A/N: It would probably be appropriate to tag a spoiler warning for TLJ on this chapter, I think! But I'm guessing anyone who's even looking at this story should have already seen the movie, right? Lol. But if you haven't yet—GO FIX THAT NOW. Hope you enjoy! :D

|| Desolation ||
(The First Night)

Fractional seconds are all it ever takes.

A blink of an eye.

A breath.

A heartbeat.

And in between it all, the whole of her descending relief, her reprieve bestowed by the peace and silence of the previous weeks past, all undone.

"...There's a familiar face."

His voice stops her cold inside and out. His sudden, unwelcome presence chills her blood, while all her pent up grievances (for his prolonged absence or for his unheralded intrusion, she isn't quite sure) seem to make it boil over. She is in the middle of straightening out her bedding for the night and at the very least, is displeased by how inopportune his untimely appearance is now.

"How long has it been, since—twenty...two days?"

How markedly specific he is in this observation. And how precisely accurate. She, too, had been numbering the days since their last conversation had. Somehow, it seems like no time at all when said aloud like that.

"I'm about to prepare for bed at the moment," she tells him numbly. "Can this...not happen right now...?" she sighs with an exasperated shake of the head as she tosses her blanket back down onto her small cot.

She turns around toward his voice across the confined space of her quarters to see that he appears to be lounging in relative comfort, seated at a table. It looks just as dark on his side as it is within her own surroundings, so well coalesced at the boundaries that she finds it difficult to know where one starts and the other begins. Like peering into a void in space itself to see him mirrored on the other side.

And he—unperturbed, completely absent of any concern to be had. Aloof, even. Like he'd been the one whose private space had been infringed upon amid his ordinary goings-on. Although, the momentary thought that perhaps he had been does briefly cross her mind.

"By all means," he shrugs. "Don't let me distract you from that."

She isn't sure whether to take his casual indifference for sarcasm or...well, what else could it be? She rolls her eyes with a stiffened frown, still beside herself in disbelief at the unpleasantry of this intrusion. She is too offended to find even the merest consolation in the fact that for once, he isn't being completely belligerent, not even in the least bit contentious. So she responds in kind with a properly derisive scoff.

"What? While you sit there and watch like some—"

And just as abruptly, her premature words seem to drop off the sheer face of a cliff at the end of her incomplete thought. Confounded by her own loss for words, she gains in nothing other than annoyance. She searches in vain within her failing vocabulary for something, anything, just one appropriate word. Yet any and all that seem befitting in mind are just as quickly passed over because none are quite right. To sum up this man, even the worst of him—the most vexing, most grating, most frivolous—worst, in but a single word seems like a spectacular exercise in futility.

In the face of all her roiling discontent, he merely sits in silent amusement under the guise of his cold stoicism as he waits to hear her insult. She's usually quite quick-witted and sharp of tongue, but ultimately, there is none to come this time around. How disappointing.

He shifts his expectant gaze as though to prompt her along.

"—Some...what?"

Nothing. Nevermind.

She can only manage to look like pure, dogged exasperation without any of the words to back it up. How stupid is this, her reproachful thoughts ache. What exactly are they at odds over this time? Does this even constitute as a proper quarrel?

And it's all the more insulting for her to glare at him with such resolute enmity, while he does nothing but merely gaze back—an unassuming look, straight and unchanging. It's almost unnerving to see how easily this single-minded focus comes to him, even in matters as uninspiring and banal as this. It might even seem comical if she hadn't already been preoccupied with being so maddeningly annoyed.

"I can turn around. If that makes you feel more comfortable."

Oh, and now she is beside herself at this calculated response. She is certain he is mocking her at this point. Such droll wit. Since when had he become such a master at feigning indifference? (He doesn't fake things like that.)

No, she is certain he is.

Or perhaps not? He seems to be in only ever one of two moods—indifferent, or angry.

"Although I prefer to directly address the people I'm speaking to. Seems a bit...awkward...to have a conversation with you while facing the wall."

We're not having a conversation.

"Well, it's a wall here."

Are we really having this conversation?

"Not sure what you'd be staring at on your end."

No. She can no longer suffer this a word further. She stares insipidly, lips parted in a peculiar blend of both awe and displeasure at his inane sarcasm. It is every bit as disappointing to her as her own seeming absence of wit is to him.

"Can you...leave? Just LEAVE."

Like it were the simplest thing to do. She is frustrated that her mind can't even conceive of anything better (or cleverer) to say. Her sudden, peaking volume does nothing to even rattle his sharpened composure. If anything, she'd swear he was even enjoying himself a bit.

