Chapter Text
i.
The ghosts have forsaken Kylo Ren.
It isn’t his grandfather who has done this— not Lord Vader, never Lord Vader. But the Dark Side is omnipresent, and it has seen the way his heart pulsed with a traitor’s tick when he finally ended that fool Han Solo. Lord Vader must know, as Snoke does, that he is still only the darkness of the thunderclap. A precursor of screams before some violent outbreak of light.
When this happens, his master has told him to imagine a roomful of candles, take his fingertips to the wicks, and feel the exquisite burn as he snuffs each of them out. He hardly has the patience to do it. But when he manages, it is not his darkness that makes the flames go out, but their heat that chars his fingers.
It is why he asks Lord Vader for guidance, for his blessing and his battle cry. The embers of his lightsaber guttering out along the floor are his only answer. Because he is still weak. Because he is still not enough. Because there has been another name that his traitor soul responded to.
(He hears a voice shouting across a metal canyon. It is in his ear on that smuggler’s spaceship, coarse hands guiding his to the controls; it is in front of him as that furry beast of a Wookie settles him on its shoulders, threatening anyone who has him come to harm. It is behind him now, shot through with a desperation he has never heard before. It says one word. He turns around.)
(-Ben!)
(Why does he turn around?)
“You look like you could use some fresh air, kid.”
Kylo whirls, lightsaber aflame. The air in his quarters crackles with gory ozone. He lunges at the wall; the gash bleeds hissing sparks. Another plunge guts the metal tiling apart.
“Might want to go easy there.”
Screws ping against the floor as he continues his assault. Kylo slams his lightsaber at the gaping hole in the wall, hilt first, clenching his teeth against the crash of metal on metal. His breaths heave hot and wet against his mask, fogging his visor into a smear of red.
And yet the vision persists.
“Get out,” Kylo spits. “Or I’ll kill you again.”
From his position on Kylo’s bed, Han Solo shrugs. “That’s the problem with murdering people,” he says, propping himself farther up against the pillow with the heel of his boot. His gangly legs are crossed at the ankle. “If they come back to haunt you ‘cause they’ve got a bone to pick, you’re stuck with ‘em. Can’t off the same guy twice.”
This Han is younger than Kylo remembers, with thick hair and dark eyes; a body lean and hungry. He has the aquiline gaze of a keen opportunist and the expression of a rascal, appraising Kylo as he would his damned ship, looking for parts that are broken, theorizing how they might be replaced.
A savage slice of Kylo’s lightsaber eviscerates the pillow Solo sits on. Scorched feathers flutter through the air. Through their blistered haze, Han lounges in the same spot, unperturbed.
“Get out.”
Han twirls a blackened feather between thumb and forefinger. “I’m your hallucination, kid. No can do.” He stills as he looks up abruptly. “And stop doing that.”
“Stop doing what?”
“Making me look like I’m some Rodian bounty hunter under your bed,” Han says. He morphs briefly, flickering; muted candlelight atop a steam-clung mirror. Kylo sees a shock of silver hair, cheeks fraught with a constellation of creases, before forcing himself to stop. Before forcing the trick of the Light to stop.
“You appear to me precisely as you really are, Solo,” Kylo growls, looking down at the mattress to where Han still lies, raising his eyebrows complacently. As though he’s not intimidated by him. As though he isn’t impressed by Snoke’s most gifted apprentice, by the power Kylo now wields. “If you’ve come to convince me of anything, know I will not be swayed.”
Just as he was not swayed the first time he appeared in his quarters. Or the fifth.
But Han’s eyes find his with a marksman’s precision, even through Kylo’s mask. “I’m not here to convince you of anything.” He gestures vaguely around the room. “All of this? Is self-inflicted.”
“I would never inflict myself with you.”
Solo chuckles. “Believe it or not, there was a time, kid.”
Kylo bristles, lightsaber whirring to life in his hand— but then Solo’s face is drenched in crimson light again, bathed in snow and rust again, and he flicks the lightsaber off. “Don’t call me that.”
“Hey, don’t knock it— you and that name go back a long way.” The crinkles of Solo’s eyes soften. His throat bobs. “Back when your mom and I didn’t know what you were going to be, that’s what we called you— since she wouldn’t let me name you Chewie. Which is frankly her loss.” He pauses on the beat, waiting for a smile behind the mask that will never come; a sign of life that is no longer there.
Solo takes a deep breath before speaking again. “Look, I’m not calling you Kylo, like one of your idiot underlings. I changed your diapers, for God’s sake.” Kylo’s fists clench as he takes a step forward, stomping into Solo’s personal space. But the man looks up at him with those Starkiller eyes, honest and daring, and Kylo’s visor suddenly feels more like a muzzle than a mask. “And, dammit, you’re still my son.”
There is a palm on Kylo’s cheek again, calloused and absolving; there is a body falling beneath his feet, silhouetted against a bloody dying star.
“You’re not even here.”
Solo clicks his tongue against his teeth. “Yes and no. True, I can’t do a fancy Force ghost, but if you spend enough time around Force users, some of it rubs off. I only exist in your brain, kid— but I’m real enough there.”
He’s projecting himself into Kylo’s mind. Prodding his way through his thoughts, like some filthy…scavenger. Anger wells hotly in his throat. This is the disturbance he has felt ever since taking Solo out on Starkiller Base, askew and terrible. Solo had not been eliminated on that day. He had merely shifted tactics, has been foraging through Kylo’s mind ever since.
Kylo wonders if it would take murdering a hundred Han Solos to begin to assuage the feeling.
“I command you to leave,” he snarls.
When he looks up, Han is gone.
ii.
