing in parts is totally understandable. I was so excited just to see part one and it's already so perfect. My heart *clenched* the moment the judge mentioned how people wanted to see him whipped to death and then it exploded when Ben agreed that that would be justice.

And then the foreshadowing in all those people's comments and Rey trying to keep him from hearing or looking at them. (And Ben already believing the worst about how she feels about him. D: Speaking of, another bonus I didn't list is Ben's torturers convincing him that his friends secretly hate him as much as they do, both because it would destroy him and as another tactic to keep him from confiding in anyone.)

And "mercy cannot be earned" - oh goosh. Mercy/forgiveness/redemption is a pretty huge theme in my personal spirituality and I spend a LOT of time thinking about the gap between redemption and human mercy and what happens to a person who's come back from a dark place and because of the nature of what they've done there's no one willing or able to welcome them.

Reylo is absolutely a thing that I enjoy, so go for it.

And I got the title reference. :)

Thank you again for this!!

Bookmarking to read when complete.

…

Ben is not given free reign of D’Qar’s military compound – he’s glad for this, really, because the imposition of routine is far more familiar – but he is permitted to take supervised excursions between the hours of 600 and 700. Visitors may come any time between 800 and 2100 hours. Often it is his mother, or his uncle. Sometimes it is Rey.

(“We’re still reviewing all that classified intelligence you sent me,” she has explained. They cycle together through a game of determining which of Ben’s outspread fingers she is tapping, while he keeps his eyes dutifully closed. This is meant to monitor the healing nerve damage. “I put everything onto a holorecorder as I went, which was good because there ended up being a good six months of it in total – did you realize that? How long you spent playing double agent for us?”

“No,” he has admitted, honestly. “Was that the left index, just now?”

"Nope. Ring finger.")

He makes the bed each morning and folds his spare uniform atop it, recalling dimly that cluttered spaces always made him feel crowded and distracted as a young child. The only other thing in this cell is an air vent, in a corner eight feet off the ground.

Eventually they will relocate him to some remote outer world– so long as it’s not Dagobah, thank you, the humidity there is like getting wet tissues crammed up your nose – but just now his mother and uncle are engaged in the tiresome business of putting a galaxy back together amidst the settling dust of a toppled regime. They are getting to be old hands at it.

He also makes daily escorted trips to the refresher, where he undergoes the farcical routine of washing himself while wearing anklet stun-cuffs. The shower is an empty room with a large drain in its floor and ten identical spigots curving out from the walls.

This seems to amuse the guards very much, or one guard in particular. The other man thinks mostly about what their mess hall is serving for lunch – apparently renaming processed meat byproducts with such jovially euphemistic names as “Galactic Surprise” does nothing to improve the taste. Both men stay well outside his reach, like children prodding an animal through the bars of its cage.

This cautionary distance will do them no good, in the event of a Code 5 emergency, but Ben hopes they will never need to find this out.

He keeps himself turned towards the shower-head.

(“Damn,” the younger guard thinks, frankly. “His body’s even more messed-up than his face.”)

It is impossible to guess which scar the man is staring at, although there is a wide assortment to choose from. The old bowcaster wound on his left side is so large that both Ben’s hands cannot cover it, while the smaller ones below his collarbone – left by Finn and Rey, respectively – are matched like military epaulets. The one Rey carved into his neck and shoulder with her – his – her lightsaber is deep enough to redirect the falling water like a trench. Snoke's lightning has left branched, fern-leaf patterns along his back and leg, which Ben finds rather aesthetically interesting.

(“I mean, I guess he’d still be weird-looking if you got rid of everything else – maybe that’s the real reason they made him wear a mask all the time. Nobody’d ever take him seriously without it. I sure as hell wouldn’t.”)

Ben scrubs industrially at his hair, his arms and hands, amused by his own temporary sense of shame. Oh, dear, someone thinks the First Order's favorite attack dog looks peculiar? How very nasty of them.

(“I wonder why? Holt’s kind of a mangy perv, but he’s definitely right about the General still being a very fine specimen of – well. That’s not respectful. And his dad wasn’t a bad-looking guy, either. Is it the will of the Force? So he’s less likely to reproduce and curse the galaxy with another generation of stab-happy Sith Lord fuckery?

May the Force be with you, you big ugly bastard.”)

The guard laughs quietly, to himself, and his companion grunts at being disturbed from his midday meal ruminations.

“What the hell's so funny?”

“Nothing, nothing. I’ll tell you later.”

Ben leaves the guard to his thoughts, which are entirely his right to have.

He attempts to go several days without showering, after this, but the mingled smells of sweat and scalp remind him too much of what it had been like to breath inside that helmet after a long fight. It was always cramped in there, to say nothing of how little he could see through its visor – only what was right in front of him, which had of course been the Supreme Leader’s real intention in asking Kylo Ren to wear it.

