11/1-30/35

A life without sun is unsettling to Rey. She appreciates Kylo's bed, and the fact that his room on the Supremacy is significantly more comfortable than her tent on Lirium. But there's no sun.

Sun comes up, day begins, get up and do stuff. That's how she knows it's time to move, but on the Supremacy, her body keeps waiting for a signal to get moving that never comes.

Which makes sleeping bizarre. She'll wake at odd times, well before he does, or occasionally well after. And she supposes that's her body just letting her know when she's done being tired, but…

It just feels weird.

A life without color feels… flat, to Rey.

It's a black room with black furniture and black accouterments and black bedding built around a man with black hair and almost black eyes who wears all black. If it weren't for his pale skin, which, when they're not playing or sleeping, he keeps almost every inch of covered, he'd blend into the room.

His room isn't dark so much as smothering. It eats light.

"Did you design this, yourself?" she asks one night, as they're eating.

"No. It was here when I got here."

She flashes him a curious look.

"This isn't my first command. I had rooms on the Finalizer, and a space set aside on Starkiller, but moved here when I took full command. Why do you ask?"

"I was trying to figure out if you were smothering any hint of light, or if Snoke did."

He half smirks. "The whole ship is black or gray with a little red. The outside of the ship is black. You saw his throne room, that red was pretty much the only color he allowed in the place."

"So, it wasn't just about you?"

He doesn't know if that's true or not. He didn't care much about a space for himself, beyond a functional lock on the door, and a quiet place to meditate. "I suppose the others have their quarters decorated however they like."

"Have you never been in anyone else's quarters?"

"Not on this ship. I was in Hux's once, on the Finalizer. It was… austere and functional. Gray mostly."

"Sounds like a lot of the First Order."

Kylo shrugs. "I don't know. Maybe. The more I get into this, the more I see that Snoke didn't like spending money on things he didn't have to. Austere may have been more about keeping credits in the bank, or turning them into weapons, than any real aesthetic."

She half-inclines her head in response, and then takes a bite of their supper. It's some sort of eel, fried crispy with what she considers a tasty sauce, and a collection of green vegetables. He's been picking at his.

"Don't like it?" She knows the flavor is likely fine for him, but the edges of the eel is crispy, and the inside is soft and squishy.

He shakes his head a bit, and begins moving the eel to her side of the plate, and more of the vegetables to his.

He's chewing, just because he doesn't like it doesn't mean he won't eat it. He won't order it again, but he always eats his part of whatever shows up on their plate. "Does it bother you?" He glances around at his all black world.

"Not for the amount of time I spend here awake. Not with the window," because he does have one full wall of his quarters made of transteel, and when it's clear, like it is now, he's got what feels like a view of the entire universe. But when he sets it to closed, and turns off his lights, his room is black in a way she didn't know existed when she still lived on Jakku.

"But you wouldn't want to live here?" he finishes her thought.

"No. I need a world with some color in it."

He nods, and continues chewing. She can tell he's just aware of what she's saying, not making any plans to do anything about it, but not notmaking plans, too.

"Do you have a favorite color?" he asks a moment later.

She blinks. That's a question she's literally never thought of. "Uh… No. I like them all."

He nods.

"Do you?"

He raises one eyebrow and glances around. If he had decorated it himself… Well… No, he wouldn't have bothered. Taking time to do things like decorate isn't part of who he is. But he does like black.

"Oh."

He shrugs. "Green. I liked green as a child. My room at my parents' house was light green and brown, and there were trees, like Kashyyyk, painted on the walls."

She gives his hand a little squeeze.

She does like living in a world of books. She doesn't always like what she's reading, but she likes the breadth of it.

When the Force first started shoving them into each other's conscious, Kylo had mentioned how busy he is with running the First Order. What she didn't realize is that, these days, for him, busy means reading.

Most nights, she finishes up her work. Because for her work means physically doing something, like building more drainage ditches, or moving more rocks, or… She goes to the Supremacy, and he's often done for the day by then.

They'll have supper, talk about the day, play with each other, and that eats up a few hours, but not all of the evening.

