twelve_not_fourteen | On the Light and the Dark ...

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On the Light and the Dark ...

“Ben --”

In a such a large structure with conditioners for the volume of systems and subsystems that run the Starkiller Base, it seems like there should have been more ambient noise then there was. Instead, the voice of his father cuts through the air like freshly sharpened vibroblade. It’s in the echo, however, that you can really hear the desperation.

“Han Solo, I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time.” That voice, cold and mechanical with the face Han longed to see so badly hidden behind a helmet. The Millennium Falcon’s captain has to struggle to hold back the tears that seem to want to spill from his eyes.

How you could have been so close, as he stalked behind you and still you didn’t seem to feel him or acknowledge that he was there, the old pilot will always wonder. Han’s first footfall onto the durasteel catwalk not the usual confident step, but a shaky one. He has a bad feeling about what’s about to happen and yet, it’s a feeling he has to ignore for many reasons.

For, perhaps, the most important reasons that any man could ever hope to have.

Han sets his jaw and summons the same courage that allowed for him to skim a little too close to black holes and run hollering into crowded barracks full of Stormtroopers. It shouldn’t take that kind of bravery to face your own son, should it? He supposes not, and for a second or two while he approaches, he tries to pinpoint where it all went wrong. As if it was only one wrong choice that sent them through this hellish cascade and not a series of them made by multiple people.

“Take off that mask.” Han says, a bit of an edge in his voice again. “You don’t need it.”

“What do you think you’ll see if I do?” A pointed response, not quite as glib as the ones his father spouts off, but sort of philosophical. It reminds him of a Skywalker response.

“The face of my son.”

When Kylo Ren disengages the mechanisms that keep his helm in place, and he reveals himself, his father’s eyes seem to soften. The sad truth is that he can recognize you, but the light that he used to see in you - a brilliance that could have dwarfed any star that Han had ever seen, seems so far away.

“Your son is gone. He was weak and foolish like his father. So I destroyed him.”

“That’s what Snoke wants you to believe. When he gets what he wants, he’ll crush you.” Han pauses to look at his son, who seems to recoil at the words. “You know it’s true.”

“It’s too late.” Kylo protests, but he’s struggling with something and Han can see it in his eyes.

“No it’s not.” He says, doubling down on Leia’s insistence that their boy can still be saved, even though in the moment he’s not really sure. The Solo patriarch says it with all the hope in the galaxy though. “Leave here with me. Come home.”

Then, when it seemed like Han was so close to getting his son back, A blaster bolt flies past Han’s arm. It comes so close to hitting him that it singes the leather of his jacket and the smell of burning touches the air.

Han turns, snarling and withdraws his blaster. His hand speed still impressive for a non-force user and he fires three shots in the direction that the bolt seemed to come from. Then more blaster fire starts coming from all directions – from Chewie, Finn and Rey as well as the troopers of the first order who had filtered into the room.

At this point, the only sensible thing that Captain Solo can think to do is to sprint back toward his friends, snap off a few more shots and hope that his son had chosen to follow. He doesn’t hear the pounding of another set of feet behind him, though. The observation makes his heart sink.

Han turns to look back at his son, in the middle of the chaos, only to see the young man pulling the helmet on again.

What Han doesn’t see, in that moment, is the way a bolt threatening to hit him right in the back, changes mid trajectory and flies impotently into the emptiness below him. Did Ben Solo use the force to save his father? Did Kylo Ren only intervene because he still wanted to end his father’s life himself?

The Knight, clad all in black, ignites a scarlet saber that glows angrily amid the trickle of blaster fire in the air.

“Fall back.” He yells to Rey and Fin.

Chewie, doesn’t need orders from Han to know what he wants. The old partners know each other well enough that many things don’t need to be said. Get to the Falcon. Someone has to raise the ramp and ignite the engines.

