i will never die

The Force, he could feel it crackling around them, their two energy signatures swirling together. He could feel flashes of her: Sunlight on her skin, the smiles of her friends, the thrill of flying through space, the sight of so much green stirring disbelief and joy in her heart. His focus on their energy is what kept him from buckling under the weight of her words.  She was right. It wasn’t fair of him to idolize her. If he did, he was no better than the rebel scum who worshipped Luke as a legend or the Jedi who believed his grandfather was the Chosen One. Kylo was familiar with the burden of a family legacy and Rey, she didn’t carry that, but she did carry the hope of the Resistance on her shoulders. They all looked up to her. “I knew.” The edge of his voice broke. The truth finally laid bare in the small room. There was little space between them, but Kylo stepped into it. He was afraid to touch her. He was afraid that she might bolt out the room with stardust and light trailing behind her. His exhale was uneven and he bowed his head to rest his forehead against hers.  Overwhelmed, Kylo shut his eyes, “I…” His hands were shaking when he finally lifted them to her shoulders, but his touch was light. He wanted to give her the choice to push him away. “I want…I want the chance to show you that I’m not going to leave you.” He could not live with a galaxy emptied of her.

When Rey imagined them reuniting, she had imagined fighting him again. She’d been so angry, she dreamed of it, among other things... but she hadn’t even brought her staff with her, the one she’d worked on, using the broken kyber crystal from the lightsaber they’d worked on. It was about as stable as his, but she didn’t care. Maybe she wanted it that way. 

Everyone saw her as the last of the Jedi, their last hope. It was a lot of pressure for someone who didn’t have an experienced teacher, who still lacked a great deal of experience wielding the Force. She came through when it was necessary, she worked hard and threw herself into learning it, but it was hard. It was so solitary a task, she hadn’t realised how alone she was. That ache in her felt as if it was being nudged by his closeness growing, the way his voice met her with its own deep emotion. 

Her breath caught in her throat as his forehead pressed so tenderly against hers. Again, tears sprung, but she quickly blinked them away. Rey tried to make her breathing even, but his words reached something deep in her. She leaned into his touch, lifting up just a little on her feet so she could press closer. 

No one had ever said something like that to her and it was instinct, the way she tilted her head up and let her lips find his. It was a little awkward, especially since she’d never done it before, but kissing him felt... right. Her hands pressed against his chest, pulling back for half a second to glance at him, her cheeks beginning to burn pink. Then she leaned up again, getting her bearings and letting the walls she’d put up fall, letting him in no matter how terrifying it was. 

Her kisses were brief, still punctuated with her inexperience, but then her eyes were shut and her forehead was back against his. “Ben.” She said his name softly, testing out how it felt in her mouth now. “Is this the other thing you wanted?”

Kylo swallowed. ‘With some sort of assumption that I would have let them.’ His mind clung to those words. Even if it was naive and foolish of her to believe that she could protect him from the masses. The fact that she would try. It stunned him. A muscle under his eye twitched. No one had ever fought for him before. He had plenty on his side, at one point or another, from the Knights of Ren to the other padawans at Luke’s temple. And yet it was Rey, the Last true Jedi, the Nobody from Jakkuu, his equal, that would have tried to protect him from a fate he deserved.  He wasn’t completely speechless before. But he was now.  She stared up at him and his heart convulsed painfully in his chest. He made her cry. That dug at him, deeply, right into the marrow of his bones. This whole evening was going fucking wrong. Kylo tried to reach for the darkness to stabilize him. Within it was his pain, all his self-loathing and hatred, the death by a thousand cuts. It waited for him in the peripheral of his energy and it feasted on his agony.  The darkness would not come to him. He felt it slip through his fingers like inky tendrils of oil. Because his mind, his heart, would not let him escape the intoxicating thought that Rey would’ve fought to keep him alive. Maybe even now…she’d try to keep him alive even after the war (assuming they both make it). After everything he did, after all of it… “You’re too good, Rey.” He realized too late that the words had slipped from his lips. “Snoke once told me you were my equal in the Light.” He swallowed again to gain control of his voice, to will it to be calm, “I believed him then and I believe him now…maybe even now, more so than ever before.” 

Another tear spilled down her hot cheek and she again wiped in frustration, sniffling and wanting to shove him for the way he was behaving. He was so infuriating sometimes. All she had wanted was this, him coming to the Resistance, him giving up his foolish plight to find something in the darkness that would fulfil him. She knew now that it couldn’t have been her that brought him, she couldn’t have turned him on her own. It had to be him. 

