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Ben didn’t remember a time before the buzzing. It would start in the mornings, when his father woke up. He’d be sitting in the palace with his mother when his father’s sleepy movements would resonate through the house and the hum would start. Somehow it only got louder when his father went away.
When he was 8, they sent him to study with his uncle. For a blissful week the noise was gone, this place so far away from home, far away from his parents, and away from the weight of their expectations. But soon the others started making friends without him and he’d sit to the side as a redness would rise in his throat and the angry tears would start to form. It didn’t stop until he covered his head with a pillow and pushed his palms into his eyes so hard he could see whole galaxies.
The lessons they learned, the drills they practiced, the meditations they attempted - they were about control. Ben would sit alone and focus, trying to will his heartbeat to slow, the blood to drain from the blush on his face. But the buzzing would rise in his ears until he wanted to scream just to let it out.
Every day he would wait, exhausted, for the last of his classmates’s breathing to change from normal to the slow pace of sleep. He would start with his fists, balling them and unballing them, feeling the crescent moons of his fingernails digging into his palms. He could feel each of their eight points more acutely than anything else in the roar of the world. The world slowed down, it quieted. He could breathe again in the silence. He squeezed them harder until the muscles in his hands were too tired to press any more.The next day with each and every movement of his hands he could feel the tender skin on his palm and feel connected, solid, like he had a secret that only he knew.
Callouses eventually formed on his palms, so he moved to his arms. He stole a piece of scrap metal from a mechanical bay and brought it back, where it lived in his bunk, hidden under a mattress. At first he just held it tightly in his hand, willing it to break the skin. His hands just fell asleep. The buzzing always came back.
His training robes covered most of his body, but the sleep clothes they provided did not. So that’s where he started, under those clothes. Each night Ben would press the edge of the piece of metal into his skin. It was dull around the edges - not enough to cut so much as scrape. And so he would. He would scrape and scrape until the blood started coming out of him in tiny red bubbling spheres and the quiet returned and he could breathe again Then he’d go to the refresher and clean the metal and wipe the blood so as not to get it on his sheets. He moved on to a new spot each night until his torso was covered in wounds in various levels of healing. His whole body would sing in pain whenever he turned. It kept him going.
The colder season was his favorite because he could wear his long sleeves and leggings without arousing suspicion. There were times the others mocked him for it, but he felt safe - confined, warm. And that’s how the scrapes soon covered his arms, too.
The first time Ben heard a lightsaber turn on he was enraptured. The ones provided to students for practice were worn - barely functional. Only the older students were even allowed near them. So when they gave one to Ben, he was cautious. It sprung to life in his hand - it's crackling like his own insides made manifest . He’d never heard the buzzing outside of his own mind before. He stared into the blade, unable to take his eyes away. He watched as it hissed and spit sparks - it wasn’t the clean line of the others, this one was broken. He didn’t ask for a replacement. This one made sense to him.
There was a moment when he was 17 when he cut too deep. It was the soft skin of the inside of his elbow, a place he had been saving for a particularly bad time because he knew it would scream whenever he moved his arms in training. The others were mocking him for something - his hair, his skill, his freckles, and the buzzing got so loud he broke away to the group to go back to their quarters. He had to run to keep them from seeing the angry tears welling in his eyes. He pulled the piece of metal out of its hiding place under his mattress and pressed it deep into his arm as he exhaled slowly, relieved.
But when he wiped the first blood away, it was back again too quickly. And when he wiped that away it just kept coming. So he went and he found his uncle. Luke saw the blood, the blood he shared, and he grabbed his wrist hard. “Who did this to you, Ben?” He saw the look on Ben’s face and his eyes moved to the rest of his arm, red and raw. When he returned to his quarters later he found his piece of metal was gone. He pulled out the crackling red lightsaber and the frustration made his world go black.
Kylo found himself a home with the Knights of Ren. Singularly trained in unwavering discipline, students were encouraged to do whatever they had to to stay focused, angry, powerful. It wasn’t long before the scars began to cover his legs. More than the cold, the uniform he adopted kept out the stares. And so, behind his mask, hidden from the world, covered from head to toe, Kylo lived in silence.
It wasn’t until he was on the catwalk on Starkiller Base with his father that he heard the buzzing again. Though he had killed every hope left in him long ago, it rose in him once more as his father asked to see his face. The world dropped away around him. The ringing was so loud and his father so insistent, all he wanted to do was go back. But despite what Han was saying, Ben knew he could never go home again. And when he his father fell… the buzzing turned into a scream.
There was a growl, a cry, a shot, and suddenly his side was raging, reverberating pain as he collapsed onto the bridge. There was a moment he knew he could fall too, after his father. Maybe that would be like going home. But the moment past. You’ve always been a coward, he thought to himself.
So Ben, bleeding, focused, determined, followed them out into the snow, trailing blood behind him, ears ringing, heart racing, each traitorous pump dripping blood down his leg. The buzzing was joined by a darkness, creeping in at the edge of his vision, threatening to black out the world. It almost does, until he digs a finger into the wound, grounding himself, the small crescent of his fingernail tearing it wider. The world flashed white. The pain courses through him, every nerve radiating out. It was punishment and salvation. Everything around him was falling down -- but this pain was real, and it was his. It promised him there was one thing, however small, that he could control.
The woods were quiet. Still. Empty.