"Apparently, you still seem to be under some impression that this is my doing."

"Well apparently, it wasn't your master's."

She watches him with a fine-edged gaze. Sees his seemingly earnest consideration. Eyes lowered. Brows knitted in thought.

"No...it was him," he hums pensively.

Reclining back into his chair, his eyes wander with the trails and traces of his mind's inner workings, trying to find where they all intersect and entwine. Trying to make some sense of it, because he doesn't quite understand it himself.

"That is a curious thing, though...isn't it?" he finally muses aloud.

Indeed. Her own baffled thoughts begin to ponder over what unrealized things this might insinuate. Neither of them know enough of the Force's nature to understand how this link remains unsevered even after its conjurer's death.

"You killed him. It makes no sense," she thinks aloud, her voice hardly above a mumble.

Perhaps that which has been bound by the Force simply cannot be undone. Like the quantum forces. Like the laws of gravity. A thing of nature not to be questioned. It simply is.

Her eyes turn back across the void, only to coincide with his own. Their sights linger on in silence, and within this brief, infinitesimal pocket of space-time—a ceasefire. A blink of an eye. A breath. A heartbeat. In between it all, perfect equilibrium. All the perfection and impermanence of the Force itself, shared synchronously across two beings.

And impermanent as the Force is, it is fleeting and passes over by those fractional seconds. She remembers again that his presence is still an unwelcome one, and her ambivalence returns with her own conscious descent back to the earthen ground.

"You killed your master," the words are repeated, colored this time by a wash of caution and doubt. No matter the vantage point, it had been no small deed.

"Yeah. I did," he acknowledges without so much as a flinch.

She finds herself unable to move past this thought, why it puzzles her so. That even after all of it, after they'd fought the whole of the Praetorian Guard side by side, after their departing words and following exchanges, she still questions his motives. He's said many things, yet there lies an inescapable sense—perhaps the strange empathic traces always resonant between them—that they are all but partial rationales. All conveniences to justify his actions and deeds, but none being reasons for them.

"Help me...to understand," she utters slowly. "Everything that's transpired since our first meeting...up until our last..."

How quickly it had all taken place. How brief, and so much in between. So much had changed within herself and all around. There still hasn't been a moment for her to absorb it all. The universe continues to whirl on, leaving her behind in its wake. A collateral consequence of its enduring vastness. Its unyielding movements. Life continues on.

"The choices you've made. The things you've done..."

She recalls her restraints. Her fear. The first of their encounters. His face. She recalls their subsequent match of wills. It'd been the first time she'd touched the Force, felt its presence and movements at her fingertips.

She recalls their duel in the forest, hardly even that—he had her on the run, like a hunter stalking prey. He'd been terrifying. He'd been relentless. And she'd been afraid, desperate to fend him off, to get away, and only once she'd recalled the flow of the Force once again unto herself, woven like the unfathomable quantum bonds stitched through body and mind, did her fortitude and tenacity reignite. Like a resurrected flame in the pitch dark. And how dark it'd been then, beneath the waning, dying sun above, while in her very hands, the spark upon which new life would spring forth. Just like the cycle of the stars themselves.

She recalls their skirmish against the guards. How seamlessly they'd understood each other's intentions. To join and fight side by side, knowing the perilous stakes and entrusting their lives in the hands of the other. To survive. Like the prodigal knight returned, even if only for those mere moments, his departure had left her feeling like an utter, lamenting fool. Only upon searching her own heart in reflection of it all, she'd found no reason to believe he couldn't return again.

"Why? Why?"

She has replayed it all. Relived all the moments, all the seconds, and she still can't fathom it, can't understand. She has gone down each possible path, only to be left lost among the endless crossroads in between them all. She doesn't even know why it disturbs her so, why it's so troubling, why it's so disheartening.

"After everything...why did you do it?"

Her soft, plainspoken question isn't even a specific one anymore. Her mind doesn't even register this. She doesn't care. She merely wants to know.

Such a loaded thing to ask, for all of its innocent simplicity. So he begins with the subject still on hand to start. It's perhaps the easiest to explain. It's the freshest in his mind. It'd come from a moment of the most clarity he had known in far too long.

"He was a narcissist. An idiot, really," he muses as though it were just some folly of a memory in the distant past. He recalls the royal fool's last few uttered words with a bitter smile. "'I cannot be betrayed.'" The repeated declaration is coated by his mild, shadowy amusement.

