Chapter Text
On the bridge below, two men engaged in a measured face-off. Rey could barely make out their features, but she knew one was Han, and she knew the other was Kylo Ren. They were unmistakable. Yet even as she looked on, afraid to blink, it seemed more dream than reality. She felt as if she was missing something crucial. Why would Han approach him at all, let alone so ill-prepared, without fear, without pretense of threat?
Surely he wouldn’t be foolish enough to try to take Kylo Ren off guard and fight him. Such a fight wouldn’t last long. A blaster would be no use, even in the hands of a seasoned smuggler accustomed to danger. He’d be killed almost right away. She wanted to scream for him to stop, but she couldn’t form a sentence.
A tense minute passed. Even with the distance, she could make out snatches of conversation—they were talking, of all things, it was bizarre—carried up to her and Finn in echoes off the chamber walls around them. The words washed over her, disconnected and broken under groans of machinery as it clanked and whirred and steamed. The things they were saying, what she thought she was hearing, seemed impossible to believe. After everything that had happened that day, she was unable to grasp any of it.
It felt unreal. It didn’t matter.
The only reality that mattered was much easier to parse: the detonators were in place. It was time to get back to the Falcon before the explosives went off and ripped the thermal oscillator of Starkiller Base wide open. Rey really did not want to be around for that part.
Han and Kylo appeared like toys as the light leaking in from outside the base went first from blue to red, then muddled into thick, smoky, colorless dark. Beside her, Finn tensed, and when she looked down his hand was gripping the railing so tightly it seemed his knuckles were about to burst through his skin. Part of her wanted to reach for that hand and squeeze it, but she wasn’t certain it would bring much comfort to either of them. He was as much at a loss as she was.
If they could just tear themselves away, she and Finn could determine what to do. They needed to get to Han and reunite with Chewie. They couldn’t leave without them; she wouldn’t, not after all they’d done for her. But she was not getting anywhere near Kylo Ren and was determined not to draw his attention. Memories of what had happened in that interrogation room were far too fresh.
So she leaned forward, squinting and ignoring the way the acrid air stung her eyes. Suddenly, there was something. Not by sight so much as feeling: a tingle at the back of her head, like hearing a sound of such high pitch it was nearly imperceptible to the ear, accompanied by the briefest tug behind her breastbone. Her mouth parted and she let out a shaky sigh, willing herself to watch the scene playing out before her.
Kylo was extending an arm, slowly, haltingly, lightsaber in hand. He was offering his lightsaber over to Han. She couldn’t believe it. It defied all probability. But for as far away as she was, as difficult as the steam and smoke were making it to see, she knew that was what was happening down there on the bridge. She could have closed her eyes and known it just as certainly. Yet all it made her feel was sick with dread at the fragility of such a moment.
Move, Han. Run away!
For a sickening instant Rey could swear she saw it in her mind’s eye: the lightsaber igniting red and spitting and hateful, Han run through, his eyes wide, a look of unspeakable sadness and love on his face, his body tumbling into the abyss as the blade deactivated. Kylo alone and triumphant on that narrow strip of cold grated metal, face cast in deepening shadow. Then the image was gone, like a terrible daydream, as elusive and harrowing as the vision she’d had on Takodana.
Instead, Han had it in his hand—the lightsaber. He had it. He moved as if to stow it away in his jacket.
He turned tentatively.
He took a few steps. He was alive, and pausing to look back at Kylo, and waiting for something more.
But Kylo wasn’t moving . . . until, suddenly, he was. He followed Han with a stiff, wide gait, like he was only half in control of his own movements, yet he followed all the same, footsteps echoing off the bridge and making it impossible to hear anything else they said to each other as they went. When they disappeared into a shadowed corridor, Rey exhaled and felt some of the tension melt from her bunched muscles.
“We need to go,” she said, barely above a whisper, her body leaning to nudge against Finn’s. Louder, she repeated, “We need to go. Finn?”
“Yeah. Yes, yeah, we do.” He’d watched, too, and the look on his face made it plain to her that he was as thrown as she was by what they’d just witnessed.
