His eyes flicked open in the darkness of his room aboard the First Order's brand new flagship, Vader's Vengeance.

As always, it was the dream that had awakened him. He sat up and swung his legs off of the edge of the plush matress. Being Supreme Leader had it's perks, but unfortunately dreamless sleep wasn't one of them.

Reaching out with the Force he flicked on the small reading lamp next to his bed.

He wiped the tears off of his face and looked at his trembling hands. The dream never left him anything but devastated and tonight was no exception. The pain in his chest was just as fresh and raw as it had ever been. The pressure constricting his lungs was making breathing a chore. It was a chore he didn't actually want to be doing at the moment.

He almost didn't notice the tingle in his spine amidst his other pains and complaints. In a heartbeat the pressure in his chest released allowing him to take in a gulp of air as he jerked the bedsheet haphazardly over his lap. His darting eyes spotted her the moment she appeared.

"This really isn't a good time." She said without preamble.

He could tell by the hoarseness of her voice, her tousled hair, and rumpled bed clothes that she had just awakened, too... If you could call the clinging, whispy scrap of white linen she was wearing bed clothes.

He had to swallow his heart before he could speak.

Reluctantly dragging his eyes away from her maddeningly parted bare thighs he groaned, "I couldn't agree more."

He couldn't help staring at her. She, in that nighty, was without a doubt the most amazing thing he'd ever seen in his life. Held up by two thin straps, it had a rounded neckline that bared most of her chest. The thin material did more to draw his eyes to the twin, slightly darker, spots beneath than to hide them. And the way it draped across her thighs! Dear Force! It was so short that if she spread her legs even another inch he'd be able to see far more of her than he'd ever bothered to hope for.

"Bad dreams?" He rasped when he finally remembered how to speak again.

"Just one." She said, staring at the floor between her feet.

He glanced at the floor and noticed a tiny red splatter. It bothered him that he hadn't noticed the damaged state of her knuckles until then.

He frowned at her hands. She'd been beating the hell out of her punching bag again. A part of him wanted to scold her for not using sparring gloves. Instead of doing so, however, he found himself nearly whispering, "Me, too."

"Why is this happening again?" Her voice sounded almost as desperate as he was feeling. "Why now?"

He had pondered that very question so many times, yet he still had no answer. "I don't know." He admitted.

As much as he enjoyed the freedom to stare, and he thoroughly did, he needed to see those soft brown eyes of hers. "Look at me, Rey."

She took a ragged, audible breath and her eyes flicked from the floor to his face. She didn't seem surprised by his state of undress. She must have looked at him already, he realized. He hoped she hadn't caught him gawking.

Putting his errant thoughts aside he concentrated on the question. "There has to be a reason." A sneaking suspicion entered his mind. "What was your dream about?"

She shook her head slightly, refusing to answer.

"Mine was about you." He confessed, suddenly overcome by the need to tell her about the dream. "It's always about you."

"Always?" She nearly choked on the word.

"Always." He repeated, noting that her breathing was becoming more harsh with each exhale. "Everynight." Her lips parted.

"The same dream." Her eyes widened.

He leaned forward. "About you."

"The red room." She whispered and his heart skipped a beat.

"Why?" She asked sharply even as her eyes welled up with tears. "Why didn't you choose me?"

"I did choose you." He said, devastated that she didn't seem to understand that.

"I chose you over Snoke." He could never regret doing so, no matter how angry she was at him.

"I chose you over the dark side." It was true. In the past year he'd even learned to tamp down his hatred for General Hux... enough to not act on the nearly constant urge to torment the pissant for the sheer enjoyment of it, anyway.

"I chose you over everything." The vehemence in his voice was too telling, but he didn't care anymore. He wanted her know that she had hurt him.

"You chose to replace Snoke!" She snapped. "You chose to allow your own mother to be shot at when you could have stopped it!"

