A/N: I am so grateful, inspired, and motivated by your reviews, favorites, and follows!
Kylo Ren opened his eyes. The memory of her hung in the air, a rose-yellow sweetness. He ignored it. He had already shown her the unthinkable, anyway.
She would have gotten in the way. He knew, somewhere inside him, that through her he would have been destroyed. Maybe not in battle or with the stab of a saber, but he would have been torn inside out just the same. He had felt her repugnance, her shock. Better this way. Now he could bury her, dismiss her, leave her for dead. The grayness of his world was satisfied. When they met again – for the final time, Ren resolved – either light or dark would win.
Rey couldn't sleep, not after last night. She lingered in the darkness of the Falcon, staring into nothingness, hoping for sunrise. Kylo Ren had really, truly gone from her – as much as he could, anyway. You would have felt it if I died. If she squeezed her eyes shut and stilled her heart and strained to stretch across space, he was still a tiny, fluttering shadow in the corner of her. But a shadow was thankfully easy to ignore.
At dawn Rey stood at the base of a mountainous island, encircled by blue and shrouded in mist. Breathing in the air felt heavy, like she was dragging her lungs through water. A field of flowers, carmine and ice-white, bloomed at her feet. And just beyond, blurred by the sea, a stairway curled into the mountainside like a stone snake. There was nothing left for her to do but follow it.
The stairs rose up and up and up, coiling through the ridgeline. Rey was dazzled again by the endless green. Green like trees, and the thin film of algae on oasis water, and desert lightning, and moss and the edges of Ren's eyes – she stopped herself, appalled. He is your enemy. He is darkness to you, danger to you. You hate him. And she did, slick cardinal hate that threatened to overflow her. She felt Ren's crowing satisfaction as he killed Finn in his fantasy, and it disgusted her. But still he was there, the fluttering shadow. Still, somehow, a part of her.
She reached the top after passing through a hollow portal of stone, the world dizzyingly small beneath her. Rey's heart fell as she only discovered a brief expanse of trembling grass. She remained, just as she always was, alone.
"Why did you not kill the girl?" Kylo Ren blinked in surprise. He was good at hiding himself from Snoke, so good that he was convinced that Snoke wouldn't – couldn't – see through his ruse. Clearly he was wrong.
"I thought we needed her," he said quickly. Next to him Hux rolled his eyes with derision and disbelief. Ren let anger course through him, overcome him, devour him as he closed his fist in the empty air. Hux sputtered and choked, his hands clawing at his neck, his eyes bulging with fear. Finally he collapsed to his knees, pale and spent, motionless, as Ren swept over his body to -
Ren sighed, coming back to the present and tempering his fury to annoyance. Though, if he were being truthful, under Ren's contempt lurked cold, electric fear. Was he really so transparent?
"She's powerful," Ren added almost lamely. "I felt it."
"Did you?" Snoke's voice was unsettlingly flat.
"She has darkness inside of her. I thought she could join us." Snoke remained still, passive.
"And now?"
"I was wrong. She's nothing, just weakness seduced by the light. I can – I will destroy her."
"Will you, Kylo Ren?" Hux shifted uncomfortably next him, his knuckles white behind his back.
"I would do anything Supreme Leader, anything for the First Order-"
"Did you resolve this before or after you allowed her to escape?" Kylo Ren didn't have a chance to answer. He crumbled, defeated, as pain ripped through his head.
Rey caught her breath. Something awful passed through her, like a shadow across the sun. Pushing the uneasiness away, she caught a glimpse of a stone rising out of the grass.
At first she thought it was a grave by the way it overlooked the sea, the loneliness of the marker. As she approached she saw that it was just a single stone among many, lining a well-worn path that wrapped into the cavernous center of the mountain.
Darker and deeper it went, cool and damp, until she saw it, the temple in the forest. Silver stone wrapped in ropes of vines, towering into the trees, melting into the leaves like an illusion. The door glowed soft blue-white. It felt long abandoned but somehow recently disturbed. She sensed it, something pulling her, commanding her, to enter.
In the center of the courtyard was an enormous tree, its trunk striped with amber and gold. Long branches curved overhead, a penumbra of fawn and white flowers, carpeting the ground in ivory. Rey's footfalls were softened. She approached it hesitantly, wonderingly. She couldn't resist the need to touch it.
As soon as her hand brushed the trunk she was shocked by memory. Digging into the desert sand in the stillness of night, scooping her hands through the warmth left by the sun. Kylo Ren's face wet with ice, his saber meeting hers in a crackle of purple.
Now images she didn't recognize, but that felt right. Imminent. A black figure on the floor, writhing and twisting in pain. Bring her to me. Rain and lightening against a rocky expanse, tumbling and twisting into the dark water of a lake. The bright interior of a starship, grey bullets of hyperspace, her hand grasping for a weapon. Someone screaming, distorted with hurt and panic and anger – pick it up! A hand on her shoulder, peaceful, still.
It was not him, no, not him, a voice she didn't know whispered, echoing inside of her. It is you.
Kylo Ren didn't bother to push himself off the floor. Warm, salty metal filled his mouth, dripping onto the tile in pools of red-black. Somehow he had bitten his tongue, and now he also felt heavy, wrong. He dimly sensed Hux leave sometime long before, and now he was alone in the chamber with Snoke. The hologram glimmered in the light, making his eyes ache. Blinking, the enormity of Snoke was doubled, tripled, quadrupled.
"You surprise me." Ren tried hard to drag in a breath to answer, but he was too slow. "I thought you had rid yourself of all attachments. Your father's blood was still wet when you fell to the seduction of the light."
"I…I still," The spots in Ren's eyes wouldn't clear. "I still feel the power of the darkness-"
"Your sacrifice was meaningless, Kylo Ren. You have failed." Ren felt something inside himself break, pour open. Failed. Never good enough, rejected, lost, suspended, another, Rey –
"Bring her to me." Snoke flickered and dissolved, and the pain finally ended. Ren panted, pulling himself to his feet in the emptiness of the chamber.
