The snick of the pen against paper soothed Kylo as nothing else could these days. The eyes staring back at him from the creamy page had been haunting him for nearly a year. He had drawn her a hundred times but he could never draw the pain from her eyes.

In the brief moments he'd spent with her he had commited to memory her every sharp angle and soft curve. He knew the features of her face better than he did his own. He drew her with such exacting attention to detail that he could almost feel her presence. He had a box brimming with ink drawings of her tucked away in the locked bottom drawer of his wardrobe.

He had drawn her looking fierce, as she had when she'd attacked him on Starkiller base. He had drawn her looking vulnerable as she had the night she'd told him about her vision of the mirror. He had drawn her looking angry as she had when she'd called him a monster. He had drawn her hundreds of different ways, but there was always pain in her gaze.

No matter the expression on her face, her eyes were always the same. The same eyes she'd glared down at him with the last time their minds had connected. The pain in them silently accused him of betraying her. The disappointment in them almost palpable. Those eyes despised him almost as much as he despised himself for making them look that way.

He hadn't seen her since the rebel base on Crayt. She had disappeared from his life, but never from his mind, she haunted him. He could almost handle it during the day, but nights were another matter.

In his dream, always the same dream, she'd be standing in front of him amidst the destruction in the red room. He would hear himself say the things he hadn't had to words or the courage to say to her. She would gaze up at him, her soft brown eyes shining with tears. He'd reached out to her and she'd reached back for him. Every night their fingers would almost touch. Every night he would be jolted awake trembling, his eyes swimming in tears, his chest so tight he could barely breathe, just as he'd felt when her fingers had inched toward his before she had ripped her light saber out of his other hand.

The question of whether she would have taken his hand if he had said in reality what he'd said in the dream had him in the training room most nights driving himself to near exhaustion so he wouldn't lie awake half the night pondering it.

He set the delicate pen down next to the drawing and stood up to let the blood flow back into his numb legs.

An electric tingle started in his spine and spread outward in a way he'd been longing to feel for a very long time. He took a deep steadying breath and turned to face her.

"Leave." She snarled without preamble.

He slid a gaze down her body, taking in every detail.

Much of her hair had escaped it's confining tie to either hang wetly past her shoulders or cling to the blotchy red skin of her sweat soaked face and neck.

There were dark smudges beneath her red rimmed eyes and the moisture that clung to her wet lashes looked an awful lot like tears.

Her chest heaved with every breath, her clinging top nearly dripping, even the bit of bare calf between her britches and boots was glistening with sweat.

Blood oozed through the thin skin covering her knuckles, he'd seen that same injury on his own hands enough to know that it came from foregoing sparring gloves while training and he suddenly realized she'd been using a punching bag. Judging by the state of her, he surmised, there must be nothing left of it but dust on the floor.

He suppressed a smile. She was so fierce!

He tore his gaze away from the bead of moisture creeping maddeningly down the side of her throat and met her eyes.

"You've been crying." He hadn't meant to speak that thought aloud and certainly not in such a dazed tone.

"Go away and stay away!" Her eyes nearly burned him with the heat of her anger. The venomous inflection in her tone should have hurt but he was too happy to see her to let a little thing like her obvious fury bring him down.

Looking like she'd sooner tear him apart than talk to him, dripping sweat, hair a mess, hands oozing blood, furiously belligerant... None of that mattered, the important part was that she was here, standing right in front of him making him ache to hold her, to kiss the tears from her eyes, to lick the sweat from her skin...

"You know I can't." His voice sounded pathetic even to his own ears, soft and buttery. He felt heat creeping into his face and hoped she was too infuriated to notice his weakness.

"Fine!" She spat, her eyes flashing in a way that made his chest twinge. She spun to the side and marched away. The sight of her walking away made him have to swallow a sudden excess of moisture in his mouth. She disappeared through the wall of his room.

A heartbeat later she stepped out of thin air and jerked to a stop right in front of him. She flicked a glare up at him and he felt his insides turn to ice as she stepped around him with a vehement, "Stay out of my life, Kylo, I never want to see you again!"

Shocked by hearing her refer to him that way he followed alongside her without even thinking about it. She'd never called him that. Not once. She'd called him Monster, she'd called him Murderous Snake, she'd even called him a creature in a mask and those had hurt… but hearing her call him Kylo like it was a curse hurt worse than having his face laid open by her light saber. "Kylo? What happened to Ben?" He asked in confusion then regretted asking the question more than he regretted a great many things when she snarled accusingly, "He was murdered by a monster!"

He'd suspected she'd be angry when next they met but he had never imagined she could possibly think of him that way after what had passed between them a year ago.

"You believe that." He could actually feel a physical pain shooting through his chest, sharp and hot like a blaster bolt. Her profile swam before his eyes for only a heartbeat as he reeled away from force of anger that blasted toward him through his link to her mind.

A wave of pain crashed against him, dropping him to his knees. He could still feel her rage as if she were right next to him.

It occured to him that every time they'd spoken he'd managed to say something that had driven a wedge between them. The man that was somehow both -and yet somehow neither- Kylo Ren and Ben Solo was assaulted by the fear that he may have already driven them too far apart to ever wind up together.