Still, his Wookiee best friend will lay down some cover fire in the space between father and son, to give the senior member of this band of heroes some time to reconvene with Rey and Finn. Only then will Chewbacca hit the trigger for the detonators and sprint off to the ship. If Solo wants to be mad about that, his copilot thinks to himself, they can argue about it later.

Soon Finn, Rey and Han are scrambling though the snow and trying to lose their pursuers in the dark forest. Considering that he’s more than twice their age, Han thinks he’s doing a serviceable job of keeping up, but a look he’s catching in the female of their party’s eyes tells him someone is nearby.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Given the unusual, if not shoddy, design of that lightsaber, perhaps some lessons in mechanics and engineering could have helped. A damaged casing and exposed wires, cross-guard vents to keep the entire thing from overloading. The blade was just like its maker, unstable and too powerful for its own good.

"I'd suggest you use the cross-guard." He huffed, as though he'd actually done this before. It was a valiant bluff if indeed it was one. If not, well, perhaps some things were better left unsaid.

Kylo braced himself against the bunk with one hand and gripped the large piece of shrapnel with the other. He took a deep breath and started to pull it out.

Only as an afterthought did he wish he'd shoved something in his mouth to muffle the inevitable scream that was sure to come.

That would have been along the lines of the questions. Mainly this one, 'Why, on something as important as your lightsaber, would you do such a lousy job of constructing it?'

Han himself is pretty mechanically inclined - he's altered ships, restored and maintained them, even modified his own blaster - but he doubts that he could build a lightsaber. There has to be some aspect of the assembly or maybe selecting of the components that requires the force. Or both. Otherwise, they would have been massed produced and as common as vibroblades by now.

Again, your father, would have done this wound care a lot differently. Perhaps he should have spoken up and insisted as much, but it's a little late for that now. ~~Isn't that a common refrain with his father ...~~

With two hands on the hilt Han presses the lightsaber in close, but not close enough. He hesitates for a heartbeat or two and then, at Ben's suggestion, presses in one of the 'flames' of the crossguard against his son's skin. He has to watch it carefully to know that it's closing, but burning skies he wants to look away, especially when he hears his kid screaming. The acrid smell of burnt flesh touches the air; skin blisters and starts to turn a brown leathery color.

When it's closed, but not a moment before, only then does he pull the blade away and carefully switch it off.

Edited 2016-06-01 13:09 (UTC)

It was because it was something as important as his lightsaber that he did the best that he could. Given the cracked crystal he was intent on using, it was a wonder he was able to cobble something together that functioned instead of exploded. But yes, mechanical genius definitelu wasn't an inherited trait.

Force sensitivity on the other hand...

He tried to muffle the screams when hot plasma hit his side, but he couldn't. It was excruciating, and he couldn't hide that. The wail echoed throughout the ship.

He was, however, able to remain standing. He simply took the pain, harnessed it and redirected it. Anything in the room that wasn't nailed down shook, and a couple of screws popped out of the wall - a reminder of how much power Kylo Ren possessed.

When the wound was closed and Han was finally able to turn off the lightsaber, they would both find themselves staring down a very concerned Finn's blaster and a Wookie with a bowcaster. Neither of them knew what was going on, but both feared the worst.

"Point that thing somewhere else, Big Beal." Han mumbles. If it was Rey, he would have just swatted the business end of blaster down and away from the two of them, but Finn is so kryffing jittery he's not quite sure the kid wouldn't jerk on the trigger if he did.

Also, he's carrying a rifle and the kid has been trained how to use it. He thinks. That whole sanitation reveal has him not knowing what exactly to think about Finn anymore. Regardless ... he's decided it's just better to gruff at the kid.

Chewie, on the other hand, can probably just look at Han and tell the difference between in trouble and not in trouble, but in case his pal is on the fence, he gives him the wordless 'stand down' look. Which is different then the 'I've got this under control' look - that look always seems to make him more worried for reasons Han can't figure.

"The wound in his side was deep." Han says as he carefully puts the saber down on one of his old nearby footlockers. "We needed to close it up."