"To divulge right in the face of his foe and his own apprentice...that he'd manipulated them both. Failing to see that...by sowing the seeds of doubt in them, he'd only accomplished in harvesting certainty elsewhere in their hearts..."

Yes, it had been a moment of indescribable clarity then.

"...Made himself obsolete. He became a useless husk to me at that point. Treacherous. Conniving. A liar."

'I know what I have to do.'

"I hate being lied to, Rey. Don't you?"

It is the memory of that stormy night on Ahch-To that comes to her mind. Hearing Ben's recollection of Luke's perceived betrayal. She'd been furious. So had Luke when he'd caught the two hand in hand. And so burdened by the shameful truth that he'd kept hidden away in his drowning conscience that he'd sooner banish her from sight than relive it again. Yes, she had been blindingly infuriated. But just as fleeting as Luke's fear had been, delving into young Ben Solo's mind, so had her anger then. For all her sympathy toward the tragedy of the old Jedi Master's error, she still isn't sure whether or not she shares in this sentiment.

"'The enemy of my enemy is my friend,'" she recites. The impassive stoicism behind its proverbial claim is all the understanding she gleans from his decisions. No. She is not content with a conclusion so callous as this.

"Do you really think so?"

With his curiosity comes a challenge. A dare. There is something about this antiquated truism that he begs to defy.

Her eyes lower to the floor at a distant focus as she sinks onto the edge of her cot.

"Depends," she ponders. "Not all things are so straightforward." With a drawn breath, she gives a weary shrug of her small shoulders. "The more I encounter, the more I find that to be true."

No. Things are just not that simple.

It's all quite droll, he thinks. The purity of her observation of something he's learned long ago. He nearly snorts in his own amusement of it.

"What a surprise. Life...the galaxy—who would've thought it was actually all so complicated."

The sound of his derisive cynicism draws her brief, unpleasant glance. She says nothing against it before returning her sights elsewhere, just as his own drift toward her. He watches for any response. Reads her physical language. Her tells. She appears to be relatively complacent with all of it. Interesting. So she finds no flaws in his musings. She actually agrees. For once. And of course, it's something she's far too stubborn to acknowledge. That much is beyond obvious. What a troublesome pupil she would have been if Skywalker ever had the proper chance to teach her. With only half a mind, he finally turns his barely attentive gaze back toward his own surroundings.

"What time is it over there...?" he asks offhandedly, catching her completely off guard yet again. He sees the dubiousness of her wary look and sighs. It was but a harmless question, truly.

"It's past midnight here." There. Hopefully that would put to rest some measure of her paranoia.

"Great. I suppose you should be off to bed, then," she fires back immediately with her own brand of scathing sarcasm.

"With you sitting there watching? That's a bit...unsettling," he answers, his wits hardly dulled by the tedium of their exchange. The girl really ought to learn to eat her own words.

She purses her lips at the obvious jab. "It's late enough that everyone else has gone to sleep already."

"Hm. So you're somewhere synchronous with standard time," he muses. A half jest. The detail is broad enough to be useless. Even so, his remark does manage to bring her a brief moment of alarm.

"Yes. Just like about half the populated worlds in the whole of the galaxy—so what?" she quickly hurls back at him just a hair too defensively.

For a merest moment, she worries whether she'd inadvertently divulged something crucial to him. How easily she might have slipped. And through such unsuspecting, seemingly harmless means. But no, she is careful. There is nothing in anything she's said over the course of their exchange. Through any discourse of theirs thus far, really. And from this aching trepidation, she is once again slighted by how easily he's managed to topple her composure with little more than doubt. Just smoke and mirrors. So sharp he must think himself to be.

And yes, he does catch on to the sudden friction he's incited between them. He is inwardly amused by how quick she is to engage when, honestly, not a single shot has been fired. There hasn't even been a weapon drawn here.

Finally, the hanging silence in this awkward stalemate begins to make her restless, shifting and pulling the focus of her eyes all about at nothing in particular.

"You...didn't really answer my question." The docile little thought emerges once she realizes that in essence, he actually had not. Surely, that had been a deft calculation on his part. All that he'd shared had been cunningly left open for her to discern and interpret however her reasoning was so compelled to.

"Why did I kill Snoke?"

He wonders about it himself and is intrigued to find within his reasoning only half-explanations at best.

"I don't know," he utters before he thinks, and he is surprised by his own apathetic indifference toward their struggle.

