Star Wars: Edge of Hope

Chapter Thirty Seven: Promises from the Past...

Sometimes doing the right thing can be the hardest, it can prove the most difficult when this choice threatens those we love, and those we couldn't bear to lose. But choices are not supposed to be easy. If they were, then it wouldn't change us so much, but sometimes change is what's needed...to feel whole again. But that doesn't mean we don't still carry that fear inside us. We carry the scars, the nightmares, the memories of choices and we wear the changes they make in us, sometimes it becomes a mask we put on to hide the truth. And sometimes it becomes the truth that no mask, no glamour, or counterfeit could distort. Because despite all the choices and the changes, its the ones that love us...that know us best and as we truly are...that can see us as ourselves, and nothing else. Ben had never had anyone see him like that until the day he heard his fathers voice yelling his name. Even with the mask on Han could only see his face, his true face beneath the lie of Kylo Ren...

"Take off that mask, you don't need it."

"And what do you think you'll see if I do?"

"The face of my son..."

"Your son is dead. He was weak and foolish so I destroyed him..."

"No, my son is alive."

It was the way he said those last words...alive...he knew there was little of the world Ben had been forced to walk in he could really truly understand...but even without the Force, Han Solo knew him better than most. Growing up, learning not to need people, to eschew all forms of attachments, it was what he knew, all that he had known and been taught, and what had been proven right so many times in his life. But the moment his story had converged with Leia's, things had changed...and they'd kept changing years and years on, until Han had become so atuned to the people around him he didn't require the Force to show him their truths. Han knew his family better than anyone alive...or dead. And he knew what it was to lose someone you valued. He'd seen people die and be killed, but the one thing that haunted Han the most...was the people he couldn't save not from an outside Force...but from the monsters they kept lock away inside themselves. Everyone had inner demons that howled in the darkness, bayed at the foot of beds, or scratched at the inside of their skulls as they tried to block out the black crawling out from under the covers. Ben had such demons, they were voices from the past calling to him...from the dark...when the light had been pulled down behind the towering forests of Naboo. He would lie there under the temperate airs blown in off the lake, and he would try to block out the whispers. It was something that he'd yet to conquer....the calls in the night...whispers of fate on the wind...
Ben jumped forward he could feel the electricity in the wind, taste the salty water running down his face, and the cold...the bitter cold breath of old monsters stalking them in the shadows. Reflexively, Ben reached out beside him to feel Rey's body shifting with each new in take of air, but as his fingers brushed against her bare shoulder a soft crackling danced across his finger tips. His hand fell hard and heavy over the bend of her shoulder, and he was struck dumb and blind to everything, but the old nightmare...made new in the flesh.
She was standing looking out across the wide edgeless water. The sounds of the crashing waves roaring all around her but she neither moved nor shook as the chilling spray fell like tears on her face. But the sound of the waves wasn't what he feared now. It was seeing her like that, standing there on the edge of the world looking out into the beyond, icy tears racing down her face...alone. She was alone again. Alone. Ben watched thunderstruck as Rey stretched out her hand towards the heavens and he watched as the sky grew darker. The sky boomed and thrashed against the invisible ceiling, her face splayed in a wicked grimace and then a cacophony of voices erupted from between her lips. The clouds swarmed with empty eyes and wicked voices churned like a black fog out over the water. Ben knew these warped faces, they had been his earliest introduction to the Darkside of the Force, but as Rey turned her voice broke apart. Her eyes pleading at him as he looks down at her shaking hands clutching in mid air as the end of a crimson saber pierces through her. Her eyes go white and empty as she falls away into the sea, and the only one standing there opposite him is...