After playing, usually feeling calm, and comfortable, they'll sprawl out across his bed, and read. He gathers up his pillows, props them into a ramp, lays on his belly, and pulls a data pad to him. Some nights, she sits against his headboard, Orlac's library in her lap, others, she'll lay across the bed, head resting in the curve of his low back.

She's against the headboard, when she feels him looking at her pad, not his.

"Kylo?"

He shakes his head. "The one's crap."

She doesn't have to put words to the question in her mind.

He looks up at her. "The first, sixth, and nineteenth chapters are likely genuine, but the rest of it was heavily redacted during the Council of First Knowledge in 6753."

She flashes him a very curious look.

He hits her back with one, no idea what he just said she didn't understand.

"6753?" she asks.

"Since the founding of the Jedi. All of their history is done on that system."

"What's that translate into Imperial Standard?"

He's got to think about it for a moment. "About 2000 Before the Empire, give or take a bit. Their years aren't the Imperial Standard 360 days. They work off of a 100 day year, but those days are a lot longer because day and night weren't the same on Jeddah as they were on Coruscant. I'd need a calculator to get it exact."

"Okay. So…" She runs that from Imperial to New Republic. "So… 1956ish BBY?"

"I hate that."

Again she's curious, but this time she takes a stab at what he meant. "BBY?"

"Yes." He rolls his eyes. "So fucking pretentious. They won one battle, nineteen years into a twenty-four year war, and picked that as the start of their calendar. It'd be one thing if it was Before Battle of Endor, or After the Concordance, or In the Year of the New Republic or… But, no Battle of Yavin. That'd be like me resettling the calendar, again, based on six years ago because I slapped Hux silly when he was being a twit."

She's not entirely sure the scale of those things line up. Hux was, from everything she's heard, both from Kylo and Finn, a truly horrible person, but… He wasn't a Death Star.

He's following her thoughts and says, "A Death Star by itself is useless. Let it drift off into space, and it'll just sit there, doing nothing. You need a man who's willing to use one. That was Hux. You could drop him naked on an uninhabited planet, and in a year or two, he'd figure out how to start hurting people. He wasn't a fighter, but he was good with the tech stuff, and if there was a way to hurt people with the tech, he'd figure out how to do it."

"Twit doesn't sound like the word I'd use to describe that."

"Likely not, but… The time I'm thinking of, he really was being a twit. His valet didn't shine his boots bright enough, and he was in a snit about it, so I hit him."

Rey thinks about that, and then says, "What does snit mean?"

"Had the man tortured, but Snoke wouldn't let him execute him. First Order rules, everyone was allowed one mistake, and that was his one. Hours later, he was still complaining about the subpar job. There was one tiny smudge on the heel of the one boot, and he just kept going on about it. I told him to shut up, and he told me I didn't get to order him around, so I hit him hard enough he dented the wall where he hit it. And then he shut up."

"Oh."

"Anyway," and Kylo's back to her book, "Manalevan's thoughts on the nature of service to the Force were too seditious to be allowed. He and his followers broke off, started their own branch, and then vanished. No one's sure, or at least willing to tell, what happened to him."

Sometimes, she forgets that he did this. Studied to be a Jedi, that he obtained the rank of Master. That he spent years reading this sort of thing, and that… That there was a dark-haired boy who spent hours with books, reading and learning. Sometimes she forgets there was a dark haired man, hidden behind a black mask, and he lived in a world where people got tortured for not shining boots properly. And somehow, he found a way to thread himself through both needles.

He's continuing on, "You'll see it when you get to chapter two, suddenly, instead of reading like something someone might actually say, it starts to feel like a droid with only partially functional verbal processing attempting to explain something complicated."

"Oh."

"Of course, by the time a hundred years had passed, the attitude toward what constituted proper service began to shift, and Manalevan became less of a pariah." He taps her pad. "They tried to put his work back together, which is why you've got this, but it's so badly chopped up that it's useless."

"Was there… a lot of that sort of thing?" She's asking about torturing valets.

"I'd say yes, but…" He shrugs a little. "Unlike you, I never read about any other religions. Maybe they're all like that." He answers about Jedi infighting. And she's not sure if he's intentionally ducking her question or staying on his current set of thoughts.

