#but he's very-- *very*-- loosely based on Jörmungandr

[capseisen]

Divine spouses of Sea and Sky [both he/Him] ,, September 2021 [coins]; April 2023 [full-body]

[chiclet-go-boom]

fracture: jörmungandr

Sitting has only delayed the inevitable.

Not that he’s ever been one to give in gracefully to anything, least of all his own weaknesses. He could blame it on pride if that hadn’t been beaten out of him years ago to make room for all encompassing necessity. Pride is for lesser creatures, who have the autonomy to care about their little victories, their lukewarm defeats. No matter how strong he gets, it’s never going to be enough.

Sometimes, like now, he wonders if he simply fights everything because it’s about the only thing left of who he used to be.

This is the part of him that Snoke had needed to correct the least. This is the part of him that paved the way for all the rest. He’s been wrong from the day he was born, after all, possibly from the very moment he was conceived and it still took, what, how many years? Before he finally understood that there was no getting away from himself.

Of all the things that will never be said about him, no one will ever know that he fought to the last to try.

Kylo licks the blood off his teeth. Stares blankly at the ceiling. It’s a familiar taste — comforting even — without the attendant terror behind it. Just pain. Just hurt. Self inflicted, self administered, self... correcting. The wall at his back provides support he’s not sure he could do without at this point.

All he knows is that the fault in his blood is too deep to eradicate, that poison glitters at his core no matter how deep he cuts or how hard he tries to excise it. Skywalker would have had him believe it was his anger. Snoke would have had him believe it was his leniency. They’re both dead so he supposes it doesn’t matter anymore what they had to say on the subject of which part of him, specifically, he was supposed to destroy.

If he closes his eyes, he can probably still see the exact moment when everything he’d tried so desperately to believe about himself fell apart in cataclysm. And this is not that. This is nothing close to that. But so many things are irresistible when he hurts this badly, because if there’s one thing he knows with certainty, it’s that there’s nothing that hurts that he cannot make hurt more.

He begins the collapse, the slow slide and it still takes a moment before he realizes what’s going on. He puts a hand down to stop himself and wonders stupidly after a moment why he thought to bother. He blinks at the back of the half glove he has on, long fingers spread wide on the floor as if it can provide answers.

It doesn’t. He pulls himself back to straight again after a moment because it seems the thing to do.

His breath hisses out between clenched teeth even as sweat breaks out again across his shoulders.

It feels like somebody tried to carve his heart out through his ribcage with a laser torch, which isn’t actually too far off reality. Perhaps, he acknowledges, he might have had the settings on the hunter droids a little high.

Then again, they’re all in pieces and while so is he, he’ll be getting up eventually and they most certainly will not.

Pride, no, never pride, but he can have as much spite as he can swallow.

Still, he tells himself he has no interest in becoming one with the floor as tempting as it may be. Precariously balanced again, he drags his leg up on his least damaged side to brace one booted foot flat to the floor. Ignores the answering shriek of protest for the movement to tilt his head back against the cool metal. Listens to the air beat furious wings against his ears.

He really should stand up. Move. Walk as far as he needs to, find his quarters, a fresher, silence. Wrap the animal hurt around his bones like another layer of muscle and use it to tear his no doubt clot-welded shirt away from whatever he’s done this time, inspect the damage he’s inflicted more carefully. Maybe even use some bacta because it’s not like there’s anyone left to refuse him the relief.

Of all the things, that is the thought that finally tightens the life in his throat, makes it hard to breathe.

So many wounds he’s never been allowed to heal.

But he could, now. If he wanted to.

Does he want to? All pain is meant for a purpose, his most of all. Every victory another scar, visible or otherwise. Every defeat another lesson, building strength out of every one of his failures. His body is littered with the reminders of how many he has.

Certainly Snoke never granted him respite so why should he reward himself with it now? If he has learned anything from walking in the darkness, it’s that he can’t carve away the pieces that are unnecessary without causing damage. Even his. Especially his.

Although his master would have smashed him to the floor long before now and kept him there for this useless wallowing. Yet even that caustic thought doesn’t motivate him to move. Snoke is dead. Snoke is in pieces. Snoke is nothing more than dust and ash sweetly mixed in with all the rest of the things he’s survived. He can only wish Skywalker were there too but that particular trophy will forever be lost to him. Even if he’d found her ocean planet, there likely would have been nothing there to bring back.

Hopefully his undershirt is soaking up the worst of it this time. At least the floor is black enough to disguise every sin he carries.