Moments later, the roar and blaze of the detonators going off and the attendant rumble of the base’s core spurred them on. The job was done. Now they really needed to go. Together they broke into a sprint, and Finn waited for her to fall in with him before he said, “I know the rendezvous point. It’s not far. If we get there before them, can you get the ship prepped? This place won’t hold long once the fighters find their mark.”
“Yes. I can.” She wanted to say something to cut the tension, though nothing seemed adequate. “Like old times, you and me running for our lives to that old piece of junk?”
He forced a breathless laugh.
His words echoed in her mind. ‘If we get there before them.’ That should have meant just Han and Chewie. But after what she and Finn had seen, she was no longer certain what that meant. Was Han bringing Kylo? Did he expect her and Finn to allow that, without question? Was it possible Kylo had manipulated Han’s mind the way she had the stormtrooper’s?
Had they even made it out of the base alive?
She had too many questions, and as she ran each one began to feel like a physical weight slowing her down. So she forced herself to focus instead on the sound of her feet hitting metal. Soon it changed to the soft crunch of snow and forest detritus as they emerged into the cold and woods, branches whipping past, to make for the edge of a not-so-distant cliff. It took her eyes some time to spot it, but then it was unmistakable: the Millennium Falcon awaited half-buried in white as the planet began its slow collapse.
Inside the freighter, her body thawing and steaming from the dash through frozen woods, she knew just what to do. It was only her second time in the pilot’s seat, and she wouldn’t be staying there long, but it already felt like home. Finn sank into the copilot’s chair. He didn’t look at ease in it, but she figured he wouldn’t want to let her out of his sight while death still seemed so likely. Within minutes, Rey had done all she could to prepare, hands deft and confident on the controls.
She was less confident, though, when it came to the matter of Han and Chewie’s location, and she didn’t want to risk taking to the air to intercept them. She and Finn would need to wait. She hoped she wouldn’t have to make the call to leave them behind; she wasn’t even sure she could bring herself to do it.
“I have to ask you something,” she said, glancing at him before bringing her eyes back to the console. The Falcon surged and shuddered, then settled down into a steadier, less alarming hum. “Something difficult.”
“All right. Yeah, actually, so do I.” He had been watching her work with some fascination, though there was no longer any hint of the utter bafflement he’d displayed their first time in the ship together. “Down there, did you hear Solo say—”
She waved a hand, shook her head roughly. She wasn’t sure what she’d heard, and she didn’t want to talk about it until Han had come back. “No. I don’t know. That’s not what I want to ask.”
Finn looked annoyed at having his question cut off, but let it go. “Is it about how long we wait? For them? Before . . .”
“No. Not that either.” She didn’t want to say such a thing. Voicing it would make it real, even if it was only a possibility. “Not yet. I know that might be what— But no. We can wait a bit longer.”
“Yeah. We can. Sure.”
He didn’t sound convinced, but they hadn’t been given much choice. As if to remind them that time was a luxury in short supply, the ground quaked and threw a heap of snow onto the viewport, where it dispersed like a wave. Finn’s eyes widened and he shifted further back into his seat. Rey forced herself to stop clutching the side of her chair so hard. Sitting in the cockpit, watching out the viewport as the world fell apart . . . it was like waiting out a sandstorm, she told herself. That was all. It was a flimsy attempt to soothe herself. She had never wanted to leave a place more than she did at that moment.
As for Finn, his patience was wearing thin. He sounded testy when he continued, “Well then what do you want to ask? Because clearly we aren’t on the same page here.”
“I’m . . . worried about what we saw.”
“Right. Me too.” He frowned. “That’s what I was trying to say. Because what I heard, what it sounded like to me, was him calling Kylo Ren his son, and asking him to leave with us. So yeah, you’re not the only one who’s worried.”
It wasn’t the response Rey had been hoping for. What she’d been hoping for was to be told she’d heard wrong.
“We did see him walk off that bridge with Kylo Ren, right?” Finn went on when she said nothing. He was speaking in an undertone, as if they might be overheard somehow, as if anyone would care but them. “I wasn’t just hallucinating that?”
