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Your name is Ben Solo.
You and your mother are the last Jedi.
Rather, you're the closest thing to Jedi that the galaxy has left. Your mother was never trained because the last Jedi Knight, your uncle, died before he could teach her. She was left with only the revelation of her birthright before Luke Skywalker went to the second Death Star and never came back. He killed Darth Vader at the cost of his own life.
The Emperor, who your mother tells you is a Sith Lord, survives. The Death Star survives. The rebellion against the Empire survives, but only barely, which is why you and your family have been at war since before you were even born.
Your mother pieces together what she remembers of her brother and his incredible powers. She does her best to teach herself the ways of the Force and to teach you as well. Neither of you can match what your uncle was capable of, but it's enough to keep you both alive and to keep the Jedi tradition alive.
When you are around five years old, your mother explains that Darth Vader was your grandfather. Given everything that has already happened in your life so far, it doesn't really register as a traumatic revelation. As you get older, though, you look at your father sometimes and try to imagine having to kill him for the greater good. As evil as everyone says that Vader was, you can't understand how your uncle was able to kill his own father without falling apart. On the other hand, Uncle Luke died so soon afterwards that he might not have had time to fall apart at all.
Your mother has lost her family over and over again. She says that she would die before she’d let the Empire take away the family she has left: you, your father, and Chewbacca. You believe her. You believe in her. You know that the Rebellion believes in her too.
Your name is Ben Solo and you hate being ignorant.
One day, the Emperor dies. The Rebellion uses the opportunity to launch a major offensive but is defeated, horribly. You never find out how many people died and you worry that the answer is much, much more than you think. You learn afterwards that there is a new Emperor, called Lord Caedus, who is even more brutal than his predecessor.
Your mother takes you and your father and Chewbacca and runs. You've never seen her run away before. For as long as you can remember, your mother has been fearless; now she is terrified.
Without your mother to lead them, what little of the Rebellion that survived fades away to nothing.
The closest thing you get to an explanation is something you overhear between your parents shortly after you all go on the run. The only thing you hear is your father asking “Is it...?” and your mother answering “It is.” You don’t know why, because it was only four words that didn’t really mean anything, but something about their tone puts a lump of ice in the center of your chest.
It is only then that you realize how little your mother has told you and how little she is telling you now.
You spend your time trying to read between the lines of everything your parents say. As the years pass, the only thing that your mother seems to use the Force for is to hide herself, her thoughts, and you. You have so many questions but all she does is put up walls between you.
One night, while you try to repair a part of the ship (not the Falcon, your first home, which your family abandoned years ago because it was too easy to identify), you overhear your mother crying in the cockpit. You hear her whisper through her tears that you’re old enough now to get yourself killed.
You wish that you could reassure her that you will be fine, that everything will be fine, but you don’t know how. You don’t even believe it yourself.
Your name is Ben Solo and you have cut yourself off from the Force.
You have to cut yourself off from the Force because the Death Star is destroying more planets and if you feel another far-away world being consumed by an endless abyss you will go mad.
Anywhere you go, the Empire seems to know that you’re coming before you even arrive. Your escapes get narrower and narrower. You and your family accumulate scars but at least you’re all still alive.
Even Wild Space and the Unknown Regions aren't havens for you anymore. The Empire is everywhere and your parents are the two most well-known people in the galaxy. They’re even more recognizable than the Emperor himself, who wears a mask and has no past but has managed to crush the galaxy under his heels anyway.
You’re more or less an adult now and you wonder if it wouldn’t be better for you to go off on your own now that you won’t attract attention as an unaccompanied traveler. But you know that it would kill your parents if you did that.
Your father likes to joke about ignoring the odds, but one day there aren’t any odds at all. You gamble on a trip to Lothal to refuel your ship and you lose the bet because not only is the Empire there, but they’ve been expecting you.
You become separated from your family in the ensuing melee but you can still hear them in the distance. The air is thick with blaster fire. You open yourself to the Force because you know that it’s the only way that you’re going to survive this.