Kylo drifts for awhile, permitting his mind to flick in and out as it sees fit, idly caressing then losing the life forces of those around him in the ship. He can feel his ribs grinding with each breath, which helps. The pulse of warm then cool as blood sluggishly continues to seep. This one will likely scar, whether he opts for bacta or not, he can feel it. No matter. He will give himself new ones until he finally learns all that his skin can hold.

He really should get up before he passes out like a child.

This, of course, is the moment when the unwelcome echo giggles in his ear. The copper in his mouth takes on the tang of electricity.

No.

Everything pushes closer and for a faltering second he wants to blame it on blood loss. The deliberately dull color of the training room sparks, flares, and then the universe starts to settle in his lungs like he’s swallowed feathers.

No.

He tries to shove it back before it can get any closer but this always seems to catch him when he’s least able to deal with it and the Force shrugs him off like a matchstick in a tsunami. He’s suddenly, stupidly grateful that he hadn’t actually tried to stand in the last few minutes since the last thing he needs right now is for the Jedi pretender to catch him staggering.

He locks his jaw and waits for the pieces to snap together.

Will it never give up? It’s as if the unending abyss that threads through reality is nothing but a petulant toddler with its toys, smashing the pair of them together over and over again as if unhappy that they have yet to kill each other.

He shoves against his braced foot to force his spine straighter against the wall. The blaze of pain is excruciating, a spike of agony lancing up his neck to widen his eyes and jolt him back into a semblance of coherence. He will not appear weak to her. He will not.

This time he seems to be more there than here in a turnabout way that he’s never going to be prepared for no matter how often this happens.

Wherever she is, it’s dark. Oddly enough she’s seated as well but the mirror they make ends there. Against his loose, ungainly sprawl, she’s pulled up tight, legs crossed at the ankles with slim knees pulled to her chest, her cloth bound arms hugging them to her body. Defensive. Rigid.

Not that he blames her because this time they’re almost close enough that he could tap his outstretched foot against her ankle if he wanted to. Artificial, heartbreaking closeness.

She keeps her gaze steadfastly down, her eyelashes a dark smudge because of course this is a time she is going to refuse to acknowledge him.

He takes a slow breath. Then another.

A soft series of colored lights flicker and play across her sharp features but the rest is in shadow. Near a control panel probably. The walls she’s touching are dark metal, riveted and banded, showing their age along warped seams.

He can all but smell the rust and corrosion from here. If he had to guess, she’s wedged herself into a corner in one of the cargo holds on his father’s ship, but it could equally well be some ramshackle Rebel base from decades ago.

His mind is always trying to paint his father’s influence over everything like a particularly obnoxious smell he can’t seem to get away from. A Rebel base he decides then out of pique.

Her hair is pulled back as always, severe and austere as always, and this time no soft tendrils have escaped to play along her ears and neck. He finds he misses those. They often tease along her skin where sometimes he likes to imagine his fingers could be.

He tilts his head in unconscious mimicry of what he’d like her to do.

Gently. He’d touch her so gently.

Does she never sleep? Even in the gloom the circles under her eyes look exhausting and her posture, jammed tight into her corner, speaks even more volumes.

She has nothing in her hands and that is perhaps the most telling thing of all. She’s always busy. Always doing, always being, always moving as if to stop would be the worst of all possible things. She attacks, she pushes, she forces herself on him over and over, demanding things she has no right to demand, asking things she has no right to ask. This is possibly the first time he’s ever been yanked halfway across reality only to find her adrift and silent.

She keeps her head down. She has to know how close he is this time. It’s prickling over his skin even if he’s in no condition to do a thing about it.

The minutes tick by and the connection mutely refuses to close as he listens to her breathe, falling into the rhythm of it. They’re getting better at this, he supposes. She has yet to launch into another loud accusation of his many failings according to her perspective. He hasn’t even thought about Force grabbing for his lightsaber, assuming that he could do anything with it without tearing himself open again.

He licks his teeth.

“What is it, scavenger? Can’t sleep? Or just hiding?” He pitches his voice down and low, quiet enough that he hopes she hears nothing in it that he doesn’t want her to. She hunches a little.

“Go away.”

“Eventually, yes.”

“You’re the last person I want to see right now.”

“I’m sure I’m the last person you want to see, ever.”

Her mouth, normally so mobile with expression, twitches and then stills. “True.”

He breathes out with the reflexive anger. He can taste the evasiveness in the Force currents building between them. He looks again at her still fingers.

“What’s wrong?”

“Funny you should ask.”

She can put so much disgust into so few syllables. “What do you mean?”

“Everything is wrong. Absolutely everything is wrong. And it’s all your fault, Ren.”

