Much like what Rey and Leia felt when Luke died, Kylo Ren felt it too. Only it didn't feel like peace and purpose, it felt like a slap in the face.
He had intended to slaughter Luke just moments before, only to be made to feel like a child when he realized that Luke had used the Force to project himself as a distraction to aid in the escape of what was left of the Resistance. Kylo might not have felt so dejected if he had been the one to kill Luke. He truly did want the satisfaction of getting revenge on his former master who only saw the worst in him and made it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The new Supreme Leader of the First Order didn't have time for a moment of silence or even a second to breathe; he only had time to spout orders and attempt to formulate a plan.
The anxiety consumed him, only managing to get worse when he finally had the chance to be alone. Although he remained physically alone, the Force connected him with Rey in a way that could only be described as spiritual. She stared back at him and he hoped that she would say something, anything. He wished that maybe she could see that something inside him was still good and invite him to come with her. Yet neither of those things happened. Kylo found himself unable to speak or move; instead, he watched her close the door to the ship that he'd been on with his family countless times in a past life. The short and meaningless life spent as Ben Solo.
Rey severed the connection and was now out of his reach in more ways than one. What added insult to injury was the fact that she was leaving on the ship that had once been known as his parents' ship.
From what he knew of Rey's interactions with both his father and his mother, he gathered that Rey was the child that his parents would have wanted if they were capable of getting a do-over on their job of parenthood. So somehow, it was fitting. Though Kylo thought if Rey had experienced the unstable upbringing he'd had, she probably would have turned too.
He looked down at his gloved hand, where he held the dice that hung in the very ship that the most important people in his life were leaving on. As soon as he gave attention to the shiny gold object, it faded from his view until he no longer saw it or felt its weight. The memories hit him all at once. The dice hung in their ship and he would watch them clink together on every trip when they were all together and they were a family.
Back when they were a family, Ben's father would tell tall tales about his adventures and the Force and the Jedi; Ben's mother would modestly correct the stories to her son, but never to whatever house guests that her husband happened to be telling these stories to.
Back when they were a family, Ben would feign frustration each time his mother would look at him in the morning and tell him he looked taller. He would groan as she made him stand against the wall where she would make another mark in pencil that would prove that he was indeed growing. Yet, he couldn't deny that he was secretly hoping he'd be taller than his father someday. Based on the last time he would ever see his father, this wish appeared to have come true.
Back when they were a family, his father would try a little bit harder than he had to in order to maintain a relationship with his son since he didn't have the same connection that Ben had with his mother. So they would take special trips together sometimes, just the two of them. His father was the one who showed him how to pilot a ship and how to shoot a blaster.
As Ben grew older, his father began to leave a lot, his mother would work a lot to deal with the loneliness she felt when he was gone, and young Ben Solo felt that he was left to face the world - and himself - alone. He'd learned how to pilot a ship, how to shoot a blaster, how to understand Wookiee, and someday through his Uncle Luke he was going to learn how to wield a lightsaber and become stronger with the Force. Of all the things he had learned or was due to learn, no one ever taught him what to do with the bad thoughts that were getting increasingly worse as time went on.
The bad thoughts were dismissed as teenage rage when Ben gathered the courage to speak of them, and he was sent to Luke sooner than they'd planned. So when a certain humanoid alien spilled the secrets that his family had desperately tried to keep from him; namely, how his grandfather had dealt with bad thoughts through the dark side of the Force, it made sense. It didn't feel right, but it made sense. The more time he spent with Snoke, the more sense it seemed to make, and the more he began to admire Darth Vader. Much like his grandfather, there was no place for someone with thoughts like Ben in the light side of the Force.
He tried to listen to both Snoke and to Luke, though he knew that at some point he would have to make a choice between the two conflicting points of view. When Ben woke up to find his uncle threateningly holding a lightsaber over him, he knew what he had to do.
Snoke was demeaning and would hurt Ben with words, yet Snoke had never tried to murder him, at least with Snoke he felt that his life might be spared.
Now Snoke is gone, Luke is gone, and Kylo has no master or leader. He's in complete control of himself and the whole First Order.
And somehow, he's never felt such a lack of control in his life.
When he started his morning back on his base, the day after the would-have-been massacre, the calm orderliness was unnerving. They were winning, yes, but they'd lost what could have been the final battle by letting the Resistance escape. It was his own fault too. What a great fearless leader he turned out to be.
