Chapter Text
Your mother dies in the spring.
Cardota mourns her death well into the summer.
Your coronation as Queen is celebrated under a cast of solemnity; you’re not the only one painfully aware of loss turning a new page in your planet’s history. Your father promises you will do well — she was already so proud of you. You rise into the ranks of the upper-caste and graduate from domestic policy to galactic politics.
This is when you begin to unravel the web your mother had begun to spin.
This is when you meet Ben Solo for a second time in your life, though he’s no longer the freckled, bright-eyed Jedi padawan who served as your knight the summer of your eighteenth birthday. He’s no longer a star-crossed friend, a boy who you’d told yourself that, maybe, one day, you’d marry.
He’s changed.
It seems Senator Organa, his mother, didn’t have the heart to break yours — she’d kept the truth from you.
(You’d asked her about him two summers ago, asked how training was going. Was Master Luke well? Ben seemed excited to continue under his uncle’s teachings. She’d been guarded in her response, hand on your cheek as a flurry of a senators came and went around you: “He misses you, I’m sure”.)
And Ben? Well, he’d stopped writing years ago.
(You wished for nothing more than to get a penned letter again — his penmanship was an art itself. He liked focusing on writing, he told you once. It shut out the darker parts of him. It was the same darker parts that kept him awake well into the nights that summer he spent as your guard on Cardota.)
Tonight’s dinner was supposed to be purely diplomatic. And yet, you find yourself surrounded by the vulture-like officers of the First Order and their sympathizers. You’re wading in your dead mother’s territory, trying to grasp how she could have ever aligned herself with these men, with this authoritative power. It shows. Your usual poise is shaken, traded in for wide eyes and tamed fear.
Coruscant hums off in the distance, through the balcony doors.
“Supreme Leader Snoke,” the young Commander at the head of the table says, “is most glad that you interested in continuing a working partnership, your majesty.”
The comment feels double-edged. Perhaps it’s the polished Core World accent that does it, or the way the redhead looks down at you – his eyes are cold. You try to hide the evident discomfort in your tone.
But, when you open your mouth to speak, but are silenced by a shadow that enters the room.
He rolls in like a storm and the air turns electric.
He’s tall, jet-black robes sweeping the ground as he strides through the private quarters of Senator Omni-Po, a First Order constituent. There’s a heaviness in his movements that anchor a feeling of dread in the pit of your stomach. Seemingly distracted, the man (or monster, you are not sure) moves to pry at the helmet along his jaw.
“Ah, Kylo Ren,” says Commander Hux, “A pleasure for you to finally join us.”
The hair that falls from the helmet is wild.
The second you see the curve of his chin, the sharpness of his nose — there are no words to describe the snap of your heartstrings and the violent burn of memories associated; he must feel the jarring stab of pain in the force.
(Ben Solo has always been hyper-sensitive to the rolling of emotions.)
But, it’s Kylo Ren who looks right at you.
He’s a ghost of the boy he once was — he’s older now, more of a man and handsome all the same. But he looks tired. Angry. Sad. His eyes are darker than you remember. His cheekbones are high and sharp and his face alone cuts you deep.
You feel, then, the icy pass of an intrusion in your thoughts.
You drop your knife.
Standing quickly, you don’t even excuse yourself from dinner. And when Kylo Ren Ben Solo follows you into the quiet hallway, you don’t look back.
He isn’t given the chance to apologize.
But you don’t want an apology anyways.