Okay, perhaps he was too hasty in his hope that this conversation might go differently than most of the others. Not even his first name?

He presses his arm tighter to his side and tilts his head as if in contemplation.

“I’m not responsible for everything that can go wrong everywhere, scavenger. Although I know you’d like to think I am.”

“Your mother. Is dying.”

“I’m sure she is.”

She finally lifts her head to glare at him. And oh, he’s seen that expression before so many times. Furious and trying not to be, as if swallowing her own feelings will keep her from reacting to them. But the anger burns clean and bright so close to the surface and he can feel how she wants it to leap across the small distance to burn him too.

He would welcome it. So different from his own and so much the same. He watches as she strangles on it before finally giving in, her fingers curling into claws.

“Fine. You’re just going to sit there and tell me you don’t care. She’s your mother.”

“Is that supposed to mean something to me? It certainly seems to mean something to you since you keep reminding me that she and I shared a placenta. I haven’t actually forgotten, you know. It’s just not relevant.”

“I do not. I do not understand you.” She scrubs the heel of one impatient hand against her eye. Her gaze doesn’t waver from his though, as if once she raised her head she wasn’t going to let him go. “How can I not understand you? I don’t even have to close my eyes now to know where you are and you… you make no sense to me.”

“Oh? And where am I, then?”

Irritation or its cousin flashes across her face and she jams a finger in the air, pointing. “There. There is where you are from me.”

He’s never thought to try and know where she is. Curiosity moves sluggishly through his thoughts. “Is that the problem? That it doesn’t come with a set of coordinates and a battle plan attached?”

Her lips compress. He tells himself it’s for laughter. He will pretend because he likes that he might have given her something to smile about.

It’s fleeting, whatever it is.

“How can you sit there and tell me that you don’t care that your mother is dying? I have to stand here and watch her fade day by day and nothing seems to help, and she’s getting weaker and weaker and I can’t… I can’t do anything about it. About any of it.”

Her hand lowers to gesture, rough and frustrated, although he’s not sure precisely what she’s trying to encompass or even it’s centered on his mother at all. Rey is nothing if not good at talking about one thing while she hurts for another. But he can still feel her heart bleeding with cracked emotion. He wishes he couldn’t.

“Then let it go, little sand rat. Everyone dies. You, me. Her. If it helps, she’s outlived most of her enemies which is more than many accomplish.”

“I wish…” she starts but then she tightens her lips around the rest. She glances away finally, fingers picking at the fabric bunched at her knee.

“Wish what?” he prods gently.

Her dark gaze locks back on him again in the gloom. She takes a breath.

“I wish you weren’t her enemy.”

I wish you were here. He exhales as calmly as he can even though her triphammer pulse is threatening to drag him somewhere he is utterly certain he does not want to go.

“I’m not.”

“Right. The same way you didn’t hate your father.”

“But I didn’t hate him.”

Her head thumps back against the wall in the darkness once, then twice. Her hands fist then open. “I do not. Understand you. I feel you under my skin like an infection and nothing you say ever makes sense.”

He shrugs carefully, folding the pain into his shields. “If it helps, I hated Skywalker. I still do. If I could bring him back, I would, if only so I could watch him throw himself away for a second time as he realizes his doomed last stand changed nothing.”

“If you don’t… don’t hate them, then why did you do it? You’ve never, ever answered me.”

Something about the earnestness in her tone, in her shadowed eyes, her skin light years away and close enough to touch, ripples across his heart. He can feel his face twisting with answering emotion and he can’t lock it down fast enough. Her eyes focus and she leans forward as if proximity will drag the answers out of him, legs half dropping from her hold on them.

His back is against a wall and he cannot even stand.

“Why did I kill Han Solo? Why did I go to the Dark?”

Why did he stay there.

She nods mutely and if he understands nothing else, he knows what fear looks like as it washes across her face. What does she think he’s going to tell her?  

“Tell me what you know about the Force,” he deflects.

Somehow that is the thing that startles her into laughter, brief as it is. He blinks at her, arrested by the completely unexpected sound. She chuffs, half looking away, seemingly as surprised as he is. “Luke asked me that too,” she says after a moment, looking quickly at her fingers. “I had a terrible answer.”

He can feel his mouth quirking. “Do you have a better one now?”

“No. Maybe.”

“Tell me then. The Force, what is it?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Answer the question, Rey.”

She licks her lips at that, her eyes flicking back to his and he refuses to react to the slip. Her name on his lips always affects him. It seems to affect her which might be worse. He lets her think as long as she needs to, flexing his hand, arm, shoulder to ripple the pain to keep his mind as clear as he can. That was stupid.

