Hello and thanks for reading this very long, very challenging story.
I may have bit off more than I could chew with this story, and I am a very novice writer—this is only my second fan fic. But let me explain a bit about Fulcrum.
My first fic attempt You Need a Teacher ended in a way that seemed to shock some readers. That surprised me. I thought all the signposts were there to show where that fic was headed from the very beginning—it was even captioned as inspired by Wuthering Heights. But I received many PMs and comments about it, which got me wondering: 1) could I write a fic where Kylo and Rey end up together and Kylo stays dark? 2) is there a happily ever after on the Dark Side? If so, what would it look like? and 3) what's it like to be in a relationship with an authentic Sith lord?
These challenges presented a few issues to consider—chiefly, why on earth would our heroine even want to end up with a First Order Kylo Ren? How would she ever hang around him enough to be open to seeing sides of the him that she might like? The easy answer was for them to live together. And this trope appears in a lot of fics—Kylo and Rey marooned somewhere together where they have to get past crossing swords and actually work together for a common goal. I put my characters together in a castle. It's a soft-ish prison for Rey. But she's not motivated to escape because of her son and because she is treated well.
Their son is the key to this story. So . . . how to get a Reylo baby? In this story, the child comes from a vicious rape. It's a completely awful scenario for Rey. It's squeamish to write about and hard to read about. And it makes Kylo a super dark Sith—hardly romantic hero material. It also makes my story very AU, as some commenters have rightly pointed out. From the get-go, my story is not canon.
But the child is the perfect plot device since mothers do pretty amazing stuff for their kids and if there ever was a reason to sacrifice your own hopes and dreams, it's your kid. I was also interested in writing about motherhood. I have little boys (oldest is 5). Most days it is hard and everyone ends up screaming at some point, including Mommy. I wanted to put some of that frustration and sacrifice into my story.
The rape backstory is very off-putting, but it establishes from the outset that Kylo is DARK. When we first see Kylo Ren on screen, he's beheading an old man. We see him murder his father and then thank him. We know he's done bad stuff at Luke's Jedi Academy. This is not good behavior and that's fitting since the Dark Side is Dark. Kylo is a violent, power hungry man who has very few limitations on his behavior. What would that translate to in real life? I think it's an obnoxious, entitled, violent narcissist. He does what he wants and consequences be damned.
So my story starts with Kylo contemplating consequences when he learns of his son. Kylo comes to grips with fatherhood much easier than he comes to grips with his rape. Fatherhood fits into the narrative of his family and also the future he is trying to build. Rey doesn't fit in quite so easily. It takes a long time for him to truly understand what he did to Rey. He has to care about her some before he can begin to understand what he did to her. And caring about people is not easy for Kylo because he mostly cares about himself and his own desires.
Of course, he doesn't grow to care about Rey in the modern sense of a mutually loving relationship. He's abusive, obsessive, possessive and controlling. Because he's a Sith. Whether or not you have the Force, you're not going to get an equal partnership-type marriage with a Sith lord. At best, you become the princess on a pedestal, which is where Rey pretty much ends up.
I confess that it was sort of amusing for me to see comments from readers who wanted Kylo to reform. Everyone wants to save this guy—to make him the good guy hero. But this isn't a Ben Solo redemption story. That doesn't interest me as a writer and others have written those stories much better than I ever could.
And that's the twist to my story: the bad guy is set up to be reformed by the love of a good woman, but he never quite makes it. Yes, Kylo grows and changes a quite a bit, but at his core he's still the same Sith from beginning to end. Did you get fooled into thinking he was changing along the way? Were you rooting for Kylo? Then as a writer I did my job. Did my ending shock and surprise you? Yeah, I know it's frustrating to see the bad guys win. That's not how SW is supposed to end, right? But along the way Kylo says it over and over again—he is who he is and he's not going to change, that people don't really change, etc. The ends always justify the means for Kylo Ren, and that's how we get our tragic ending.
Watching the The Force Awakens dvd this spring, I was struck by the little bits of snippy sarcasm that come out of Kylo's mouth. ("You're so right"/ "perhaps Leader Snoke should use a clone army" etc). So I wrote my Kylo to have a sarcastic, gloating, provoking edge to him. It fit right in with my smug, entitled Sith prince. I also wrote Kylo at points to be gleefully bad (modeled after Emperor Palpatine from the Star Wars Lego cartoons my sons like to watch). He enjoys being a Sith—he's not a tortured soul who secretly yearns for reform. Kylo Ren is who he wants to be.
