Chapter Text
Ben didn’t remember much of anything before he turned five, other than vague snippets of droids that babysat him while his mother attended to her Senatorial duties and his father was off on another one of his adventures. He rarely questioned why he had so few childhood memories. When he did, he would rationalize that it was probably because he had no one to fondly reminisce with. After all, wasn’t that how childhood memories worked? Wisps of memories solidified by stories told by loving friends and during family reunions?
“Remember the time when you refused to leave the house unless you were wrapped in Uncle Lando’s cape?”
“Remember when you wouldn’t stop crying unless Uncle Chewie carried you back and forth in the room while your mother was away?”
“Remember when you wouldn’t go to bed unless C-3PO told you the story of how the Ewoks saved the princess?”
(Ben would eventually see recordings of the above incidents when he “disassembled” one of his mother’s protocol droids in a fit of rage as a teenager. But by then, there weren’t any childhood memories left in him to reinforce, and they became simply another reason why he was so angry at the universe.)
The truth was, his parents never reminisced, or at least not in front of him. Growing up, Ben sometimes wondered if it was because they weren’t home often enough to recount anything, or because they could barely hold a conversation with each other without it leading to an argument.
Or maybe, he found himself thinking later, it was because they didn’t like to talk about a time when they still had hope for their son.
Kylo Ren felt her before he saw her in his peripheral.
Not quite as clearly as he could when Snoke was alive, but she was still there, like an itch he couldn’t scratch. For a brief moment, he allowed himself wonder if he was the same to her.
She wouldn’t look at him, hadn’t looked at him since she looked down from the Millenium Falcon door ten months ago, but he knew she felt his presence all the same. She tensed for the briefest of moments when the Force connected them before she caught herself.
She wasn’t alone this time, not a difficult deduction, because she rolled her eyes and snorted at an unseen companion on her right. “Sure, whatever you say.”
He dug his nails into his palm until they left angry crescent moons on his flesh. He didn’t let himself think about why when his throat tightened at her easy composure, or at the way she nodded and smiled so brilliantly at whoever she was with. Yet, he couldn’t deny his pleasure when she excused herself shortly after.
He waited until he was sure she was alone before he spoke. “You have gotten good at telling those lies.” And she had, she didn’t even blink when she told her companion she needed to get her gears ready for tomorrow.
Her hands clenched into fists at her side, the only evidence she heard him.
Sometimes he wondered if this was what it felt to talk to air. Sometimes he wondered if this was what it felt like to be trapped in a dream. Most of the time he wondered if this was what it felt like to be mad.
He knew she wouldn’t answer, but he found himself asking the question anyway: “Have you told them about this?”
Have you told them about when you still had hope in me?
Like always, there was only long suffering silence.
Ben had never been a restful sleeper but he was five when the nightmares began.
He woke up, screaming, tears trailing down his sweat-laden face. He didn’t quite remember the details of the dream, except that it was dark and terrifying and he was alone.
He remembered his parents running through the door at his cries.
“Ben?” The alarm in their collective voices only made Ben cry harder.
His father turned on the light, blaster drawn; his mother sat quickly at Ben’s side, frantic.
“What’s wrong, Ben? What’s wrong?” She only calmed when she checked him over twice and saw that nothing was amiss. “He had a nightmare,” his mother finally concluded, looking at his father.
“Looks like it,” his father observed, and put his gun back into its holster. He bent down and picked his son up. And finally— finally —Ben’s sobs abated. “Come on, big guy, you can sleep with us.”
(“It’s my fault,” Leia told Luke, a few days after she heard the most devastating news in her life. It was clear from the bags under her eyes that she had not slept since the news. “Ben had those nightmares. It must had been Snoke, he had been targeting him since he was—”
“It’s not your fault,” Luke told her.
Leia shook her head. “If I’d made the connection earlier, maybe I could have done something about this, maybe...”)
During rare peaceful interludes, when his mother had time to personally put him to bed, she would tell him stories. Her stories were based on all the stories she had heard when she was a child, like the ones about the princess and the Antarian pea, or the prince who cried dark wolf, or the princess and the beast. Ben liked the last one the best because it had exciting battles.
