#thread tbd

[kylo-wrecked]

"Tell me who did this." (scav verse!)

{ 🫀 You broke and bought: Smuggler!Ben }

She had a right to ask. Mason had only been gone a few hours, and the aftermath of an onboard struggle was apparent in the chaos of a spilled coolant cube carton and a couple of all-kits strewn wherever they'd landed. One of her holding cells was open, and further investigation would reveal no small amount of blood spatter.

Ben lifted his shirt and examined the bloodstain. Yep, that would have to go. Then his eyes crawled from the semi-cauterized bolt wound under his ribs to Mason’s quizzical expression.  

"Who? Oh, well. You'll love this. I—"

He'd claimed the wound was practically nothing and demanded he take care of it himself, which was why they were now in the main hold, Mason fuming around him with antiseptic and threatening him with fae restoratives.

'Wait, wait—" he tried to turn from her and knew in the instant he felt the sting of her ointment that he'd failed. "Kriff."

He grunted, grinding down his teeth at the burning sensation.

"It's gonna to start doing that bubbling thing, isn't it?"

No sooner than he said it, his flesh began to hiss. Ben seethed with the wound.

"Tthh—oh. Yeah, that." Screwed his eyes shut; his body pricked all over from a single point of pain, where the open flesh roiled before knitting itself together, a wound in reverse. "There it goes. I hate that it does that."

He paled and looked up at the copper piping above them with an expression of discomfit that couldn't be rivaled. The bolt had only grazed him. Why not use bacta? Sure, it was less effective, but it also didn't feel like the terrible concentrated power of five hundred suns. Bacta was standard. As was Ben's situation.

Mason prodded the exposed beam of his shoulder with the butt of her pistol and waited for an answer. Ben scowled at her, holding his palm out for a bandage.

"I don't know, okay? And it doesn't matter because the guy's dead. Deader than dead. D-O's still rolling over his cremains."

And he tried not to think whether the message might have been intended for her instead.

@smokinmirrors

[kylo-wrecked]

❝  your presence is like a stone in my shoe, impossible to ignore.  ❞ (for vamp! Ren)

{ 🕯️ You conjured: Vampire!Ren }

A coyote's howl climbed on a breeze of azalea in the braying and crunching of the last buggies, and thus began the first notes of midsummer.

For Mason, midsummer meant a full garden of wonders, impatiens, and petunias, the sunset-colored manes of the marigolds. Midsummer was light, and it was life. But for Ren, it was Mason who was life, for reasons as base and unutterable as the taste of her scent in the library. Their arrangement was ignoble but simple. There was no moon without the sun.

The sun was sat with a book in her lap. She slapped the binding shut suddenly and glared at the moon.

"So, you are fully literate," he muttered, laconic in his black frock cloak, his stolid, marble fingers bunched around the fold of a heavy curtain. The evening long since settled, Ren watched the last light slide off the horizon. "How very poetic."

She had been reading the same page for so long that, for a moment, he believed he'd thoroughly overestimated her.

@smokinmirrors

[kylo-wrecked]

{ cont'd from here }

"Don't," the weak boy spat, seething with the rage that made him that way. Weak. "However you know that name, you'll soon forget it."

For rage was only broken focus on a broken face. Feeling a wound Ren balmed in the hissing durasteel maw that enveloped him, raven crown to grimace. He was a young man swallowed whole by totem, all signs of the human form rewritten in shadow.

The helm was not a trophy, for piloting x-wings, for Jedi spawn. It was life rewritten and engraved in chromium finish. A silent war cry. Then that crimson kyber flame spouted forth, shivering like a ghost. The weak boy was concealed in fire and steel. Gone.

"You will complete this vessel," this new creature growled. "Train it. If you don't die by my hand."

Ren parried the man's blows once, twice, and again and charged with preternatural vehemence. Something beneath the skin seemed to drive him, yet it was not finesse; it was the brutality of a hound with twice his natural strength and an odd sense of precognition. Ren's body ran as pure automata, slashing, striking, pumping black blood. He was black blood driven by man's blood, by the whiff of the centuries coming off this curious vessel wielding a blue saber, strangely heedless of Kun's years and the mere twenty he carried in his own ribs.

