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"we are embers from the same fire
we are dust from the same star"
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Ben knows that the color he's missing is green. Forests and fields and gardens in bloom: they're all grey to his eyes. He wears a length of rope around his wrist—green, his mother promises—so that he'll see it right away when he meets the boy or girl he's bound to.
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When he's twelve, Ben discovers that his father still can't see blue.
Dad is on-world, his first trip home in weeks, and his family takes a trip to the beach. Ben learns how to swim, then lounges on the sandy Naboo shore, soaking up afternoon sunlight until the warmth lulls him to sleep.
He wakes to find his parents laughing, their shadows casting a cool shadow over him. They make fun of his uneven sunburn, and Ben is on the verge of sitting up and complaining about it when his mother whispers, "The sky was so blue today. It's a shame you couldn't see it."
"I don't need to," Dad says, his voice suddenly serious and gruff. "The view I've got is just fine by me, thanks."
Ben can't sleep that night. He knows, as well as any boy his age, what the lack of each color means, and blue is the color of safety, steadfastness, home. It's said that people who see without it are restless souls. Wanderers and troublemakers who'll never find satisfaction until they meet their mates.
A month later, Ben corners his father while he's making repairs on the Falcon, and asks, "Will you leave us if you find her? The woman who could give you blue?"
Dad drops his wrench, cusses, and scrubs a hand over his face. "I, uh, did find her, when you were three."
"What?" Ben asks. "Then—why can't you see it?"
Dad tries to wave him closer, but Ben stays put. "Well I did, for a few hours, and that wasn't half-bad—I finally understood why people make such a fuss about the sky."
His father smiles at him expectantly, like he thinks this is funny. When Ben doesn't smile back, he clears his throat and says, "Anyway, her name was Meera, and it was good to meet her, even if it didn't change anything for me. After I said goodbye, and told her I wasn't interested in all the soulmate shit, the blue went away again."
Ben crosses his arms over his chest. "How can you not care? The Force makes our matches. Uncle Luke said so."
"Yeah, well I've had that conversation with Luke too, and I'll tell you what I told him: the Force can take the color blue and shove it." Dad throws an arm around Ben's shoulders and says, "I don't need somebody to keep me tied down. Half the reason I love your mother so damn much is that she knows who I am, without some missing puzzle piece that's supposed to fix me, and she still wants what I've got to offer."
It's not an answer Ben likes very much, but it's the only one he's going to get.
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Green is the color of growth and transformation. People blind to it wrestle with their own hearts. They get tangled up in their shortcomings, frozen by the need for change that they have little capacity to make.
At least, this is what Ben has always heard, and it terrifies him. As the years pass, he understands that there is something wrong, something rotten right down to his blood and bones. And that rottenness will ruin him if he doesn't find his mate soon.
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Green is a long-dead dream, one that does not belong to Kylo Ren. He buried it with a bracelet of rope; he destroyed it, same as he destroyed the boy he once was.
But when Kylo lays eyes on the scavenger girl, the woods come to life. Takodana's empty grey gives way to new, vibrant color. It's stunning, overwhelming, so beautiful that the sight of it shocks him into stillness.
The girl gasps, her eyes trained on his lightsaber, her expression hungry and repulsed at once.
Red, Kylo thinks. She'd been missing red, before this moment.
It fills him with more pride than it should, because red is the color of passion, provocation, and fury. He's always heard that the red-blind are a cold sort. Pragmatic and patient above all else, until they meet the one who will drive them to take risks, to indulge their impulses, to choose selfishly instead of wisely. This is what he's meant to bring her: the kind of love that burns.
She's ready to bolt—fear is written all over her—but he can't let her run, not when he's only just found her. Kylo draws the girl into unconsciousness with one measly push through the Force. He catches her before she falls, lifts her into his arms, and carries her back to his ship.
On the long walk out of the forest, he keeps his gaze trained ahead, focused on the task at hand, but all around him the world is green, green, green.
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The scavenger's name is Rey, and she's seen the missing piece of that elusive map to Luke Skywalker. Kylo knows he should only care about prying it from her memory, but—
"It's red, isn't it?" he asks. "The color I brought you."
Rey won't meet his eyes when she says, "What does it matter?"
Kylo takes off his helmet, sets it aside, and approaches her. She's restrained in the interrogation chair, a tool that has seen more blood than he wants to consider right now.
Rey frowns, her indifferent expression giving way to confusion. It seems he surprised her by removing his mask, and Kylo wonders what she thinks of him, whether she finds him pleasant or disappointing to look on. Not that he should concern himself with that.
He traces the curve of her cheek, his touch so light that he can barely feel her warmth through his gloves. "It matters because we're bound to each other. For better or worse, this is what the Force wills."
Rey glares at him so hatefully that it kindles a flare of shame under his skin.
"I don't care," she says.
Kylo trails his fingers across her jaw, then the pale line of her throat, down to the delicate hollow between her collarbones. Rey turns away from him and hisses, "Not even the Force could make me want a creature like you."
Kylo unlocks her restraints, steps back, and smiles. "We'll see."
It's stupid, releasing an enemy who's strong in the Force, but he needs to face her on equal footing.
Rey scrambles out of the interrogation chair. Though she doesn't attack him, the way Kylo expected, she keeps her distance. Waiting and watching, until he makes the first move.
He rushes to her, cutting through the space between them, and pushes Rey against the wall. She looks up at him, her pretty lips turned down in a scowl, and somehow she's even more beautiful when she's angry.
He bends lower, closer. "You know what red means, don't you?"
Rey shoves at his chest, but he's too tall, too solid, for it to move him. They grapple, yanking and pushing each other, until Kylo has her pinned, caught between his body and the wall. They touch, their hands lingering too long, too intimately, for a proper fight, but there's nothing soft or forgiving about it. Only fury and an undercurrent of something else, something more. She's so warm, steeped in the invisible aura of the Force, and he wants—
Something has broken within him, shifted and turned its sharp edges inward, but Kylo doesn't care. This moment is his, this moment is theirs, and nothing will take it from him.
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Kylo never looks for the map. When he finally finds the courage to break away from Rey, he tells her to run. He wonders if he'll lose green from his sight as suddenly as he gained it, but no, it stays, and that gives him hope.
Later, when Kylo stands on a narrow bridge and faces Han Solo, he thinks, You should've chosen the woman who could give you blue.
Then there's a moment—one quiet moment charged with the weight of his choices—when it would be easy to cut down his father.
Instead, Kylo hands over his lightsaber. It doesn't matter that there's no green on this bridge, because he can see new possibilities unfolding around him in the Force. An opportunity to break away from Snoke, a chance to be free.
It isn't too late.
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