"Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine. I couldn't get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time."
- Richard Siken
Rey is alive. This is first and only thing that matters.
It should not—it should never be so. Anger drives through him like iron, catching painfully on all and any soft snags of hope. But this is the duality of his fractured heart: he can resent her hold over him and still cling to the relief that she has not left him yet.
She did leave you.
He killed the monster beside them, if not the one that lives inside him, and he offered her his hand.
Did she know his heart would follow?
Did she care?
Crait and Takodana, it would seem, did not offer him all the time he needed to think through, to find how deeply Rey settled in his bones—she and her clinging gaze and her departing steps.
But was it the Force that ground time and space to so much spittle between teeth?
Or something else?
He traces the damp folds of his garments with tense fingers. Hosnian Prime is no more, and yet it rests firmly beneath his feet.
Something has happened, and something else has not.
…
Kylo finds his way out of the senator's garden. It hadn't really been a garden anymore, anyway—the rubbery plants in their rectangular beds were the color of charcoal, and no birds were singing. The swarthy vines and choired trees of Takodana feel like they are a galaxy away.
In point of fact, they are.
…
Rey is not easily tracked; the essence of her is buzzing sharply in his ears and chest, but there is no direction. It is as if she is everywhere at once, not a single entity, but two. More than two?
His mind keeps settling on two.
Kylo claps his hands over his ears.
…
"The rot," Leia said, "Goes all the way to the center. Do you see?" And she carved the golden halofruit in half, so that Ben could see the festering green-black in twisted, itching veins.
It made his skin crawl. "What do we do?"
And she, brow uncreased, unaffected, had tossed it aside. "It is no good. No point in trying to save it."
…
Someone might know him here.
This is his second thought: that his hulking form is feared, and his name known, in many corners of many worlds. As many corners, of course, to which he himself has spread it.
It might be pride; he would rather call it practicality. Then he realizes it is neither.
This is Hosnian Prime, and he is Kylo Ren, but not here.
Hosnian Prime no longer exists.
A pebble catches under his foot.
He lifts his shoulders a little, and feels fear and freedom. There are no voices in his head, only Rey. No rot in his veins, only wonder.
But the scar is on his face and his father is dead—that he can feel, always—and he forgets to rejoice to find a world unblemished, still spinning in the galaxy it once littered with its own death.
Ben Solo's heart climbs up to his throat.
Kylo Ren pushes it down.
…
"Kid, what have you done?"
He heard his father's voice in pieces, sparking, stinging. Word by word, as chip by chip the broken glass drank deeply of the dents and tatters in his skin.
"The pain," Ben said. "It makes the voices go away." There were too many voices, all of them in agony, and one that was soft—but not quite of its own accord.
They are afraid of you, and of your power, young one…
His father looked at him.
No one taught him the difference between sorrow and disappointment, not then, and not until long after.
"Ah, kid," Han sighed, and the very wind seemed to sift through him, turning him gray. "There's something wrong with you."
…
Beyond the gate there are more villas, more shell-like houses, stacked in twos and threes. The city rises, sometimes in sheer steps, sometimes in the lazy incline of uphill ground.
He pauses. The path before him stretches in two directions.
But just like many turnings today, the question is answered for him. The earth shakes with an explosion before he reaches a decision as to this main road; the ground shivers under his feet.
For a moment, he wonders if the freedom he felt a moment ago was just a mockery.
Maybe the Force has placed him in the near past.
Maybe the Starkiller is going to kill him.
Is it—justice? He saw the sky split red, and heard no screams.
(But that is death on a macro, morbid scale. Too large to be felt and too loud to be heard, and Han Solo died like that—a thunderclap and then a feather-fall and a never-ending break.)
In a moment he overcomes the foolish thoughts. He will not die here, not at this moment. The sky is still clear—if gray—and there is a fog rising in what he can see of the streets below, but no more strikes follow.
(In another life, perhaps—and this is another life, but he has never taken the chances offered him—he might have wandered out of the city, instead of further in.)
Now, he wants to know what has happened, and where and why he is. The fog is reaching him in little creeping gusts, dissipated by the wind. It turns the air around him hazy, and his eyes prickle. He recognizes the tang of Jatoori gas, and his fingers stretch for his saber. It's a classic scoundrel's distraction—not harmful, only irritating.
And it gets everywhere.
He wishes for his mask. But on the day that he broke it, he felt as if it were already long gone.
He pulls his cowl over his face and steps out into the street, towards the hub of the disturbance.