He looks at her, only to see her staring in a bewildering patience for an actual answer from him. The thought of disappointing her somehow repulses his very being whole. How natural it'd been for him to feel so completely removed from the memory. He is certain that any answer he has to offer would leave her hollowed by her own disillusionment. But what bearing does that have on him? Why does she even have expectations anyway? Stupid girl.

"It was convenient. Appropriate. Seemed like the right thing to do."

Those are the answers she wants to hear, right? Whatever the case, these are the closest things to answers he's got.

'The right thing to do.' That much, he seemed to perceive. A whisper of a conscience. Of moral decency. She knows she should be content to hear this, but it strikes her as more disturbing than it is a relief. Because after all this time, it hadn't been anything that remotely weighed on his heart. It'd hardly even been an afterthought, not until it'd come up again now, and only because she'd persisted on the question at all. No, it'd hardly troubled him in the least. How detached he'd been as he recalled the deed. This made the act akin to murder rather than deliverance. In spite of all the good that it'd done for them both, for the Resistance, for the whole of the galaxy at large at the grandest, fullest scale of things—in the end, it'd been but a triviality to him.

How a man could dissociate himself from the act of killing so profoundly. Had it meant that he simply didn't care? Or a manifestation of something beyond even hatred or anger? Everyone has a motive—to protect, to destroy, and everything in between. What, then, did this speak of toward his capabilities? That while he could be driven by pure passion like a burning zealot, he had just as much potential for brutal, cold-blooded apathy.

True demons were a thing that existed only in old stories and tales, but everyone knew, even if only symbolically, that they existed all over the galaxy in the souls of the worst beings. That had been the most terrifying notion to imagine. In Kylo Ren—in Ben Solo—Rey had glimpsed the extents of his range, all the most far-reaching facets of humanity to be witnessed. The potential of someone like this was simply incomprehensible.

Perhaps Master Skywalker was right to be afraid.

This man had everything within him to become either of two things—a being of considerable greatness, or a horrendous fiend to be truly feared.

Maybe even both.

Perhaps for the first time, she starts to understand Luke's reluctance. She is certain she feels the touch of the same fear, because she recognizes quite well all that she sees in Ben. So ingrained are the parallels that they've become indistinguishable to her eyes, yet they remain intrinsic within her heart. For one such as he to have fallen so deep, led so far astray. And she, hardly at her journey's beginning, already faced with such daunting uncertainty. Without guidance. Without safety. She could trust and die by the verity of her resolve until the time comes when it wavers and crumbles as easily as it is ironclad. What could it possibly say to her potential? This alone is enough to terrify her. Because she is afraid of getting lost. She is afraid of failure. She is afraid of being alone again.

Just like Ben.

She looks to him now without the obscuring shroud of her trepidation, her indignation, or even her lament. In his eyes she sees the consummate absence of—not a flicker of compunction to be found. No lingering cloud of ambivalence. Not even a shred of consolation or relief to be had. For the first time, she looks through his eyes and catches sight of all that lies past the wreckage of his soul's tumultuous conflict. Sees through to the pitch darkness in the far distance. How clear it'd been. How vast. How empty. A barren void.

This was his clarity.

His desolation.

A/N: Yay, an update! And in less than two weeks?! WAT? Yeah, that probably isn't happening again unless we get another big holiday where pesky work and life won't get in the way of fanfic-ing. :(

Sooo...I actually thought to have this chapter be three separate parts with a loosely unifying theme, but...wow, word counts. One unusually long chapter will usually mean nothing but unusually long chapters from that point on with me. :| So...three separate uploads it is! I didn't want to wait too long between updates either because I'm scared of losing momentum. Also, I foresee more work and such coming up next month...lesigh. 'Kay, gotta buckle down!

Well, I hope the style of the writing isn't too loosey-goosey for you guys. I don't always stick to any specific one way to go about writing stuff. And when it comes to more...I guess feeling-y, character explore-y type bits, I like to play with less structured or less literal styles? Which...might end up being a little vague and formless in weird ways? It's like...trying to describe feelings in words without using words cause feelings aren't words...but use words—shit my dance coach says all the time. Lol. Now do the same but with MS Word! :D ...Writing is stupid.

Haha, anyway...I hope you guys enjoyed this! (Or not? S'all cool beans.) I'm definitely going to get busier come 2018, so I apologize for the slower rate of updates in advance. If you guys like this, it'd be good just to follow so you'll spot the sporadic new posts when they come. Thank you so much to everyone who has left a review, favorited, or followed! ^_^ And as always, feel free to PM me if you have any questions or comments at all.

Have a great New Year!

12/31/17