Chewie could, and the grunt roughly translated to, "just in case..." The nod of his head meant that the 'just in case' applied to Han, his wayward son or the former stormtrooper.

The energy spent, Kylo's limbs were shaking. He held himself up on the bunk as he worked to steady his breath. As soon as he was able, and not a moment later, he straightened up.

"This... does not concern you, traitor! Get out!" He growled, and then force-pushed both of them back out of the door.

Edited 2016-06-01 23:33 (UTC)

There's a lot of perfectly applicable just in case scenarios that could be extended to the situation that they all find themselves in right now. Doesn't help that nobody, including his father, has any idea what to predict from Ben anymore. Though the old pilot does appreciate that friend is still rushing to his side after all these years.

The loyalty Han and Chewie have for each other you can't buy with a stack of credits or coerce out of people with displays of power.

Han is ... starting to see there was room to teach his son plenty of things. Things that he probably would have tried to show him if he'd stayed with him instead of going with Luke. Not that he could have ever pictured his brother-in-law as anything but a wise and patient teacher, but ... something didn't go right, obviously.

Would he accept anything Han wanted to show him now? With the kid being ... twenty-nine or thirty now - he thinks, that's a bit late to get started.

"Hey kid." He says with a frown, already heading toward a crate underneath one of the bunks. "Do you want something for the pain or should we just get to the rest of it?"

The sound of footsteps and a Wookie growl slowly faded from the background. Those who understood Shriwook knew he was arguing with Finn, telling him it was all going to be all right. That might have been a bit of an overstatement, but at least it was true for the time being.

"I'm fine!" He insisted with a grunt.

His body was still shaking a little, but it was obvious he was doing his absolute best to hide any kind of weakness. Again, it was worrying how much of this was pride and how much might be experience.

"I am more than strong enough... This... this is nothing."

It's always funny to hear people talk to Chewie because Han can so easily tell who is talking at him versus who is talking with him. Finn talks at him. Tells him what he wants or what he's thinking, but doesn't respond back to him. Rey, conversely, talks with his partner. Which isn't inherently strange except for the fact that she's been on Jakku most of her life and there ain't exactly a large population of people speaking Wookiee dialects on that rock.

"I know." He says with a nod. He's not being unkind with the words, it's just a father's attempt to smooth things over - which will probably annoy Ben all the same. "You're tougher than the skin on a Rancor."

Still, he procures a bottle of brandy (Corellian, a favorite of his) from under his bunk and then walks over to the other side of the cabin to grab a small first aid kit ... there are bigger ones on board, but this is the one that's close by. He offers the bottle to the Ben. To hold or drink from it is all up to him.

He takes a small bottle from the metal box of med supplies and shakes out two pills into his palm, holding it out in offering to the kid. "All the same, I'm pretty sure nobody revels in the aftermath of staggering away from an explosion."

Kylo Ren took the brandy, and just stared at the bottle for a moment. His expression was a bit lost, as though he were chasing down a memory that was just outside his reach.

There were things he wanted to say, but he just... couldn't yet.

He opened the bottle and sniffed it. He almost chanced a taste, but then saw his father walking back with a couple of pills in his hand. He looked at the pills, at Han, and then back again. Hesitantly, Kylo reached out to take them, but suddenly decided against it by knocking Han's hand away.

He couldn't afford to let his mind be purposefully clouded, just in case. It was too much trust that he wasn't willing to give. But he did take a swig of the brandy before holding the bottle out for Han. It burned on the way down, a subtle distraction from the burn of disinfectant on open wounds.

"...Here I thought you reveled in all kinds of aftermath."

If Han is especially offended by the action of his son pushing his hand away, he doesn't show it. When he was Ben's age he was just starting to come around to the idea that he might not have to spend the rest of his life trying to be the slyest and grittiest spacer in the galaxy - but he still would have probably pushed away painkillers from an old man too.

No skin off the Captain's back. He was going to take two for himself anyway, now, instead of being Ben's, they're his. He holds the two tablets on his tongue till he can swallow them with the brandy, then he makes sure both the meds and the booze are capped. With all that sorted it's time to start seeing to the kids wounds.