There are other lifeforms here; he can sense them. He feels their hacking lungs and watering eyes. But no one interrupts his stride. The Hosnian citizens, such as they are, are crowded indoors and out of the way.
Yet, as he descends a little, near the gate between the upper and lower city, dust still hangs in the air.
Curious, he reaches out through the Force and runs smack into someone else's rage.
Rey.
…
Isolated, pristine, furious.
Something is not quite right but nothing is right here and Kylo doesn't think twice; he runs. Up one alley, down another, looping back from the edge of the Senator's villas to the low, staunch walls of a barricade compound that marks the split in this city between poor and privileged. Above even the senators' dwellings, of course, the turrets of the city shine most brightly—polished, rather than sanded flat—but Rey is not among them.
He pushes a message, his most direct yet, into what he believes is the Bond.
I'll find you.
There are guards at the door of the compound; stormtroopers in white and black armor that he knows too well. He does not so much order them aside as he does flick a finger and watch them crumple.
The door clangs shut behind him like a sealed tomb.
Darkness closes around him. He pushes back the cowl, and finds uncertainty buried under urgency.
When her voice answers, it almost does not sound like hers. Who dares find me?
…
Memories can only sour with time. In the moments of their united battle—when Rey moved with him, through him, against him—he longed for a future.
When the future came, it was not the one he wanted.
In the days since Crait, he has often wished to find himself back again, staring across sparks and mayhem, to Rey with the blade in her hands.
If he had run more quickly—caught her in his arms before she caught him in a question of destiny—if he had—
Memories are sour, and he spits them out.
At least he tries to.
…
He doesn't need to hear the tramp of footsteps to know that she is coming. Not running, not quite, but close enough.
"What are you doing here?" Her voice finds the ragged edges of his scar and scatters over his soul.
Only—
Rey is not Rey.
He knows this like he knows his own heartbeat, like he knows black dreams and Snoke's voice and the way Rey grits her teeth when she is angry.
And this is not Rey.
But her lithe form is the same, though laden with rich wool-velvet and a ruby like a dying star pinned at her breast. Her eyes are the same in shape and color, but the darkness in them is wider than his own darkness.
Rey, as ever, is stronger than she knows.
Only—
Now she knows.
They are in a long, low hallway almost like the ones that track the perimeters of spaceships. Kylo holds up both his hands, palm outward, a gesture of peace.
The next moment he is on his knees.
He can hardly breathe, and yet her fingers have hardly twitched.
She comes close enough to touch him, and slides a black-gloved hand behind his neck. The leather is cold against his skin. Her fingers curl in his hair. It is a touch that even Kylo Ren can admit he has longed for. She tugs his head back fiercely, forcing his face to lift towards hers.
"You're not him," she murmurs, voice almost sing-song, but very, very cold. "That scar, that whimpering mass between your ribs. But your mouth—" She thumbs the width of his lip, tugging it down to bare his teeth. "The same." His body responds but his heart does not. It is too cruel to be a lover's touch.
Her hands leave him sharply and she stalks away from him, back turned. Yet he is powerless, still, frozen in place. He senses no exertion, no exhaustion. She is a star-system of strength. She is greater than he could ever be.
He speaks, because Kylo Ren is many things but he never wants to be a coward. "Rey."
A quick turn, and a cock of her sharp chin. The white powder covering her face but for a few smears of black (and her eyes) lends her the air of a vengeful ghost.
(Not his Rey, but then again, is Rey his in any world?)
"You know me. You come from another world, and you know another me." She bends her head, eyes hawklike and sparkling like black gems. She is probing his mind.
It hurts.
He fights.
She wins.
"A filthy little scavenger," she whispers, and for a second, pain floods between them before she snaps away. She shakes her head, as though she is clearing it of cobwebs. "You, the dark lord, and she, the wildheart." She palms one glove across the ruby below her collar, closing her fingers around it, but she turns in profile from him, shutting him out as effectively as if she has placed a layer of durasteel between the tendrils of their minds. "What a curious, pitiful little world you know."
That makes him angry. His world—his wreckage—pitiful? No, it can never be that. If his world can be pitied, that means it is nothing.
And it cannot mean nothing.
It has always been easy, for him, finding anger. That is how Snoke found him, and found the things that lay beneath the pale skin of a frightened, hungry face.
In anger, he finds decision. if there is anything that is the same, he knows which wound into which he will press his will. He is not nothing. He is Skywalker, Vader, a rage that his Rey could not wash away. "If you're Supreme Leader," he gasps out, each breath shorter than the last, "Where is Snoke?"