What a shame it had taken him so long to figure that out.

…

Ben emerges from a memory of Snoke – they are afraid of you, can’t you see it, your mother and father are afraid of what you may become, it shows you how very small and unimaginative their minds are – to find that he has managed to tear his alusteel bed frame off its anchoring floor-bolts and hurl it against the far wall. His limbs do not seem to remember this titanic effort, so he may have done it partially with his thoughts.

As with most things, he cannot really decide.

Normally this would summon Rey to his cell, sometimes carrying a half-eaten apple or hopping on one foot to put on a shoe after being woken from a semi-decent night’s rest. He still broadcasts images and emotions to her at an unwilling and nearly horizontal angle, from clear across the compound, but she is off-world at the moment and he is not her responsibility in any case.

(“Where’s your pity party today?” asks the man who delivers Ben’s food, sometimes. “All got better things to do than sweep up your pieces, I assume.”

“I’m sure,” Ben usually answers.)

This disruptive occurrence appears in the new rulebook as a Code 3, so although Ben is coherent immediately afterwards they are still required to slip a needle of sedative through his arm. For reasons of safety, it is explained – to others, mostly.

(“Listen, man. It feels really weird saying this, but, uh."

Finn had hesitated in the cell's doorway, one hand over its keypad lock.

“...I just realized that I’ve never thanked you – for not reporting me, remember? When we were in Tuanul, on Jakku. You looked over at me and –” then Finn had tapped the side of his head, twice, for emphasis “—I think you saw something insubordinate happening, up here.”

Ben had studied the man, remembering the scents of scorched flesh and smoldering cloth as he cleaved FN-2187's back open. The jacket appears to have since been mended.

“It would be more accurate to say I recognized it,” he had said.

“Well, maybe. But thanks either way, okay?”)

They have switched their preferred sedative to tranquarest nowadays, because Ben has a spectacular tolerance for renatyl and increasing the dosage any further would put him in a coma. The assistant medtech who arrives to administer his injection is a young woman with amber skin, braided black hair, and a malevolent expression quite apart from the quavering distress most of the medical staff members reserve for him.

“Hello, Kylo Ren,” she says, firmly, in what seems to be a well-rehearsed voice. The needle waits slender and graceful between her gloved fingers. “My name is Lin Sella. Does that name mean anything to you?”

Ben holds out his left arm, clenches his fist, offering her a raised blue-gray vein that runs up from his wrist to his bicep.

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“I didn’t think it would.” She draws a substantially larger-bore needle from her pocket, after a moment, and in one efficient twist has switched the filled syringe between them. “My sister was Commander Korr Sella. How about that?”

Ah. Now he can place her.

Commander Korr Sella was among the dozen or so Resistance officers and representatives who were scheduled to visit Hosnian Prime, carrying his mother’s final written appeal to the Senate, on the day Starkiller was first tested. He had felt them all die at once, in a single raised and pandemoniac shout that had cracked his mind from side to side, so any individual voices had been impossible to distinguish.

“Yes,” he says. “I understand.”

Lin Sella keeps her eyes down as she brings the needle’s angled, venomous mouth against his arm. She holds her other thumb held against the pulse in his wrist.

“My sister was always a great admirer of your mother’s, you know. Ever since we were little girls.” She steadies her hand on the plunger. “I guess she had good reason to be – I don’t know how that woman’s kept herself sane, all these years, knowing a thing like you came out of her body.”

Ben does not move his gaze from the woman. “I believe she tries to forget about it, mostly.”

“I wish it were that easy for everyone else.”

Then she drives the needle in, clear up to its hub, so hard and viscous that it leaves a bruise. Ben covers this with his sleeve and occasionally pauses to dig his fingers against it in the days that follow.

(And in reverential consideration, because Ben knows very well who he reminds her of and because he has blamed her all these years for things that were his own doing, he avoids his mother's eyes whenever she looks at him.)

…

Ben does not know the officer’s name – does not care to know it – and the man certainly shows no intention of introducing himself.

This is just as well, since Ben does not spend a great deal of time looking at the man’s face.

“Tell me something, Kylo Ren – ”

Hips jerk roughly against the apex of his back. A sharp, hot pain drives its way up his spine and through his stomach.

And he must pause to breathe, here, to steady himself, because the raging power in his blood surges up like a sea and reminds him he could rip this man apart tendon by tendon without ever once moving his hands – if he wanted to, that is. Which he does not. He can hardly believe this himself, even as it is happening, so he sincerely doubts anyone would believe his version of things in the aftermath. Why should they?

Besides, he has endured far worse pain, although not of this particular nature.

Oh well.

