A pause passes between them before Rey speaks again, her voice coming out stern, almost cruel, but with the undertones of a plea, "Please Kylo, don't ever talk about that child ever again. It was never the truth. It's a joke that the force or something keeps playing on us, like this bond. It was never possible, but now more than ever, it will never, ever be."
"That's not the way the force works" Kylo responds, clearly expecting this reaction on her behalf.
Rey stutters out a breath. Of course it's not. None of what has happened between them is normal for the force. And yet, here she is. Sitting impossibly across the room from this man. There is no way she is force projecting and this bares none of Snoke's influence, this is something else. She recoils at this paradox.
Kylo sighs deeply. He pauses and an anticipation grows in the air. He has to ask.
"What did he look like Rey?"
Her eyes narrow at him, rage and spite burrowing down. He never listens. He never sees what she wants.
"Please just stop" Rey's voice is low and dangerous.
"Because the girl, she was you and me..."
"STOP!" Her anger cuts her out from his thoughts and she can't tell if he is earnest or just being an asshole, but she stops him before he can say anymore.
He stares at the floor as her voice reverberates. It rings in this empty chamber for longer than she expects.
She knows she can get out of here, but she needs a handle on her emotions. She unhooks her legs and sits crossed legged, smoothing down her bunched up tights and placing her hands on the insides of her knees. She starts to breathe in as much as her lungs will allow. She closes her eyes.
A few minutes pass before she can sense the force again. The atmosphere of the room has made it unbelievably clouded and hard to face. She opens her eyes, and across from her, sees Kylo's face in his hands. An almost negligible tremble shakes his shoulders.
The reason why she reached out in the first place hits her as she is faced with this vulnerability she never thought she would ever see again from Kylo Ren. Her heart lunges out for him, at how exposed he is. She chastises herself for letting her emotions get the best of her in this conversation, she had meant it to go so differently.
"We buried her on Chandrila. In the field of sun-dew flowers east of the Tintolive tree."
"You should leave." He says through this hands, which are now tightening into fists, his leather gloves straining out loud with the tension.
"It was hasty, we didn't have time to recover the site with seedlings, so it should be easy to find."
"GET OUT!"
Rey scrambles to her feet, choking down the fear she knows will impede her exit if she doesn't go soon. She calls forward the force and turns to leave.
"I wanted you to know, even if you didn't. Someday all of this might be over and you might want to see it. I didn't want it to die with me." She pauses, needing to say something else before she is gone, maybe forever, from his life, "She loved you until the end. Even when you broke her heart, the pieces still rang out for you."
Through the whir of the beginning of meditation she hears his reply. "I know." His voice is sincere and pained. The authenticity of it causes her to still on the edge of the force plane.
He knows she's leaving, but a final question that he needs her to answer rings out between them, "Why Chandrila, Rey?"
"You know why."
"I want to hear it from you. How you heard it."
Rey's whole body swells with breath and she steps fully back into Kylo's bedroom. She gathers herself. She hadn't expected this, for Kylo to respond in this way. She wasn't sure she was ready to talk about any of this. But when she looks at Kylo, she knows something in him needs this.
"The only time I could truly see Leia, and not the General, is when she would lapse into a memory of her time on Chandrila. It seemed like the one pocket of happiness she was afforded in the struggle of what became her life. She had Han there." Rey pauses before adding the next bit, "She had Ben there."
Kylo winces, knowing that Rey was not referring to him anymore when she used that name.
"When she ultimately succumbed, it was Chewie who suggested the sun-dew fields. We didn't question him, even when it meant risking detection near the city. It fit." Tears start to stream down Rey's face and she doesn't care, doesn't try to wipe them away.
Ren spits out a sigh to the air above him. His eyes angle up and away from her. Something breaks between them and his words flow out like lava, stinging the air between them, "We would go there every cycle to watch the sun's equinox, when it would line up perfectly with the Crystal Canyons to the north. It was the best spot on the whole damn planet, and it was ours." The words come out with so much difficulty, contorting Kylo's whole body. He somehow becomes smaller and larger at the same time. He digs his nails into his palms so deeply that Rey can barely see the tops of his fingers.
Rey freezes, not wanting to move and break him out of this reverie. She had seen tinged memories of his mother when she invaded his mind, none of them very nice, but he had never willingly given her anything. She didn't want to break whatever spell this was.
"We would take enough for three days, and we would camp underneath the stars. I'm surprised the Wookie remembers. He came a few times, the smuggler too, but ALWAYS Leia. No matter what, no matter how busy. I would always get those three days with her. Even if I only saw her for a few hours the rest of the cycle, those three days were..."
He was someplace else, maybe in that field with her again, his words pouring out, needing to face the air. Rey noticed his consciousness wandering and felt brave enough to advance toward him, slowly, noiselessly. It was hard to hear Leia's name on his lips, but exhilarating, even if he couldn't say Han or Chewbacca's.
"We would light a fire every night and she would sit me between her legs as we stared into it. She would tell me fantastical stories about swallowing sand pits and princesses wielding blasters and men being frozen alive. It took me years past my adulthood to realize that these weren't fairytales. She was telling me about her life without telling me about her life." He sighs, his Adam's apple quivering as he continues to stare at the ceiling.
He pauses, thinking.
"Of course, I came to despise it, despise her. Snoke was all over, eventually, telling me that three days couldn't make up for the months of neglect, that it was only a manipulation on her part," his voice sounds resigned. 'But before all that, those were probably the only moments in my life where I was truly...happy," the last word comes out almost as a question, a word unpracticed on his lips.
Kylo's eyes finally come down and he faces the empty room in front of him. He realizes she had gone, sometime in his long speech about Chandrila, and he hadn't heard, hadn't sensed her slip away. She had left him again, just as everyone else had. Intense loneliness sweeps through him harshly at the realization that he is alone once again in this pain.
"Tell me more," the voice to his left startles him enough for him to jump, very slightly. When he turns, his eyes find hers immediately. She was not close, but close enough that if he stretched out to her, he could touch her. She sways a little farther from him as he thinks it.
"Don't worry, I won't," the promise he makes in response to her shrinking from him brings her body back to him, a little. She scoots closer by less than an inch.
"What else?" she posits again.
He pours out the memories he thought he had destroyed. He purges them into her. Rey listens, so intently, so achingly that it hurts him to look at her in more than glances.
At some point, he closes his eyes, but continues to talk. His head droops down until he is tilting slightly closer to her. She doesn't clench or move away when he moves, she trusts him not to touch her. He talks himself to sleep, with her right next to him, giving nods or affirmatives when appropriate.
When he wakes, his back is stiff from the floor. Rey is gone, but his hair feels displaced, as if someone had run their fingers through it while he slept.
When she is back on the Falcon she weeps. Her sobs are uncontrollable, full of every emotion, for Leia and Kylo and what was. Her stomach heaves and she slips to the floor, wanting to stop the spinning she feels. What she had kept buried for the past two years bubbles to the surface like all the secrets she had ever kept hidden deep inside her. Her greatest hope and her worst fear combine and mingle in her brain:
He's still in there.