And even when he was letting words spill from his lips impulsively, making yer eyes widen for a moment, her brows furrowed in further dissatisfaction. “No. Don’t say that.” She shook her head and reached out to him, fingers grasping his shirt, wanting to make him listen. “My wanting to keep you alive is not an act full of light. It’s selfish... I’m selfish. I want..” Her hand flexed and then balled into a fist, letting go of the fabric. “I want it despite what is justified. Don’t you put me on a damn pedestal.” She choked out, though despite the hint of anger in her tone her eyes were searching his, watching him. 

She hadn’t seen him look at her like this in such a long time, but she still felt he wasn’t understanding it or her. 

“There’s dark in me, just as there is light. You saw that. You saw.... you knew I wanted to take your hand, didn’t you?” Rey lowered her gaze, shame beginning to course through her. She felt erratic, a moment from turning away as she seemed to realise just how close they were. 

“What do you think would have happened if I came with you!?” Kylo spun on his heel, finding that now she was turned away from him. The Force felt oppressive in the room. A heavyweight settling over his shoulders and threatening to drag him to his knees. He stared at her back, hands clenched at his sides, the leftover taste of food turns to ash in his mouth. “You seem to believe that your Resistance would’ve welcomed me with open arms, but we both know that isn’t true.” His lips twisted into a sneer, “Do you really think they would have believed us if we told them that we killed Snoke together?” He pressed onward, each word like re-opening a wound that he refused to let heal. “Countless lives have been tortured or killed by my orders. If I came with you that day, they wouldn’t have let me live.”  Kylo shook his head. His jaw clenched and his breathing ragged as he scrambled to collect his tumultuous thoughts. He felt raw. Exposed. Yet, it was freeing, too. He wasn’t speaking to an image of the Force bond. This wasn’t a fever dream. He could reach out and touch her.  He didn’t. He wanted to. But, he didn’t. “And you don’t see it.” He spat the words out, “The Resistance is just like the First Order.” Kylo lowered his eyes to the floor, thinking that he might be able to burn a hole into the concrete with his gaze alone. “You’re–” At the last second, he lost his nerve, because they were fighting and the darkness was tangible as it curled around his heart and stuck to his ribcage and threatened to suffocate him. He wasn’t about to admit anything to her when he wasn’t sure if he was ready to admit it to himself. “–still trying to fight the Light in me and it’s not there, Rey.”  

Rey shrunk only for a second at the sound of his voice rising at her, again filled with so much anger, a refusal to understand where she came from, to see what she’d seen in him when they’d touched hands, when she’d watched him kill Snoke instead of her. There was a refusal in her to stay there like that, pushing her shoulders back, blinking away insistent tears as she glared at a spot across the room. 

Maybe he was right. Rey knew how they hated him, she knew how hard it was to see underneath everything in him, the layers of resentment and anger, the horrible things he’d done. “You...” She shook her head and shut her eyes tight, letting out a breath. “You say that with some sort of assumption that I would have let them.” Was there a point in saying it, since he hadn’t come? She she let the sentiment be known regardless. 

The energy in the room had quickly grown impulsive and intense, every cord in her was strung tight, she felt like she was going to explode. She felt... that maybe even what she felt wasn’t entirely her own. She could feel him. 

Wiping at her cheeks, she turned to him, chin raised in defiance of his words even as a gasp rose in her throat and she practically choked on it. “That’s not true.” She spoke quietly and then took a step towards him, then another until she was in his space, staring up at him with not an ounce of fear for the terrifying Kylo Ren. 

“You can fight it. You can tell me that there is nothing good in you, but I know that Ben is still in there! The Ben who listened to me and reached out to me and fought by my side. That Ben still exists, no matter how much you try to snuff him out.” She was so stubborn, so determined to make him see it. In her gaze, what had been fire was extinguished with pleading, her breaths coming out slow and shaky. “Your darkness a crutch. It’s a mask, you’re still wearing it even now.” 

Kylo was about half-way through his meal when Rey polished off hers. He didn’t know what to think of her ‘Alone, mostly’ comment. Did she have someone else helping her? He didn’t sense anyone else on the base who was attuned to the Force. He fought back the wave of jealousy that tinged his focus green. Rey still needed a teacher. A real one. Someone who didn’t hide the truth about the Jedi, their failures, and the Darkside. He could still be that teacher. If she let him. It would give him something else to do besides betray First Order secrets to his mother The General. His eyebrows rose at her sudden admission. Perhaps if he still wasn’t physically and mentally exhausted from his battle and escape from Hux’s men. Perhaps if he didn’t just deal with Leia Organa. Perhaps if he was thinking even just a little bit clearer, then Kylo might’ve stopped the next words out of his mouth.  “You left first.” Once the words were out, he couldn’t take them back and then he was saying almost everything he wanted to after that night on Supremacy. “I woke up and you were gone. If you’d just listened, then none of this would’ve happened! We could’ve saved - it could be different. Our galaxy. If we’d just - if you’d just—!” Kylo rose to his feet, his plate clattering to the floor, and he paced away from Rey because he kept looking at her then he might shatter. 

