•LEGACY - A Reylo Story•

EPISODE XI - LUKE'S ACADEMY

"Didn't you ever fix ships with your father?" Rey grunts as she tries to wrench a melted part off of the compressor.

"I mostly used the Force and annoyed him. He thought I was showing off."

Rey rests back on her heels.

"Maybe I was, a little bit."

Rey swipes sweat off her brow, continuing to study Ben. You wanted his approval anyways, didn't you? "If you're not able to help me," she says, nodding to the gruel they'd been given. "Make dinner."

"Okay." He gets up.

"When did you find out who my grandfather was?" Rey calls, curiosity getting the best of her as she works.

He leaves without answering her.

Fine. Rey scowls.

He returns with two steaming bowls of mush. Rey gives up on the compressor for the moment.

He leans against the wall. "Is this what you ate on Jakku?"

Rey wrinkles her nose. "No. Believe it or not, the food on Jakku was more appetizing." She doesn't care, though. It's food, and her stomach rumbles for it.

"I knew you were Obi-Wan's granddaughter when a lieutenant told me that the droid and the stormtrooper had escaped with a girl from Jakku."

The food stalls in Rey's mouth. "What? How?"

He swallows, looking into his own bowl. "Somehow, I knew. I didn't know for sure until later, when the lightsaber answered to you, and Snoke told me."

"That's not what I'm asking. How did—how did you know—you knew I was on Jakku!"

Ben pushes his hair back. "How much do you remember?"

"Remember what?" She shakes her head. "Nothing. I remember nothing, Ben, aside from someone flying away in a ship and leaving me with Unkar Plutt!"

"Has Luke told you anything?" he ventures.

"That you killed all the padawans at the academy. And that I was the only survivor."

"But you don't remember it."

"No."

He looks at his hands. "I'm glad." He takes a deep breath. "Snoke told me that the Jedi—if a new Jedi order was allowed to grow, it would ruin everything. It would ensure chaos, undo the little bits of order brewing in the galaxy. He told me it was time to make my choice. And that, if I was willing to join, the Knights of Ren would have me."

"So you didn't plan it."

"I didn't try to stop it, either."

True.

Ben presses his hand against his side and winces. "I didn't know. Until they were there. I thought there was always one more minute—one more chance—to tell. I didn't know what I was going to choose. I wanted to make Snoke happy, and when the Knights arrived, they patted me on the back—they talked to me like I was already a brother. The padawans never did that. They treated me like a pariah, whispered about my family. And so I—I helped. Luke was gone that night."

"And me?" Rey whispers. She can't remember what happened, but another memory—the vision she had in Maz Kanata's palace—fills her mind. Rain. Lightsabers crackling. The dead, lying all around her.

Ben meets her gaze. She sees anguish in his eyes, darkness, fear, but also shame. She doesn't need to push inside his mind. He's giving all of it to her, showing her.

"You were on the ground, in the mud—there was thunder, and everyone was—gone. And you had been playing dead. You whimpered, and I realized you were alive—and I knew you, Rey, because you were so kind, even then. Feisty, but kind. Another knight noticed you, too, so I killed him." Ben's voice is barely a whisper, but it echoes in Rey's mind. "I heard later that Luke found you and sent you somewhere in the Western Reaches. I should have known when I found Lor San Tekka that night... he must have been watching you."

"Who?" Rey asks.

"An old friend of my mother's."

He killed him, too, Rey realizes. "So if I hadn't played dead," she says, voice shaking. "You would have killed me, too."

"I didn't kill the padawans. Not one. I didn't start killing people I knew until—later. But I didn't stop it."

She's not letting him off the hook. "So, you killed them."

"I killed them," he whispers. Eyes swimming, he looks to Rey again. "Do you hate me?"

She wants to laugh at his question. But she can't, because even though so much of her screams that she should hate him, she knows it's the darkness. And the regret—she hears it, and the fear. Regret excuses nothing, but it might be a ladder to the Light. "I wish I did," she admits.

He frowns. "I don't understand."

"I don't hate you."

"No, that part I get—it's just, why? Why not? I killed my father in front of you. I kidnapped you. I tell you now I could have let you been murdered as a child, an innocent child, and still you don't hate me?"

Now, she proves his mind and she feels his loneliness, the loneliness and fear of a child and a man, his anxiety, his terror and reverent worship of the Dark Side, and his draw to the Light because he wants so desperately to hope, to heal. And he lets her in.

There's something else, an image. Orange, and small.

"My doll," she says suddenly, breaking away from him. "You had my doll!"

"I made it for you."

Rey swallows. "I always thought it was from my mother."

He shakes his head. "When you arrived at Luke's academy, you cried because you missed a doll you had back home. And you idolized Luke, but he was gone a lot, and he had us older padawans training you. So, I made you Luke as a doll."

Rey stares at him, perceiving no deception, and she laughs.