“Fine. The Force… keeps things together and it tears things apart. It’s like it keeps falling in and then falls out just as fast.” A frown crosses her face even as a streak of yellow touches her hair. “It isn’t a thing at all. I can’t describe it with words. There are no words. It just... is. A feeling of rightness. Or when something’s wrong.”

“Not too terrible. Better than my first answers anyways.”

“What did you think it was?”

“I’m not telling you that. I was a precocious child and you might laugh again and we can’t have that.” Her mouth twitches and a glimmer of blue light hits her cheek so sweetly that his breath stutters. He ploughs on. “Is the Force Light or Dark?”

“It’s both,” she returns promptly.

“Is it?”

“Isn’t it?”

“I’m asking you. You’ve reached into it. You’ve reached into it through me even. You’ve bent it to your will. Do you feel the Light in it? The Dark?”

The uncertain crease he’s grown to know so well settles between her eyebrows. The continuous flicker of lights dances in her eyes as her gaze unfocuses and he can feel her reaching out as if she can discern the answer simply by looking.

Maybe she can. She’s as strong as he is, after all.

“The Force,” she finally breathes. “I don’t. I don’t know. I can feel life in the Force. I feel the destruction. I feel you. But I don’t… know.”

“The Force is. The Force will always be. Planets, systems, galaxies; they rise, they fall. And the Force cares nothing absolutely nothing for what you would call Light, what I would call Dark.”

“But I can feel it in you. So much. So much Dark. Under everything, under all of it. You’re always so angry.”

Feed the hate, a voice whispers and it’s almost unrecognizable at this point. He lolls his head against the wall, watching her with half closed eyes. Embrace it. Use it.

And he does. Oh, he does. The only thing beneath the rage after all is the void and he is pretty sure the day he swallows that all the way down, what comes up will not be him anymore.

“And I see the Light in you,” he murmurs. He can’t help himself. He will never be able to help himself when it comes to her. Right up until the moment she puts her blade through his heart, he won’t be able to stop himself. “You shine, Rey. Like a thousand stars, you shine. You’re so beautiful and you don’t even see it.”

Even in the shadow she’s hidden herself away in he can see the blush streak across her skin. She twitches uncomfortably, shifts back infinitesimally to put distance between them again, more emotional than physical.

His answering exhale is more tremble than sound. He wants to do that to her again. She opens her mouth and then closes it before glancing away.

“You’re still not answering my question.”

He takes a deliberate breath, expands his ribs so bone grates on bone. The surge is the sickening taste of wood in his teeth and he shoves it into his fraying shields, already starting to come down again because every part of him wants her closer.  

“Ask anyone on any world what the Force is and they’ll tell you, if they believe anything at all, that the Light is good. Forgiveness, mercy, all things sweet and beautiful. Sunrises, the laughter of children I suppose. And everyone of them would be wrong.” He would lean forward if he could, but settles for keeping his eyes trained on hers. “The Force is life, everywhere. The Force is death, everywhere. You feel it. The same as I do.”

“I do.” Her agreement is small and cautious but he latches onto it. She is the only one that could possibly understand, could see the truth that he sees.

“The Hosnian system died to Starkiller. Like Alderaan died to the first Death Star. I expect it was much the same both times. So many creatures, ripped from one state into the other within seconds. I felt it. Every one of those lives that were awake, they screamed as they saw it coming and I heard them all.” He takes a breath. “But it was a pebble tossed into an ocean. The Force cares nothing either way.”

“No. That’s wrong. You’re wrong. You can’t know what the Force wants. The Force would never have wanted all those people to die.” She’s already shaking her head.

“I didn’t say that it wanted them to die. I’m saying it doesn’t care.”

“That’s not true. You can't know that.”

“I can, scavenger. You know I can.”

“You’re lying.” She says it and he can already feel the retraction in her heart. As if he could, as if he would ever want to. She hurries on. “The First Order… you did that. You can’t tell me that destroying those worlds wasn’t wrong and evil.”

“You can call it evil if you want. Hux oversaw the project. Snoke was the one who ordered it used. I objected, if that makes you feel any better, but Snoke wanted to send a message that couldn’t be ignored. Obey or be destroyed.”

“And that’s somehow not evil?” Her lips have pursed into something he expects is somewhere between horror and disappointment and exasperation.  

“The First Order does not exist to be passive, scavenger. Weapons are built to to used. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar.” His mind’s eye paints again the red thrust, the blood red ruin streaking against the blackness. “For my part, I stood on the bridge and watched it happen. For my part, I bore witness. Because yes, they did not need to die and all life is precious. And life is also irrelevant. Their's were. Her's will be.”