“No. You weren’t. Or else I was too.” She just couldn’t shake the thought that it wasn’t right, what they’d seen. She couldn’t understand it. After all that had transpired in the last day, she was desperate for something to make sense. Jakku had been hell, but it had been straightforward: salvage, trade, eat, sleep. “I wonder if he might have been manipulated. By Kylo Ren. That that’s what we saw, why they walked off together. A—a mind trick.”
When Finn didn’t say anything, she risked a look at him. He was staring at her as if she’d just started speaking to him in Shyriiwook. “A mind trick?”
“Yes, as in . . . Force stuff. They can do that. People who can use the Force. Right? Like they do in the stories?” People like me, apparently. Maybe she sounded paranoid.
“I don’t know, Rey!” He blinked rapidly and threw his hands in the air. “Where is this coming from? And how would it explain any of that? Did you hit your head while you were—”
“Never mind.” She shivered, anxious and stomach in knots.
He took a deep breath, looked embarrassed, and said in a quieter, calmer voice than moments before, “I’m sorry. You’ve been through a lot. Of course. I wasn’t trying to . . . forget it.”
Without another word, Finn rolled his shoulders and shrugged his jacket off, then handed it over to her. She took it with a small, tired smile of gratitude and awkwardly put it on. It was far too large, as it had been when she’d briefly worn it inside the base, but it held his body heat and now hers, and the gesture warmed her further.
“It’s fine.” She pulled the jacket tighter around her and hunkered down. “You have too.”
Now she just felt stupid. They were both running on no sleep, frayed nerves, and their last reserves of adrenaline. Of course she sounded ridiculous, and of course Finn was on edge. But he hadn’t seen what she had in the interrogation room. He hadn’t done what she’d done. She knew it was possible.
She knew what it was to feel Kylo Ren in her head, to have his face so close to hers, his hulking form hovering a hand’s breadth away. Han had been that close to him, down on the bridge; was proximity necessary for that sort of trick?
She could have dealt with it, the physical closeness, but whatever happened when Kylo had looked into her mind . . . she couldn’t ignore that. The fact that she had gone and done just the same to him—looked right back and seen him, deep into him—that was what stayed with her. With hardly any effort she had known exactly what to say to him to make him relent. And it had worked. She had never seen someone look so wounded without a scratch on them. Somehow, she had cut very, very deep.
Later Rey might have to figure out what that meant, and how it had happened, and how she’d so soon after made that guard let her go. She had an inkling, but it was too alarming to consider when she just needed to get away from where she was and live through the night. As for whatever they thought they’d heard and seen, she didn't think that Han would just—
Boots were pounding up the boarding ramp, and Rey felt a twinge again, like she had watching the events on the bridge. It was brief, a tremor up the back of her neck, a faint fuzz of ringing in her ears, then gone. This time it reminded her of something she couldn't place, but there was no time to dwell.
She leapt to her feet, casting about for a blaster or anything to use as defense and finding nothing. Finn followed her out toward the lounge, where Han and Chewie now stood, snow-sprinkled, damp, and, in Han’s case, red-cheeked. Barely inside the mouth of the ship, so close to the slope of the ramp that if they shut the hatch right now he might lose a limb, was Kylo Ren.
Unmasked, his face was even paler than she recalled, his hair beaded with melting snow, and again she was stricken by his youth and wholeness. Like Han, he was breathing hard through his mouth. He stood stiff and guarded, like an animal that had been caged so long it had no idea what to do when it was released to such a place, and he wasn’t looking at any of them. The ship may as well have been empty. She wanted to read it as arrogance, but it plainly wasn’t.
His eyes flicked suddenly to her, caught there, bore into her. “You.”
She could hardly begin to parse his reaction—the way his mouth had fallen open a little, or how the timbre of his voice had been almost soft—before his gaze shifted to touch on Finn. Kylo’s nostrils flared, and his jaw went rigid, and whatever had been on his face a moment before was gone, replaced by deep, simmering displeasure. Rey felt a surge of anger and confusion at the sight of it, at how he dared to address her as if he knew her, at how he dared to look at Finn that way, and was glad she hadn’t been able to find a blaster. She might have used it. Instead, she rounded on Han.