"Pain was never among them." Han assures his son. Burning skies, does Captain Solo know pain. Bespin was by far the worst, but ... there was plenty more besides. "I don't have the tolerance for revelry the way I used to."

At this point he's grabbed a bottle of astringent and is soaking a piece of gauze with it. "This is going to sting." He warns, "but it will clean out the wounds."

Edited 2016-06-06 20:36 (UTC)

Kylo hissed when the gauze hit the open cuts, but he let Han work without lashing out. At least, not physically.

"Pain is just... a conduit of the Force. Fear. Hate. Suffering..." He scoffed. "You did a fine job preparing me for my destiny."

It was difficult to tell if that was supposed to be a compliment or an insult. Perhaps it was just a way for two relative strangers to make conversation without discussing the real matter at hand - such as where this ship was going and what plans Kylo Ren had for his hostages.

His son is not so different than he is sometimes.

If he knew him better, he would notice it far more often than he does. It's true that they did not form the sort of attachment to each other that one would expect from a father and son. He always thought it would get better; blamed it on phases and assured himself that eventually when things settled they would have a chance to bond. The next thing he knew, he was an old man and Ben seemed virtually lost to him. It's something that he lies awake thinking about.

"Is that so?" He says. "The only person I've ever known to use The Force that way died burdened with a lot of regret."

So he's interpreted, at least. It's not as if he's ever heard Luke and Leia talk extensively about their Father's dying moments and he can't begin to imagine he ever knew what Darth Vader was thinking. He just knows a little bit about making a lot of the wrong choices and turning around to make the right one when people were counting on him ...

"I didn't do a good job of preparing you for anything, kid. Let's call that like it is." He took his hands off the yoke when it came to preparing his son for adulthood because he was convinced that everyone else would do a better job of steering. That's not to say he would have done better or worse, but things would have probably at least been different.

Han drops the blood and alcohol soaked gauze onto the metal floor of the cabin and grabs a fresh one along with a tube of Bata in ointment form. "This stuff smells terrible." He murmurs as he begins to smear it all over Ben's cuts.

Edited 2016-06-08 13:47 (UTC)

Kylo clenched his fists, breathing through the pain.

"Darth Vader was ruined by sentimentality. Skywalker destroyed a great man with his mind tricks. I will... I will not be seduced by the light..."

It sounded too close to an empty promise for his own comfort. He was here, on board his father's ship, wasn't he? With the old man and the Resistance supporters still alive? Unforgivable. The Supreme Leader was more of a father figure than Han Solo ever was. And like a child, Kylo Ren could expect to be punished for his weakness.

"Take your hands off of me! That's enough!!" He stumbled back, actively scraping bacta from his skin. "Don't... Don't make me do something I... you'd regret!"

Even his threat seemed hollow.

It was pretty plain to see, Han Solo - your son was being torn apart.

When he thinks about what Kylo Ren has done - the villages he smashed through looking for god knows what, the role he played in the activation and use of yet another superweapon that turned a whole system into dust, the lives he snuffed out like they meant nothing ...

He just can't fathom it.

How could that be his Ben? The kid that fit so well into his arms that he never wanted to let him go. There were days like that, Ben Solo, they were just so long ago you probably can't remember them. Your father never has. It just makes these days that much more heart wrenching for him.

"This isn't what you want." He says quietly. At first, it seems so typical of him. A knee-jerk response coming from the old scoundrel. He's always been the guy that, when you hear him arguing with you, you wonder if he took the other side just to be a contrarian. Like he's arguing with you just for the sake of it.

And maybe, he did feel that way when he said it at first, but the more he thinks about it, the more it seems so painfully obvious ...

"You don't need to do this. You don't have to struggle to fight for them, it ain't your cause." Han says that with faith because he believes it to be true. And then he adds, "Maybe your Uncle's isn't either."