The moment she spat the words out, she bit into the fruit again, this time almost rabidly, until her mouth was full and she was chewing furiously, gaze dropping to the floor. That was, until he responded and her chewing stopped all together. The colour seemed to drain from Rey’s face as she listened to him, the words getting deep below the surface, attacking her for the things she knew she couldn’t have done. Back to chewing at a ridiculous speed, she turned her head to watch him move past her, eyes blazing with fury at his tone. 

“If I’d just listened?” She echoed incredulously, standing from her chair, abandoning her fruit on the ground. “You left me no choice. I asked you... I almost begged you! I wanted you to come with me but you were still so full of anger.” She pointed out, her face scrunching up, accusations shouted at his back. 

“I couldn’t have left them. I couldn’t just abandon the people who cared about me. You were asking me to make an impossible choice!” Her voice became thick with emotion and she gasped, dropping her head and turning away from him, holding the back of her hand over her mouth. Every pent up emotion she’d been holding in since his arrival on the base seemed to be trying to pour out of her at once. 

“And now you have come, but only for revenge. Or maybe something else, something you haven’t told me.” She said solemnly. “Nothing else was enough to sway you from the path you’d started down. Not even me.” 

Kylo watched her in between careful bites of his own food, he just…he couldn’t stop staring. He knew it was impolite, but he couldn’t stop. She was here, alive, in front of him and he was talking to her. How many nights had he laid awake wondering what she was doing? How many times had he woken up from a dream that involved her? Did she dream of him, too? He watched as she devoured her food and a swell of protectiveness caught his breath. Are they feeding her enough?? His gaze trailed to her wrists, her arms, and then to her face and surmised that she didn’t look like she was starving. Her muscles were toned and she didn’t have any gauntness to her features that he typically saw with starvation.  It took every ounce of willpower for Kylo to look away from Rey when she asked about the General. His eyes focused on some bare spot on the wall. “She said they would use what resources they could to discover if my intel was accurate.”  “Are you still training?” He asked, deciding it was better to steer the topic of conversation away from Leia. Leia looked at him with a scrutiny that made his stomach churn. 

It wasn’t that Rey didn’t notice his eyes on her. On the contrary, she could feel them burning into her skin, she just wasn’t sure what to do with it. All of that time only seeing him in through the force, through broken moments in their bond where at times she completely refused to acknowledge his existence. She had told herself that she hated him, but with him right there in front of him, none of that hatred existed in her heart. She felt displaced and unsettled, unable to keep still, nodding as he answered her question and then leaning own to lower her plate to the floor and lifted a piece of fruit to her mouth, biting into it. 

His question had her brows furrowing for a moment before she nodded. “Yes.” She waited until she’d swallowed this time to answer, lowering her hand to her lap. “Of course. Alone, mostly.” Her gaze lifted from the fruit she’d been staring at and she blurted out the first thought in her mind before she could stop herself. 

“I don’t know how I feel about you being here.” She admitted honestly. “No one seems all that pleased about it, but I know we need you. I... I don’t know how to believe that you’ll help us. That you won’t just leave.” 

When Rey left him, it was easier to be himself again. She was true to her word - he could feel her Force signature nearby when General Organa finally chose to step into the room to speak with him. She was all formality and he expected nothing less from his politically savvy mother. Kylo kept his tone clipped, his expression controlled and impassive. She asked for names and so he gave them; high-ranking officials, politicians they worked with, smugglers and so forth. Each brush of Rey’s Force signature nearby soothed the frayed edges of his nerves and stopped him from snapping at Organa. He gave her names of some of their bases, though he did not know all their layouts.  When their meeting came to a close, Kylo ignored the muted disappointment when he saw that Rey was not waiting outside the door. She was still on base. Somewhere. He resisted the urge to knock-out his guard detail and go find her. His question was answered when the door slid open, revealing his scavenger with food in hand. He looked at the plate she gave him, waiting until she sat down before he did, “This is what passes for food around here?” Kylo said with a dry tone.  He took a bite. He wouldn’t have trusted anyone else to bring him a meal. He was grateful, he was…it was just that he just exchanged more words with Leia in thirty minutes than he had in the past decade and it left him feeling unbalanced and then there was Rey - who was just in front of him - and Kylo didn’t know if that centered him or threw him more off-balance. It may have been a little of both.