“What is happening here? What have you—”
He brushed past her. “There’s no time for this, we have to go. You come with me.” He tugged at the sleeve of her jacket but kept moving toward the cockpit. “Chewie, stay back here with Big Deal and hold things down until I can—”
“No!” she cried, on Han’s heels and feeling mutinous. “I want to know what’s happening, and why th—”
“Rey!”
That was Finn, keeping back with Chewie, eyes trained away from Kylo, who seemed to have decided it was in his best interest not to speak beyond the single word he’d already uttered. She glared at Finn and his mouth clipped shut.
“This was not part of the plan.”
She wasn't sure how much of a right she had to claim that; she hadn't been there when they’d decided to come to Starkiller. It was difficult, piecing this together as she went along based on Finn’s rushed explanations and her own deductions.
Rey looked back to Han, who had taken advantage of her momentary distraction and disappeared into the cockpit. She growled and pursued him.
He was already in the pilot’s seat, and he looked pointedly at her before returning to what he was doing. “You did good with this,” he told her, indicating the controls and the way the ship stood ready to go. “Saved us a heap of time. Take a seat.”
He certainly seemed lucid—gruff, flippant, abrupt. So, normal, as far as she knew. Her theory about him being in the thrall of some mind trick was crumbling.
She considered storming out and refusing to copilot. He didn’t need her. But she wasn’t going to act like a petulant child when the stakes were so high. She pressed her lips together and clenched a fist, then sat. It didn't take long to get into the air and out of atmosphere, and a few minutes more put enough distance between them and the gravity of the dying planet to jump to lightspeed. They didn’t see Starkiller explode not long after, but they heard the Resistance transmission come through when it did. Rey was glad to miss the sight; she’d seen enough destruction. She did her part in the cockpit, not speaking to Han but knowing what was needed and when.
Maybe that was why, the moment he switched autopilot on, he looked at her seriously and said, “This was part of the plan.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s my son. She told me to—” He winced as if something was causing him physical discomfort. Rey had no idea who ‘she’ was, but that didn't make a difference to Han. He wasn't telling her everything, she sensed. Only what he felt she needed to know. “Before we left to come here, she told me to bring our son home. If I saw him. And I did. And I’ll be damned if I know why it worked, but that’s why he’s here.”
Rey kept her eyes on the viewport and knew Han was doing the same. So it was true. She hadn’t wanted to believe her own eyes and ears, had wanted to blame it on the distance and the ambient sounds of the oscillator, had wanted to think up any alternative to explain, but . . .
“I know. I heard you. We both did. We were standing on one of the balconies, not so far off.”
It all should have been so transparent, even before what she’d witnessed at the bridge. What Kylo had said to her, with something like pity, as he rooted through her memories and innermost fears—‘You feel like he’s the father you never had. He would have disappointed you.’ What she had seen and felt when she’d entered his mind, things that made little sense then but all seemed to align so perfectly now. Fury and abandonment and fear and so much resentment, and somewhere in the heart of it all, flickering, dejected attachment.
She thought of how intimately Han seemed to speak of what had happened at Luke’s temple. ‘One boy, an apprentice, turned against him. Destroyed it all.’
Convenient, the detail he’d chosen to leave out: who that one boy had been, and who he had become. She felt a flare of annoyance. Everyone she had met since leaving Jakku had secrets, evidently.
After what had happened to her just hours ago, she did too.
“I just didn’t want to believe it. Kylo Ren is your . . . Why didn’t you tell us when—”
“Ben. His name is Ben.”
Such an ordinary, human name. It was difficult to match it to her masked pursuer in the forest, and she couldn’t let herself apply it to the face she had seen beneath that mask, either. To her mind, the face and all the fears it so poorly concealed still belonged to Kylo Ren. She shook her head.
“Chewie’s with him. I don’t know if—” He broke off and grimaced. She was beginning to get the idea he was talking more to himself than to her, until he said, “I know he took you. I know you want an explanation. I don’t have one. It’ll have to wait. But you won’t need to see him.” The implication in Han’s words was clear: But I do.