As you do, you sense a horrible darkness following you. Not the terrible emptiness of a destroyed world but something with a core of durasteel so cold that it burns. Not the absence of light but the active rejection of it. Something that hunts and destroys everything around it while wielding Dark Side powers as sharp as the edge of a vibroblade.
You feel the touch of someone’s fingers on the back of your neck and you feel as though the Force is being pulled out of you. You can’t move. You can’t speak. You can’t escape.
The last thing that you hear before everything goes black is the sound of your mother screaming your name.
Your name is Ben Solo and you might be the last Jedi.
You don’t know what happened to your parents or Chewbacca. You hope they escaped. You realize that you might never find out either way because, after a lifetime of fighting and running, the Empire finally caught you.
It’s almost a relief.
You knew that your parents were important but it never occurred to you that you might be important as well. You’ve been in a cell on this ship for a long time. You don’t know where they’re taking you until red-robed guards escort you to a shuttle and you realize that you’ve been brought to Coruscant.
You sense the same terrifying darkness that you felt on Lothal and with every passing minute it gets closer.
The shuttle lands outside a building that you recognize as the Imperial Palace. The guards escort you inside and you know at last who they’re taking you to see.
The throne room is dark and because of that it takes your eyes a moment to adjust. The Emperor rises to his feet as you enter and you now know for certain that he is a Sith Lord, the source of the darkness that you’re sensing, and that he went all the way to Lothal himself to find you.
The guards release you and leave the room as Lord Caedus walks toward you. You can see that the right side of his face, the area around his eyes not hidden behind the black mask, is covered in a grisly network of scar tissue and burst blood vessels.
He removes his mask and you find yourself staring at one of the only faces in the galaxy more recognizable than your parents.
“Hello Ben,” your uncle says, “I’ve found you at last.”
Your name is Ben Solo and if you start screaming you might never be able to stop.
Luke Skywalker, the Rebellion’s last hope, killed his father and took Vader’s place at the Emperor’s side. He fell to the Dark Side and never looked back, spending the years that followed learning the ways of the Sith, keeping to the shadows until he was finally powerful enough to destroy his master and supplant him.
He says that there are always two Sith: a master and an apprentice. He wants you to become that apprentice.
He tells you that if he had been able to, he would have brought you and your mother here long ago and spared you the years that you wasted on the run. You notice that he doesn’t mention your father or Chewbacca.
He says that he has watched you since you were a child, watching you through your mother’s eyes until she was finally able to block the Force connection between them.
That’s when you realize that your mother knew. She knew the whole time that her brother wasn’t dead, that he had been corrupted into a monster, and that once he had overthrown Palpatine he was going to tear the galaxy apart until he found you both.
Your grandfather fell to the Dark Side and your uncle fell to the Dark Side and you wonder if maybe your entire bloodline is doomed to fall to the Dark Side. You remember your mother, though, who had every reason to fall but never did, and you hold on to that sliver of hope.
The smile that Lord Caedus gives you is mostly one of pity. You realize with a shudder that he stepped through your mental shields without you even noticing and that you no longer have a way to hide your thoughts from him.
That’s why he knows that you have questions. He tells you that he spent so much of his own life being lied to and kept in the dark and that he knows how you feel, how badly you must want answers. It feels like every drop of your blood is screaming at you to run away, because if the answer is that even Luke Skywalker could become someone like this, then the Light Side never stood a chance and your fall is inevitable.
But that doesn’t stop you from wanting answers.
Ben Kenobi, the Jedi that you were named for, wrapped everything he told your uncle in lies and Yoda wrapped everything he told your uncle in riddles. Darth Sidious was the only one who bothered to tell him the truth: Anakin Skywalker was never a hero because heroes don’t exist. The pure-hearted Jedi Knight that both Luke and Anakin pretended to be was just a fantasy, a delusion created by people who needed to believe in a hero so badly that they were willing to sacrifice your entire family in order to get one.
