The Apprentice

Chapter 8:

A harsh buzz sounded and Rey leapt to her feet.

"Excuse me, Miss. I apologize for bothering you. My master sent me to deliver a message to you." A droid's feminine voice sounded over the intercom in her room.

"Coming," Rey shouted. With only a couple steps, she closed the distance between her and the doorway. She pressed a button on the control panel to the left of the door and lifted open. A silver humanoid droid stood in front of her. She recognized it as a 3PO-series protocol droid. "Hello?"

"Ah, yes, Miss. Thank you for opening the door. My Master wished for me to give this message to you." The droid extended its arm and handed a folded sheet of paper to Rey. It was a note - for her. Rey's eyebrows knit together. A handwritten message? Delivered by a messenger? That technique was so old-fashioned. If someone really wanted to talk to her, wouldn't they use the com-links between rooms? Or even talk to her in person? Surely either of those ways would have been much more convenient to use. It puzzled her why the writer wished to go out of his way just to send a message like this.

Her curiosity taking ahold of her, she eagerly took it, opened it up, and read over the scrawled handwriting:

Rey-

You were right. About everything.

I wish I had realized it earlier.

If I'm not too late, I'd like to talk to you tonight.

I'll be in the grove on the fourth floor balcony. 10 o'clock.

-Ben

Ben. Ben. The corners of Rey's mouth twisted and she was suddenly unable to contain her grin.

"Miss, would you like for me to send a reply back to my Master?" the droid said.

"No, that's fine," Rey said. She held up the piece of paper again. "Thank you… Thank you for bringing this. Have a good evening."

The droid bowed slightly at the waist. "I hope you have a good evening as well," it said before walking back down the corridor.

As soon as Rey shut the door, her smile got even wider. She leaned against the wall and sank to the floor, clutching the piece of paper to her chest. Ben. She almost couldn't believe it. He always bristled at the mention of his old name and now, was he beginning to embrace it? Something had changed within that man that finally managed to crack his hard outer shell. Rey brought her fingers up to her lips and touched them lightly. She still remembered how warms his had been against hers. Had it been…? No, it couldn't have been. One kiss wasn't enough to change a person's entire attitude. Had the words she said to him finally sank in? It sure sounded like it. She hoped more than anything that she had finally gotten through to him.

But this meeting could be nothing other than a trap. She had threatened to kill the Supreme Leader. As an official Knight of Ren, she had committed a high act of treason against the First Order, which she assumed was punishable by death. She expected for any respectable member of the First Order to uphold that.

Part of her argued that he wouldn't do anything to hurt her - if he had wanted to, he had plenty of chances to kill her before now. Back in his bedroom, when she first suggested Snoke's murder, she was unarmed. He could have easily run his lightsaber straight through her. Still, another part of her warned her to be wary of the boy.

The note could be a trap, just as it could very well not be, but in the event that Ben was truly asking for her help, she had to go. For his sake. It was a risk she was willing to take.

At a quarter to ten, the sky was still light enough to cast shadows, even though the sun had long since set over Coruscant. Ben stood in the middle of a cluster of several trees with his hands folded behind his back and faced a set of sliding double doors. On such a heavily populated planet like Coruscant, green spaces like this one were hard to come by and he treasured the small rooftop grove. During the earlier years of his training underneath Snoke, he used this place for a momentary escape when his mind raced too much. If he sat here long enough, he discovered that he could almost stop his thoughts entirely. Too many times had he felt the call back to the Light, but with Snoke's training, his connection with Darth Vader's helmet, and those secret meditation sessions, he had managed to stay on the path of the Dark Side.

Until now.

It was almost ironic that he had chosen this place to voice his betrayal of the First Order.

He glanced up at the sky. Just a few stories overhead, a line of traffic zipped between the two towers that rose up on either side of the grove. Was it ten o'clock yet? It had to be at least a few minutes past. His legs had the beginning of a slight cramp growing in them from standing in place for so long. Where was Rey? A pang of disappointment shot through him. She wasn't coming. How long would he stay out here waiting?

He tried to stifle his worry. She was going to come - she had to come - he convinced himself.

The doors slid open and a silhouette walked outside. The figure stepped into a pool of city light and the shadows washed away from her face.

"Ben?" she said.