"Maybe." She looks at her pad and decides to stay with Jedi. It's likely there's no answer about living in the First Order that's going to make her happy. "I've been avoiding the history and focusing on the philosophy so… I get stuff like this in a vacuum. Just the ideas, none of the politics."

He kisses her thigh. "Probably the best way to do it. Everything's ugly when you look at the politics."

She realizes that's his answer not just to Jedi infighting, but also to her question about the First Order. She strokes his hair, and looks at his pad, mostly numbers. "What are you slogging through?"

"Spot checking my supply contracts. We buy supplies for the First Order as a whole, and each command ship also orders supplies for its own needs. I'm checking to see if the numbers are in order."

Her eyes skitter over the column of numbers. They are, for the most part, similar. "What am I looking at?"

"Cost of bacta per liter."

He's already got the number highlighted, so it's easy to find. "And…"

"That's the Arcadia," he replies.

"And the Arcadia is spending three times more per liter than anyone else."

"That's how it looks to me."

"And you intend to find out why."

"That's the plan."

She thinks about it for a moment. "Is there a why that might not get the quartermaster killed?"

He half inclines his head. "I'd imagine there could be a reason for why this is so expensive for him and only him. And I suppose there could be a reason why he doesn't just place an order from us for it in order to avoid the cost. I just don't happen to know what it might be."

That doesn't bode well for the Quartermaster. "So… what do you do next?"

"Look at his books, see if he's just spending too much on Bacta, or if he's spending like this on everything. Check his location. It's possible if he's off in the middle of nowhere that just getting things to him is expensive. Maybe it's a very small, very safe ship, and they just don't need much of it. The less of it you buy, the more per liter is."

Rey finds that comforting. Then she looks at what he's doing. This doesn't seem like the job of the Supreme Leader. "Don't you have people who do this?"

"I have auditors. They do this."

"Then why are you doing it?"

"Every day I have C8 get me something, somewhere to check. I can't watch everything, but I can check enough things at random to keep people nervous about not getting away with not doing their jobs."

"And today it was bacta expenses?"

"Today it was bacta expenses. Tomorrow it may be how many uniforms we go through. Or ship maintenance schedules or… How many rivets we've got. It'll be something. I'll look at it, poke around, and spend a few hours on it."

She's not sure if that's a good use of his time, but since he doesn't exactly have a trusted second-in-command, she supposes it's necessary.

She thinks morning Kylo is her favorite Kylo.

He's not a very good sleeper in the sense of falling asleep easily, or staying that way. She'll often wake in the night and find him lying on his side, back to her, using his body to shade her from the light of his data pad, reading, usually with a hand or foot touching her.

He tells her that he's always been the kind of person who prefers to go to sleep long after the sun, if there were one, sets, and stay asleep well into morning. Kind of moot here on the Supremacy, but she can see that being true about him.

However it works, when the part of her brain that's aware of the idea of morning tells her it's time to get up, he's often asleep.

There's a softness to him when he sleeps. She assumes that's likely true for everyone, though, aside from those days when the Falcon was stuffed full of people who all had to sleep, and none of them had enough room for it, she hasn't really ever seen anyone else sleep.

He likes to snuggle in close, spooning up behind her when they're falling asleep, but generally, at some point in the night, they'll roll onto their backs, and end up side to side.

So, by the time she wakes up, assuming it's at a time when he's sleeping, he'll be on his back, spread out, taking up… more room than he seems like he possibly could, and given how big he is, that's a lot of room.

She wonders if this is part of why he's a bad sleeper. Once he's fully out, all of his defenses just melt away. He'll lay there, totally open, completely relaxed.

The man who woke to the green glow of a lightsaber a bare meter from his face can't afford to do that. And absolutely nothing she's learned of life in the First Order has done anything to suggest to her that that lesson wasn't re-taught over and over and over.

She likes the fact, that on mornings like this one, where she's woken before him, she's got a chance to… not erase the past, but… complement it, maybe. Offer him the chance to wake up to something other than heart pounding terror and abject rejection.