"What I want is far less important than what I have. And what I have is power!"

That, in and of itself, was his lot in life. The Supreme Leader coveted the energy that flowed through his veins. He was a means to an end. But the doctrine of stability and progress that the First Order preached actually meant something to Ben. It still meant something to Kylo. It was a place to belong.

"My loyalty is to the First Order. To the Supreme Leader... I... I won't go back to..." He began to argue, but his voice trailed off when Han said something he truly didn't expect.

Light side or dark side. Skywalker or Snoke. There were only two options! To live one was to be seduced by the other!

"...wh..what?"

Responsibility, duty, honor - those traits were always so very ingrained in Leia, but did they have to be in Ben? Especially if it means seeing him suffer and then use that same suffering to lash out at other people. He'd sooner see him become a moisture farmer on some desert planet or grinding out his days in a manufacturing plant on an industrial mecca. Fishing on an ocean world. Anything. It was all better than this.

It never occurred to him that in trying to point him the right way, he and Leia had robbed him of his free will. No doubt the elder Solo would have been furious and bitter himself if, into his thirties, he still felt like everyone else was the master of his destiny. If someday he should want to run back into the fray, no doubt there would still be battles to fight in their war-torn home, then let it be his choice to do that too.

The way this old man had ultimately choose it for himself.

"Be the man you want to be, Ben." He says. "Forget about what anyone thinks you should do. Your mom and I included."

Kylo Ren would never admit it, but there were times when, deep in solitary meditation when his mind (as far as he could tell) was entirely his own, he dreamed about what life might have been like if he were born without the Force. If he could have been part of the agricorps, a merchant, a trader. After encountering Rey, he even wondered what it might have been like to be a scavenger.

But those simply weren't options.

Snoke was courting his mind since he was old enough to cry about the monsters under his bed. They were never the bed, though. They were inside his head. Traveling with Luke would make it all go away, they told him. They never wanted you anyway, Snoke replied. In a way, slaughtering the other Jedi was comforting. They had a way out that he never did. They didn't have to live with being torn apart.

"The Supreme Leader says that killing you will stop the pain I feel..." He admitted softly. The fact that he was saying it instead of doing it meant he had his doubts.

Had Han tried to take him prisoner, to make him return to the Resistance or to Luke Skywalker, it would have been so easy to focus on his rage and strike the man down. But instead, he just... he treated him like a person instead of a tool to be wielded, clay to be sculpted or a prize to be won.

"I ..." had a bad feeling. When he stepped on that bridge, he felt it in bones something was going to go sideways. The fact that Ben might try to kill him had crossed his mind as an outcome. It didn't keep him away. You can say what you want about Captain Solo, but you gotta admit the man has guts.

Han backtracks and says, "I'm not surprised he would say something like that." That's what the dark side does, right? "If I thought it would actually help, I'd hand you the saber myself."

It shouldn't be a complete surprise that Han treats his son just like he would any other person he would meet in a hanger or a backwater dive somewhere. He doesn't know exactly how one is supposed to be fatherly, after all. In some moments, it's the perfect approach, and in other's ... it would be sorely lacking.

"I understand if you want to be alone." No doubt the kid has plenty to think about. He looked all but stunned when Han suggested there could be a life for him outside of being either Snoke or Skywalker's apprentice. "I'll do anything I can to help you, though. I want you to know that."

Edited 2016-06-09 20:05 (UTC)

Kylo was stunned enough to reveal his mission to the enemy. And at the moment, he didn't actually want to carry it out. Should the Supreme Leader learn of this, he'd be reprimanded severely. In the eyes of the First Order, he was dancing the fine line between treason and making a pathetic excuse of espionage.

Could he really do it? Have a life where he served no master? Could he run from the First Order, the Resistance and what was left of the Republic? Was there anywhere he could possibly go?

"And if I wanted to take this ship... and never come back? To... to anyone?" He dared ask aloud.