@sithisms

[kylo-wrecked]

{ 🔍 You found: Modern!Ben }

“  The price of freedom is high. It always has been. ” / senator's son au

"Uh-huh," Ben blinked, sinking into the booth like a six-and-a-half-foot stone. He made to grab the mug but didn't move, momentarily losing himself in the plume of coffee steam. "You know?" His eyes lifted from beneath a knitted, contemplative brow. Rich as coffee grounds. Hot as molten steel. "Uh." He met Orson's smug, colorless gaze and scowled. Tipped his head as if he wasn't sure what he'd heard. "No?" The knuckles clenched at his hips pumped rosy and damp. "No, I don't think so. I don't believe there's a hard price for my freedom. I was born into this family. No price will shatter that image." No matter how warped it became. Least of all in the eyes of the public. "Trust me on that. Take my trust fund as evidence." He was a scion of the Organa-Solo clan and no price, and no failure, could seem to prevent that fact. Sweaty palm motioning to Orson, Ben cleared his throat, dropped his hand below the aluminum table trim, and slouched further. "Sorry. Please go on." Please, God, he thought, pinching his inner thumb with a chewed nail. Please just tell me who turned out their pockets.

@debelltio

[kylo-wrecked]

❛ Tell me you want me to go. ❜ Reb to ex! Ben

{ 🫀 You broke and bought: Ex-Con!Ben }

Conversations barely ever got started for good reasons. Ben watched the lighted stripes on Reb's shoulder vanish into her skin as chalk streaks of cirrus drew themselves over the sun. Were they fighting? Hadn't realized. He hadn't said anything. Now, he spoke the one word he knew to have some finality to it.

"No," Ben scoffed.

Withdrew one step back toward the sink to look at Reb fully, a spooked ungulate in his unsuspecting poise. Uncertainty still dwelled on his face though he approached.

Everything in his kitchen was soaked in silence, awareness, and absence: the paper-cramped table carved by his hand, the undone dishes in cirrus-colored water. He hadn't asked Reb to stay; maybe she wanted him to. She knew he was naturally high in reactance and that she could rile him to action by providing some antisuggestion. That was Reb.

Mumbled, "What'd do that for?" Took another step forward and clasped Reb's shoulders, his grip tremulous as the intermittent light. Then he took the diamond of Reb's face, his fingers swallowing her chin, and drew its brightest points to him. Her mouth, her eyes.

"What would I do that for?" he repeated, his voice a shade darker than it had been a moment ago. Deeply serious, deeply as concerned, waiting with a jackhammering heart, his concrete core fissured.

@ifyoucatchacriminal

[kylo-wrecked]

@riiese ://

—☾—

He rambled home one day to find it altogether changed. When Ben was a child, his hometown was one you'd drive right through and miss, 'you didn't watch the roads or the trees. Everyone called it North Wetyin back then.

North Wetyin, in the tradition of probably all backwoods villages, was more like five or eight miles out from the bustling North Wetyin of 30,000 strong. At least, he remembered it being eight or ten. Today it seemed like five or less, like the boonies suddenly came into a lot of gambling money and turned a blind drunk eye as city developers ate their way into the trees, swallowing distance. The real name was something like Wetsprings or Westwood. Something lost to time. 'Lot of trails lost, too, but that didn't put him off walking them.

Forty-five minutes through a dog-friendly path, something Ben and his Dobermann could ease into, and he stopped to breathe in the piny air. Off a guarded ledge, a shaded dome, all kinds of green. More trees than he'd seen in a decade. He felt gnarled and big, getting old, like the cedars and firs.

A little ways off was a gulley so lush Ben almost missed the valley closure signs. D.O. reminded him with a low growl. Ben tilted his cap in a way that said, 'Just a look,' and D.O. hung back in a way that said, 'Your funeral, bucko.'