The story changed with each telling, sometimes the beast turned good, sometimes the beast turned bad, sometimes the beast became a prince again and lived happily ever after, but the story always began like this: Once upon a time, there was a prince who was turned into a monster by an evil Sith lord’s curse…
“I know everything I need to know about you,” the girl snapped at Kylo Ren.
“You do?” It was a rhetorical question. “Ah, you do.” She was looking at him with the same blazing hatred as she did when she struck him in the forest. She already heard from the traitor about what he did to the village, she witnessed him killing his own father. What more was there to know? “You have that look in your eyes. From the forest. When you called me a monster.”
“You are a monster.”
For a fleeting moment, Kylo's mind flickered to the heartless monsters in the stories his mother used to tell. That’s who he was now, wasn’t he? He stepped forward. “Yes, I am.”
The stories his father liked to tell him were much different than his mother’s.
Gone were the righteous princes and princesses fighting for justice, instead they were mostly about epic space battles smugglers got into while working their latest job. In his stories, the smugglers always completed impossible maneuvers in their spacecrafts as they flew away from the grasp of the latest rich but unsavory character they had just stolen from—smug and victorious.
If Leia had heard those colorful stories with her five year old son, she might have disapproved, but she wasn’t there, and Ben thoroughly enjoyed them.
“I want to be a smuggler,” Ben told his father one night, clutching his father’s dice in his hand after another story about past ventures.
His father laughed and ruffled his hair. “We don’t need to smuggle anything anymore, how about you be a pilot like me and keep the New Republic safe instead?”
Ben considered his words for a moment and frowned. “Will I still get to fly The Millennium Falcon like you did if I become a pilot?”
His father grinned. “That and V-Wing, and X-Wing and whatever other Wings that come in the future.”
Ben’s face lit up at the possibility.
(Han often thought back to this moment with his son when he saw the nervous but excited faces of yet another crop of young pilots and felt his stomach drop.)
“I want to be a pilot, just like you,” Ben declared, the smile on his hopeful lips brighter than a supernova.
“You will, kiddo. When you are old enough, I will teach you myself, I promise.”
(If there was one promise Han wished he kept, it was his promise to teach his son how to fly.)
The nightmares kept coming.
Twisted, smoky tentacles would reach for Ben from the blackest pits. Sometimes he would be all alone, his parents nowhere to be seen. Worse though, was when his parents were there and saw him, only to turn their backs and abandon him. Either way, the tentacles would eventually grab and drag him into the pit. The pit wasn’t filled with water, but a black substance that oozed like lava. When he fell, darkness engulfed him until it entered his lungs and drowned him.
Ben wasn’t aware that his mother’s concern over his repeated nightmares went beyond his lost sleep or the possibility that the dreams could be the manifestation of something more sinister. To him, the nightmares were merely the nature of things. Nothing more. Nothing less. But the dreams did make him deathly afraid of the dark, and they made him panic every time his father and mother stepped out the door without him.
“I’ll be back before you know it, kiddo,” his father would say, giving one last pat on his back.
“I’ll miss you too, Ben. Be a good boy while I’m gone,” his mother would console him as she kissed him on his forehead.
(Years later, when Leia heard reports of how Kylo Ren mercilessly destroyed another village, she wondered what would have happened if her younger self let everything else go and gave her frightened boy the attention and assurance he needed instead. Could she have prevented the birth of Kylo Ren? Would the universe be a better place? Would her son still be by her side?)
“Please, don’t go,” he begged them, holding their hands just a little tighter with each parting.
But the universe needed saving, and the good of the universe outweighed the neediness of an irrationally scared child, so over and over, Han and Leia would shake loose their son’s hand.
Kylo Ren’s hand barely grazed her face and instantly his surrounding shifted to a desert and he was suddenly staring at a child, the scavenger when she was younger.
“Come back!” she cried, her face scrunched up in distress as a ship flew away. He knew instinctively that the ship carried her parents; that they were abandoning her to a stranger in a strange place, and— suddenly, he wasn’t just seeing the scavenger anymore, he was also seeing himself.
He saw a pitiable boy, crying as his parents inevitably took leave.
Kylo let out a shaky breath.