Han cocks his head to the side and regards his son in a way that he hasn't ever before - then again, as fractured as things between father and son have been, it's not as if Ben had ever suggested he could take The Millenium Falcon away from Han Solo. It's easy to picture him in a dingy hive of crooks somewhere with the look on his face and the words 'over my dead body' seem to be right on the tip of his tongue.

But ... he's not in his twenties anymore and truth be told, there's nothing that Captain Solo could really do to stop him, if that was his son's intention.

"I'm not letting anyone take this ship from me again." He murmurs, in his own time. Funny how so much of his stuff was still exactly in the same place despite the ship having changed hands twice at least. It's like they hadn't found at least half of the compartments that Han knew about.

"Besides, you couldn't handle this ship. That ain't a knock on you though, kid, there aren't many people who could."

Edited 2016-06-10 18:02 (UTC)

Kylo Ren considered those words for an uncomfortable amount of time. Han could clearly see the wheels turning in his son's mind, but not the direction they'd roll.

"The others will leave peacefully, sworn to silence. or die by my hand. You... You will stay."

He wasn't taking the ship away from Han. Nor was he going to kill him. It was almost as if he was... No, he really was... Kylo Ren was defecting from the First Order. Han succeeded in exactly what Leia had asked him to do.

Then, Kylo added a final condition.

"...if you contact General Organa, tell her that I died in the explosion."

The flash of bravado or confidence, whatever it was, that Han felt burning in him like the plasma of a star was gone the moment Kylo Ren brought up General Organa. From their son's point of view that seems like a win for the Resistance. It does take one of the First Order's most powerful figures out of their equation - so in that respect, perhaps it is - but that wasn't what Leia asked him to do. She had said "bring him home."

Home was not flying off to who knew where. Bringing him back was not telling his wife their son was dead when he wasn't. It feels like a hollow victory, at best, to the elder Solo.

If he even could even do such a thing convincingly. His ability to pull off a con, once there wasn't someone around to hold him hold him accountable for his failures, was always hit and miss. And lying to Leia he was never especially good at. He has no idea how to even begin to approach that.

"What about Chewie?"

Of course, Leia would have felt the death of her son, even that many star systems away. So lying would be difficult, if not impossible. At best, he might be presumed dead or otherwise still missing, but Kylo clearly wanted something far more finite.

At least he wasn't asking for the real thing.

When Han spoke about the Wookie, Kylo Ren lowered his gaze to the floor. He despised the General and all that she stood for. His father was a disappointment that he needed to eliminate. But his memories of Chewie weren't nearly as tainted. Perhaps the Supreme Leader left those untouched as a point of comparison to all the actual people in his life.

"...I think Chewie held me more than you ever did."

He didn't outright say he could stay, but the sentiment was somehow there.

The General will go on.

In spite of whatever heartbreak she feels in seeing through her scoundrel's lies, she will fight for what she thinks is right and live up to the duties she feels are her's to bear. Sometimes Han loves that about Leia. Sometimes Han can't stand that about Leia. At this point, though, he's known her long enough to know that's just who she is.

"He's the best person I've never known." Han says flatly. It's the only answer that comes to mind that isn't argumentative. He knows his impulse to argue is not likely to earn him any favors with his son, though in this instance, he very much wants to stand up for himself a bit more ...

"Do you want to let me finish this?" He says, gesturing to the medkit still open and in fact, Han still has gauze in his hand. "Or I can leave it and you can clean up how you like."

He looked at Han, and then back down at the gauze. He clenched his fists and then let his hands fall at his side. It had been so long since he'd been asked to decide his own fate (if ever), he didn't know what to do. His expression said that loud and clear.

Eventually, Kylo nodded, raising his arms again so Han could bandage his wounds.

"...will you show me what it's like..." He asked hesitantly. "to be your own master?"

To smuggle contraband, to swindle and profit, to escape by the skin of your teeth. To fly fast, live large and be good enough to not die young. It seemed a fitting place to start - a son wanting to be like his father, but not knowing how to ask.

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Heh. The typos. Sorry.

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