He hadn't known his mother was alive when he'd declined to stop firing at the rebel shuttles. He didn't even find out for several months afterward that she had survived the vacuum of space.

"You chose the First Order over everyone who ever loved you!" She looked and sounded as heartbroken about that as he was at hearing the heartbreak in her voice.

"Like Luke?" He sneered, unable to keep the anger out of his voice. "He tried to murder me!"

He scooted forward, looked hard into her eyes from so close he could see the gold flecks in her irises even in the low light being cast by his bedside lamp. "My mother? She ignored me my whole life and then sent me away when I needed her the most!" He squinted at her, "Or my father maybe? A man I've seen maybe five times since the age of ten?" He leaned in so close their noses almost touched. "They never loved me." he scoffed bitterly. "Nobody has ever cared about me."

"That's not true!" She snapped at him. "Your mother always loved you! Your father! Your uncle! They died trying to save you! I risked my life trying to save you!" She finished accusingly.

He'd wondered about that so many times he couldn't help but leap at the chance to ask, "Why?" He searched her face for clues, once again frustrated at not being able to use the Force to search her mind from across the galaxy. "Why did you do that?"

"You know why I did it." She mumbled.

"Say it." He sounded a bit breathless, even to his own ears.

A muscle in her jaw twitched and she shook her head almost imperceptibly.

"Say it, Rey. Why did you come to the Supremacy?" He needed so badly to hear her say that she cared about him. Even if she only cared a tiny bit, it would be enough, he told himself. "Say it."

She shook her head mulishly and remained silent.

He stared at her, willing himself to wait for her to say it. Long minutes passed while he stared her down. Long minutes during which he hardly dared breathe. He didn't want to rush her but eventually it became clear that she intended to wait him out.

After waiting so long he was slightly dizzy from lack of air, he decided that if she wouldn't say it, he would. "I've loved you from the start." He would have preferred to say it a little slower, with a lot more style, but as soon as he'd opened his mouth the words had come bursting out. He felt his face redden.

"What?" She yelped and flinched away from him.

That wasn't the reaction he was hoping for.

He decided to try it again and took a deep breath to steady himself. "The forest on Takodona, you tried to shoot me, remember?" He fought hard to suppress a grin at the memory. "You were so fierce! Not a speck of fear in you!" He'd followed her Force signature that day, literally feeling his way toward her. She had been so determined to protect her rebel friends, that it never crossed her mind to fear for her own safety… not until he'd frozen her anyway. "If not for the Force you'd have killed me a dozen times over." He took a ragged breath.

She'd been magnificent in her courage. Anyone else might have been terrified at being stalked through the woods by Kylo Ren, Jedi Knight of the First Order, but not her. She'd only been feeling an overwhelming desire to kill him that he could feel from a hundred meters away.

"When I saw into your mind, I knew then… I had to have you… it was all I could do not to fall at your feet and beg you to love me." The depth of her loneliness had touched something deep inside of him. The way she fought his mind probe with nothing but raw, untrained power and an almost savage ferocity had intrigued him. When she'd broken into his mind he had been awe-struck.

She was a potent combination of softness and strength all wrapped up in such a lovely package that he had been drawn to her like a magnet. He still was.

He reached out, his fingers tingling with the need to caress the tears from her face… before he could fulfill that need she intercepted his hand and shoved it away from her.

He struggled to swallow his disappointment.

"That's not true." She said almost as breathlessly as he felt. "I was terrified on Takodona." She took an unsteady breath.

"Only after I froze you." He countered, feeling almost too deflated to sit upright.

"No, I was terrified from the moment I felt you nearby." She said stubbornly.

He opened his mouth to argue but she cut him off by continuing to speak.

"I could feel danger and pain and rage rolling off of you like a hot wind. I thought you meant to murder me."

In truth he had meant to kill her and take the droid, but that intention was long gone by the time he had found her. It was not easy to admit, even to himself, that he had at one time intended to kill her… before he had gotten close enough to feel her.