“Are you . . .” Rey suspected she may be overstepping, but she had to ask. “Are you sure you know what you're doing?”
“Sure enough.” In the next breath, he stood and moved to go. “We’re okay up here for now. Go get some rest. Spend some time with Finn, if you want. He came here for you, you know.”
“I know,” Rey said again. At least that was something she knew was true, and she felt a warm glow of gratitude and affection for Finn. In a daze, she rose and followed.
“He’s a good kid. In way over his head, but hell, so am I.”
A flicker of a smile crossed her face. They all were.
“Don’t get too cozy,” Han called back, his path diverging from hers as they hit the communal area. Presumably, he was making for one of the holding spaces. Wherever Kylo had gone, or been taken. “I’ll need you back in the cockpit for landing.”
✴
Kylo waited in the dimly lit galley. It had always been small, but now it was positively tiny. He was grateful that Chewbacca, perceptive as ever, had opted to bring him there and then give him space, waiting in the tunnel just outside. He couldn’t fathom trying to share the sparse room with a Wookiee right now. He could hardly fathom being in this ship at all.
His head was throbbing. The room was stuffy, too hot. He remembered that, how damnably stifling the ship could be, though he knew it wasn’t really the problem. The sensation was coming from inside, too, like his lungs were too big for his chest. Kylo sat on one of the benches and pawed roughly at the high neck seal that was beginning to feel like a vise around his throat. He couldn't do much about it right now, but he could at least get his gloves off. The stale air felt strange on his skin, and he flexed his fingers but pointedly did not touch anything.
He was trying not to think of the fact that he had no idea what had become of his lightsaber after Han accepted it. It was in the ship; he could sense its proximity and the shuddering call of the crystal inside it. But beyond that, he wasn’t sure and somewhat doubted he would be seeing it again any time soon. Though he would have liked to see anyone try to keep him from it when they landed . . . wherever it was they were going.
Minutes passed too slowly. He began to feel like a prisoner. Perhaps that wasn’t so far from the truth. He’d come by choice, nominally. Han had named no conditions of his return. But Kylo knew better. This wasn’t over, and he did not have high hopes for what awaited him.
What have I done?
He’d been a fool on that bridge. Weak. Duped. He hadn’t had the strength to do what needed to be done, and now he would pay the price. He held his breath and counted to five. When he released it, he assured himself that those were his own thoughts and conclusions, and he nearly believed it. Part of him believed it.
A sound from the tunnel drew his eye—a shuffle of feet, Chewie saying something in his version of an undertone, and then Han stepped into the galley and waited just inside the doorway. Kylo regarded him warily and felt him, just as wary, taking him in the way he had on Starkiller. He thought that if Han was looking for familiarity, something he could recognize and latch onto, he would be disappointed. But Kylo couldn’t even convince himself of that. He’d already cracked. His posturing on the bridge had proven hollow.
“There was a tracker on my belt.” It was a strange way to break the silence, but Kylo hadn’t yet decided what he wanted to say. He had a lot of ideas. This was the most impersonal, though, and thus the least volatile. It was as close to a gesture of goodwill as he could manage. “I left it behind on the base. It may give the impression I was killed in the explosion. Temporarily.”
He wasn’t so stupid as to think the ruse would last long, or take at all, but it might at least keep the truth of his treachery secret for a short—very short—time, which was better than nothing. It could be long enough for him to form a plan. This had certainly not been planned. There were other measures he could take on that front, too, but they were more extreme and he wasn’t ready to explore them yet.
“Okay. Good.” Han took a few more steps into the room and stopped by the opposite bench, but he didn’t sit. He drew a deep breath and uncrossed his arms. “I’m sorry. I just— I can’t believe you came.”
Kylo looked at him blankly. Maybe that statement should have hurt, but he agreed. His mouth tightened and he dropped his gaze to the general area of the wall behind Han. “You’d rather I didn’t?”
“No.” There was conviction in Han’s voice that Kylo could never remember having heard before. “No, Ben, of course not.”
