I'm Reylo garbage. No one is surprised, so I wrote angst.
Naturally, I don't own Star Wars in any manner.
There are things he cannot destroy.
Kylo Ren had believed subduing the girl would be like slashing with his saber, indiscriminate — as natural and mechanical as driving the blade into glass or chrome or flesh. He couldn't have predicted how she'd breach his defenses, divulging, stripping him bare — a failure no one really grasps, not her, not even him. No one in the First Order considers the things that don't crumple under force, not when the only way they know to win something is to shatter it. She is strong, hisses Snoke; she will be useful. He doesn't realize that when you try to break light, you only get more light.
She seeks to undo him, he thinks, even worlds away — night after night of nothing but irritating snatches of sight and sound, undissapating, somehow one with yet separate from the stark monochrome world that surrounds him. If he wills it, he can embrace the burgeoning connection as a boon, a fresh asset for the First Order to exploit. Kylo Ren knows the principles of refraction, dispersion; but no one's ever taught him the reverse, when memories as spots of light decide to come together blue in the shape of a girl. The scavenger is not someone he can mute with violence or persuasion; she bruises and bends, but not readily, and from their brief but fervent encounter Kylo Ren knows that she is different — the link between them a thing to be nurtured and developed until the day he is ready to claim her for the Dark.
It's not until a few close encounters of the mind (stolen stretches of time measured in seconds, in passing stars) that he realizes she's reading him too, and Ren can feel himself being pulled in. And he can't break her - not with his blade, not with his mind. Not just because there's no sound or shatter loud enough to make him forget that she's everything he isn't.
It's she who speaks out first, tests the limits of the bond that they both know exists but cannot entirely scope, like an animal sampling a new environment (she is in this, in every sense a rat, despite her undeniable abilities); she's a quiet tug on the corners of his mind, and if he probes a little further he can see her outline — wary, licking up the uncertainty she's too unskilled to conceal and too proud to admit.
I know you're there. Low and lilting voice, like light piercing the veil. (I can hear you, see you, feel —)
"Are you lonely?" He'd implied it as her captor; he asks it of her now. Recalls her as a prisoner, tension crying out in her limbs, her jaw. Taut like a wire and only seconds from splitting, in darkness where she belonged to him and only him. "Initiating a conversation with someone who isn't there?"
I'm not. It's only half a lie. Her anxiety, her anger flow into him like waves. Part of him wants to reach in and devour those feelings, to steal into the dark spaces of her and be swept up by the sweet-scented sea of her consciousness, but the rest of him gags on the taste. She doesn't resist him, but reveals no secrets, no maps of any kind; Ren can see only the tranquility of a landscape in sheets of nihilistic blue, the possibility of an island. Memories like wind when he delves deeper.
Get out of my head, she orders at last (small steady grasp of the Force a hand on the door of her mind, itching to close).
"Not until you tell me where to find Skywalker." Where to find you, he does not say.
It's not your right. And neither am I.
The rage is burning in his eyes when she pushes him out. It sparks and dies there just as Ren touches his face where her scar slashes clean through, and reminds himself that these are only mind games — the scavenger, the island, the Force heavy in his ears. Eventually, he ceases shaking.
The bond strengthens as they do. He catches her in glimpses. Focused, indefatigable beside her master — she in her desert rags and he in simple robes, vivid in Kylo Ren's head but still wholly, infuriatingly out of reach. She'll never willingly betray their location, but he can glean other things from her — thoughts and feelings hidden from his uncle, memories like holo-films to be viewed at his leisure. (Or so it would be, if he didn't know how she watches him, too.)
The girl's a mess of consciousness. Sometimes he looks in and there's only empty space, until Kylo Ren reaches deeper and finds another star. She feels him occupy her mind (meets him with words, with petty threats). She thinks of home, of the life she knew, combing through countless scraps of ancient metal with just as many stories to tell. Sometimes she thinks of the traitor, or the pretty-faced pilot, waiting for her so many worlds apart. And smiles, but it's a brief and painful thing, one that she wills away with meditation. The girl is such a dutiful student already. Kylo Ren does nothing to hide his disgust.
She's there, too, behind his eyes, behind his mask; a lump at his throat that drums like knuckles at a door. Securing access, taking — a spectator to Ren in darkness, Ren training with his Knights, Ren conversing tactics with Hux. His days and nights are measured in her, in their Force-bond that hums bright and blue and she's becoming entirely too good at seizing control. "Let me in," he commands, not for the first time; but what he's come to mean is turn over to me, open to me; let me possess your mind (as you have mine).
At times, Kylo Ren can nearly taste himself in her laughter.
There are occasions when he thinks perhaps she has a plan, some ill-founded scheme to bring him to Light by way of attrition; but he can feel there's something storming inside her, too (desire as shifting sand that rushes into him like her light, only never quite as blue). Each passing night her presence is stronger, and Ren wants nothing more than to find her, to teach her, to bend her to his will. To make her like him.