She does know that if she moves slowly, and gently, and doesn't do anything too fast or rough, her soft man will lay there, still sleeping, and she can play with him. She can feel how much he enjoys this, being half in dreams, just enough awake to know it's real, just enough asleep to be utterly careless, to have no existence beyond the sensations she can rise in his body.

She thinks he knows how much she enjoys this, space, where she can just explore him. Where she can fit his physical body, and all of its curves and plains, it's puckered scars, tiny moles, fine dark hairs, into a psyche that found this form at least unsettling, if not outright dangerous, for almost a decade.

Kylo is male. There's nothing even vaguely androgynous about him. And it's true that he doesn't set her danger sense off any longer, it's also true that that danger sense is still there, and she doesn't exactly enjoy having it. She doesn't want that little part of her brain that still clenches a bit when something big and male gets too close.

And she hopes that mornings like this, where he gets to wake up to someone who's touching him with joy help with his past, that getting to play with him, touch him, explore and taste and look, will help her with hers.

They've both got too many nightmares, and maybe waking with sweet dreams will help with that.

He keeps his rooms on the Supremacy comfortably warm. A touch cooler than she'd like, but that's because her idea of comfortable was set on a desert. So, while it's true that she appreciates the blankets on his bed for a little warmth, she knows that he has them there more as a matter of defense. So he's not completely open when he sleeps.

But that's not part of the game right now, and she slowly, and gently, pulls the blankets up, just a hair at a time, so there's no fast rush of cool air, and then, when they're hovering above them, she places them down on the floor.

And in the dark of his star-lit black room, in a time that is likely something like morning, she lays out next to him, resting her hand on his belly, ready to explore.

She knows he finds it somewhere between unsettling and inconceivable when she tells him he's beautiful.

And she supposes that maybe, in the grand scale of things, he's not. She doesn't really know; beauty not being a thing she's spent any great deal of time contemplating. At Orlac's school, though, they talked a lot about beauty and what it was, and from what she could tell it ranged from extremely symmetrical people with perfectly even features, which, of course Kylo not only doesn't have but likely never did, to very abstract concepts of color and line and textures bleeding across canvas or clay.

From whatever she could tell, just about anything could be beautiful. Pretty had a stricter definition, and Kylo certainly isn't pretty. Handsome likely had a similarly strict definition, and he's probably not handsome.

But he is beautiful.

He has fewer scars than she would have thought.

There are the three she put on him, though she didn't remember getting him in the leg until she saw the mark. That, like much of that fight, bled into a long blur of mostly feelings, and few images. The only really clear image she has of that fight is his eyes, centimeters away from hers, and their sabers reflecting in them.

The line along his side, a thin pink line now, she knows that's from Chewie's shot.

There's the kiss of a lightsaber against his right shoulder, where Finn hit him. It's only a few days older than the mark the Praetorian Guard put on her. Both of them are about the same size, and shape. But on her body it's a white mark fading into nothing, and on his it's still a dark pink.

There are older marks she doesn't know the stories behind. Several of them faded to white. But not nearly as many of them as she would expect.

She knows he thinks he's terrible at healing skills, and maybe he is. Or maybe he's just bad at it the way Luke taught it. Couldn't do it because it took a lot of light work. Maybe. But if he's not good at healing, he's good at something… Preservation or hardness or… something.

She's seen him after his training fights, feels the amount of force he can put into a strike, and there's no way, just as a normal human, that he could do that without crushing his hands, breaking his wrists, and shattering his arm.

Human bodies just can't take that sort of hit.

But his can. And has… His hands are fine right now. Long, thick fingers, resting and relaxed against the sheets, skin pale and unbruised.

And sometimes hasn't. She knows his nose, and jaw, and both legs, and ribs, and… There are a lot of healed breaks along his body. He can dish out that sort of hit, but not, from what she can see, just take one. Or maybe he can, and whatever hit him was so much harder than what she's trying not to imagine, that it still broke him.

