The blood from his wounded hand left a trail behind him. It dripped, slowly, onto the shiny tile floor, splattered onto the wall as he reflexively used the force to knock out of his way anyone who happened to walk near him, and fell through the metal grating that made up the bridge. A droid, gliding about his tasks below, stopped short when he felt his casings suddenly slick with blood now cooled from its rapid descent.
Kylo could barely see his surroundings. The door was hardly closed before he was screaming profanity and slamming his fists into the wall with a rage so deep it threatened to consume him completely.
And why could it not? It was all that he wanted.
Despair and resentment washed over him. Weak now, his rage spent, he stumbled blindly towards the table that held his grandfather's helmet. He was on his knees, his hands folded. His vision blurred and he closed his eyes, realizing that his sight had not been clouded by rage … but by tears.
Despair turned to shame. He let out a guttural cry.
"Grandfather. Forgive me!" He was weeping, shuddering. "I feel it again."
He couldn't say it.
Visions flashed through his mind. He saw his mother smiling down at him as he learned of his powers. He couldn't have been more than four or five. In her smile, he saw pride. But her smile was too big – forced. In her eyes, Kylo saw her true emotion: a deep fear. This fear was made manifest a few years later, when he discovered his powers could be mixed with rage to create something lethal. His mother's droid was in a thousand pieces on his bedroom floor when Leia entered to see him in the corner, seething.
"How dare you!" she screamed at him. "How DARE you use this power in this way!" Her disgust was palpable – his soul was drenched in it. In that moment, all Kylo wanted to do was to make his mother proud again. He would do almost anything to fix what he had done, to right the impulse towards good. But instead of crying with remorse and begging for forgiveness, he felt the rage overtake him once more, and, chin jutted and fists clenched, watched as his mother flew several feet at the impact, her body hitting the wall and then falling to the floor in a heap.
Never since had he been more ashamed of his pull to the darkness.
Never … until the moment he had tried to kill the scavenger.
"I feel it," he whispered to his grandfather. "The pull to the light."
Why was his grandfather dead? Why now, when he desperately needed guidance? He had never met him, but Leia's stories about her father had revealed a man of deep conviction and resolve. "He was a good man," she said when recounting stories to him."But his soul was twisted. He gave in to the siren song of the dark." A young Kylo nodded then. But he knew that he understood something his mother did not – that the siren song sometimes grew so loud in his ears that he thought his very soul might explode at the base need of it.
"Show me again the power of the darkness," he prayed. He needed to relive his pain. He needed to feel it again, untainted by the sick desire he had felt, if only so briefly, to see the scavenger live … to feel the scavenger's touch … to know her. Deeply. To know what it was that she knew-
His rage began to mount, like the coloration of his cheeks, as he reacted against the pull of the light.
"Show me, Grandfather," he said. He scrambled suddenly to his feet, towering over the ashy remains. "Show me. And I will finish what you started." It was a vow. His breathing settled, his heart slowed.
Filled with a new resolve, he wiped his eyes.
As his tears mingled with the blood from his wounded hand, his vision turned red.