Work Text:
Kylo winces as Rey slams the Force connection shut, leaving him kneeling in the cracked, empty shell of an old Rebel base. He’s defeated, but he doesn’t realize how much he’s truly lost until he boards his command shuttle for the tense ride back to his flagship.
Hux is livid, but he knows better than to vent his indignation while he’s within choking distance of his Supreme Leader. The rest of the crew avoid Kylo as much as possible, and he doesn’t need the Force to tell that they’re terrified of him.
He’s alienated the one person in the galaxy who cared about him, and for what? To command millions of people who fear and despise him.
Back on the Finalizer, Kylo tries to look confident and competent as he lays out a vague plan of action to his dubious chief officers. He then announces he’s leaving to conduct some reconnaissance, figuring that phrase is the right combination of official, classified, and ambiguous to deter any prying. Sure enough, no one presses him for details.
Hux will probably plot a coup while he’s gone, but he’d plot one if he stayed too. In the meantime, Kylo needs to regroup someplace where he doesn’t feel like everyone wants to stab him in the back. He heads straight from the conference room to his Silencer, not even bothering to pack a bag, and tells the navicomputer to set a course for Naboo.
The mighty Kylo Ren, running away to Grandma's house.
It seems fitting that his princess mother would inherit a villa from Grandma Amidala. Senator Organa hosted countless networking retreats there during her years of public service, and even took her family on a vacation there once when he was little. Before things got complicated.
His mother had told him that Varikino once belonged to a famous poet who disappeared somewhere on the grounds. Young Ben was captivated by that story, and spent the rest of the trip pretending that the poet’s ghost haunted the villa’s library.
Perhaps Varykino’s caretaker recognizes that lively boy in the grim man who strides up to the villa’s door in the middle of the night, or maybe he just knows danger when he sees it. Either way, he lets Kylo in and doesn’t ask questions.
He drifts through the sleepy villa, its dark rooms and corridors illuminated by shafts of moonlight. There’s the bay window where he watched a family of quadducks dive for fish in the shallows. And the dining room where he got to eat as many sweet rolls as he wanted for breakfast, because they were on vacation, so why not? And the game room that had everything from novacrown to dejarik, where his father taught him—
Grief cuts that memory short, jarring him back into the present.
Why didn’t it occur to him that this place might be just as fraught as the kouhun nest he left? He’s starting to wonder if he even should have come when something catches his eye out on the balcony.
Maybe it’s a trick of the moonlight, but there seems to be someone standing on the terrace, gazing out at the lake. With a start, he realizes he can see right through her.
He’s heard plenty of Force ghost stories, but this is no Jedi in a plain, hooded robe. It’s a petite woman with an elaborate hairstyle and an elegant, flowing dress.
She glances over her shoulder at him. “What brings you to Varykino?” she asks. Her voice sounds young, but she carries herself with an air of hard-won experience.
He doesn’t exactly feel like chatting, but this woman seems like the sort of person who requires a response. Not in the fierce, commanding way his mother did, but in a spirit of mutual respect. Like she intends to be civil and forthright, and she expects him to do the same.
“I needed somewhere to think.” The long answer to her question is messy, but that about sums it up.
“This is a good place for that,” she says with a warm smile.
“And what brings you here?”
“Memories,” she replies. “Do you have memories here?”
He nods.
“Sweet, or bitter?” she asks.
“They started sweet, then turned bitter.”
“Mine did too, at least for a while,” she says, turning back toward the shimmering lake. “What did you come here to think about?”
“What to do with my life,” he says, stepping out of the shadowy archway and gazing up at the star-dusted sky. “I finally got everything I wanted, only to realize that I don’t want any of it.” He’s not sure why he’s opening up to this phantom. Maybe because she’s one of the few people who ever seemed to care what he thought.
“If you could do anything, what would you want to do?” she asks.
Kylo’s eyes skim the stars. He technically rules most of them, but he can’t tell one system from another in this unfamiliar sky. “When I was younger, I wanted to be a pilot.”
"You have a ship," she points out.
"But what would I do with it?"
"Good question. Action without purpose isn't very fulfilling," she acknowledges. "What else do you want in life?"
Rey, but that truth hurts and he doesn't want to talk about it.
"Something that feels out of reach," the ghost surmises.
"Someone.”
“Why are they out of reach?”
She won’t let up, will she? It’s irritating, but it also feels like karma.
His mind flashes back to Force bond conversations with Rey, when he was the one firing off unwelcome questions. She called him a murderous snake, and after he let the Supremacy blast away at those Resistance transports, he probably deserves that.
“We’re on opposite sides of a war,” he replies, his gaze dropping from the stars to the moonlit landscape. Dark hills silhouetted against the pale sky in half a dozen shades of grey.
“Why is that?” she asks.
“I’m trying to bring law and order to a galaxy in turmoil,” he says testily, “but she thinks my side is being too heavy-handed.”
“Are they?”
Kylo’s ready for this conversation to be over. He scowls down at her, fully prepared to tell her the ends justify the means and then take his leave, but when he meets her earnest, unguarded eyes, all he can think of is Hays Minor and Hosnia. Everything he meant to say suddenly feels hollow.
After a few silent moments, the apparition looks out over the shimmering lake. A breeze ripples the water, but doesn’t nudge a single strand of her spectral hair out of place.
“Back in my time,” she says, “the galaxy traded freedom for security, and found out too late that order can quickly become oppression. It took them decades to win back the rights they gave up in a single day.”
That sounds more familiar than he’d like to admit. As Snoke’s enforcer, Kylo often parroted the propaganda that they were bringing order to the galaxy, replacing a gridlocked senate with something more efficient, but his heart was never really in it. He just wanted to finally succeed at something, to have someone be proud of him, even if it was a twisted gargoyle like Snoke.
But now Snoke is gone, and Kylo has inherited a nightmare. For a few brief moments, he’d thought he could wield the First Order’s might and vast resources for the galaxy’s benefit, but when he thinks of its warmongering generals and legions of brainwashed stormtroopers, it’s clear the Order was always bent on domination, not benevolence. And he can’t change that any more than he can push a star destroyer off course with his Silencer.
“So, what am I supposed to do?” he asks, leaning against the balcony’s railing. “Join the ragtag Resistance? Even if I handed them all the First Order’s intel, their odds of success are virtually nil.”
“Maybe,” the phantom concedes, “but it still might be worth a try. When you look back on your life, would you rather see a man who played it safe, or one who fought for something he believed in?”
“They wouldn’t accept my help even if I offered it,” he mutters, mostly to himself.
“I suspect one of them might.” She glances over her shoulder, then fades from view.
The Force ripples, and from somewhere across the stars, Rey materializes on the gleaming terrace.
***
Through a window of the villa’s library, a shimmering figure in Jedi robes watches the pair on the balcony. When the ghostly woman appears beside him, he takes her hand in his.
“Good timing, Chosen One,” Padmé says.
"One moonlit Force Bond conversation, as requested," Anakin says. "I told you bonding those two was a good idea."
“Oh, so it was your idea now?”
“Actually, I think some senator from Naboo suggested it first. I can’t quite remember her name, but she sure was pretty,” he says with a wink.
“Rascal.” Padmé slips her arms around him, then sighs. “I wish Snoke hadn’t kept us from him for so long. No one should have to go through what Ben endured.”
“Skywalkers seem to be magnets for trouble,” he replies, “but we always rise above it in the end.”
Out on the terrace, Rey offers Ben her hand, and he takes it without hesitation.
“Looks like they’ll be all right,” Anakin says.
“Yes, I believe they will.”