I also wanted him to be sexy. Not tortured soulmate kind of sexy, just outright cocky sexy. Honestly, his initial sexy, asshole characterization was inspired by the old school tune Candy Shop by 50 Cent. I had this whole scenario in my head of Kylo and his Ren Men ballin' through Coruscant incognito for a furlough of sex and booze after their latest violent mission. Like Wall Street investment bankers on bonus day. But I also wanted Kylo to be sort of clueless about flirting and how to relate to women generally since I imagine him mostly cavorting with prostitutes and underlings when he isn't killing people with his posse. He doesn't want a relationship with a woman and he's never actually had one until Rey shows up. The man has never had to make an effort with any woman, and he doesn't know how.
What about Rey? I think she's the ultimate survivor. From what little we know of life on Jakku, Rey has dealt with a lot. If any heroine is going to make the best of a bad situation, it's Rey. I know many people (and probably Disney) view her to be a cheerful good-through-and-through noble Jedi-in-the-making. She'll be an amazing character and a great role model for young girls. But in my AU world, I like to think that her experiences on Jakku—her loneliness, her abandonment, her lack of exposure to the outside world—have left their mark on her.
She's also dealt with so much in life by herself that I'm not sure Rey knows what a healthy relationship is. And she might be willing to put up with a lot more than she should because of her neediness. My Rey is much more accepting of mistreatment than lots of readers would like. Honestly, some part of her doesn't know any better. I see her as being very capable, but still having serious insecurities. She's this complicated mix of vulnerability and strength. That makes her ripe for manipulation and seduction by Kylo.
In my other fic, Rey ended up a bit too passive. This time around, I wanted her to be more feisty. To give her more chemistry with Kylo, too. This time around, my Rey is less committed to the Light and the Resistance. Instead, she's committed to her son and herself. My Rey becomes largely agnostic about the conflicts that surround her—she's more interested in surviving than she is in winning. This is also a key part of Kylo and Rey ending up together. You can't have a lasting relationship between two people who wear their galactic politics on their sleeves (enough to fight and die for it) on opposing sides. Then every scene is conflict and, well, that's hard to move past in a story. Let's be honest, after a while the "I love you but I hate everything you stand for" gets old. Relationships come from commonalities—shared passions, shared goals, shared values—to counterbalance the differences we all have with our partners.
It was important to me that Kylo and Rey not have a Force bond. Don't get me wrong—fever dreams over a Force bond are hot. But it's been written before—and written very well—so I wanted to avoid this plot device. It seemed too much like a shortcut to romance ("only you understand me because you're constantly in my head") and you can't really have the characters hurting one another if they instantly feel each other's pain and inner thoughts. Real life doesn't work that way—real relationships have all sorts of drama and miscommunication.
My first fic had a serious tone throughout. But this story was so much darker and less romantic that I wanted parts to be more flippant and conversational. I worried that really dark stuff in a very serious tone could just turn out to be plodding and heavy. Who wants to read that? Instead, my goal was for the story to be darkly entertaining. To use everyday language and present tense. I even introduced profanity, which seemed to fit for Kylo's nastiness. Rey uses it sparingly only for super tense situations. I tried to balance the intensity of the conflicts with plenty of slow (but hopefully character developing) fluff. Sith fluff, it's called now in my mind, thanks to a charming reader's comment.
There are several themes that pervade this story, the most important of which is consequences/responsibility. The story opens with Kylo finding Rey and his son and being faced for the first time with real consequences from his actions. Kylo learning to deal with this is key to his development in the story. But Kylo is ever the arrogant Sith, and he never fully accepts responsibility. And, honestly, as a Sith Emperor-in-training he will never be asked to account for his actions the way a normal person would. In the end, Kylo won't accept Rey's death and sacrifices his son to save her. It neatly gives him back his wife and also erases his crime on the Starkiller (which Rey has basically forgiven him anyway). And life goes on for Kylo and Rey.
Of course, my favorite Star Wars theme/plot device is the dysfunctional Skywalker family and that is everywhere in this fic. Kylo has the facts of his family history a bit mixed up (Snoke did the telling, in my mind) but really that family is stranger than fiction and marvelously fun to think and write about. Family is a huge motivator for both Kylo and Rey. He's trying to live up to his family legacy and create a dynasty of his own. Rey is trying to establish and hold on to the family she has always wanted. It's a commonality that helps to bring and keep them together.