The first thing he did after assuming his new position was fail. It suited him.
While every eating creature in the First Order took their shifts to eat breakfast, Kylo avoided the kitchen as if the food would be the sole perpetrator for every emotion that he was trying to keep under lock and key. After he had failed the entire First Order, it didn't seem right to go on like nothing had happened. A single skipped meal wouldn't ruin him, and the punishment was subtle enough to go unnoticed.
More than anything, he just didn't want to interact with anyone.
Instead of eating breakfast, he found himself walking about aimlessly, pretending to give great attention to every monitor, every stormtrooper he passed, every crack in the wall that he'd probably made in anger but honestly didn't remember the reason for any longer. No one would say a word because Kylo Ren was known for killing people without hesitation and force-choking people if they said something that made him upset. No one would dare to tell him what happened with the Resistance was his own fault and that if he hadn't spent so much time trying to kill his former master that they could have finished this thing for good. He already knew it, but if anyone dared to speak it, they knew his anger would flare and he would attack. Though, he would only attack because the dark side doesn't hesitate, not necessarily because it would be his first instinct to do so.
He remembered how if he went too long without eating as a young boy his temper would rise and he would snap at everyone and everything. His mother would notice quickly and tell him his blood sugar was low and make him something to eat, and afterward, he would feel significantly less angry. If he waited long enough maybe the hunger would turn into anger and he wouldn't have to calculate every single move he made. He could be pulled out of this melancholia into a state of being that held some familiarity.
Out of some sick combination of self-hatred and morbid curiosity, he didn't eat anything that day.
As expected, no one said anything.
–
He awakened the following morning with a clear head and an empty stomach. The pathways in his mind weren't as chaotic as he presumed they would be, it felt more like order and control. Either way, the change was welcomed.
Instead of eating breakfast, he immediately went to work on plans to bring order to the galaxy by destroying the Resistance.
Instead of eating lunch, he planned a time for the departure of a few TIE fighters for a special mission to try to find the Resistance base.
Instead of eating dinner, he drank water until he felt sick and curled up on the floor in the fetal position and waited for the pangs of hunger wracking his body to dissipate.
–
The first person to say something is Hux. "You haven't come to a meal in two days."
"I know," Kylo said.
–
Based on Hux's observation, Kylo decided that his curiosity was satisfied after his two days without food and that maybe he'd suffered enough for his recent failures. If he were to say he was upset about having to return to his normal eating patterns, he'd be lying.
When he sat in front of his plate of food though, something felt very wrong. He looked closely at the plate, carefully examining each component of the meal that was not at all dissimilar to that of everyone else. It seemed odd to him that everyone had more or less the same amount of food, a concept that hadn't struck him before. Surely not everyone in the First Order had the exact same energy requirements. His stomach was begging for attention, the savory smell only making the sensation of hunger that much more palpable.
He wasn't prepared for how his body would tremble in terror at the mere thought of eating the meal in front of him nor the fact that something in his brain would remind him he didn't deserve nourishment. His body wanted it desperately; the sounds coming from his stomach were so clamorous that Kylo wanted to punch his abdomen just to quiet it and avoid the unwanted attention.
A calculating expression graced his face. If he ate half of the meal in front of him, his body would have something in it and be able to run a little bit better. If he left the other half on the plate, his brain would still be able to function without having to worry about accidentally triggering other emotions.
By the time he even starts eating, everyone else is halfway finished. That works, since by the time he eats half of his meal, everyone else will be finished, and they will be none the wiser.
–
The routine dragged on for days, and there appeared to be no discernible expiration date. Kylo made sure to eat, but to never eat quite enough to satisfy the hunger he felt deep inside. He blamed his supposed lack of appetite on a stomach illness or a topic that had come up at the table that he could claim bothered him deeply. It was important to answer the questions that no one was asking about him and his eating habits. He didn't even see the questions floating around in their brains, but if he could make the questions cease before they appear, it would be for the best.
The meals give him just enough energy to walk around the base, practice his battle skills, and fall asleep at night. The meals keep him just hungry enough to give him the semblance of being in control of his thoughts and emotions. Whether he was actually in control or just didn't have the energy to think or feel anything his body deemed unnecessary, he wasn't sure. He didn't find that it made much of a difference either way.