He just had a look—couldn't help it. The flowers drew him, these white frilly poles, sprays of curling mango-hued leaves. Invasives, maybe. His eyes drifted onto a boulder shaped sort of like a head. D.O. growled, then yipped, loud enough to ruffle a few feathers up in the trees.

"Quiet," Ben grunted. But all right. Look had.

Just as he began to make his way back, the mossy head-shaped boulder moved; it turned the whole way left. Turned on a neck thick as a redwood and so close, Ben stumbled a good dozen steps back toward D.O., boots scuffing the poor man's asylum of the cleared path, feeling like he was falling the entire time.

D.O. bark-whined excitedly like she was saying, 'Told you so,' but all Ben could do was freeze.

[kylo-wrecked]

@protectmypeople ://

—☾—

The crowns of ancient maples are wet and black under the scratched mauve hull of sky. A sky ruled by the dark moon. The underbrush holds its breath. The wind howls with wolves, and blows through the open window of a stolen 1994 Dodge Ram Van, where the unconscious threat bound to the scaffold of a deconstructed car seat stirs to gold dice clinking on the rearview mirror.

Tang of rubber and pine, stale wax paper. Piles of books and yellowed, mummified gazettes, husks of flora suspended from a wire stabbed and stretched across the foam ceiling. The emptiness and fullness of a stranger's makeshift living space; the foam board and sleeping bag rolled into the shape of a body and folded into the backseat to make room for his.

The way the stranger hunches, his broad yet hollowed shape, he could be an iron fixture built into his vehicle. Only his scleras seem visible, the hard black shells within them, glinting out from the dark like the slightly upturned blades of bowie knives.

Many minutes pass before his mouth moves, and the stranger's voice is a molasses, a low and gentle timbre that drips between great pauses. Yet his interrogation begins without ceremony.

"What was your car doing parked outside this trail for three nights?"

The threat can't answer gagged. Makes muffled sounds the stranger seemingly deciphers.

"I know." The stranger pauses. "You weren't pursuing me. You have no idea who I am. Agent…"

He jimmies the badge. Brown gloves, stained thumbs—"B-E-L-L-A-M-Y. Special Agent Bellamy Blake. Issued in Washington D.C.."—and drops it onto the crease between Blake's thighs.

"What were you doing, Special Agent Blake? You have no jurisdiction here."

'Here' could mean the van or the dark of the woods. By the furor lurking under his stoic face, the stranger refers to something far beyond the laws of man, let alone New England.

"We're interstates." He lifts his head, parting his lips to lap at some potent, arcane power in the stormy air. A long pause. "Between New Hampshire and Massachusetts. An old college friend of yours lives there. The Ren told me. Hm."

His belief is so strong and permeable, this Ren seems to form in the small, cold pit of the van, dangling its hooked arm from the driver’s side window. With a strange, stilted gulp, the stranger sifts through rubbish. His hide-brown fingers pull a map from its contents, point to a speck of green among a topographical lexicon of tiny hand-drawn symbols.

"Mm." The stranger leans to expunge the balled-up t-shirt and tape from the mouth of the threat. His body musky and warm, his waffle shirt somewhat tacky to the touch, ripe with the earth, as if he'd clambered out of a shallow grave. "You have to answer my question now."

[kylo-wrecked]

@itmeanspeace sent:// [ 𝐰𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐭 ] : as sender is about to leave, receiver grabs them by the wrist,' and now it's the starter of all time

—☾—

New York City was a good place to disappear completely. Historically, Manhattan was the mythical megalopolis where people came to create themselves in Their image fading into ghosts and withered gods over time by choice or natural selection. Ben told himself he was back in the Apple temporarily. He was in public transit purgatory until further notice. That was all.

On this muggy, pre-fall day in limbo, Ben was on his way to 'pick up Rey from work,' though Rey, being both the mechanic and the one with a valid driver's license, ruled the wheels. Ben was a tolerated, eternally grateful passenger. Since his license had been suspended, Ben joked that he'd sold his car to a really talkative guy named Greg Arias. 

