They sit, they listen, they stay. Rey and Kylo linger on the cliffside, eyes closed because all the color around them is just too blinding. The leaves are too green, the sky too blue, and the air too living, so they focus on the sound instead.

The voices below change and distort, and sometimes they stop completely. But still Rey and Ren stay, because both of them are too scared to take the first step (and be the first to fall).

It's all meaningless drivel they hear, but two voices among it all are prominent and just won't go away. Rey couldn't stop hearing them even if she wanted to, and oh, how she does. She would give anything, everything in the world to just wipe her mind of those cursed voices that are Finn and Poe's.

But she can't. She can't move.

Finn and Poe talk about plans, war, and how scared they are. But also about good things, meaningless things.

They laugh as if it were the easiest thing in the world.

Rey hears them, but always pretends she doesn't.


Kylo sits beside and watches as every color slowly drains from Rey's face, washing right off her skin and down the drain, gone.

Her hand, wrapped around his, clenches shut, and is cold. Kylo looks at her, but she doesn't look back. Her eyes are too fixated on the blur of people below, searching for two figures she never wants to find.

"Do they know what became of you?" he asks, careful with his words like a man handling glass.

She shrugs. "Everybody hears rumors."

"Not everybody believes them."

"Then, they think I'm dead. It'll give them closure."

"They don't want closure, Rey. They want you."

"What do you know?" she flares. Kylo doesn't understand why his words burn her like this— or maybe he does— but Rey is on fire. She opens her mouth ready to speak, but when she does her lungs give out.

She whispers.

"Don't pretend you know them, Kylo."

"Don't pretend you don't, Rey."

Red. Everything turns red. "I'm not pretending—"

"Then why can't you even say their names?"

"Because I—"

"... What are you so scared of?"

Rey closes her fist so tightly, quickly, that her nails cut into her skin, deeply, and lets the blood escape.

Red.

Kylo, still holding her hand, finally discovers why he had worn gloves all this time.

At last, she looks him in the eyes, because she made sure there is nothing, nothing he can find inside.

"I know them," she whispers, pointing her gaze to the people below. "But they don't know me."

"… You're scared they'll despise you," he whispers.

"No," Rey shakes her head, closing her eyes and maybe her whole life too. "… I'm scared they won't."

Silence takes them both.


At sunfall, Rey walks closer to the base, just a little bit, and she isn't entirely sure why. Sometimes you just move.

Rey walks close enough to hear the people more clearly, but stops, afraid that if she takes another step, she can never turn back again. She sits down, and continues to just, silently, listen. Before she can stop herself, the nostalgia sends her falling into her graveyard of memories.

She opens her eyes and sees her old, colorful self walking along with Finn and Poe.

She is smiling, and laughs so easily— too easy. She is carrying cargo, happy.

Rey fears of remembering the day when she realized that having a place in the world wasn't all that wonderful after all.

She drops a box, but back then they never seemed to break and picking it up again was so very easy.

Rey can hardly recognize herself, like this.

In the moonlight, when all is still and dark, Rey embraces Finn and Poe, and she thinks that it is perhaps today that the trio truly comes together. They form a promise: To stay together, to defeat the First Order, and to finally escape the masked man chasing after them, for so long.

And now, here sits the "new and improved" Rey on the cliffside, wearing the uniform of the First Order, together with none other than the "masked man." Her friends are nowhere to be seen, even though they had promised "forever."

So she lied.

So all of it was a lie.

Here she is, sitting and breaking every promise she ever made, and she can't even bring herself to feel sorry.

So she just continues sitting there, listening to voices flit around her, unable to move. She doesn't even have to try— finding Finn and Poe's faint laughter is effortless. They had, after all, once been the trio of the Rebellion, that everybody talked and praised and gossiped about. Now they weren't.

Finn and Poe are together, and she isn't.

All the dark thoughts pull Rey's head down, into her hands, to hell.

I want to see them.

To embrace them with her greasy scavenger arms and never let go, wouldn't everything just be so perfect if that's what she wanted?

And to laugh, laugh like the world dies tomorrow, and the war you promised to fight is gone and now there's nothing left but to—

Tears escape through her fingertips. They roll down her arm, wet her elbow, and dampen the earth.

… Die.

Maybe a flower will grow there someday.

"Finn. Poe," she rasps, but they can't hear her.

"… I'm sorry."