Ouroboros

Eight

Eight.

It was cold. Suddenly, she was alone, surrounded by tendrils of clammy fog, sounds muffled and everything contracted to the little pocket of gloom around her body. There was an unseen ground under her feet, uneven and slick as she slowly rotated to look around.

"Hello?" Her voice was muffled, sucked away by the fog. It intensified the feeling of isolation, of loneliness. "Master Luke? Master Yoda?"

Silence.

She frowned, peering into the fog and seeing nothing. So she chose a direction at random, one that felt right and started walking. But as she took her very first step, the voices began. Echoey representations of voices she knew and many she had never heard swirled around her, confusing the environment further.

"Rey."

Her voice leapt at her in a hundred voices. Finn. Poe. Leia. Luke. Han. Ben. Snoke. Palpatine.

She stopped and looked ahead.

"Ben?" she murmured.

The voices silenced.

"I can hear you," she tried again. "Can you hear me?"

"Rey?"

"I hear you," she said, relieved that she could finally hear his voice. "Are you alright?"

"Rey?"

She walked forward, towards the sound of his voice, her brow lightly furrowed.

"Ben?"

She reached out for him, trying to catch the edge of their Bond, to feel the familiar mind once more...but there was just dark and cold and disappointment. She paused and balled her fists, closing her eyes and stretching out her mind once more.

"Ben? Are you there?" she whispered.

Abruptly, the grey fog grew pitch black and the temperature dropped to freezing. Rey's breath coalesced in freeing lungfuls, billowing around her face. Her eyes widened as a shadowy shape loomed towards her...not the familiar shape of Ben but...

"SNOKE!"

-o0o-

"Take them to the holding cells!"

The stormtroopers were taken by surprise as the door to the interrogation cell hissed open and the dark shape of Kylo Ren erupted through, already walking fast and not sparing a single glance for the men he was addressing.

"Yes, sir," one offered, not expecting an acknowledgement and receiving none. Looking at his fellow, the pair entered the cell once more to collect the prisoners for their transfer.

Force, I really was an ass. Ben had to concentrate on keeping his expression looking pissed off-which was the closest he could approximate to the constant roiling rage, exasperation, pain and hatred that had pretty much been his entire mental state as Kylo Ren. He had been granted plenty of time during his imprisonment to analyse his previous behaviour-among other things-during his imprisonment on the Resistance Base and images had flashed through his memory, too numerous to ignore, of him treating others as nothing. And, he realised, to Kylo Ren, there were nothing. All his concentration and value had been invested in his personal quest to become even stronger in the Dark Side of the Force, to crush all weakness within himself-including any personal attachments. But would it have killed me to acknowledge those men?

Kylo wouldn't have. So I can't.

He slowed slightly, evening out his pace from his usual angry stalk to a slower rate to allow himself to consider his next step. Finn and Poe had been suspicious and neither had played along with the 'interrogation' to any great degree, though he had assured them that he had located the missing parts for the Falcon. If anyone watched the tapes of the interrogation, they would see that he certainly hadn't reamed their memories using the Force and definitely hadn't reduced them to the slumped, trembling state his victims ended up in. He was sure that they would have been happy to see literally anyone else in the same circumstances but neither man trusted him and was prepared to listen to any explanation.