It would be a lie to say Ben was a horrid child. He wasn’t. Aside from the nightmares and his aversion to separation, Ben was a relatively easy-going child. He wasn’t a picky eater, he was generally well-behaved, and he could even sit through long formal functions when required. He was bright too. He could name every component in a hyperdrive, he could read by the age of five, and he was fluent in Basic, Shyriiwook, and Droidspeak all before the age of six.
Han used to half-joke, half-brag to anyone who would listen that Ben was so smart he would have questioned his parentage if he wasn’t so obsessed with spaceships.
And Ben was obsessed with spaceships.
He had an enormous appetite for anything spaceship related. He would read anything: books, articles, holo-ads, anything that mentioned ships. He would spend hours drawing schematics of the insides of make-believe crafts, and played make-believe battles with his toy X-Wings. Every conversation somehow led back to spaceships or flying or both. Nothing else held his interest—which was fine when he was interacting with protocol droids since droids naturally tailored themselves to a human’s interests, but with other children…
At a rare playdate, the children began to cut Ben off after he interjected for the fourth time with a random starfighter fact.
From afar Leia watched and winced.
“We should enroll him in school.”
Han sighed. It was not the first time Leia brought up the idea of sending Ben to some school with the other sheltered children of senators and diplomats. “He has his whole life ahead of him to learn to make friends,” he told her with a shrug, not understanding her concern, just as he didn’t understand her desire to send their son to school at such a young age.
“He will be able to interact with more children his own age if he goes to school,” Leia insisted.
“He will learn more by traveling the galaxy.”
Leia rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. “He is six and a half, Han. He can’t go anywhere without us, and neither of us can just randomly travel the galaxy anymore.”
Han rolled his eyes at her. “I can do whatever I please, Your Highness,” he snapped, the beginning of yet another heated argument.
(In the end, Han didn’t do what he pleased, nor did he ever travel the galaxy with Ben. In reality, as much as he would like to pretend otherwise, he cared too much for the New Republic to forsake his responsibilities. In reality, Han never had a father, so he never quite trusted his own instincts when it came to Ben.
He rarely let himself wonder what could have been, but on one whisky filled night after his son had stopped speaking with him, he wondered what could have been had he trusted his instincts and traveled the galaxy with his son instead.)
Ben was seven when his parents enrolled him in school.
A hush settled over the busy manicured yard in front of an imposing white building as Ben stepped past the gate between Leia and Han. Ben instinctively shifted closer to his mother. A balding man in a brown robe stepped quickly forward. He had obviously been expecting them.
“Senator Organa and General Solo,” the man greeted with the familiar deference Ben had heard from strangers that sometimes walked up to his parents on the street. “I welcome you to the Lumcet New Republic School.”
“Headmaster Karthiar, it’s very kind of you to greet us personally,” said his mother as his father settled for a silent nod. His father was never one for empty pleasantries.
Ben ignored the boring adult conversation and looked around, taking in his new surroundings. There were more children here than he had seen before in his life, but no one he recognized. There were a few adults too, all in robes similar to the headmaster. They—the children very obviously, the adults more subtly—were looking at him. Some of the children were whispering. He thought he caught one of them pointing. It made Ben feel self-conscious, like maybe something was wrong with him.
He didn’t want to be here, he decided. He took another step closer to his mother and pulled at her hand. “I want to go home.”
His mother turned to him and smiled the same smile she always had when she was about to leave. It was mid-summer on Chandrila, but Ben suddenly felt cold.
“You will love school, Ben. You will get to learn so many new things and make so many new friends.”
He didn’t want friends. He wanted his parents. But he saw the hope in his mother’s eyes and didn’t want to disappoint her so he tried his best to keep his panic at bay. “If I make a friend now, can I go home tonight?”
“A transporter will bring you home every seven solar cycles.”
Ben felt his breath seize. They were abandoning him, just like they did in his dreams.
Did he do something wrong? He searched his brain for probable causes. Was it the toaster he broke the other week while he was trying to figure out how the heating coil worked? Was it because he didn’t make his bed? Or maybe it was because they were getting tired of being woken up by him every time he had a nightmare? Last time he did that, while they weren’t angry, he knew they were annoyed.
“I won’t wake you up at night,” he tried to negotiate. “I won’t cry,” he added, but he knew he was already failing at his words because he could feel his throat tightened.