"Let me in," he says another day, and knows that she hears, feels the noxious vein of want on his tongue. "Or I'll come for you myself. I'll come for you, and I'll slaughter you like I did that man you so admired."
You lie, Kylo Ren, she replies (showing him her teeth, her eyes, shameless). You lie to me, and to the Order, but mostly you lie to yourself. It's your mask, much more so than the thing that hides your face.
The darkness chokes his scream.
It's a thoughtless exercise to cast away his father. The man is a husk, a relic of a former life, like a junked ship lost to time and space. It isn't so with her (she knows). He's connected to her in the same ineffable manner in which he's detached himself from his father, yet different in a way he can't comprehend. Kylo Ren has watched Ben Solo die, a slow and painful choke. He's watched his father dying, too; only with much more contempt and less regret.
Are you so keen on training me, whom you bested? Scratches the thought in him, a frustrating rap on a hard surface; she is an expert in opening doors that Ren cannot, cannot force shut himself. A nothing girl from Jakku? I wonder what your superiors must think of that.
She doesn't speak of the scars (fresh and red and teachers of their own) though he knows she can see the angry slashes, if she's inclined. Pain keeps him faithful. And there's something like sadness pressing sudden to his chest, but Kylo Ren does not have a head for sentiment; Kylo Ren is rational where Ben was not; Kylo Ren knows the girl is nothing more than an annoyance, a vermin rat — not rival, not pupil, not anything of his. Yet her pity stings him, more so than any punishment.
When the connection opens he can see her in her muted garb (drab hues of a Padawan like ashes in his mouth). No, she is not his; but he can imagine her in dark colors, her hair loosed over her shoulders, thriving under Kylo Ren's tutelage. When she swings his grandfather's blade, he imagines a petulant curve of lips, eyes reflecting red instead of blue: reckless, alive, burning without a whisper of Light. And come nightfall, when she sheds the hated clothing in pursuit of sleep, Ren bares himself to her as well (black fabric falling from his frame like smoke) — and dares to think they might be this way, any way the same.
In his dreams he paints her red, and doesn't let himself think she is beautiful (but knows that she feels it, because she dreams him too).
He can't remember when he first begins to wake in the middle of the night, feeling-not-feeling her body splayed over his hips like a bruise. Wakes to the Force palpable around him and the girl deep in his mind, fingers slipping down her thighs as she breathes I hate you, I hate you, I hate you — and he'd almost believe, if not for the scarred naked shape of him threading her thoughts or the low dark squeak of his name she makes when she comes. She whispers him at night.
(She is not these tainted words; she lives in a world of day-to-day, a world of good and evil clearly defined. She is not afraid of the dark. These words will not turn her, he knows, even as he curses her name like a dying star.)
She calls out, not just to Kylo Ren but to the one on the other side — and he can feel the small hands gripping tight, the claw and tug of them around the phantom pains in his chest, white and warm and just this side of familiar. He can see them, her fingers blushed with his blood, pressing to his throat his lips his hair his heart that beats alone, afraid, the only sound in this empty darkness thick as sand, thick as greed, so much that he can nearly taste — (I know who you really are —)
The fever in the young girl's eyes betrays her, even as Ren gives in and takes himself in hand, imagining only her fingers and power beyond stars. And she's thin, she's rangy, but he is too; he bends like a whim, violent strokes (this isn't control, this isn't control).
Ben, she breathes, and he doesn't protest, doesn't even think to. She's Light, burning blue; she's the call he's made it his life's mission to resist, and Kylo Ren comes harder than he ever has in his life.
She's taken to conversing openly by the time the nights and the noises in Ren's ears start to meld together, when they are somehow more than objects in space. She approaches him as an equal, unafraid and powerful and so smugly sensible it makes him want to scream. I'm getting stronger, she prods in that voice Ren knows, just like he's come to know the tentative hands around his heart, or the shock of blue that blinds his vision at the most inconvenient moments, a light so far-off and he cannot break —
(There's no reason for his heart to be stained blue, except that it is, and so are the pair of eyes that pierce it straight through — the hands, the voice —)
"I will find you," he promises, when next she summons her blade to her hands. "I'll find you and your island and I'll take you as my own. I can still take whatever I want from you." And breathes, and thinks: rat.
I am no rat, the girl bites back, nor do you see me as one. Her grin is a brush of warmth (under that blue, blue sky), and she adds: come take it.
So he lives, so he wakes, and he is not Kylo Ren; and he wants, he seeks, he calls for (Rey).
Her fingers are splayed out over his heart, wedges of emptiness between them; he makes a fist so as to not see himself in the spaces.
He is mostly still Ben where it counts, apparently, and there are things Ren cannot destroy.