#Kylo Rea Fan Fic

[steves-on-a-plane]

Destiny Disputed

Words: 2216 Pairing: Ben Solo x Reader Timeline: Pre-Episode VII AU Summary: Ben takes Reader on what they think is a joy ride to an outer rim planet. What Reader quickly finds out is that Ben has come to Tatooine in an attempt to define himself and his place in the force.

“Hold on tight, we’re going in for the landing.” The young pilot behind the yolk of a borrowed tandem x-wing you were riding in told you. His voice came in slightly static through your headset. You looked through the viewport trying to see the planet below. “It’s going to take a while before you see anything good.” He told you as if reading your mind.

“Well, it’s Tatooine, so I won’t see anything good until we leave.” You insisted. “But I never get tired of seeing planets from this high up.” You smiled.

“I used to think that too.” He laughed. “But the magic wears off after a while.”

“I just realized that other than your uncle, who we see every day, you never talk about your family. Did you travel a lot as a kid?” You wondered.

“My mother is in government and my father is the captain of a freighter.” He told you. “So, there was a little bit here and there.”

“A captain?” You commented, clearly impressed. “Is that where you learned to fly?” The curved sandy surface of the planet below finally came into view as the X-wing continued to descend towards Tatooine.

“You could say it’s in my blood.” He answered back. “My Uncle always dreamed of being a pilot. I’m told my grandfather was a pilot too. I’ve been flying as long as I can remember.”

“You have quite the legacy to live up to, Ben.” You told him.

“Yeah.” He scoffed. “Tell me about it.”

“How exactly did you talk Master Luke into letting you borrow this X-Wing anyway?” You asked.

“Right, about that…” His sentence trailed off.

Once the X-Wing was landed and secure at Docking Bay 42, You followed Ben to the crowded streets of Mos Eisley Spaceport. They weren’t streets in the sense that you were used to. They were more like dusty pathways with no clear flow of traffic. Only a few steps off the ship and you were already grieving it’s temperature control settings. The planet of Tatooine was hot, dry, and full of sand.

“What exactly is so important here that you had to steal an X-wing for?” You found yourself coughing violently as flecks of sand managed to find their way into your lungs. Ben rolled his eyes at you.

“Wear this.” Without giving you a change to protest, he wrapped a thin piece of linen cloth in such a way that your mouth and nose were covered. “It protects you from the sand.” He explained impatiently. “And I didn’t steal the X-wing. We’re going to bring it back.”

“You’re still not answering my question.” You remarked. “What’s so special about this place? Other than the fact that it’s a miracle any life forms can survive on it at all.”

“C’mere.” He grasped your hand and tugged your off the street. The two of you were wedged together between two Tatooineian Clay buildings. You hadn’t thought the dual sun planet could feel any hotter, but with your chest pressed against Ben’s, you could feel his every breath on your exposed skin.

“I never tell anyone this. I don’t want the others to make fun of me. Can you keep a secret?” You nodded. “My mother is Leia Organa-Solo. She was the princess of Alderaan. Her husband is Han Solo.”

“As in General Leia Organa Solo?” You repeated.

“Yes, not so loud!” He covered your mouth with his hand. Maybe it was the heat but pressed between him and the building with one of his hands holding yours the other covering your mouth, it was almost romantic. Definitely the heat. You decided. “We can’t be overheard talking about them here, do you understand?” You nodded. He nodded back, removing his hand.

“I don’t understand, you tell everyone your name is Ben Skywalker. Why would you do that?” You questioned in a whisper.

“I couldn’t avoid being Luke Skywalker’s nephew. The others would sense some type of familial bond through the force, but they didn’t need to know about my parents. I want to forge my own destiny. I don’t want to be known as the general’s son, or the smuggler’s son. I just want to be me. You can understand that can’t you?”

“I-I…” You looked into his brown eyes. You could feel the weight of what he was saying. You could feel it in his body language and in the force. You could feel how it had burdened him all this time. How he was pleading with you now to understand him. You were proud of where you came from. Your father was a respectable trader and your mother, who had been a pilot in the rebellion, now worked transport jobs for the republic. She’d even met Leia Organa once or twice and had nothing but kind things to say about the general.

“What’s on Tatooine, Ben?” You asked him again.

“Ghosts.” He whispered. “And we’re going to see them all.” He tugged you out of the ally and towards a land speeder rental.

“You said before that I have a lot to live up to.” Ben recalled your earlier conversation. “Everyone in my family was once a nobody.”

“Everybody is somebody, Ben.” You disagreed.

“Not in the outer rim.” He shook his head. He stopped the speeder. It appeared you were hovering inside abandoned ruins of some sort of colosseum. “When my grandfather was a child, before he was a jedi, he was a slave; a nothing. Where we are now was once the starting point for the Boota Eve Classic. A podrace. A pod race that my grandfather won, his winnings were used to repair the ship of a jedi master named Qui Gon Jin who helped him escape this place. Without pod racing, he never escapes Tatooine, he never becomes a Jedi, he never becomes Darth Vader.”

“There’s no way to know that for sure.” You disagreed. “Master Skywalker says…”

“Master Skywalker.” Ben offered a grunt of contempt.

“Is it Master Skywalker or his teachings that you don’t like?” You asked over the hum of the landspeeder. Ben was already steering the vehicle away from the forgotten racetrack towards another part of the planet.