Pursing her lips, Rey lifted her gaze slowly from her own plate, piled with a heap of food to stare at him for a moment, blinking. “I think you’ll take what you can get.” She replied, almost amused by his ability to respond to everything in the exact worst way. There was a twinge of annoyance that he didn’t seem to appreciate the fact that she’d made an effort to bring him his meal rather than leaving it to be slid past the door by the guard like he was a prisoner. She supposed he kind of was, though, for now. 

Rey always ate like she had been deprived from food, maybe because she had been. Initially she’d gotten into the habit of trying to hoard her food in her room, but eventually she realised that no one was going to withhold food from her on the base. Even in front of him, she was stuffing her face a little, speeding through what she’d gotten for herself.  

Shamelessly she ate and spoke with her mouth full of food, brows furrowing at him as she tried to reach some sense of normalcy, although the very idea had gone out the window. “How was talking to Leia?” 

Making small talk was hardly what she wanted to do, but she felt strange. Having him be there, trying to hang on to a belief that he wasn’t going to change his mind and decide none of this worth it — it wasn’t easy for her. Swallowing what was in her mouth, she wiped it with her wrist, eyeing him cautiously.

At her question, he was quick to reply with a short, “No.” He didn’t just want revenge, not really. He had wanted freedom from Snoke and she helped give him that. He wanted to build something new - something different from the First Order that was Snoke’s playing ground, something different from the Old Republic, he wanted to change the Galaxy into something better. But, more than that, deeper than that - Kylo wanted this aching, impossible loneliness to end. There was only one person who mirrored him and she left him unconscious in Snoke’s throne room. Even if he told Rey the truth, there was little chance she’d accept his offer a second time, and he still had his pride. The air in his lungs constricted as she spoke again. She would come back? His brow furrowed and his lips parted, his emotions - his confusion and his wariness, - all played out across his features. His instincts scrambled, heckles rising in fear, years upon years of feeling like the other shoe would drop at any moment. A trap? Was this a trap? They both had their walls up, so he couldn’t feel inside the bond for reassurance that she was telling him the truth. The blood was roaring in his ears, “Let’s win the war first.” He finally said, then he nodded towards the door, “And I’d appreciate it if you asked them to remove these.” He looked down at the restraints on his wrists. 

With no elaboration on his answer, Rey was tempted to ask, but duty was getting in the way of her personal feelings and she had to let it remain there. Surely Leia and everyone else were awaiting her word so they could move forward with compiling a plan. 

When he was around her mind seemed to cloud, she felt she couldn’t make rational decisions. She’d gone to him recklessly once, she’d let her heart lead her into such a dangerous situation. Even if he’d come through for her, he hadn’t come all the way. 

Pursing her lips, she almost smiled and then moved forward herself, pressing the button to remove the restraints as a show of trust. There she went, being foolish in his presence, but he wouldn’t let her down this time. She was certain of that. “I’ll talk to them. I won’t go too far when they come to talk to you.” She said with a tone of finality, giving him one last lingering look before she pulled back and turned away, heading out the door to inform the Resistance that what he was saying was true. 

It took time, before General Organa decided to go back in. It took even more time for her to come back out again. They moved him to his own space, a room with a cot and freedom to move around, but they’d stationed guards by the door. Rey didn’t bother to do much but slip past them easily, two plates of food in her hands as she entered the room. “You better not pretend you aren’t hungry.” She announced, handing him one of them and then reaching out, dragging a chair from the other side of the room forward, so she could sit down. 

@azaleapaths​

even with the mild inebriation, scarlet had managed to play so hauntingly well that it would have brought some crowds to tears. as it was, her tinkling remained background music for the ridiculously upper class, hardly noticed or appreciated. scarlet’s face dropped into a bored expression the moment the music faded out. it was clear that this wasn’t what she wanted to be doing, but at least it paid the bills. it was only once she rose from the piano bench that her intoxication became obvious. she was always noticeably uncomfortable in the heels and silken dresses that she wore to her day job. the discomfort combined with the booze made her stumble slightly as she walked, catching herself on a recently vacated table. she spotted a glass of unfinished wine, something that made her scoff. the booze here wasn’t cheap, why would someone waste half a glass of wine? without so much as glancing around to see who was watching, she lifted the glass to her lips and continued stumbling her way through the restaurant.