Thank you for reading!

Originally, I conceived of this story as a gothic romance inspired by Wuthering Heights, with Kylo and Rey as the Heathcliff and Cathy of a galaxy far, far away. I wanted to write a story of obsessive, destructive love. Love is really the entire focus of this fic: how much we need it, what happens to us if we lack it, what we will do for it, what it feels like when we lose it, how it changes us to lose it. I wanted to tell a love story that was cohesive and believable, with true emotional resonance. At the end of the story, I want my readers to feel a sense of loss along with Kylo Ren. I also hope that readers find some solace in the Epilogue when father and son do end up together at long last.

I had lots of reasons for rewriting this fic a year after its original publication. The most important reason was that I never felt like this fic achieved the characters or the story arc I set out to write.

First, on the characters. My original version of Rey was just too passive and accepting. Ultimately, she seemed a bit out of character. I had this idea that she was so needy for attention that she would accept bad treatment from Kylo in exchange for it. That idea—that Rey could be a strong and capable survivor but also have horribly low self-esteem morphed into the Rey of Fulcrum. But it didn't really work here. This time around, Rey is more her usual self and she's making more of her own choices in her relationship with Kylo.

Kylo is different in the rewrite too. I wanted him to be a bit crazier, more of a Jekyl-and-Hyde dichotomy of good and bad. He really is a man 'torn apart' as he says in Force Awakens. There is good in him, but slowly over time we know the bad will overtake it. So when we seem him in the Epilogue, he is indeed a very Dark Sith. But, I like to think, not all Dark. For I do envision that Kylo will come to love his son like he came to love Rey.

The concepts of Dark and Light in this fic are different than in my other stories. Ultimately, I decided that the Dark Side is not some disease you catch from Snoke with all its quasi original sin overtones for poor Ben Solo. But it is necessary for the plot of this fic. A lot of what motivated the depiction of Darkness here was my desire to explain why Kylo has his tantrums and rages. It's funny in the movie when Kylo Ren destroys things with his lightsaber. But in my story there is a reason for those acts besides pure childishness. I had this idea that when you are consumed in Darkness, you lose a lot of awareness of anything other than yourself and your feelings. All your inhibitions fall away because in the end the Dark Side is selfish. That's why Kylo goes berserk now and then. It also helps to explain how Anakin in Ep.3 might end up choking his beloved Padme. Anakin, like Kylo, gets lost in his dark rage and does something tragic that deeply hurts the woman he loves the most. Kylo, like his grandfather, acts similarly and when he is in the throes of a Dark rage, he also hurts Rey. Both men are truly remorseful in the aftermath, I think.

This fic is a tragedy not just because of Rey's death but because Kylo's misplaced reverence for Dark Side causes it. He gets everything he wants in the end: Rey as his Sith wife full of Darkness. But it's a disaster because it kills her. He loses everything while thinking he's getting what he wants. Kylo has some naiveté in this fic, like Anakin in Ep. 3—both men ultimately are manipulated by the Sith. But for the most part, Kylo is really quite good intentioned where Rey is concerned. Far more so than Snoke in this tale, who from the beginning I think sees Rey as a way to get a new Skywalker and to mature his Apprentice into Darkness. The tragedy is threefold: Kylo who destroys what he loves and ends up alone, Rey who is betrayed into Darkness, and their abandoned son who is ultimately adrift and isolated by the Dark gift he does not know how to handle.

Kylo's tale is the same tragic story arc as Anakin in Ep. 3 who thinks he will save his wife by embracing the Dark Side. But in the end, he loses his Padme and loses most everything else. One of the reasons I wanted to revisit this story was to make this theme more apparent. I think everyone understood that Rey played the Padme role in this fic (that is hammered home again and again when Kylo calls Rey his Padme). But I don't think that the parallels between Kylo and Anakin were as apparent. The pain of Rey's memory will haunt Kylo all his days. Like Padme for Vader, Rey is the one true regret of Kylo's life choices. This theme makes You Need a Teacher the closest I come to writing a morality tale.