Could he have caught it? The cracked urge had burrowed like maggots into his mind at the time. It was only energy after all, tunneling and twisting, the world serpent brought to hellish life eating through folded space. Nearly a sun’s worth, yes, but what was a sun to the Force?

He will never know if he could have. Snoke had given the order and he’d obeyed because pride means nothing against necessity.

“Billions died. You say you felt them! How.. how can you call that irrelevant?” She’s shifted towards him once again in her agitation and her eyes are desperate on his. His bones prickle with the knowledge that she still wants to absolve him of it, the worst excesses of the First Order. That even now, after everything, she still wants to believe in him, grasping at these straws. Even if she won’t admit it to herself.

“There is no Dark, in the Force,” he grits out. “There is no Light. There is only power. Everything lives, everything dies. People, planets, religions, governments; good things, bad things, everything, everywhere rises, rots and falls. The Light kills, scavenger. The Jedi were nothing if not willfully blind in their discipline. The Dark can nurture and protect and the Dark doesn’t lie to you about what it is. The Force is simply the will to shape and control everything around you.”

“And that’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? Like… like killing Snoke and taking over the First Order. Trying to control all of it. So you can’t be hurt anymore.”

“You think I killed Snoke because I wanted to take control? ”

She looks mutinous, her chin jerking up but she doesn’t take it back.  

He squeezes his hands and lets it crest only in his mind. He will not lash out. She is ignorant of so many things. He threw away everything in that room and she is a child.

She has that frown again between her eyebrows as if whatever she’s feeling from him isn’t what she expected

“Don’t be simplistic,” he finally manages. “But we’re not talking about me, or what hurts me as if you actually care about that. We’re talking about the nature of the Force. You seem to believe that since Starkiller is gone, you’ve dealt some sort of crushing blow to the Dark side. The First Order is unhappy about it. Hux certainly wants Organa’s head on a plate with Dameron’s for an aperitif.”

“And you don’t?”

“Oh, I do. And I don’t need a death planet to accomplish it. I can easily order a few Star Destroyers to any planet I choose to annihilate a continent or two. As intimidation it would be crude, yes, but still effective.” She opens her mouth, angry and he growls, cutting her off. “The Force will scream and ripple with the loss and then it will. Move. On. Pebbles, Rey. Oceans. Or in your case a handful of lost sand blowing in a desert of it.”

“That doesn’t make it right! ” She jerks forward, her teeth bared, half rising up as if the next part of this is where she calls a saber to her and strikes him down. Although he’s already down so it’s not really going to take much of an effort on her side.

“No, it doesn’t make it right , but that is also beside the point. The Force is above us. Around us, below us, inside us and it has no morality, no… no alignment.” He flicks his fingers. It feels clumsy, without feeling. “It no more favors the Light than it does the Dark. What I am, what you are, is only different in how we shape it. What we use it for. The Force doesn’t care how you connect to it and my way is faster. ”

She covers her face with both hands, hiding her expression and he can feel the scream building behind her teeth. His breath is fast and sharp and he growls again and deliberately shrugs hard with her eyes no longer on him. He’s starting to lose track of the pain, subsuming it into what his blood wants which is to bury his teeth in her throat. He’ll take it figuratively if that’s all he can get.

It always comes to this.

“Annihilating whole planets is so wrong that I don’t even know how I can begin to explain it to you,” she finally says, so calmly that he knows she’s a heartbeat from yelling. As if he couldn’t tell from the roil in the Force.

“And how many do you think were on Starkiller?”

“Excuse me?” Her hands drop.

“Starkiller. Your Resistance destroyed it. How many did you kill?”

“I…” She compresses her lips. “I guess I have no idea.”

“Millions, scavenger. Millions. Soldiers, yes, troopers and their officers, weapons experts, communication technicians. The people who built that machine and maintained its systems, kept it operational and on schedule which I know makes them casualties of war and somewhere you’ll accept that. But they had families, Rey. There were children on Starkiller; there were schools, playgrounds, parks. People who ran the commissaries that kept everybody fed. Janitorial staff.” She flinches at that for some reason. “Transportation, cargo runners, warehouse supervisors, garbage collectors, too many sub-systems to name. They died. And I heard them too. The. Light. Kills. As many and as easily as the Dark.”

“To prevent even more death!”

He sucks in a breath. She’s just refusing to understand at this point. Why does he even try.

He stares into her eyes, so close and yet so maddeningly far.

“Fine, let’s try this. Do you know why the Jedi forbade attachment?”

