Kylo Ren was very surprised one day when breakfast was almost served to him in bed.
The shock came first from the smell; the aroma of bacon leaking through the floorboards from the downstairs kitchen. Kylo awoke with a start, clutching desperately at his sheets. He never cooked anything beyond Lean Cuisines and Spaghetti-O's—there certainly hadn't been any bacon in his kitchen, which meant—
His mind whirled with possibilities.
The second shock came slower, with a calm, sinking dread: the absolute fact that Kylo had, for the past three years, lived entirely alone.
He rose from his bed and reached for the phone, only to find that the landline redirected to nowhere—worse than nowhere, it played music at him, like he'd been placed on hold. It was like something from a dream.
Venus make her fair,
I loved a girl with sunlight in her hair…
Kylo let the phone thump against his bedspread, heart jackhammering in his chest. He could hear an echo of the music coming from the kitchen, from the walls; it seemed to grow louder as he listened.
Oh, Venus…
Oh, Venus!
He sat back, hands fisting the hard wood of his bedframe, and took a deep breath. All of this added up meant one of two things:
One, that he was having some kind of a mental break. Not unlikely, considering that he had no friends or family to speak of after throwing his future into the dark hole of heroin addiction. Eight years ago, he acknowledged, he'd been a complete and utter dick—a transformation had overtaken him utterly in college, turning him from a yuppie pre-lawyer into one asshole standing over another as he bled out into the street.
(There had been money in the dead man's pockets. That was it; that was why Kylo had killed him.)
(He'd acknowledged many times in prison that it had been a dick move.)
Kylo steered his thoughts away from that as he considered Option Number Two, which was quite simple, and probably the real truth:
Someone had broken into his house. They'd brought a speaker with them for some reason, and were making themselves breakfast with bacon that they'd smuggled into his kitchen. It was odd, but Kylo had been homeless once, and he figured this might be some kind of bougie squatter. He exhaled and reached for the illegal gun that he kept underneath his bed, tucking it into the waistband of his pants. He didn't bother to cover it with a jacket or robe as he stood, bare feet pounding on the hardwood floor.
He grimaced at the creak of the stairs as he thudded down, despite his best efforts to place his toes just-so. Pictures stared like round eyes from the walls, reflecting dead generations of family and other, older occupants of the house. They were old and creepy, but Kylo hadn't bothered to get them replaced; to be honest, he kind of liked the idea that the house had been lived-in. It made him feel a little less alone.
Speaking of—
As he rounded the corner into his kitchen, he could make out a feminine voice lilting in time with the lyrics. His hand landed upon the butt of his gun.
He inched forward, breath short—standing in the doorway, he could make out the corner of a checkered apron, swinging just into view.
"Hey," he said. He cleared his throat. "HEY!"
He pulled the gun, and almost dropped it just as quick; the woman was... He rubbed at his eyes, trying to convince himself that he wasn't dreaming.
The woman was dead.
—
She smiled, wiping her hands on her apron. "Hello, Kylo," she said. "Glad to see you're awake."
"You—" Kylo was speechless. "Your…"
"Oh, this?" She gestured toward the stab wounds lacing the front of her dress—in the breasts, stomach, thighs—so many, so many little holes angling inward. She made an awkward face. "I apologize—I know it's unseemly, but you see, Daddy didn't exactly have a discerning eye when it came to getting rid of the rest of us, so—"
"Daddy," Kylo repeated slowly. He blinked. "Your dad did this to you?"
She pursed her lips and nodded. Then, wiping at her eyes, she turned back to the stove. "Sit down," she ordered, her voice cracking in time with the sizzle of the bacon. "Your eggs are getting cold."
Kylo turned to see that the dining table was set with a plate, knife, fork; everything. There was even a little vase of flowers sat up by the window.
He sat. His gun was a heavy weight by his side; he re-cocked the safety and placed it carefully on the table. He couldn't kill her twice, he supposed. Might as well hear what she had to say.
But then the music crackled, and the woman's hands faltered. Thunder rumbled from somewhere far away.
Kylo blinked; but the music was gone.
—
Oh, Venus…
Oh Venus!
Kylo rolled over in bed and pressed his pillow over his ears, mouth open in a silent scream. It didn't matter—the music followed him into his dreams, strange wanderings where he stepped into blood-soaked corridors and remembered the blast of the gun over and over, the man falling and the rain falling and the drug-haze tripping his feet over the pavement (worms, worms squirming under his hole-filled tennis shoes, oh god oh)
He didn't sleep much anymore. Instead, he wandered around the house and stared at the pictures, trying to place the woman. She wasn't in any of them, which struck him as strange. He would've thought a murder would have been disclosed to him when he inherited the house from his Uncle Luke—though he supposed that he hadn't been in his right mind at the time of the will, or in the aftermath of the inheritance. He'd been a little busy hammering out license plates behind bars and trying to get his shit together.
I loved a girl with sunlight in her hair…
Every night for two weeks, now. It never stopped; he found phonographs spinning in the attic, radios playing in the dead cars decaying on his front lawn.
And take the shining stars up in the sky, and put them in her eyes for me…
Kylo had taken to walking out of the house into the hot summer air, tattered bathrobe flapping behind him like a second skin. The song would echo everywhere in the woods, bouncing from oak to oak. The cicadas would chirp in tune.