“What I don’t like are his philosophies.” Ben hissed. You watched his grip on the landspeeder’s yolk tighten. “My father is the sort of man who believes a person makes their own destiny. Uncle Luke thinks all things are determined by The Force. That our destiny isn’t fully within our control. I suppose my mother is somewhere in between, though her opinion was rarely asked about while the two of them debated at the dinner table.”

“So which do you believe? That our choices all mean nothing or that they mean everything?” You watched his brows furrow together. He scowled into the skyline.

“That’s what we’re here to find out.” You traveled in silence for serval miles. You wondered how Ben could so easily navigate the planet. To you Tatooine seems to be nothing but sand for parsecs and parsecs. He navigated the terrain as if he’d spend all of his youngling years there. You supposed it was possible he could have. He’d already admitted to lying about who he was once. You began to wonder if you really knew him at all.

The landspeeder seemed to stop suddenly. You glanced around looking for any type of landmark. Ben reached over and tilted your chin with his forefinger and thumb. He pointed out to the horizon. If you squinted, you could just make out the signature dome shape of a moisture farmhouse. You knew from the stories he shared around the temple that Master Luke had grown up on a moisture farm.

“Is that…” You started to ask Ben.

“Not exactly. Like the legends say, the majority of it was burned down the day my uncle left the planet, but it’s the same land the family farm was on.” Ben nodded solemnly. “The family farm where my great grandmother lived and my uncle lived and where my great uncle died. Did anyone ever tell you who I was named after?”

“Until a few hours ago I’d thought your last name was Skywalker.” You reminded him. “How do I even know your name is Ben?” You turned in your seat and looked at him. You waited for a response.

“I deserve that.” He laughed. “I am named after Uncle Luke’s mentor. A jedi named Obi Wan Kenobi. The people in the area knew him as Old Ben. He lived here for eighteen years here keeping an eye on Luke. Trying to protect him from my grandfather.”

“How exactly is this helping you with your moral dilemma?” You interrupted him. Both Ben and his uncle had an affinity for dramatic story telling. Normally you enjoyed that sort of thing. There wasn’t much entertainment at the temple. Being in the vast openness there in the broiling land speeder, however, had taken away your usual appreciation for grandiose speeches.

“How is it possible that so many people’s stories can be intricately intertwined here, on this one planet?” He didn’t wait for you to answer before asking another question. “How can so many lives start and end here and it mean nothing? Obi Wan brings a baby Luke Skywalker here to this broiling hellscape while his sister is sent to live in the utopia that was Alderaan. What if instead they’re switched? If Luke becomes Luke Organa, prince of Alderaan, does he still grow up dreaming of becoming a pilot and discovering life somewhere else? If Leia Skywalker spends her life here, does she still become the great general who openly defies Darth Vader and helps get the Death Star plans to the rebellion? We have one more stop on our tour.”

The landspeeder gave a sudden jerk forward and you began to move away from the moisture farm and back towards the closest thing to pass for civilization on Tatooine. It was in that moment that you sensed it for the first time. You weren’t sure how you’d missed it for so long. You’d known Ben most of your life after all. Sure, he’d been quiet and mostly kept to himself, but you’d always considered him a friend.

You’d always known he was powerful. That was the burden of the Skywalker legacy. He’d always learned things faster than others and you assumed it was because of his bond with Master Luke or maybe that he’d received additional training on the side. Despite being good friends for years, you realized you’d never been truly alone with Ben. The sheer vastness of Tatooine meant it were just the two of you alone, no other lifeforms for miles.

Your fight or flight response told you to be afraid. You felt yourself stiffen, as if even the slightest muscle twitch would put you in danger. You fought to gather yourself and shake the feeling away. Surely it was the unfamiliar planet that had given you a scare. Maybe all of Ben’s talks of ghosts had put something in your head. Deep down though you knew, the darkness that you were sensing was coming from Ben.

“You’re afraid of me.” He stated. “There’s no sense in lying. I can sense it in you.”

“No.” You told him quietly, your voice barely audible over the speeder’s hum. It was the truth. Ben had been nothing but kind to you, you had no reason to be afraid of him. It was the darkness you were afraid of. You wondered if it scared him too. Had it been the allure of the darkside that had brought him all the way to Tatooine?

“My uncle is.” Ben told you. In the distance the outskirts of Mos Eisley were visible at last. You no longer cared about making it back to the spaceport. “He’s worried I’m too much like Vader. That I won’t be able to fight it.”

“What do you think?” You asked.

“That he doesn’t know me at all.” Ben answered. “That if he knew I had something worth fighting for, he’d understand why I wasn’t really tempted by the dark side.”

“What’s that? The something you’re fighting for?” You questioned.

“You don’t already know?” He stopped the landspeeder a mile from the very edge of Mos Eisley. He turned to look at you. You met his gaze with your own. “My father once said that a man doesn’t get where he’s going alone. You get as far as you can on your own, but sooner or later you need at least one good partner to walk beside. Someone to co-pilot when you just can’t seem to make it that final stretch of the journey. There’s a cantina in town, the same one my father met Uncle Luke and Old Ben at for the first time. You’ll know it’s the right place when you hear a blith band that playing incessant Jatz music. After an hour, if you’re not there, we’ll meet back at the ship, I’ll take you to the temple and we’ll never speak a word of it again.”

“What sort of a co-pilot would I be, if I even got out of the speeder?” You asked reaching for his hand. “You won’t get rid of me that easily, Ben. I’ve got you.” You promised.