“Don’t call me that.”
If Han was abashed, he didn’t relent. “It’s your name. I’m not going to call you anything else.”
The lights above the kitchen station flickered erratically, and Kylo glared but felt some of the fight go out of him. There was no point in arguing. This was ridiculous. His head was still killing him, and he was tired. What the hell did Han want from him? An apology? A story?
“I tried to avoid you. Instead you had to—” he said. “I could have killed you.”
“I know. I thought you would there, for a second. I was ready.” He went quiet, and Kylo knew Han was studying him for a reaction. Perhaps he wondered if Kylo was going to tell him what had been going through his mind as they stood there with the lightsaber held between them. He wouldn’t though. Kylo wouldn’t tell him anything, and Han finally seemed to realize it. “But you didn’t.”
Kylo had thought he would, too. For a moment he thought he had. Something had happened as they stood there, Han staring into his face, promising that yes, he would help his son. He would do anything. And hearing those words, Kylo had seen it, clear as if it was happening—he could have turned the lightsaber on Han at the last moment, killed him with a single cruel thrust of the blade, felt his life ebb, tried to ignore the look of regret and forgiveness in Han’s eyes even as he died and fell away. Surely, it would have quelled the conflict within Kylo at last, just as the Supreme Leader had told him it would. A sacrifice. A test.
But it hadn’t gone that way at all. Instead he’d seen love in Han’s face. He’d seen desperation and hope, and felt some brittle part of himself quaver and break. It was just enough that he had hesitated, heeded that pull he always fought. He had let Han take the lightsaber, he’d let him lead him down that bridge, and out into the snow, and up into the Falcon.
He ignored Han’s answer, and whatever he must be implying with it. “What are you going to do with me?”
“Do with you?” Han sounded incredulous, but Kylo recognized something in the way he said it, a nuance he knew and somehow, despite all the years, hadn’t forgotten. Han didn’t know what was going to happen to him now. But he bluffed certainty. “You’re not going to be treated like a prisoner, if that’s what you think.”
“What else would I think?”
Han spluttered, growing frustrated. “I admit, some things haven’t been hammered out. A lot of things. But they will be.” His brow creased, and he tried to make Kylo hold eye contact. “Look, kid, I came for you. Your mother—”
“No. This isn't helping.”
He knew what Han was going to say. Leia loved him. She missed him. She wanted him back. They both did.
He wanted to believe it, but couldn’t. It had been too long. The more he thought about it, the less certain he became. Worst of all, he knew there was part of him that loved them too, or at least a part that did not hate them. He couldn’t hate them, even when he tried. Snoke had known, and he’d made sure Kylo identified it for what it was: weakness. It was—the sort of thing that made people like Han march in to certain death hoping that things would work out. The sort of thing that needed to be rooted out and burnt up.
It’s too late.
“Do you . . . need anything?” At least Han seemed willing to let the matter rest for now.
But Kylo found the question almost offensively reductive and fixed him with a disbelieving look.
“No.”
Han sighed in defeat and massaged his temples. “Right. Listen, I’m gonna go run some maintenance while there’s time.” He sounded simultaneously relieved for a reason to go and sad that the conversation had been so strained. But surely he’d known it could not have gone any other way. “I’d say help yourself to the food stocks, but there aren’t any. Water’s good, though. We’ll . . . we’ll talk later.” He half turned to go, then paused. “I wanted to see you. I'm glad I did.”
Kylo nodded but offered no other indication of agreement. It was just as well to him. He needed to focus, and to do that he needed to be alone. There was nothing he wanted to say to Han right now. Later, yes. He’d have to eventually. But right now he could barely keep his own thoughts straight, much less accommodate interaction with another person. The moment Han departed, Kylo let himself slump, elbows on his knees, somehow exhausted by the brief conversation that had just transpired and grateful to have it done with.
He shut his eyes and tried to clear his mind, but it was impossible to ignore the conviction that continued to plague him: He had fallen short, once again. And now he was here, still at war with himself.
Forgive me, grandfather.
This was only the start of it.