He could barely see his mother from the blur of tears when she knelt in front of him and pulled him into a hug. “You’re not being punished, Ben.”
Ben couldn’t shake the feeling that he was. There was no other logical reason why his parents would want to leave him in this place all alone.
He felt dizzy from how quickly his heart was pounding. He couldn’t help but remember his nightmares, the dark pool, and the way his parents just walked away as the dark tentacles reached for him—
He turned to his father. “Dad—I don’t want to—please don’t leave me—”
“Breathe, big guy, breathe.” His father guided him from his shoulder to sit down. “That’s it. In and out. In and out. We are not leaving you.”
Ben finally breathed and noticed that his parents were crowding around him while the headmaster looked on with concern. “So I don’t have to go to school?” he asked hopefully.
His mother looked on helplessly. His father shot her a sharp, what Ben would later identify as his father’s see-I-was-right-and-you-were-wrong look before sighing. “All big boys go to school, Ben,” his father said. “But you know what else big boys get to do?” He paused and waited until Ben looked him in his eyes.
Then he lowered his voice, the way he always did when he said something he knew Mom wouldn’t quite approve, “They get to ride on the Millennium Falcon.”
“Why did you hate your father? Give me an honest answer,” the girl demanded, the embarrassment from a moment before seemingly forgotten. “You had a father who loved you, he gave a damn about you.”
He remembered a feeble child choking on his own words, as the world spun around him. He remembered his parents leaving him to a group of strangers to a place that wasn’t home, and he didn’t know why or what he did wrong to make them do this. He remembered begging his father to stay with him, because he needed him, couldn’t stop needing him.
It was funny how different and yet similar they were, it was almost as if the universe was playing a cruel joke and made them two halves of a whole.
It would have been so much simpler if he did hate him.
He told her the truth: “I don’t hate him.”
It didn’t take long for the staff at Lumcet New Republic School to realize that Ben didn’t quite fit their expected mental image of Leia Organa and Han Solo’s son. They expected either a charismatic prince or a rebellious charmer, but Ben was neither. A bit sullen, a little awkward, and a touch peculiar with his near endless random facts about spacecrafts, Ben often ended up next to whichever teacher was assigned as supervisor during recess. It was clear that Ben had trouble connecting with children his own age, but it was not yet apparent that he would grow up to be an unsociable outcast or an unstable walking emergency. They shrugged and pushed him back toward the other children. They assumed it was a phase and he would win everyone over in due time. He was his parents’ son, after all.
Shoulders sagged, Ben turned back and surveyed his options. He could ask Mistress Bate to let him join the game of Limmie, but Ben hated the game. He was lanky and long in a way that was not conducive to grace or coordination, he never managed to score, and being tackled onto the ground hurt. Ben considered joining a group of boys who were playing in an intense card game, some variant of Sabacc. Ben was very good at this, but the boys rarely let him have a turn, and no one ever listened to him when he suggested a better move. Ben ended up making his way to the group playing some sort of imaginary battle against Imperials. It seemed better than the alternatives. They were in the middle of some sort of mock blaster battle, and he didn’t mind watching from the sidelines. It reminded him of his father’s stories, and he liked his father’s stories.
“—Rebel scums, you are outnumbered, ten to one!” said A’Toba. Ben remembered his name because he was the only Togruta in his class. A’Toba dramatically cackled. Ben had a feeling he volunteered to play the evil Imperial general just for the villainous cackles.
“Ten to one is more than enough when we have the skills,” said the Abednedo girl whose name Ben didn’t quite remember, except that it started with a T. All he knew of her was that she was friends with Cassi, a popular Mirialan that the other boys in his class had secret crushes on.
“And the galaxy’s strongest Jedi,” added Maze, a Twi’lek girl and another one of Cassi’s friends, nodding toward Cassi, who was, of course, given the best part.
A’Toba cackled again. “Your Jedi is no match for my Sith.”
Next to him, Kyle, the blond haired golden boy in their class, imitated Darth Vader’s infamous breathing sound. “Yes, they are no match for me,” he said in the deepest voice he could manage. Then he held up the stick in his hand and made a buzzing sound to signify a lightsaber igniting.
Cassi smirked and lifted her stick like she was holding a lightsaber and made a buzzing sound. “Leave the Sith to me, sisters.”