Tonight, Kylo gave in; he cleared his throat and sang along, hoping it appeased someone, somewhere. Maybe the woman could come back and feed him breakfast, bleeding into the sausage. That's all humans were, anyway—that's what his cellmate used to say, just dumb bags of meat, all. It gave Kylo comfort to think of himself that way. He was just a walking pile of decay, waiting to slump to the ground and get pecked at by vultures. The circle of life for someone that had already rotted themselves from the mind-out.
He rose and went to the window, pressing his hand against the glass. If he squinted, he thought he could make out Venus winking in the early haze of morning.
He closed his eyes and prayed for dreamless sleep.
—
He sang the song until his voice grew hoarse, drumming his hands along the banister as he descended down the stairs for lunch. It would probably be the same as yesterday: handfuls of lunchmeat and a carton of stale cigarettes from the stash he'd found in the attic. He liked puffing into the stale air, the way he imagined his ancestors must have done mid-20th-century.
"Can I bum one?"
He started; but it was just the dead woman, wearing that same checkered apron. He surprised himself by agreeing, and by passing the physical object.
She took it in hand and tried to inhale. A stab wound in her neck stopped her cold; she frowned, and stubbed it out on the stove.
"Been enjoying the music?" she smiled, showing off a row of unstraightened teeth.
Kylo exhaled a week's worth of madness. "Please make it stop."
"Oh." Her eyes grew wide. "Oh, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to—It was my favorite song, I thought... I thought we could share it together."
The music stopped, plunging the house into an uneasy silence. Kylo straightened, feeling the echoes of it still pinging around the back of his skull. A shudder worked its way from the soles of his feet to his chest, settling there until he was forced to clutch at himself, working his nails into the bare white meat of his arms.
"...Why?" he breathed.
"Because I like you."
She said it so matter-of-factly; as if it was perfectly natural that a dead woman should stand in his kitchen and steal his cigarettes and pour a song into the very recesses of his soul through sheer, horrible repetition. He wanted to scream and cry and pull his hair out. Most of all, he wanted heroin.
"Well," he said, trying to keep his voice steady. "I don't like you."
He tried not to react to the hurt rippling across her face—that horrible, ruined, bucktoothed face. "You're lying," she said. At least her voice was sweet.
"Just leave me alone," he sighed.
She shook her head. "I'm sorry, but I can't."
"Yes, you—"
"I can't, alright?" She bit out the words, gesticulating in the air—she was one of those people that spoke with her hands as much as her voice, growing more agitated for want of a cigarette to motion with.
Her brows knitted together. She met his eye, and stood a bit straighter. "You're just like me," she whispered. "You get it. You've killed someone, too."
—
After that, she didn't leave.
No—she did better than that. She made meatloaf for dinner, with wine that she conjured somehow with her bare hands. The next morning, she made toast, and sandwiches for lunch. She stayed for a week, and a week after that.
She hummed as she cooked. When she wasn't in the kitchen, she was knitting in the living room, or tending to the half-dead hydrangeas in the yard. Kylo grew to tolerate her presence, and his own insanity—he chain-smoked in front of her, and she watched longingly each night as they sat on the porch step.
They talked about everything but the murders. And slowly, the two of them began to heal.
She told him her name—Rey, like a ray of sunshine, and he teased her about it. It was a pretty name for a pretty girl, and he thought she might be, underneath all of that blood and in the right light, when she looked more solid than see-through.
But all that time, he wondered how she'd known about him. One evening, as they sat together on that self-same porch, listening to the grasshoppers chirp, the urge overtook him and he finally asked.
"How did you know that I killed someone?"
Rey gave him a confused glance. "After you die," she said slowly, "You know these things. Knowledge is flexible, and so is time."
"Hmph." Kylo leaned back onto the porch swing, swaying on his toes. He gestured at her upper half. "So you—You still killed your father when he did that to you? How?"
"Revolver in the kitchen cabinet." She gave him a sad smile. "It was one of those freak of nature things, I think—like when a mother raises a heavy car to rescue her trapped babies. All I know was that I was so angry that I…" She sighed, and deflated a bit. The sun reflected off the glossy stains of her wounds, forever weeping, forever trailing bits of blood behind her. "Truth be told, he was drunk as a skunk. He never saw it coming."
"That makes it easier," Kylo agreed.
The sun was setting quickly, burning a red-hot hole into the edge of the world. He had to squint to look past it into the outline of Rey's shape. That flowing dress, that apron tied tight around her hips.
"I'm not sure if it does," she said.
He closed his eyes, and the imprint of the sun danced behind his lids in double.
"That wasn't my favorite song, by the way," he heard her say. "I lied." Her voice was still so sweet.
"Oh?"
"It was my mother's. She—She slept through the whole thing, she was drunk, she—"
He opened his eyes to watch her exhale, wringing her hands. "I forgave her, and I forgave myself." She turned toward him. In the twilight, she was more shadow than person, more spirit than reality. "You should think about it, too."
And then she leaned in, and Kylo had the strange sensation of meeting her lips. Strange, but right, somehow. It felt warm instead of cold, as it should have been—as one would think it would be while kissing a ghost.
It felt like forgiveness.