Throughout this story, characters have widely varied understandings of the truth concerning the past, the Jedi and the Sith. Differing perceptions of the truth and how hard it can be to recognize the truth when you hear it are themes that carry throughout this fic. Luke and Leia consistently speak truth to Rey but it falls on deaf ears. Everything they tell her is true or comes true. Rey's understanding of the past is completely Kylo's, which Luke and Leia fail to recognize from the outset. And so their actions to try and save Sheev just play into the scary narrative Kylo has told her.
Some readers have found my Luke and Leia to be very out of character from their canon versions, and I suppose that's true in some ways. They are tired old veterans at this stage, losing a war they have fought for decades and once thought they had won. Maybe a bit hardened and blunt now (although Leia is very blunt in ANH and I can easily see her getting bitchier over time). But in my mind, Luke and, in particular, Leia would be very motivated to try to save Sheev, even if that means outright stealing him. The Skywalker twins have seen the Dark Side first with their father and now with Kylo and they know what's coming. I never intended Luke and Leia to come off as the bad guys, but that's certainly how Rey and Kylo see them and most of those scenes are written from Rey's perspective.
I spent a lot of time in this fic exploring what it means to change as a person and what it means to adapt to events surrounding you. Do people change? Both Rey and Kylo change in this story, but in the end I think they are still very true to their original versions. Rey changes far more than Kylo. These two characters don't so much meet in the middle as Rey keeps compromising and making excuses for him.
Does Kylo love Rey? Certainly, he respects and admires her. And aspects of their relationship look like love. But it's not what an objective viewer would consider to be a normal, healthy relationship. Kylo thinks it's love, and in a way that's very tragic for me. In my mind, Kylo gets as close as a Sith can get to true love. He is still selfish and self-involved at his core, which is how we get our ending. Kylo loves Rey, but he loves himself more.
Does Rey love Kylo? Yes, I think she does. In as much as she knows what love is. It is kind of devastating for me to contemplate a life as solitary and harsh as Rey's. To never know the love of a parent (or a parent-figure) is so heartbreaking. I have observed that a lot of self-esteem and relationship issues later in life come from the examples we saw as children in our home environment. And Rey saw none of this except what she absorbed through media (my Rey loves the holonet). So when we meet her, she's kind of clueless and childlike about what it means to love and to be a family.
What does it mean to be a Sith? ROTJ and the prequels seem to suggest that you must be all bad to be Sith. That if there's some small spark of humanity or compassion in you ("There's good/Light in him" that comes out of Luke's mouth, Padme's mouth and Leia's mouth) then you are ripe for redemption and ready to turn from the Dark Side if given the right pitch at the right time by the right person. And there is the very strong suggestion that Darth Vader truly repents all his wrongdoing and ends up on the Light Side. Which is quite a feat given all the blood on that man's hand.
Putting this all together, I feel as though some fans have taken that to mean that the Sith are completely and always evil and solitary 24-7. And that seems unrealistic. And also sort of uninteresting as an author. My Kylo is a bad guy and he enjoys being bad. But that doesn't stop him from having relationships and even some fun along the way that doesn't involve killing people. He has father figures in Darth Plagueis and Milo. He has colleagues in Hux and Nestor and the rest of the Ren. He has a lover in Rey and, of course, he has his son.
In my mind, the Dark Side is seductive. And so we see Kylo seducing Rey in both mind and body. Rey never comes around to falling for the ideals of the First Order, but she gets to a place where she tolerates it and even understands it. And she stops opposing it. And since the First Order is largely Kylo's vision for their future, she ultimately becomes loyal to it in a fashion. And where the Jedi and Sith are concerned, Rey accepts Kylo's worldview completely.
SW as we know it is a morality tale, and this fic diverges completely from that narrative. The bad guys win and evil deeds go unpunished. That will never be canon. But I think it's interesting to turn the SW universe upside down and look at it from a completely different perspective. I think the best fan fics are not only enjoyable, but they help you understand and appreciate the canon story all the more because you think about the what ifs. I love the imaginative aspect of fan fics—putting familiar characters in different situations to see how that might cause them to react. If you are a slave to canon, then this story is not for you.