She flounders again with the conversational shift. “What? Kylo, what does that have to do with anything? You’re trying to justify the slaughter of whole planets somehow and now you want to talk about how the Jedi didn’t… didn’t like kissing? ”

“Just answer me.”

She throws up her hands. “Fine. I don’t know that either! I don’t know anything! Luke gave me exactly two lessons and neither of them mentioned anything about attachment.”

“He did blow up the hut you were in when he saw us,” he reminds her.

“When he saw you, you mean.”

“Because I was touching you. He already tried to kill me once in blind panic and trust me, he felt exactly the same thing when he saw us. Not me. Us. ” He swallows as both memories try to surge up at the same time, fighting for priority.

“And you blame him.”

He hisses. “I blame him for everything. ”

“That’s not fair.”

“I don’t have to be fair. I stopped caring about fairness as a child.” He hauls his attention back to the point of this whole pointless interaction. When is this link going to break? “So let me tell you once again, if you didn’t get it straight from the last, great Jedi himself in his self imposed exile for all of his many failures - the Jedi Code proscribes emotion. Seeing us together, feeling us, would have been a personal nightmare come to life.”

“He didn’t want me to leave,” she admits after a moment. He snorts. “He told me it wouldn’t go like I thought it would.”

That memory really wants back up now, clawing into him with black hands, and he shoves it down ruthlessly. He doesn’t want to know how she wanted it to go. He doesn’t want to remember how he wanted it to go.

It happened. They’re both still here. That’s enough for now.

“No attachments, no love, no ties. The Jedi took their disciples as children for a reason. Did you know the Stormtrooper program is based on the Jedi teachings?”

“W..what?”

He nods with a sick sort of satisfaction. This is one thing that he is pleased to share with her, because it will choke her memory of Skywalker with even more thorns.

“Take them young, take them before they can remember anything. If they know nothing, they cannot question.”

“Kylo. That’s not right. ”

“You are very fond of that word. Along with fair. It works, that is why the Jedi did it. Even Anakin Skywalker, the strongest Jedi of his time, chosen by the Force, had to hide his relationship with the woman he loved.”

“Who’s Anakin Skywalker?”

He didn’t hear that right. “What?”

“You heard me.”

Okay, so maybe he had heard her right. He thumps his head against the wall, relishing the hollow sound. That little? Did Luke tell her nothing ? Although considering his own introduction to his bloodline perhaps he should have seen this coming. He’d scrub a hand over his face if raising his arm wouldn’t make him scream. “Luke has so many things to answer for that even his kriffing ghost may never catch up.”

“What,” she spits at him, “does this Anakin Skywalker have to do with planetary annihilation?”

“Everything.”

“I have no idea how we got here at this point but if you don’t start making sense, I swear I’m going to do something I will regret later.”

It’s on his tongue to spit back every other time she regretted something she’s done with him but he holds it back by force of will. Another time. He inhales deep and and hisses out the grind of bone. His side throbs in sympathy for it but it helps.

“The Jedi,” he begins carefully, picking out his words, “have a mantra. Do you know what it is?”

“I hate you.” He narrows his eyes and she makes a sound of pure frustration. “The Force be with you? Okay. Then no.” It seems she realizes suddenly that she’s inched forward yet again during their argument and with a huff she settles back, sitting hard on one leg underneath her. The heightened color on her cheeks is apparent enough although this time it’s anger and agitation.

He inhales the fact of how close they are, the spark in her eyes, the thread of her breath linking his heart to hers.

“You don’t need all of it, but it starts ‘there is no emotion, there is peace.’” He keeps his tone is as dry as the desert she came from. “The Jedi are forbidden to feel, I’ve told you this before. Friendship is acceptable, if you can manage it in moderation. Anathema to anger, any strong emotion. Jealousy, lust. Pride, love, anger, although I don’t know why I’m surprised Skywalker never got around to telling you that considering that he failed at upholding it so often. The central tenet of the Jedi faith is to care for nothing at all.”

The frown that creases between her eyebrows is a kind of music. “Okay, skipping over the part where I have no idea why we’re talking about this, that’s just. Wrong. Really, just, wrong.”

“Yes. But the Jedi were nothing if not dogmatic.”

She chews on her lower lip, staring at him. At least she appears to be thinking about what he’s just said for once. Her breathing is starting to steady, calming down which some part of him is pathetically pleased about. “Is that something he told you? That you were forbidden to… to love? To care?” Her voice is cautious. Her eyes flick away and then back.