Ben watched the two sides rush at each other with finger blasters held out. He couldn’t help but side with the Rebels and cheered a little when the “Stormtroopers” started falling on the ground. Maze began chasing after A’Toba, and A’Toba was running away like a coward, just like how his father described Imperials. He turned his attention to Kyle and Cassi’s duel. It was a close match. Kyle was taller and a little stronger than Cassi, but Cassi was better with the stick. Cassi blocked gracefully as Kyle brought down his stick, before spinning away. And…
Cassi suddenly snapped her head his way with a look of disbelief.
Ben blinked in confusion. He looked around him, trying to look for a logical reason to her attention. There was no one behind him, which meant Cassi was looking at him, but it didn’t make any sense. She was in his class, but they barely interacted. Ben wasn’t even sure if she knew his name.
Kyle took the opportunity to jab his stick into Cassi’s side. “Distraction is your downfall, Jedi,” he said dramatically. When Cassi barely reacted, he followed her gaze toward Ben with a frown. “Cassi?”
This woke Cassi from her weird trance. She suddenly noticed the stick on her side. She clutched her side like she was really wounded and slid down on one knee. “You bested me this time, Sith, but next time...”
Ben thought nothing more of the encounter—until Cassi threw herself in the seat next to him in the library the very next day.
Ben nearly jumped out of his seat. He had been so absorbed in his book about the history of space navigation, he hadn’t noticed anyone approach him.
Cassi invaded his personal space as she leaned in to get a better view at the book on the table. “This looks hard.” Then, before Ben could stop her she picked the book up and flipped through the pages. She made a face. “There aren’t even pictures,” she commented before putting the book back on the table.
Ben pulled the book toward him protectively and quickly flipped back to the page he was reading.
“Oh, sorry,” she said when she saw his reaction. “I just—”
“What do you want?” The question came out harsher than he intended, but Ben didn’t apologize. It wasn’t like any of his classmates had gone out of their way to make him feel welcome in the last few moon cycles. When he tried to share with them something interesting he had learned, they always spoke over him. When they had to pick teams for team work, he was always paired last.
But Cassi was not deterred. “Miss Mabel told me I might find you here,” she began, casually taking a seat in the chair next to him. “I wanted to talk to you about what I saw yesterday.”
Ben was not comprehending. “What you saw yesterday?”
Cassi turned and stared at him most earnestly. “Are you a Jedi?”
“No.” It was the most ridiculous question ever. Uncle Luke was the Jedi, but he was just Ben.
“Oh,” said Cassi, she touched her chin with a small frown. “But you made the rocks float.”
Rocks float? Ben had no idea what Cassi was talking about and he didn’t know how to react.
“Like this, silly,” Cassi said with a giggle as if she was reading his mind. She reached out a hand and suddenly his book flew away from him and into her hand.
He should be impressed, after all, while he had heard all about Uncle Luke’s great Jedi power, he had never seen the Force in action in real life before, but at that moment, his mind was purely focused on the fact that someone had stolen his book. His had reached out of hand by reflex. “Hey! That’s my—”
An unexpected warmth grew in the middle of in his palm and suddenly the book left Cassi’s hand and floated back.
“You didn’t even realize you were doing it!” Cassi deduced in amazement.
Ben watched the book in shock. His heart fluttered at the sight in disbelief. This was the Force. The same Force his mother talked about in her stories. The same Force his Uncle Luke used to save the world. Ben felt the pull of the Force for the first time.
It took exactly two sets before Kylo Ren was fully convinced, but the familiar footwork and saber swing combo was such damning evidence that he couldn’t deny the fact any longer. The girl was pulling his skills, even though she wasn’t probing his mind. He knew this because he knew exactly what having his mind probed felt like after so many years of being Luke’s and Snoke’s apprentices.
No, this was something else. This was something new.
His lightsaber glowed purple near where it clashed with hers. Ben could barely feel the pain from his wounds or the cold from the snow, all he could feel was the pull of something he couldn’t quite place. Maybe it was the Force, or maybe it was fate.
He didn’t want to fight her. There must be another way.
“You need a teacher. I’ll show you the ways of the Force,” he said because knowledge was the only thing left he had to offer her, after everything.
She glared at him in contempt and forced him back.