"He tried too hard." That's all there was to it, in the end. He couldn't accept the parts of Ben Solo that had been dark from the moment he was born, and because of that, they had no choice but to grow.

"He tried not to let it show, but he was afraid of me. I saw it." Long before he'd ever expected that fear to turn against him in the way that it did, he had seen the cracks forming. For a long time, he tried to live up to what his uncle had wanted from him. What a silly notion that was. "And then one night, I woke up to him holding a lit saber over me in my sleep."