He wonders if she hears the question on all the levels he does. Maybe. Or not. He doesn’t care to presume anymore that he understands her either. Feels her, yes, oh, he feels her running through his veins like magma, but it’s not as if that is the important thing.

He would touch her so gently, if she’d let him.

“In so many words, yes. Among so many other half truths and outright deceptions.” He rummages cautiously through the words, trying to keep the worst of them tucked away in their boxes. “That feeling things is wrong. That feeling anything at all is dangerous. The Jedi Order is a celibate one. No lovers for you.”

She shifts and her chin lifts. “And of course you’ve had dozens because the Dark is all about feeling things.” There’s something in her voice that wavers and her fingers tighten. He’s not sure what that might mean, but some of him likes it. Maybe she doesn’t like to think of other people touching him either.

“I was raised Jedi, little desert rat,” he remarks gently enough. “I lived under those rules, or as many as I could tolerate. Untouched and untouchable. If not for the Code, than for the fact that I was Ben Organa Solo and I broke things and sometimes people when I was upset. Cracked walls when I had nightmares — nobody wanted to be anywhere near me. And Snoke’s dedication to my training did not include anything resembling relief. Snoke rewarded me by letting me sleep. ”

He shakes his head, the taste in his mouth wanting to turn sour. “No attachments other than to the Order, everything given over to the Force itself. The Jedi believed in control over themselves and that in reflection was supposed to give them control over everything else, I suppose.” He can’t help the sneer. “Which is the worst sort of lie.”

She’s quiet so long, staring at him, that he wonders if she’s even going to reply. When she does, her voice is an ache, quiet enough that he barely catches it.

“Luke told me that the legacy of the Jedi was failure, you know.”

His breath expels and he must have moved because he can’t breathe for a hot heartbeat as something shifts deep inside. He makes an involuntary sound and she frowns at him.

“He said that?” She nods slowly, still watching with a puzzled expression. He tries to project ease he is nothing close to feeling but isn’t sure how well it’s coming across. “Well, at least he knew it before he died. If he’d had his way, we’d all have grown up droids.”

“And what does any of this have to do anything?”

“Anakin Skywalker,” he enunciates carefully, “was a Jedi. Like me, he had no choice about it. Somewhere along the way he fell in love in defiance of the Jedi and he kept it a secret for years because his other choice was banishment. He consummated that love against every stricture of the Code, while the Jedi, peacekeepers of the galaxy, promoted war within the Republic. When the Galactic Empire rose to supplant the rampant corruption, sweep it away, she was one of the first to die and Anakin... went mad with grief. He swore to the Dark and spent the rest of his life serving it. He got his revenge, scavenger. He destroyed almost all of what was left of the Jedi.”

“Sounds like your clone brother.” He can tell she doesn’t mean it, is simply deflecting the words so she doesn’t have to think about them but the rage shoots through him like phosphorus, igniting in his veins.

The blood on the ground sticks to his fingers like tar. He’s lunged forward in a single blink, shoving into her space even as she throws herself back to get away although she can’t, she can never get away from him and it doesn’t matter because whatever hurts, he can make hurt more.

“The rest of the galaxy knows him as Darth Vader. You remember him. The one I can’t live up to.”

“Ben!”

“So tell me this, little scavenger.” Her face is so close now, panicked. The twisting hurt is inside, is out, is an achingly distant shiver along every one of his bones. “If Darth Vader, Fist of the Empire, my grandfather, had been permitted to love, to do something as simple as hold my grandmother’s hand where it could be seen, how many people would that have saved? His vengeance lasted twenty years of slaughter. Alderaan would not have died. He killed all but one Jedi and somehow that Jedi twisted him back from his purpose, back to the Light at the last and the Empire fell for it. And Luke kriffing Skywalker went on to make yet more Jedi, to force their useless Code on yet more children and here we are, you and I, in the ashes of Hosnian and Starkiller and D’Qar and Crait. Billions dead because Anakin Skywalker fell in love.”  

He can see the scared white around her eyes as she stares up at him. She opens her mouth as if to reply, to say whatever she wants to say in this moment as if it’s anything he could possibly want to hear and he throws his hand up. She flinches at the harsh movement.

He clenches his fingers into a fist. He can smell his blood on the leather.

“Tell me again that there is no emotion, there is peace. Because you have no idea about any of this, as always, although you are so very sure all the time that you are right, that you have been told the truth. That of course Starkiller was evil and had to be destroyed, when its very existence would have kept the Core worlds in line, so that I wouldn’t have plan to take them over one screaming planet at a time now, enacting bloodbaths that you have yet to comprehend.”