"When I woke up in those restraints, and saw you… I thought you meant to torture me. Everytime I was near you I expected to die screaming." She paused to take a deep breath.

He wanted her to stop, her words were cutting him to the quick, but he could feel that he needed to hear her out, so he held his silence.

"I was frightened of you but I was drawn to you." She said to his belly.

He wished she didn't sound so unhappy about that last part, but it was understandable, he supposed.

"I saw you murder Han Solo, a man I admired, but I felt your pain even more keenly than my own." Her voice became raw.

Killing Han Solo was supposed to have ended his internal struggle against the light, according to his master, but all the deed had done was hurt him far more intensely than anything his father had ever done or neglected to do.

"Then after… in the woods…" Her eyes flicked upwards to meet his. "You nearly killed the only friend I'd ever had. I wanted to kill you... I needed to end your reign of terror." She looked away again.

"But there was something holding me back... I was relieved when the ground split open between us."

He had been, too. He hadn't been ready to die. Not when he'd just discovered how powerful she was… and how much he wanted her.

"I had so many nightmares about that fight." Her eyes welled with fresh tears, but she blinked them away.

He had woken up screaming, more than once, from dreams that he had lost control and killed her during that duel.

"When this," Rey waved her hand back and forth between them. "mind thing started happening I never imagined I'd come to see you so differently."

His heart started pounding.

She was getting closer to the point, he could feel it even across the galaxy.

She looked up, into his eyes. "You were Kylo Ren, the most terrifying creature in the galaxy… and then… you weren't."

She looked away, past his shoulder, "I thought I'd found this whole other person, down deep inside of you." She took a shaky breath and continued in a voice so soft and warm it made his skin tingle. "Someone real and solid… Who didn't just tell me I wasn't alone but made me really believe it."

He saw a hunger creep into her gaze that had nothing to do with any sort of physical need. "Someone who so understood how lonely I was that he had tears in his eyes just to hear me speak of it."

Rey's eyes dropped to her lap and his followed to find her lightly skimming her thumb across her fingertips, "Someone who cared so much that his hand shook just to be reaching for mine."

She looked back at him then, "It broke my heart to think of how he'd been driven into an impossible choice between the Darkside that welcomed him or the Lightside that feared him."

Her broken heart leapt into her eyes, nearly choking him. "I thought that if I could just show him how much I cared, he would surely turn back to the light. I was so sure that he was worth dying for that I risked everything to try to save him."

She'd said it! He wasn't sure she would, but she had! His heart began to pound in his chest so hard he thought she might have seen it if she had looked there.

Her voice lost it's softness, "I nearly died trying to save him…" His pounding heart nearly stopped at the hatred in her next words. "From you."

The look she gave him then was one of pure loathing. Her voice grew louder and her eyes seethed with hatred.

"But there was no saving him, was there?" She seethed. "Because he never existed, he was nothing but a cruel illusion you used to seduce me!" The betrayal on her face was as heartbreaking as it was unfounded. "When you were in my head you saw how lost I was, how much I needed to have someone give a damn! And you used that to manipulate me! I was just a tool for you to use to usurp power from your master! You never cared about me at all! You were just using me the whole time!"

He would have protested, set her straight about all of it, but he was taken aback by the golden glow that replaced the soft brown of her eyes.

"And you have the nerve to sit here and tell me this pack of lies? Do you honestly expect me to believe that you love me?" The outright hatred in her face and voice was more painful to him than anything he could even imagine. "You? Kylo Ren?" She snarled, "You really are a monster!"

The raw hatred in her words, the glowing yellow of her eyes, shocked him far worse than the sharp sting of her slap.

In an instant she was gone.

He was shaken to his very core. He knew what the glowing yellow eyes meant, Snoke had told him. He'd stared into the mirror a thousand times, trying to will his own eyes to look that way. Seeing them in her face, though, was too much to bear. She was all that was good and right in the universe.

He had to fix this.

He had to fix this right now!