The story was always intended to end with Rey's death and I had no intention of changing the basic plot in this rewrite. I did want to amp up the fluff of the love story but also amp up the horror of it. There is a real Rosemary's Baby element to this story. In the end, Rey is very much preyed upon by Kylo. He wouldn't see it that way, of course, but it's true. Kylo loves Rey and in doing so he kills her.

I have written quite a few Sith stories in the past year and they are all dark tales to varying degrees. A lot of readers saw Fulcrum/Fulcrum Part Two as the darkest of the bunch (it's certainly the most brutal version of Kylo), but it has always been my private view that You Need a Teacher is by far the most bleak story. Here are two people with incredible power and damaged, neglected hearts trying to connect across a war. Of course, it's going to end badly. And the victims include not only themselves, but the son neither of them gets to raise. Their son finds his father in the Epilogue and I hope that's a bittersweet and ambiguous moment. You want father and son to find one another because Kylo is probably in the best position of anyone to help poor Ben. But you know that the cycle of Skywalker drama has begun all over again. And that's something Kylo never wanted but can't seem to be able to prevent. This concept of the Skywalker mess as a cycle is a prominent theme in my Reylo story Immune to the Light, and it was very much on my mind during this rewrite.

When I begin to craft a story, I start with a basic set-up in mind and I envision a turning point of conflict. And then I work backwards and forwards from that plot point. Here, the turning point is the showdown between Kylo-Rey-Luke and Leia. I loved the idea of our would-be lovers getting found out and then Luke Skywalker being shamed by Kylo into letting Rey go.

I also love a good Skywalker family brawl. There is at least one (sometimes several!) in every one of my stories. The outcomes and the participants change but the drama is all the same. I think my favorite Skywalker fight is in Fulcrum Part Two when Kylo loses it watching Snoke resurrect his dead wife Shan. And, well, the consequences of that blow-up are ugly. But by far the most intense Skywalker brawl is Kylo versus Leia towards the end of Fulcrum. I wrote that chapter from Kylo's perspective initially but then decided to only show it in memories/flashbacks because it was just too vicious and harsh to see it unfold real-time. It was too dark, even for Fulcrum. But still, Fulcrum Chapter 31 is my favorite writing of that story; I adoring my anti-heroes achingly vulnerable in the arms of their beloved. Sadly, that sort of scene never fit into this story's plot.

I also love it when hero Kylo gets to make a dashing entrance to save our girl. The showdown between Kylo-Rey-Luke and Leia in this fic became the origin of the Kylo-Luke showdown towards the end of Fulcrum with Kylo leaping down from his shuttle to freeze an entire battlefield worth of blaster bolts around Rey. I feel as though we see a lot of pissed off, bumbling Kylo in Force Awakens. So I like to write a commanding badass Kylo now and then who swoops in to save the day. I mean, wouldn't you go running headlong into this guy's arms at the end? Don't get me wrong—I'm all for strong women who can save themselves. But every once and awhile, you have to let the hero be the hero.

The revised version of this story has references here and there to Snoke's Jedi wife. For those who are interested, the tale of the unsuspecting Old Republic era Jedi girl meeting Darth Plagueis at a picnic is told in Fifth Wife. Snoke is a remote figure in this tale-he's not the ladykiller smug wine-loving Sith of my other tales. In this story, he's more of a plot device than a character.

This fic has a lot less of the extemporizing on politics and other stuff that shows up in my other fics. It's a straightforward love story. This was intentional—I wanted to focus on the characters' motivations and choices primarily and less on the context of their relationship. The war is a distant backdrop for this story, unlike my other fics (esp. Fulcrum) where the war itself is a bit of a protagonist.

Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa both appear in this story mostly to move the plot forward. I am a long-time Princess Leia fan, and I view her as the moral center to the Star Wars universe. My Kylo Ren is disappointed by his mother, but doesn't hate her the way he hated his father Han Solo. In the end, he turns to his mother for help because don't we all want our mother to make it alright?

The Luke Skywalker of Force Awakens is very much an enigma to me, but I tried to give his character a sense of loss and anger from what has transpired. At least in ROTJ, Luke shows some dark tendencies so I extrapolated that to suggest that he too has struggled with darkness at times. I think that makes him a more interesting character too.

Thanks again for reading. I hope you enjoyed this and it was worth the investment of your time.