Both of them found a way out: the Dark Side. Now your uncle wants you to follow him down the same path.
Lord Caedus tells you that this is your destiny. He tells you that this is what you were meant to be.
Despair settles into your bones as you realize that it doesn’t matter what you want. He is going to keep you here no matter what.
Your name is Ben Solo and you are a Sith apprentice because your master never gave you a choice in the matter.
Lord Caedus takes you aboard the Death Star. You don’t know what heinous excuse the Empire has for destroying yet another world; to be honest, you don’t want to know. That’s at least one thing that you’re glad to be ignorant about.
Alone together looking out at the doomed planet below, you tell him that you don’t understand how he could continue doing this after knowing how much pain it caused your mother when she lost her family on Alderaan.
He snaps at you that Alderaan and the Organas were never your mother’s family; he is her family and Darth Vader is her family and no amount of lying to herself will change that.
That’s when you realize that she must still be out there.
You also realize how desperately your uncle misses his sister and how desperation can lead a person to do terrible things.
He must still be reading your thoughts because he proceeds to tell you about the moment that he fell. He tells you about how he hid from his father in this very room, still naively believing that he could turn him back to the Light Side, until Vader found his way into your uncle’s thoughts the same way that Caedus is in your thoughts now. He tells you how Vader made a fatal mistake by threatening to go after your mother instead.
Your uncle gave into his anger and killed his father in the same room that you are standing in right now.
You can see a sky full of ships desperately trying to escape the planet. You know that they’re running out of time because you can already hear the faint hum of the Death Star’s deadly beam charging. You start to tremble in spite of yourself and try to close off your access to the Force. You’ve sensed enough of these horrors in your life to know that you can’t bear to feel another world die again.
Caedus doesn’t let you turn away. Any barrier between yourself and the Force crumbles as he destroys everything in your mind that could possibly keep it at bay. You are so open to the Force that you feel like you’re on fire.
The Death Star fires and a billion voices cry out in terror, including your own.
You are swept away by an inferno of suffering. There is no “you” anymore, only an endless sea of death. All you want to do is let go but the monster that your uncle has become drags you back to your own consciousness and forces you to feel every agony that the Force can inflict on you.
As you scream, Caedus tells you that there is nothing more infinite than the galaxy’s capacity for cruelty. He tells you that embracing this pain is the only way to survive it, the only way to control it, the only way you can access the power that has been waiting inside of you all along because it is the true legacy of the Skywalkers: the Dark Side of the Force.
He orders you to use it.
You obey.
Your name is Ben Solo but that name no longer has any meaning for you.
Because you were never really trained as a Jedi, there are no old habits for you to break. It doesn’t hurt that the Dark Side is quicker and easier to wield than your old amateurish attempts with the Light Side. Your mother tried her best but she didn’t know how to guide you; now you have a real teacher, one who can show you what real power is as he leads you step by step into the dark.
You are becoming what you were meant to be.
Your master tells you that he has foreseen your mother’s arrival on Coruscant.
You only have to be patient, he says. In time, she will come to you.
Your master receives word that her ship has landed. Soon you will show her that it is her destiny to join you and your master at the helm of an Empire so powerful that it can never be stopped.
Your mind and your master’s mind are so connected that it isn’t clear which one of you senses it first: the agonized scream of the woman who you cared for more than anyone else in the galaxy, followed by a silence so complete that for a moment it feels like the Force vanishes entirely.
Somewhere on Coruscant, your mother just died.
Your master is nearly incandescent in the Force as he snarls into the comlink, demanding to know who was responsible, who will be punished for this failure. All you can think of, however, is that your master is the one in command of the very Empire that killed his own sister. That, for all of his power, he couldn’t even manage to save one person. That, in the end, he is the one responsible.
He turns to face you and you realize that he knows what you were thinking.
Your lightsaber strikes your master in the chest and he collapses at your feet.
There is no fury in his face. In fact… he is laughing.
“Well done, my apprentice,” he whispers at last, as his eyes focus on nothing at all. “Your training is complete.”