“—I heard –” the man pants, his damp fingers digging into Ben’s still-clothed shoulders “—someone told me – getting their mind read, by you, it was like – like a dull knife. Like getting their scalp peeled off.”

“Metaphorically speaking,” Ben answers, though his face is turned to one side against the floor and so it comes out muffled.

He knows this air of placid expertise usually makes them angrier, but he must ponder who could've made this creative and not at all inapt comparison. Snoke had not entered his mind with a great deal of care, those final years, so Ben can speak from experience in this regard.

Had Commander Dameron said it, perhaps? Most likely.

(“Recognize this?” Dameron had said, holding the datacard up and almost-grinning as he did. “I dug it out of a drawer. I’d completely forgotten I had it – A Record of Hyperspace Travel Before the Galactic Empire, Collected in Three Volumes. Didn’t you loan this to me, way back when?"

“I may have.” Ben had lifted the datacard gingerly between his fingers, recalled only a puling and dark-haired boy of ten or so as he tried to follow his conscripted, unwilling older playmate up through the branches of a Force-tree. “Am I to assume you never read it?”)

There is another spike of pain.

Then Ben remembers the interrogation chamber with its cold and shackling chair, remembers watching people turn their heads aside as they wept with fear because it was the only part of their bodies they could move, and he thinks yes, yes, this is perfectly suitable. This is entirely deserved.

So Ben says nothing to the man, after this, and the man says nothing further to him.

“…Hello?” Rey asks, about a week later. “Did you hear what I just said?”

Ben looks up at her. She perches on the folding chair that she has carried in here so they may eat their morning meals together. There is something like a quiet knocking at the forefront of his mind, her signal that she would like to be let in, because these days she always asks for permission.

He recalls her face twisted in pain, her brows furrowed, her voice breaking in the middle, and so he keeps her shut out.

(“I’m not giving you anything.”

“We’ll see.”)

“No,” Ben tells her, stirring the untouched soup with his spoon. “Excuse me. Say it again.”

...

…

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.

Anon, I read this first thing in the morning and it made me cry. The way you capture that specific psychotic depressive numb, refexively self-punishing mental state is impressive and terrible. The line about the body resisting transition between one life and the next hit like a sledgehammer. All the history and past you're describing here-- Ben's, Rey's voice talking about chopping off Snoke's head like a lizard, the shower scene, the scene with the young boy-- is painful and perfect to this universe; one of those fanworks you hope the canon is going to live up to. I don't know which way you're going to go with the last part; part of me is really really hoping that you somehow write your way out of this ngl-- but whatever you decide to do, you wrote something incredibly powerful.

Same anon, btw-- the Ajax of Telamon's post-war suicide ref is A+++.

Wow, well done.

OP again:

Oh man anon. This is gorgeous and such a gift and I'm overwhelmed to have gotten it as a fill.

I love how eerily and heartbreakingly resigned Ben is to the treatment he gets. I love the snippets of his interactions with Finn, Poe, and Rey and how he either misreads or misses their efforts to show kindness.

And the last (hopefully penultimate?) scene reads so true. Being intellectually ready for death and believing it's the right thing, but "the body always resists transition between one life and the next" - know what that's like. Commenting on the last scene is actually a little hard but yeah. It's so good.

Thank you.

Anon here - Would you like me to conclude this as the original prompt specifies, or according to the bonus/alternate option? I have drafted ideas either way, but it's your fill! And thank you for your kind feedback.

OP: I'm torn but actually leaning toward wanting him to live now, though I would be 1000% down for alternate endings. (As in, if you wouldn't mind posting both?) I don't want it to be too much work though, so if you only have time to finish one, I would go with the one where he's found in time.

Anon again! The last part is going to be too long to post on this thread, so the rest will be here when I finish: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6499309/chapters/14877532

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PROMPT POST #5 - CLOSED

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Kylo, Gen or Any, Post-redemption Kylo commits suicide (TW abuse, rape, depression, suicide)

Re: Kylo, Gen or Any, Post-redemption Kylo commits suicide (TW abuse, rape, depression, suicide)

Re: Kylo, Gen or Any, Post-redemption Kylo commits suicide (TW abuse, rape, depression, suicide)

Re: Kylo, Gen or Any, Post-redemption Kylo commits suicide (TW abuse, rape, depression, suicide)

Re: Kylo, Gen or Any, Post-redemption Kylo commits suicide (TW abuse, rape, depression, suicide)

Re: Kylo, Gen or Any, Post-redemption Kylo commits suicide (TW abuse, rape, depression, suicide)

Re: Kylo, Gen or Any, Post-redemption Kylo commits suicide (TW abuse, rape, depression, suicide)

Re: Kylo, Gen or Any, Post-redemption Kylo commits suicide (TW abuse, rape, depression, suicide)

The Sword of Prince Hector (1/3)

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