“We’ve received intel on the enemy’s next assault,” Supreme Leader Snoke says, voice a hailstorm from on high. “General Organa is joining the attack.”
Hux smirks beside Kylo.
“General Organa has always been at the forefront of the Resistance,” Kylo says instead, managing not to strangle Hux by clenching the lightsaber at his hip instead.
“She is leading the ground assault,” Snoke replies. He regards Kylo with eyes like the glittering void of hyperspace. “Personally.”
The room scintillates with dust, brief and golden and dying. Kylo lets his anger settle on each mote as it passes; lets Snoke coil his consciousness through each bone of Kylo’s ribcage, testing the poundage and resistance of his resolve.
He welcomes the invasion. It settles in his lungs with the dark, choking burn of a forest fire.
“Tell me, General Hux,” Snoke says suddenly, and the intoxicating suffocation of his probing snaps away. Kylo finds himself taking a shuddering breath. “Do military men of your rank frequent the battle in person?”
Hux eyes Kylo scornfully before answering. “No, sir.”
Kylo swallows a scoff. Hux’s father may have been an academy commandant, leaving his son to claw to his current position, but Kylo’s birthright has always been to a princess and a general. He knows high-ranking military protocol better than Hux’s backwater dreams could dare.
And he knows Snoke knows the same.
The Supreme Leader somehow looks down at Kylo without moving, air swirling around him with sweet malice of intent. “Now why would General Organa set foot on the field, in this most decisive battle, if her death could mean the death of the Resistance?”
Through his gloves, Kylo’s nails bite into his palms. “I don’t know, Master.”
“I am sure that you do.”
Kylo is sure that he does.
Shafts of grimy light scythe from the projector behind Snoke, mottled blue and silver. They stop at Kylo’s feet, but do not touch.
“Your mother has come to kill you, Kylo Ren,” Snoke says, and Kylo counts himself blessed. He prays she will press the blaster muzzle to his chest, grief and fury whittling down her choices to the trigger. Joy has come to Kylo Ren at last, and it is the feeling of Leia Organa giving up on him.
Kylo’s grip on his lightsaber tightens. “Then I will kill her first.”
Snoke is probing through his mind again, presence like the searing cold of an interstellar plain. Kylo lets him enter without resistance. The heft of his master’s roots twine against the dark rivers of his veins, skating past the barren badlands he has so dutifully cultivated. See the magma where family once stood. See his total devotion where there was once only confusion and loss.
The pressure of Snoke’s invasion suddenly stops. When he speaks, his voice is hard.
“I see that your father still lives.”
A stone drops into the well of Kylo’s being. He grits his teeth, waits for the upshot of water after the projectile launches itself to the bottom, and forgets to breathe.
“He does not, Master. The entire planet was annihilated where his body lay. Where I destroyed him.”
The room is abruptly tinged with the salt-tang of sweat on metal— scent of the fastest ship in the galaxy, smell of the endless afternoons of Dagobah, hands slipping against a steel saber’s grip.
—Don’t grind the clutch, kid.
—You lack patience, Ben. Again.
And again and again, an endless orbit around the suns of things ever beyond his grasp.
When Snoke speaks next, it is as though Kylo is not wearing a mask at all. “You killed his physical form, yet I still perceive him in you. He troubles you.”
“He is but an apparition." Hux raises his eyebrows beside Kylo, but even that weasel wouldn’t dare openly mock the Supreme Leader’s protégé. “A trick of the Light, Master. I will not succumb.”
“The very nature of this vision suggests that you are, Ren.”
“Even Vader was tempted by the Light.”
“And to the Light he ultimately fell.” Kylo nearly steps back at the force of the echo clanging against his feet. “Your grandfather yielded to the trickery of his deceitful son in his last moments, and died in disgrace. You are not here to emulate him, Ren— you are here to surpass him. Your birthright is to win the victory he ultimately failed to achieve.”
He had always known that Lord Vader had been tempted by the Light. It was comfort as much as anathema— that Kylo’s weaknesses could too one day be sutured into strength. No one else in his family had ever struggled— born prodigies, all of them, Force users and princess warriors and even simply pilots who could make the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs. They had their decided places. Only his grandfather struggled as he did; knew what it meant to be too much of one or the other to be anything at all.
Kylo swallows hard. Lord Vader did not find his place in the Light. He died from it.
“Let me kill General Organa with my bare hands. I will show you that I am fully devoted—”
“—If you must,” Snoke says languidly, waving away a twist in Kylo’s chest that Kylo does not care to analyse. “I have a mission that is yet more crucial.”
“Master?”
“Bring me the scavenger, Rey.”
“She is a champion for the Resistance— completely brainwashed by the Jedi.”
“—her power is great, Ren. There is a seed of anger yet within her, ignited when Han Solo died. It can be fed. If brought over, this scavenger could be the Dark Side’s greatest asset.”
Memories of the scavenger girl are a blurred potpourri of snow. A filthy slip of a girl, staggering against the sudden glare of his lightsaber on Takodana; a desert rat, pushing him out of her mind until she tumbled through to the other side, and found what he ought to have killed her for seeing. He remembers her scream tumbling from the steel cage of Starkiller when he felled Han Solo; the sharp lash of her saber on his face. She was strong with the Force indeed. With proper training she would easily subdue him. But if he were the one to raise her as an apprentice, bring her to Snoke as his trophy, then her glories would be his, and his weakness would not be revealed.
He knew what it was to be young and untrained.
“Let me teach her,” he lowers himself to beg. He can feel the desperation in his voice, and despises himself for it.
Snoke merely looks down at him, titanic and unrelenting. “You ask me, when you are yet untaught.”