I started banging out Fulcrum on my laptop almost as soon as my first fic was published online. Then, I got cold feet over the rape angle and put the story down for about a month. I'll be honest—I searched over and over to find an angle for this story that would not include rape. It simply bothered me to write about that topic. I even wondered if there was something wrong with me for even putting this story to paper, to be honest. Like, what kind of creep am I to be spending my time on this?
During this time, Mr. Blue Envelopes was traveling for business quite a bit, and I ended up seeing three performances of Wagner's Seigfried on my own. I love opera (yeah, I know, opera is usually an older person's thing, but I love it even though I can't sing a note) and I have gotten into the Ring cycle of late. Well, when you watch 15 hours of Wagner in two weeks, it gets you thinking. Mostly, I was thinking about Wagner's Walsungs—the operatic version of the Skywalker clan—who are the central family/bloodline of the Ring cycle. The Walsungs do everything Skywalkers do—they love, they kill, they betray, they fight with magic swords from their father, they topple regimes, they incestuously kiss their sister—you get the picture. And power is the underlying theme of the entire Ring cycle. Think my story ends darkly? In the Ring, everyone ends up dead and the world comes to an end. Now, that's dark! So, thank you Richard Wagner. After three performances of Seigfried, I was inspired to pick the story back up again. The Ring cycle has some pretty nasty, distasteful stuff in it and people still seem to enjoy it.
The ending was inspired by my own experience a couple of years ago with an ectopic pregnancy. If anyone has ever lost a baby, you might relate to it being something you talk about with your husband obsessively for a couple of days and then there is nothing more to say. So you silently think about it obsessively for a few months. My ectopic pregnancy loss was especially hard because I was forced to terminate a pregnancy that was very, very much wanted. It was the medically correct decision and the baby would not have lived anyway. But oh, the guilt.
One day, months later (I think I was already pregnant again) Mr. Blue Envelopes caught me crying and figured out why. In an effort to be comforting, Mr. Blue Envelopes told me that he would not hesitate to choose me over a baby in any circumstance. It was one of those moments when someone is trying so hard to comfort you and they say the absolutely wrong thing. His statement sort of bothered me, and it stuck with me. And it became part of this story.
Kylo is a man who chooses his wife over his kid in an unsettling and spectacular betrayal. But, from his twisted perspective, it's the ultimate sacrifice and demonstration of love. But it's a selfish decision because it's motivated entirely by his own wants and needs, and contrary to what Rey would have wanted. It's another example of when Kylo's version of what happened is not what the reader sees.
Killing children is horrible. But it's Dark Side canon in SW. Anakin confesses to killing the Tuskan Raider kids in Episode 2 and he kills younglings onscreen pretty much in Episode 3. I'm assuming that Kylo himself took out few younglings at Luke's Jedi Academy (although we don't know this for certain). And Darth Vader unknowingly came close to taking out Luke over Death Star 1. None of these examples completely square up with my ending, I realize, but I didn't break any new ground here with the death of Han/Sheev.
I originally had a slightly different slant on the ending. Instead of Rey telling Kylo she is pregnant with Force strong twin boys, the story skipped to years later with Kylo telling Snoke about the arrival of his fourth son. Kylo gets all the little Siths he wants except there is one problem—none of his kids have the Force. Because the Force is fickle that way and it isn't going to give him another Force-strong son after what he did to poor little Han/Sheev. Snoke just laughs and tells him they will have to create Skywalkers the old-fashioned way and then old Darth Plagueis manipulates midichlorians and creates a new Force strong child in the fashion of Anakin's fatherless birth. It turns out the Snoke is Anakin's father –in this manner of creating progeny through the Force—making him sort of Kylo's great-grandfather. I actually wrote this out, but then I decided that Rey really needed to have Force-strong kids so that she could teach them the holochrons. I didn't want to take that purpose and Light away from her. Plus, I wanted Kylo to literally get away with murder. I wanted my anti-hero to end the story unredeemed, unrepentant and victorious.
Thanks for reading this fic. I never intended for it to become so long winded (so many chapters!), and I know that I lost readers along the way with the tedium and the scary Dark subject matter. I'm not a trained writer in any respect, but it was a fun project. I've been a SW fan since I was a little girl. There's so much I have to say about SW—I can go on and on-and a lot of those ideas found their way into this fic.
If I ever write another fic, no one is going to read it now since they'll assume someone will die at the end. But I guess that's my own fault, eh?
Thanks again for reading.