She closes her eyes, feeling rather than looking, and she can see why this works the way Luke talked about it. If she just lets herself feel it, she can sense little currents of energy flowing around and through him, and there are snarls, tight spots, places where the energy gets dark and sluggish, spots where he doesn't glow.

She knows some of them are physical. There's an almost rock hard snarl on the bridge of his nose, an old break that didn't heal quite right, and the energy petrified into stasis there. There are tangles and sluggish whorls in his head and heart, too. Part of her wants to lay her hands on him, and unpick those threads, untangle them, get them flowing the way they were meant to, but…

He wouldn't be Kylo after.

If that energy is going to shift, and if he's still going to be him after, he's got to do it himself, or at least ask her for help. It can't be something she just does to him.

She supposes it's big.

The men at Niima used to joke about how big they were, but she didn't care to ever find out. The ladies would occasionally talk. They seemed less interested in how big the men were, beyond telling them that they weren't nearly so big as they thought they were. But, wherever they were on the big scale, it certainly seemed to matter to them.

Kylo as a whole is big, so… It's probably big.

Sleeping on his thigh, cuddled up in its little cap, it doesn't seem big so much as right. And, if it's cuddled up against his leg, instead of standing tall, that means he didn't sleep through the night. When he sleeps straight through, it'll rise up to greet the day. Mornings like that, he'll often wake first, and she'll wake with him wrapped around her, gently rubbing against her rear.

A lot of them have been good mornings. One of these days she'll ask why it can predict how well he slept, but for right now, she's content to just know that it does.

She enjoys this part of the morning, and his parts, how she can just, lightly, stroke the little cap, or gently lick it, just a slight graze of wet tongue on soft, soft skin. And it is so soft. Nothing about Kylo, especially awake Kylo, looks like it should be soft, besides his hair, but this little tip is so soft. She likes the feel of it under her fingers or against her tongue.

She likes the smell of it, and the taste, especially now, in the morning. Later, at night, if they haven't gotten a bath, and he's been doing something physical and hard, it can get a bit overpowering, and not in a good way. After the bath, he just smells like soap, and it's nice soap, but it's not him. But now, when all they've done is play and rest… This is good.

She likes the way, especially when she's being very gentle with him, like she is now, that it'll start to wake up slow and easy. The head fills out first, then the bottom of the shaft, and eventually the middle catches up, and it'll creep its way from his thigh to his belly. Eventually, it'll stand up, looking to meet her lips and fingers, asking for more.

By that point, the little cap's grown tight around him, and just a hint of pink peeks out.

It's a shaft, so it can't exactly have a personality, but it does. It likes to tease, barely peeking out at her, calling her closer, to come and get to know what's hiding below.

If she's gentle, and careful, and keeps her tongue and fingers wet, it'll stay that way, just peeking at her. He'll shiver, a little, even in his sleep, and make a tiny mmm sound when her tongue glides over the pink.

If she's rougher, holding it in her hand, stroking firmly, the cap will slide back, and all of his pink will be exposed, flushed to the air, to her gaze, damp and waiting. He doesn't make any noise at that, but the muscles in his stomach and thighs tense, eager.

He's not really asleep now, but he's not exactly awake either. Probably in that sleepy space where everything is soft and loose and easy, aware of the world around him, but not caring much about it, maybe still dreaming a little, adding a layer of fantasy images to the world around him.

She slips her tongue over him, her mouth around him, sucking gently, her pink on his. His eyes are moving fast behind his lids, but he doesn't open them, doesn't move his hands to touch her, or guide her.

She's playing, and he's surrendering, enjoying, passively accepting pleasure.

She can feel his tension building, though he's not really moving. His hips and thighs are still fairly loose, but not for much longer. The muscles of his low belly are starting to clench up. His hips start a slow, easy rock.

A few more strokes, and he'll spurt.

She's moving a little faster, still keeping things gentle, not wanting to jar him too quickly into full awake, and the thought that occurs to her is that she's never seen him spurt.

Felt it, likely on a more intimate and intense level than anyone who isn't Force sensitive can. And felt it on the more common level of it happens inside of her, so she's felt it. But never seen.

