"No, what if-" Rey began again.

"Rey!" A man called from somewhere behind her, "Are you ready to go?" The man jogged out into the meadow but froze suddenly when he saw Kylo Ren. It was the man from the video, Kylo Ren realized, the one who had been guiding Rey through the crowd so protectively. He realized then who it was, Poe Dameron, it had been difficult to see in the low quality footage.

He looked back to Rey, and smiled crookedly, a half, lopsided, sad smile.

"You'll be fine," he said, the moment bitter sweet. She would be safe, whole, complete and loved...without him.

"Kylo," she said, her voice pleading, "you can still come to the light. Luke believed, no one is ever really lost."

"It's too late...for everything." He turned to go once more. "Stay away from the systems in the outer rim for a while."

"Why?" She asked quickly.

He paused for just a second but then kept walking. He trudged through the forest until he was deep in the woods where his ship waited, hidden. His breathing was fast and his heart beat erratically as he climbed aboard.

He regretted pretty much every word he had uttered during their encounter. He knew he shouldn't have let on about the First Order's plans to crack down on rebels in the outer rim systems but he couldn't stop himself from trying to protect her. Even if she chose to put herself in dangerous situations by aligning herself with hooligans and thugs.

He was fairly certain his obsession with keeping Rey safe was stopping him from being an effective leader of the First Order, how many times had he already delayed an order to fire on a squadron or search a rebel base for fear that she could be killed in the process. He's already allowed countless rebels to escape. He put that thought on the pile of self loathing to take back out and examine at a later time.

Kylo Ren thought about Dameron, he'd interrogated that man before, he could have stopped him then and there. He shook his head as he stepped into his cockpit and a prepared the ship for take off. It was no use thinking like that, Poe wasn't the problem, not really, just a result. Kylo Ren questioned why people even bothered to rebel, couldn't they see the good he was trying to accomplish for them all?

He knew he should have hated Rey for all her arrogance and resistance, but he couldn't. He'd given up hating her too long ago to try to start again.

She was moving on, he needed to as well.

One day, maybe she would give up her anarchist schemes and see that the beings of the galaxy required a leadership, a pooling of resources. Without these things, systems trudged along in poverty and squalor for millennia.

But her face. Her voice. She had wanted to stay with him. If only he been Ben Solo.

Ben Solo.

It was hopeless. He knew it was, there was no going back, he had come too far, crossed a line of no reversal. Ben Solo was dead, just like he had told his father.

Han.

His father had believed until the end that he would come around, back to the light.