"Rey! You showed up!" Ben ran up to her, only to stop a few feet in front of her. Right then, he would have given anything to know that it was alright to sweep her off her feet and kiss her, just like he had done only hours earlier that day. But he couldn't. He was certain that it would only make her run off like had done before. Hell, it was even a miracle that she was here. It was a miracle that she had agreed to meet him alone in the grove, late at night, right after he had just about forced himself on to her.

"Yeah. Of course I did."

Ben looked down at his hands. "I… I was beginning to think that you wouldn't show."

"You've changed," she whispered to herself so quietly that Ben barely registered what she said. "Am I late?"

He shrugged. He had thought she had been, but he really had no way to confirm that. "After what I did, I thought-"

Rey took a step closer to him. "The kiss?"

Ben gulped. God, he regretted that. "Will you forgive me?"

"Forgive you for what?" Rey continued to walk towards him.

"I shouldn't have. It was wrong of me. I was confused. I don't know what I was thinking. I should have just…" Rey placed her hand on his arm, cutting him off, and Ben looked down at it.

"You're fine." She put space between the words. "I…" She looked down and her hand fell down to her side. "I regret running off."

Ben's stomach did a little flip. She regretted running off? So had she actually liked the kiss? "No, it's my fault. It was too sudden and - and I must have taken you by surprise."

"Yeah you did," Rey laughed a little. "But back there, when I told you that I could like you if you weren't so cold all the time, I really meant it."

Ben didn't know what to say, so he did the next most logical thing and reached for her hand. He lightly closed his fingers around hers.

She met his gaze. "But, Ben, I can sense you changing," she whispered and gave his hand a light squeeze. "I can see that underneath all your anger and bitterness, you can be a sweet guy. You have a good heart, Ben Solo."

Ben felt his heartbeat in his chest as he closed the space between them and grabbed Rey's chin between his thumb and index finger. He tilted it upwards and bent down, turning his head to the side. His eyes closed before his lips met hers. Just as he remembered, she tasted sweet and familiar. He moved his free hand to rest on her back and her fingers snaked to the back of his head where she wrapped them in his hair.

He had never been happier to have left his mask off.

"Is there something wrong?" Ben said as he felt Rey gently pull away from him.

Rey shook her head, her hands still entangled in his dark brown hair. "No, just," she let her hands fall back to her side, "this isn't why you asked me to come. Right? You were going to tell me something - about why you signed the note as Ben?"

Ben nodded over to a bench near the base of one tree. "How about we sit down?" With his hand still resting on Rey's back, he guided her over to it. The tree's thick foliage shielded them from the light of the city and cast shadows over their faces, plunging them into relative darkness. They sat side by side in silence as Ben fidgeted with the fabric of his cloak, trying to find the right words.

"You said that I run away from my problems," Ben said, his words slow at first, "No one else has ever been more right about me. That's why it took me so long to realize that I wasn't satisfied with being Kylo Ren. I was so scared to admit that I had made the wrong decision - to admit that I had bottled up all of those regrets inside of me. I didn't even want to consider that I had chosen the wrong path. I regret leaving my family. I regret…" Ben went silent for a moment, "I regret killing my father. I regret joining Snoke.

"You were right; he manipulated me. The only reason that I even joined the Dark Side was that I fell for Snoke in a moment of weakness. I felt like my family had abandoned me - that they hated me. The first time that Snoke came to me, he seemed like the father figure I needed in my life. He offered to take me under his wing and teach me everything that he knew. I thought that all I needed was power, but it was really compassion that I had been looking for. And I cannot get that here with Snoke." Ben let out a strangled laugh. "I know that this probably doesn't make sense. My mind is kind of a mess right now, but…"

Rey placed her hand on his knee. "It's fine. I understand. It's hard to sort through your thoughts."

"What I'm trying to say is that this life isn't for me" - A smile spread out across Ben's face - "and we're going to have to train much harder from now on."

Rey furrowed her eyebrows. "Train? Why would we want to stay here and train?"

"We'll have to get stronger if we ever want to beat Snoke."

She searched Ben's eyes as if she was looking for some trace of deception. Even though he knew that there was never a chance that he would ever deceive her, he wanted to shrink under her scrutinous gaze.

"You're really serious," she said. Her face remained stoic for a few seconds but then she laughed and smiled. "You're really serious," she repeated as if she was trying to convince herself of it. Rey reached up and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek.

Happiness surged through him. This is what he had been looking for all along. Here was a place where he belonged and here was the compassion that he had been missing for all this time.