His thighs twitch, a little. If he were more awake, she knows he'd be thrusting, hard, but his body's not up to much right now. So, just a little twitch, and tiny roll, and she pulls back, crouching between his legs, just stroking with her hand, and watches.

It's so flushed. Pink and red toward the tip, and wet, shining, and so hard. The veins are standing out, purple-blue against pink skin, and the cap's nowhere to be seen, having pulled back as he grew longer, seeking release.

His face is starting to look tense, chest tight, nipples hard, fingers starting to draw into fists, and he's breathing faster, so close. She rubs just a little faster, feeling it slip through her fingers, slick and hot, and then he twitches all over, twitches in her hand, too, and it puts her in mind of a break in a hydraulic lift. One fast spurt, fluid shooting out, arcing high to hit his belly and chest, and then a few smaller ones, dripping over his belly and her hand, as the pressure lets off.

His skin is pink, flushed all over, not just his shaft, and his breathing is slowing down. She calls a towel to hand and gently wipes both of them off, before laying on her side, next to him, watching.

She knows he's awake, fully awake, has been since about a second before he spurted, but he hasn't opened his eyes, yet, he rolls over to face her, and then he does. Slowly. And they stay at only two-thirds open. Sleepy eyes. He gazes at her, and there's no other word for it, this is a gaze, it's not a look or an ogle or anything else, it's a gaze.

He doesn't smile, but she can feel he's warm and content, and that sensation is new and frightening for him.

He doesn't reach for her, not touching, but his eyes are intense, and she can feel his emotions open to her. "I feel you here. Even with my eyes closed. I know I'm not dreaming. But I always take a breath before I open them, just to stretch that moment out a little longer, because it'd be so horribly disappointing if you weren't here when I opened them."

She takes his hand in her, kisses it, and smiles at him.

He half-smiles back, and she can feel the litany in his head: Don't ever leave me. Don't let me wake alone. Don't reject me. Don't decide I'm not enough. Don't break me. She can feel the moment he woke in Snoke's throne room, alone, save for the person he least wanted to see at that moment, Hux.

But he doesn't say it. So she doesn't respond to it.

Both of them know, that some things, even if they can feel them, still belong in privacy of their own heads.

Rey likes sunlit Kylo.

When he does come to her, he's usually just in time to catch the sunset. At least the second of them. The green sun lingers longer in the sky, waiting an hour or so to join its sibling, and as it does so, it casts everything in an orange-brown glow.

He's got that jittery edge to him that goes with too many details and not enough running around or hitting things.

Lucky for him, Chewie left today, and left Rey with four new pre-fab cottages. All the comforts of home, albeit a small one. Each one is a main room and a tiny bath area. They clock in a 150 square meters, and rumor has it, can be put together by one person with three tools, a modicum of technical talent, and a spare afternoon.

Or so the instructions say.

She didn't outright ask Chewie if he got these from the same guy who sold him the transteel dome, but she's got the sinking suspicion, in that she's got all three of the necessary tools, significantly more than a modicum of technical talent, and has been attempting to get the first two walls locked into place for three hours, (with both said technical talent and her Force skills) that just possibly, these things are not quite as spiffy as advertised.

They are, however, cheap and these days, when she's living more or less off of Chewie's kindness and whatever scraps the Resistance can kick to her, that counts for a lot.

So, right now, she's got work, heavy, demanding, move big things around, work. (Part of why this is possibly taking her more than three hours is that she's just not tall enough to get some of the higher bits fitted together. Or maybe they just can't fit together. Either way…)

It's warm today. Warm in the way Jakku just never got. It got hot there, but there was no moisture in the air, so it didn't feel so thick and slow. And, yes, Chewie said it was winter on the coast, but it can't be winter here. The grasses are alive and happy, waving about in what little breeze there is, sagey-green-gray. There are tiny flowers that grow on and through them. This has to be summer, or maybe late spring. Winter can't be the season where everything is alive.

But, whatever season it may be on the equator of Lirium, a kilometer from a transteel dome, a few hundred meters from the edge of a lake, it's hot. Fortunately, Chewie's never been fussed by naked or mostly naked humans, so she didn't feel odd about stripping down to just her shorts and undershirt as they unloaded the buildings.

