A/N: One-shot that could conceivably expand. This was hard to write.
He stood outside the door, one gloved hand on the smooth, featureless wall, and took a breath.
The tempest was raging, swirling, and it was like breathing in smoke; he had to lower his head and clench his jaw. In that moment, all he wanted to do was turn on his heel, and flee from this uncertainty and the pull he could not deny to the woman on the other side of that door. He didn't want to see her. Not now. He didn't want to see her.
She's grieving. Rey's voice in his head; an exchange from minutes ago. She wants to see you. Let her have this one thing.
No, he'd responded, with a petulance he heard and hated but could not keep from his voice. She created this situation. They could have surrendered. And she doesn't want to see me. Of course she doesn't. Not after this.
Rey had fixed him with that look; the look that said simply we can't lie to each other - remember?
She's your mother, she'd said. And that had been all.
And so here he stood, listening vaguely to the night-cycle sounds of the ship and desperately angry at himself for having been compelled to come this far. But... but. To go back to Rey and tell her that he had had so little courage that he'd walked away from a closed and silent door was unthinkable. To go forward was madness. And as the split between the two grew so did his humiliated anger, and he slammed his hand onto the door controls hard and all of a sudden, was darkness.
Silence.
And her presence.
Ren took three steps into the room, not registering the echo of his passage on the floor or the sound of something metallic jangling faintly from his boots. Not hearing the creaking of leather or the air recyclers humming behind the walls.
He could hear her breathing.
Leia Organa, formerly of Alderaan, General of the Resistance and the last of the Rebellion against the Empire, lay on the bed on the other side of the room, and her grief was a palpable thing. He felt it crash into him like a wave, rocking him momentarily until he gritted his teeth and forced his mind closed against it. This is not my fault, he spat out in his head. This is—
One step now.
He'd ask her if she needed anything, he decided with a lift of his jaw. He'd be civil as befitting the Supreme Leader upon the eve of his greatest triumph, he wouldn't gloat, and then Rey would be satisfied and they could move onto other thi—
Leia stirred.
And as Ren put a knee on the edge of the bed, she reached out to him in her sleep as if she'd known he was coming all along.
"Oh... sweetheart," she murmured, her voice thick. "Did you have a bad dream?"
Silence.
Two heartbeats.
And Kylo Ren's heart imploded.
His pain rose up like a lumbering beast, like a thing buried and long left for dead; the fracture so profound it was like an audible sound... a glacier, perhaps, finally bursting beneath its own weight.
She would have sworn she heard it; with her hand on his face Leia felt it. Felt him stiffen and lock, try to disappear into the darkness and deny it. But it was simply too big. And as she came fully awake and understood in an instant her error, she realized that she had only one path in this moment. One chance, one choice.
"It's all right," she whispered softly, keeping her sleep-slurry voice. Carefully - so carefully - she slipped a hand behind his neck and pulled him toward her. Gently. "It's all right, sweetheart, I'm here."
He resisted for a moment, shaking his head, over and over: no. No. No. But Leia kept her hold on him and made some comforting noise, feeling his sweat-damp hair as he trembled beside her.
And in one sweeping, crushing, terrible moment, a dreadnought that all else fled before, she heard his voice in her mind; whether it was his actual thought or only what she felt, she didn't know.
Yes... I dreamt I turned to the dark side and then it all fell apart.
Everything else was gone in that instant. Before either of them knew what was happening her arms were around him, and she could feel the heat baking off him in waves. Was he ill? Exhausted? Injured? Something else?
No. As she held him, her conflicted heart torn between his suffering and her own, she could feel the barest tremor, the faintest shake to his shoulders. No sound escaped him, but when her fingers brushed his jaw - the furrow of that awful scar like an exclamation in the dark - she felt the wetness there.
He was weeping.
Leia allowed herself a flash of white-hot hatred for Snoke, and all he'd passed on - who taught my son to grieve soundlessly? To show nothing on the outside, to cry without voice? - and then all was eclipsed again by the pain she felt. Shrouded in darkness and so desperately alone.
She should hate him. She should blame him, should hold him accountable for all he'd done. The losses, the pain, the torture and maiming of her people. The brutality.
And Han.
A small choked sob. Muffled, against her chest. That constant headshake, negation, rejection, refusal. But he did not pull away. And Leia did not release him.
Luke: No one is ever truly gone.
In her mind, Rey's voice: he's your son.
"I know," Leia murmured, smoothing Ren's hair and resting her forehead against his. Just like she knew this was folly, folly, folly: her people were gone, her son was the commander of the First Order, meant to crown himself Emperor and try with all his considerable might to convince their last Jedi to join him. And they were connected, beyond all imagining, there would be no denying that.
More, she truly believed Rey loved him. And if her son was still capable of love, this girl would have his heart; Leia knew that as well as she knew her own, as well as she knew she feared the disastrous end should Rey refuse him.
But kindness ran as deep in Leia Organa as the steel, bred into her blood from the Naboo line and taught as sacred by Breha and Bail from her earliest hours.
And still, and still, he was her son.
So she held him, as he wept, and stroked his hair; she could feel his confusion, his hate and his pain. Let him have this one moment outside of time, let him know that he still has that spark. Let him, for just an instant, be true. This pain proves Luke right; his grief means that maybe he can still be reached. Let me tend that seed that Rey has planted; Force willing, I will be alive to see it grow.
A breath in the silence, and then she took the chance.
"Ben," she whispered. "It's all right."