The wall between them drops, if only for a moment. She towers over him, somehow, though even on his knees his eyes are level with the curve of her ribs. "I killed Snoke the first moment I held a lightsaber in my hands," Rey says, and her lips curl into something that Kylo knows is not really a smile. "I split his puny, wretched body in two and watch him fall." Her eyes narrow, and his throat narrows, and she stalks closer, releasing him a little only when black spots crowd his vision.
Once more she reigns, drawing back, drawing back. Cold hands reach into his very center. They pry open the little caskets and secrets, inspecting with shivering, sharp intent. "You knew him too. Did his guards beat you? Did he flay your mind like he used to flay mine?"
She already sees the answer. It can be counted in years.
Rey lifts her chin, and lets go of the hold she has on him. His hands scrabble at the floor as he heaves, ungracefully, for a full gasp of air. "You were weak," she says. It is not pity, but only because he is sure she is not cable of that. "You served him."
Kylo wonders if she feared Snoke, but he does not say it aloud.
Her stare is as deep and empty as the space between stars. "I only fear the things I have to."
…
If Rey would only turn, he had told himself, they would rule side-by-side. She would put away the Rebel-hued softness that did not come to her by nature—rough-edged girl that she is. She would save the warmth of her heart for him and him alone.
She would find power and he would find honor, both unbridled.
He told himself, he tells himself, that she threw this happy chance away.
He tells himself that it was something they both held in the first place.
…
She has not finished with him yet.
Once again, her mind surges into his mind, folding and unfolding like the rifled turn of so many pages. There are memories there he desperately does not want her to see.
It is different, somehow, than the things he hid from Snoke.
This is Rey, only, it is not Rey, and he does not want her to find and recognize the boy on his mother's knee, the boy with his hands on the Falcon's controllers with his father's hands tight around them.
(For there were not only the soured memories of disappointment. Snoke would have called them so, but Snoke lied. There were memories shattered by time but no less shining—they were bright, and that was why he could not look at them in the dark.)
(Han used to toss him the air, shouting out landing directives. Pull right, drop your wheel-gear—we're in for a close one, Ben! And the boy would laugh and laugh.)
(Luke used to set a roughened hand on his shoulder and guide his eyes towards the stars. They all have names, just like you, he would say, and the boy asked, Were they alive once? only for Luke to smile as all those who know loss smile, and say, They still are.)
(Leia used to put her hands on his shoulders and their gazes, met, would burn. She would tell him of Alderaan, and would tell him of Luke's daring escapades, and she would try to tell him that shouting still meant love, when it came to her and Han.)
In any world, he realizes, shamefully, just down a passageway of thought that she has not yet entered with her warrior's stride and blade, in any world, these are the things he would want to show Rey freely, in his own time.
For himself.
His lips part. Through gritted teeth, he hears his voice, a rattle and a prayer, whisper, "Please."
She stops. This cold and vengeful woman with the eyes and voice that plagued him since long, long ago—
Stops.
"Ah," she murmurs. He cannot help but ask himself if this Rey, in this other world, ever saw the island in her dreams. "Ben Solo, never Skywalker—you are the same in every world, aren't you?"
She sends one image to him, but it is not hers to keep, it is his. It is Rey, with tears on her face and red light blazing around her like worship—
—leaving him.
The word left his lips then, too.
"Ben," says the Rey he thought he wanted, dark and beautiful. "Please never works on me."
She turns.
When Snoke turned, he struck Snoke down. When Han believed, he pierced him through the heart.
Rey does not fear him because she does not need to. "Guards!" she calls out, and her voice rings like steel striking steel, "Shackle him. I will question him again later."
The stormtroopers who surround him are not Force-trained, but Kylo submits as they fasten linked cuffs to his wrists and ankles and half-march, half-drag him to a narrow cell almost at the center of the compound. Rey has shown no flicker of weariness, no need to refresh her strength, yet she leaves him.
It is the only thing that remains the same.
Somewhere, the terror of the First Order is bleeding on fresh snow. Somewhere, the boy whose father's hands will never hold his again watches through a creature's eyes as the gray body falls, sifted through with red light.
Somewhere, Ben Solo knows it was all for nothing, and has known that almost since the start.
His own devices are of little enough use now. He sags wearily against the chill gray floor, lifting cuffed hands to cradle his head. She has split him open—in mind, this time, instead of body—and left him shaking, seeking for a hold.
Her interest in him fades down the corridors of the compound even before she does. The only possible reason is no comfort at all:
He is not the one she wants.