Hours later, after Chewie's left, Kylo arrives and intensely notices her in just her undershirt and shorts. She feels a little self-conscious when he looks her over, and smiles, licking his lips. She rolls her eyes at that, she's sweat soaked, hair ratty, and covered in smears from the oil that's supposed to let the wall pieces just slide into each other.

He pulls off his tunic and shirt, and stands beside her. "What are we building?"

"Hopefully, a cottage."

"Yours?"

"Maybe. For a little while, at least. If I can get this together, I might take two of the other ones," she nods to the boxes of cottages that Chewie left behind, "and make a bigger one for me."

His eyes flick to the packaging, and he can see the specs on this indicate it's about half the size of his bedroom. "Don't want to be constantly tripping over me?"

She gives him a little shove with her hip. "It'd be nice if it were big enough for both of us. And… I kind of like the idea of having a separate place to sleep from where I eat and work."

"I certainly do."

They get an hour to work, before the light is too scarce to see what they're doing. And though the cottage refuses to come together without some serious re-tooling of the joints, she's not too dismayed.

She spent an hour, in the sunshine, with her Kylo. The Supremacy doesn't just eat light, it eats color. The Supreme Leader has almost white skin. He has black hair, and black eyes, and wears all black. The First Order bleached all of the color out of him, and dyed the bits that may have had some life in them black.

Sunset Kylo, on a grassy plain, in the orangey-brown sunset light, has brown eyes. They're dark, and always will be, but they're brown. Warm brown, a color that makes her think of slow moving, succulent liquids. Something she hasn't yet tasted, but is looking forward to. His skin is pale. Between keeping every inch of him below his chin covered all day, every day, and the artificial light of the Supremacy, he is pale. But in the sunset, he's pale peach. His hair is black. That's true of him no matter where he is, but like the rest of the planet, it gets a layer of slightly brownish sunset highlights here. His lips and nipples are still pink, but unlike on the Supremacy, where they contrast sharply against the pale of his skin, here they're just a warmer, redder compliment to his skin.

For an hour, she got to see him bright, in color, not black, or gray, and work with him on building something, together.

She notices, and thinks about, after, in the shower with him, as they scrub off the smears of oil, and humid sweat of too hard work on a too hot day, that he really enjoyed that.

He'll often do something hard and physical just to do it. Move rocks, run around the lake until he collapses, beat his punching bags into tatters, train with his saber until his arms shake. Something, anything physically difficult, and though his body sings from the endorphins, she doesn't get the sense that he really likes it.

It's a means to an end.

But… He was smiling as they kept trying to get the bits together, laughing a little, though they were both frustrated. At one point, rather than putting the walls down so they could get to the top easily, he picked her up, settled her on his shoulders, so she could see where the joint wasn't meshing properly.

It was fun.

Her, and her boy, building something, in the sunshine. Almost, achingly close to the shape she saw of… at the time she thought it was Ben's future, but now knows it's Kylo's, when their hands touched for the first time.

"You really liked that," she says to him as he's rubbing shampoo into her hair.

He doesn't exactly respond, but she can feel the agreement.

She turns around, facing him, water streaming down her back, suds flowing over her. She lays her hands on his chest, just below the token that he's wearing today, and she can feel it all through her. "It's not enough to kill the past, you've got to replace it with a present, and a hope for a future."

His fingers trace over hers, and she can tell he's not quite sure where she's going to take this. If it's a condemnation or a commendation.

"You tear things down, but you're doing it so you can build anew. You're not destruction for the sake of destruction, you're destruction for the sake of creation." She feels the flash of that, how he took out the Jedi, destroyed their place, and how he destroyed Snoke's idea of the First Order. How he's cleared and is clearing the ground for something new.

That pleases him. He doesn't smile, but she can feel how much he likes that.

She can feel him take that flash, that re-framing of the past, and run with it. "No Jedi, no Sith, no New Republic, no First Order… Tear them all down and start new." She feels it turn in his head, too. "But I still don't know what new is."

She strokes his shoulders and arms, and touches the token. "We'll find it."