in the gutter, looking at the stars.

“And it’s more than just real, it taste good. Unless you don’t like sazón in which case I got no help for you.”

Her eyes widened and she shuddered.

Nilza made a face.

"Mhm," Ben said, reaching down to scratch Saphira behind the ear before rising to his feet, the couch wheezing with relief.

They said the stuff'd make him humble; it did.

She pulled her hand away when he was finished checking her sugar, looking around her office. There were pieces of home everywhere, in the blanket that rested on the back of her chair, the baskets that held her memos, the paintings on the wall. But everything else was everything Ben hated. Stacks of legislation. Sticky notes of committee meetings. Evidence everywhere that she was a politician, the very thing that consumed his mother.

Why would he want to be with her?

She stepped away, set her glucose monitor down on a pile of notes. Looked at him.

Ben could’ve been angry, but his gaze only softened, dark eyes gently tracing Reb’s face as she peered around her office. 

He took three breaths, each deeper than the one that preceded it, and closed the space between them. 

Everything in his expression communicated, ‘Don’t ask me to explain it.’ 

For now those, eyes glanced at the dogs still not moving from where they were.

"Wouldn't mind support with the costs to make it that way.. if you're willing to drive after tonight."

Back to the marsh, Atieno thinks for a moment.

"I had seen many things.. so I think there's a chance I had run into something like this before. I just..didn't imagine such a being would be so close to where it could be detected."

Ben pauses, then trudges forward, dragging his gaze and a simple question along the sand. 

“What being?” 

He nods toward his truck, rust lifting dull beneath the cloud cover. Windbreaker brushing his knees as he starts up the dune. Motioning for them to follow. 

Kylo Ren Portrait Study

It was too easy. Too sweet. It was the easy kind of sweet that got them into trouble the first time. That said, be blind, that said, don't talk, don't ask. That was glutinous and gregarious. Brunn loved the way it made the corner of Ben's eyes crinkle. She loved his easy, hidden smile.

She was about to blush. About to lean through the humidity to unfold his knuckles and kiss his palm. About to do whatever one does before a hammer slam. A spitting muzzle. Before the fire and brimstone.

After two decades of training, her palm became hard. It fisted Ben's shirt and dragged him down. Down. Down to the floor, with the shattered ceramics and glass. Down to a thought about where the lead might be lodged.

Ben can't remember a time before it. Before all the smoke and flame. All the blood. The impact. 

The bullet doesn't hit as hard as the airbag did. Still, his heart throbs in his throat, his pulse beats against the inside of his skull, and he doesn't know what she means at first: are you hit? For a moment, he is back in the Audi. Watching the charred corpse of a BYD burn down to its ribcage. Airbag launched into his gut, cracked against a rib. 

At first, he doesn't realize he's on a knee, under a garden table. One hand at the back of his head, the other guarding his breastbone.  

Something's stolen Ben’s breath and dug under the hem of his collar, jabbing him like a finger; the Kevlar bears a warning in the form of a 9mm Luger. 

Ben finds Brunnhilde’s eyes, then her brow, the hairs at her temple, her crown, her collarbone, her shoulder, anything they can trace and account for from under three cast iron legs, and shakes his head, just once.

i guess i will wear a darker t-shirt and hope everyone mistakes my visible anxiety for Power.

"Here," she pulled out her glucose monitor, setting it in his hand. "You know I hate checking for myself. Although, for the record, I did have a sandwich while I sat in committee meetings a few hours ago. I even made sure to drink a juice with it. But that was a few hours ago, so I probably should eat soon. Did you have a place in mind?"

Reb looked at Ben with an affection she didn't feel for anyone else here in Washington. Her idealistic nature drove him crazy, but Ben was always supportive of her, always told her that he believed she knew how to achieve her goals. It was more than she could say for anyone else on The Hill. Everyone saw Reb and saw a child, immature in the way of politics. Nobody stopped to consider that maybe she'd been playing politics her entire life, but she was just now taking it to a national stage.

He accepted the monitor as naturally as he accepted her hand, thumb finding the strip and depressing the release with a quiet click. The monitor took its measure while Ben's attention lingered on Reb’s face, waiting through the countdown until the digits lit the screen.

“The good news is, I don’t have to kill you. The bad news is, I didn’t make a reservation. We never go out! I didn’t know whether you’d have to cancel.”

Again.

That was what had started the whole argument in the first place.

"You look unpopular. This can be attributed to the fact that you are not popular. In any context that I am aware of, anyway. You should want this to change. You need this to change."

Ben simply thinks, Ow.

He thinks again: Ow. And laughs, and it's a gracious laugh. It could even be a grateful laugh, but. 

"Davy," Ben says, pained. "Why are you telling me things I already know?"

"Hm?" 

Ben closes Lincoln in the Bardo, which he is beginning to loathe, reads Davy's expression, and briefly wishes that he could revise it. That he could revise everything.

"I 'need 'this' to change...?'" he repeats. "Yes, that's correct—and, so..." 

𝐈𝐍𝐏𝐑𝐍𝐓 𝐇𝐢𝐠𝐡 𝐐𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐀𝐫𝐭 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐬

Grey background Kylo in Red

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Or your idols.

Or your gods.

Kylo's master died. Initially, Anakin wraps his head around the statement without resistance due to the inevitable, reliable nature of death. (This has been true for Anakin before the war, before abandoning Tatooine for Coruscant. And it will, of course, be true until the end of him, true until beyond Kylo's time.)

However. First master, and who?

Anakin knows he's young, objectively. (Does Kylo think so, too? Had he ever imagined Vader before Vader, the way he was almost vibrant, the way he smirks and beams when he's proud? Has Anakin lived substantially in the expanse of Kylo Ren's expectant memory?)

Anakin also knows to carry himself with authority and experience, which compel him to see Kylo as young—in need of guidance. Anakin does not know, infuriatingly, what kind of life Kylo could possibly have lived before now—appearing, as he has, seemingly out of thin air, unaffected by the Order, undocumented by history.

Anakin grimaces, more thoughtful than truly irritated. He glances, shifty, at Kylo's hands. Around them, this world spins. Their ears echo with the sound of energies colliding, blasts being fired - this will never end.

"Who is your master now? Who were they?"

“My master now?” 

Kylo stilled his thoughts, sheathing the subtle edges that might reveal exactly how he felt about his second master; surely he had died by his own folly. 

"I don’t have one," he admitted.

Blaster fire shrieked against his eardrums.

"The truth is, nobody wanted to train me at first. Nobody wanted me."

And that had been true, hadn’t it? 

“I don’t even know where I come from or how I got here.” 

A war he didn't know rumbled just beyond the next ridge, a proximity he was unused to after Snoke stationed him aboard the Star Destroyer, in the black where he trained and came of age.