Star Wars: Edge of Hope

Chapter One: Voices, Dreams, and Nightmares

"The girl I've heard so much about..."

The image, so crisp and so clear, as it replays behind his eyes. Not for the second or even the third time, she was always there with him. He could smell the warm moss that covered the ground and climbed up the trees. He could hear the detritous of the forest floor crunch as his feet approached her frozen form. He remembered her face most of all. The beads of sweat racing down her face and neck, the tears that formed at the edge of her eyes as he reached out his hand. He had never looked into someone like that. Someone that despite all his efforts, he could only touch the surface of who they really were, of who they would be. The dream shifts and he's seated in front of her as she sleeps. He couldn't stop himself from looking inside again. He saw her pain. He felt her fears. But the thing that resonated with him the most was the way they all felt so familiar to him. He sat there looking through her past like the pages in a book. They were coated with tears, creased by age and repetitive folding over to mark them out against the others, and the covers were marked with miles and miles of deep scratches. These were her years, her weeks, her days and hours...that she spent waiting, watching...hoping she'd wake up to something new.
But nothing ever changed....
Until the day she'd met him....

"You still want to kill me?"

The muffled distorted sound of his own voice as he looks at her face when she wakes...to find herself alone...with him.

"That's what happens when you're being hunted by a creature in a mask..."

The way she looked at him when he showed her, the monster beneath the mask, the look of almost childish questioning. It made her feel different to him in some ways he hadn't expected. Then the dreams shifts as it always did the moment he reached out his hand to peer deeper into her soul. Looking for the answers to the questions he had scarred into his own.

"Can you see my surroundings? I can't see yours...

"Murderous snake! You're going to pay for what you did..."

"Just you..."

It was there in her eyes. The anger for the momentary happiness, the brief belonging that she had found with him. Han Solo. And perhaps it was fitting that he'd felt a certain fondness for someone that had been left behind. His own past was full of people he'd left behind or had been left behind by. But what rankled him was that Han had seen more of himself in her than he had seen in him. Where she showed strength and determination, he had faltered and fallen, but unlike himself...Rey had never known anything of real love. She'd never lost it. Never had it stolen away from her as he had. So the loss of Han Solo, the father she'd found, was the cruelest crime he'd committed against her. The dream shifted again...

"Ben!"

The sound of his name being broken and shakingly spit out forcefully as it echoed off the empty space around them. It had once been a beacon shining in the dark places which had given him a point of focus, a reference for guidance, a wayfinder to lead him home again. But then...the echos melted together becoming not one voice, but many all reaching out inside his mind to grab at him. The Voices grow louder and louder, almost to the tune of the blood pumping in his body, racing across his forehead which furrows under the strain to break free of the sound.

"I know what I have to do..."

"Ben!"

"But I don't know if I have the strength to do it..."

He could hear her voice. Calling to him. Beckoning him to come to her...to reach out and hold onto her...it was just a whisper, soft and quiet like a promise written on his heart. But then the light fades away from him and he's left alone in the dark, in the nightmare of his self made reality. There are so many voices calling to him in the darkness. They are sharp tongued and burn like flames in his ears, but he cannot break away from them. They bury their teeth and their claws into his soul, like hooks that keep him moored always within their reach. Always there in the darkness, where she and the light, could never reach him...could never save him.

"Ben!"

"You were weak!"

"You have too much of your father's heart..."

"Solo!"

"Ben! Ben! Ben! BEN!!"

As he flies forward in his bed, wildly looking around him for his tormentors, everything is quiet...the only thing he can hear are the shallow breaths filtering in to him through their bond.

"Be with me...Be with me..."

He can feel her reaching out to him. He can feel the sting of the light as it touches him. He pulls away from her...away from the light...still she calls to him.

"Ben."

"Ben..."

"Ben?"

The sound of her voice melts with that of his mother, his father, and Luke Skywalker.

"Forgive me..."

"Be with me...Ben."

"I feel it again..."

"Be with me..."

"The pull to the Light..."

"Be with me...Be with me...Come back, Ben...Come back"

"I can't. I can't ever go back...Rey? Rey?!"

As the connection fades, all around his room the floating chairs, tables, and the pedestal where his grandfather's twisted mask rested fall breaking apart on the floor. Ben sits there listening as the echoes of her voice fades away. He feels his heart beat pounding in his chest, and feels the sticky sweat drenched sheets cling to him as he looks out across the black void of his room. He was afraid....but not for himself...for her. He had hoped they would find each other again, but as the months became years...it seemed like their destinies, once uniting them had now decided to divide them. Kylo Ren sat in his bed looking out into the dark that enveloped him, watching the shadows of the past dance in revelry of his pain. As his shoulders slouched and the beeping of the red button on the wall flashed across his face, he reached up to wipe the memories away.
And the tears for a life....
For a person....
That he could never be and could never have.
Alone.
Alone was easier.
Alone.
Alone he couldn't hurt her....he knew by now that if the Darkside couldn't have her...it would destroy her.

"Darkness rises, and Light to meet it..."

"I'll never join you!"

"What have I done?!"

"Ben? Don't do this Ben...Don't go this way..."

He knew she couldn't cross the boundary between them. He knew she could only exist in the light...So he let her go. Not because it was easier. Not because he wanted to.
But because...it was the only way to make sure she would be safe.
From the First Order.
From the Darkside...
And from him.

"Ben? Ben...be with me...Be with me...Be with me..."

Quietly, as he brought his hands back up covering his face as if he were still a little boy playing hide n' seek he whispered across the galaxy.

"I can't...And neither can you, Rey....I'm sorry."