In all seriousness, he had.

Rey wasn't waiting outside Salerno's Body Shop when he rounded the corner of Ninth. A quick look inside the vestibule led to an awkward exchange with her boss, and when Ben shrugged through the open door of her supply room, he didn't find Rey there.

That was fine.

Ben then sloped into the main shop, Hell's Kitchen's largest industrial carousel. As he scanned the floor, a funny feeling crept up his shoulders, placing him in a chokehold. Not funny-ha-ha. Funny-uh-oh. Something was going to happen—but Ben usually had the sense that an anvil was about to drop on him any second, so, slouching, he took his leave, figuring he’d text Rey later. Or possibly tomorrow. Or in a year, when he renewed his license.

At the very moment Ben shuffled toward the front gate, he spotted a mechanic he'd never seen before, and stopped dead in his tracks. She had big red hair, wore an oversized logo t-shirt knotted at the bottom, and the air of a person ready to go home hours ago. The woman was also instantly and eerily familiar, which Ben hated. He preferred the possible reality (now lost and gone) in which the woman was a stranger. Usually, Ben would hang under the flag brackets and wait out her exit so he could lope off undetected, but he couldn't ignore the impulse that told him she was a ghost, like him. A ghost he knew.

Ben smoothed the hair on the back of his neck, his body locked in reverie. A matte orange Mustang rose on the lift behind him like a silly set piece, and Ben was a doubly silly prop hanging from limp strings. Then those strings snapped, and the shop spilled back in full color, its bite of machine music and chemical fumes eating at his senses. Though it couldn't have been happening, it was; the red-haired woman was real, and Ben recognized her. She was one of the twins.

Ben swelled with memories, memories of glowsticks in dark wardrobes, fortune-telling games with autumn leaves; a sprig of golden-yellow horse chestnut meant good luck. Did they ever remember? Those lonely nights? The games with Reagan and Shiloh, too, though she joined in less often. 

Shiloh was a bit different. Reagan took to dancing and music; her sister took the china clocks apart and put them back together again. She’d been the more private sister, and Ben and Shiloh could be quiet together.  

One day, he never saw them again. The twins became whispers, ghost stories told around solipsistic urban bonfires. Twins were haunted, they said. It was that simple. 

How much time had passed? Ben stared at the twin, open-mouthed. She stared back at him.

In the rise, the rush of feeling in his chest, the quickening pace of that blood-pumping organ under his ribs, Ben couldn't tell whether he was looking at Shiloh or Reagan. For a moment, Ben was convinced she was Reagan, utterly enthralled until reality backhanded him. Reagan was...

"Shiloh?" 

Ben froze as she did—the name, it'd just sort of slipped out.

Shiloh’s face moved. She recognized him. And that wasn't good, apparently. Maybe she heard about his 'little accident' in Singapore. Maybe she didn't remember him at all. She dove into the Ninth Avenue rabble like merfolk. And Shiloh let herself be swallowed and hustled along, surely in hope of losing him in the stream of people, but Ben, who knew the rhythm of all crowds like the hammering of his heart, who, with a modicum’s assertiveness, could push his way through, and didn't, just couldn't let her slip away, couldn't let it go. 

Occasionally, one of his shoulders would slam into someone going against the flow of traffic, and so as he hurried to catch Shiloh, he waffled between calling her name (which drew far too much attention but seemed fundamental to their situation) and apologizing to hapless pedestrians.

"Sorry—

Shiloh, hold—

Excuse me

Uh, okay…

Sorry, please move, sorry—

Shiloh, wait

P—Ow

oh my GODfffmnmOVE

Shiloh!

Wait—"

Finally, Ben caught Shiloh's wrist in his big, hot mitt. Held fast, though his grip felt clammy and weak, though she glared at him, alarmed, maybe angry? She still hadn't grown into her eyes. Ben hadn't grown into one or two attributes he wasn't going to name.

"Just wait."

He'd had enough of ghost stories.