This hadn't been the first time that he withheld food from himself. He'd found himself skipping meals every once in a while when he was too busy to eat, or more often, when he needed to punish himself for something. But restricting his food for longer than a day or so was something that he had never done before; so although he was used to feeling the symptoms afflicting his brain and body that his mother explained away as low blood sugar, he wasn't used to how restricting food for an extended period of time affected his thought process.
His morbid curiosity only grew stronger with each passing day.
–
Kylo saw Rey for the first time in ten days. The night had fallen upon his base hours ago, and the sight of Rey felt like the first glimpse of the sun after a storm that seemed like it would never cease.
"You too?" Kylo asked, seeing very clearly that she'd been trying to sleep to, wherever she was in the galaxy.
Rey blinked in response as all hope of finding sleep vanished. "Why are we doing this now?" She sighed in exasperation. Her frustration was quickly noted by Kylo. Maybe he was wrong in his comparison of sunshine. Maybe it was more like the rain was still pouring, just not quite as heavily, and for a brief moment, it felt like there was hope that the storm would cease.
"I don't know, it's not like I have control over it."
A dull ache struck Rey in the pit of her stomach; she didn't quite understand what she was feeling, nor what it meant. Kylo didn't appear to be injured, so she wondered if the feeling was his and she was feeling it through the Force bond, or if somehow it was her own after all. Either way, she didn't find it appropriate to ask.
"So why are you up?" Rey asked.
"I don't think you'll want to hear it," Kylo said in a threatening tone. Rey reasonably assumed this was a threat to her or the Resistance.
"And that's what's keeping me up..." The look in Rey's eyes was that of someone who was staring death in the face, yet she failed to realize that maybe that was the same look in Kylo's eyes as well.
"What do you think I'm doing?" Kylo asked with a bit of fear and curiosity. How this Force bond worked, he still wasn't quite sure. How much did she know?
"Plotting against the Resistance," Rey said in an accusatory tone as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Kylo scoffed. It was both a sound of relief, but also that of dejection. He didn't want her to know what he was doing, but he also didn't want her thinking that he saw her only as a tool to be used in aiding the First Order in destroying the Resistance. While that's what she was to him this entire time more or less, the Force bond they shared changed that. Even if he destroyed the entire Resistance fleet, he'd go out of his way to spare her, no matter what he might have said to the contrary.
"You think you know me so well," Kylo said in a lower pitch, as if he were trying to entice her.
"I thought so, Ben."
Rey's face faded from Kylo's view as their Force bond concluded and the pair were then again faced with their own surroundings and insomnia. Rey to a sleepless night as Finn tended to a recovering Rose, and Kylo to a sleepless night of hunger and intrusive thoughts about food.
In a state of being that fell somewhere between consciousness and dreaming, Kylo rose from his bed in the middle of the night, where no one would catch him in an act that he deemed as being quite shameful. Hunger will wear on anyone, and Kylo hadn't experienced much in the way of hunger until now. Not really.
What his parents lacked in emotional availability they made up for in an overabundance of things. He never went without food or water or clothing or a place to sleep. He just didn't always have someone to share a meal with, or someone to tell him if the items of clothing he was wearing looked good together, or someone to say goodnight to.
Either way, the hunger was wearing on him and his craving for food was growing more intense day by day. If he snuck into the kitchen when the fewest amount of beings were conscious, he could probably avoid being greeted with disdainful glances.
The kitchen was all but abandoned when he reached it. He'd never really noticed how big and vast the room was. Anytime he'd occupied it, he was one of hundreds. If he had been one of hundreds in the room, the embarrassment alone would have been enough to make him leave just as quickly as he'd come in. The incongruous truth was that he wanted to be seen eating, he wanted to convince his subordinates that he was in good enough condition to be their leader, yet eating was something that his brain was beginning to associate with shame and shame was something that must be hidden at all costs.
As Kylo rummaged through the food in the kitchen, he found his body was working faster than his mind. His brain couldn't formulate enough thoughts to stop him from what he was doing, his body was overriding his thoughts of panic and doom, for all his body was yearning for was food.
The next morning was a bit more foggy, even after spending nearly an hour examining his stomach, he couldn't determine whether it was a dream or if it actually happened, but he felt indescribably guilty for it. Based on the slight distention of his stomach - or had it always looked like that? - he comes to the conclusion that it had actually happened in a horrible lapse of judgment. Then and there, he swore to himself that he would never lose control like that again.