“Luke Skywalker, son of Vader, told you nothing. General Organa, daughter of Vader, tells you nothing. You are told to be Jedi because of course that is what you must be. That there are no other options. That the Dark is bad and evil and misguided when the Force itself makes no distinction. Anakin Skywalker’s betrayal came from the Jedi, by the very people who professed to love him most, as did mine. Their arrogance, their wilful shortsightedness, their utter determination to foster war in the heart of a corrupt Republic is why we’re here now.”

His breath is a furnace. She’s pressed herself so far back into her corner that she’s half welded herself to the metal and he feels like a penitent, scourged and bleeding and broken on one knee at her feet, crowding her there. He reaches out and braces one hand on her wall without thinking about it, leaning down as if to nuzzle her hair. He’s close enough, he could.

“We’re what’s left, scavenger,” he croons. “Just you and I. The central tenet of the Jedi faith is to stop caring, because the cost is too high. Are you going to stop feeling? Tell yourself that you’ll stop me too, however you have to do it? A saber through my heart? A knife in my side? Poison in your kiss, perhaps?” He’s trembling with strain, torn muscle and bone struggling to meet the demands he’s making. “Throw yourself into this war because somebody else told you that’s what you were supposed to do? I will kill all the Jedi, even if that means you. I will fix Anakin’s mistake.”

She stares up at him. He wonders what she sees. He is afraid of what she sees.

“Nobody... nobody is telling me to be anything I don’t want to be. And maybe I don’t understand things I should.  But you? The Dark is killing you, Kylo Ren. Benjamin Solo. No matter what you say.” She licks her lips and then her gaze steadies, quiets. Calms. He’s seen that on her face before as well and there is a sudden nameless dread wrapping around his heart for it. “No matter what terrible things they did to you. No matter how much they failed you and I know… you know that I know they did. But they still… they still tried and they loved you and what you are doing now is wrong. Nothing you will ever say can justify the cruelty of the First Order. Maybe the Force doesn’t care but you know what you’re doing is wrong. That the Dark is tearing you apart. It’s eating you alive and you know it. ”

The noise he makes seems to come from far away. He shakes his head once, twice to dislodge it. She leans forward in her advantage and now he’s the one to flinch. They’re so close.

“I am sorry for your grandfather.” She swallows. Her voice is so quiet. “For the terrible things that must have happened to him. For the terrible things he did. For the terrible things… the terrible things that were done to you, that you do back.”

He shakes his head again. “If they had left him alone, I might have… instead they fed me to the Light and not one of them heard me screaming. You asked me and I am not... I am not my mother’s enemy although sometimes I wake up in a panic, afraid that I am yours. Knowing that I have to be. You’re going to try to bring them back and I can’t let you do that, Rey. I can’t. ”

Her tears streak with colors in her darkness. He doesn’t know which of them is shivering more. He tells himself it’s because he’s bleeding pain although he knows it’s not. Tell himself it’s because she’s afraid.

“And you keep asking me why, as if having an answer is going to help you. I did not hate my father because killing him would have meant nothing if I had. The Dark eats pain. The Dark eats sacrifice. The Force cares more for Han Solo’s death than it does for Hosnian’s destruction because I care that he died. It ate five planets and the ripples settled within hours. Solo’s death still echoes. I may never stop hearing it.”

“Then why? Why did you do it?”

He hisses it out between his teeth, wishing he could shatter bone with it. He can feel her breath on his skin, more weakness that he has yet to carve away.

“Because Snoke told me to,” he pulls up from somewhere, “and he was right. Because I loved my father and wanting him to love me back was a chain around my throat, trying to drag me down. Drag me back to your vaunted Light like a snarling animal at the end of a leash. The Light which tried to murder me. ”

He pulls back and slams a fist into her wall before he even realises he’s done it. The swell of sickening pain buries his mind, washes down and through his body in a tingle of ice. The breath he hauls in is edged with knives.

He glares at her. He had a point. He was trying to make a point.

“I did it because what Solo wanted so desperately was to bring me back to Leia. He stood there and he told me he loved me, told me Snoke was using me as if I was a naive child and lost in the woods, when my master was giving me purpose for all my pain. The strongest thought in his mind was that maybe, just maybe, my mother would finally forgive him if he just brought me back home. Like an apology gift. ”

Her eyes are wide enough that he can see himself reflected.

“Would you like to know how that felt, scavenger? Even there at the end, it wasn’t just for me. He forgave me as he fell and I will never forgive him for thinking of her first.”

“Ben. ”

Her hand reaches out.

He throws himself back before she can make contact, unable to make it seem like anything but what it is. The sound he makes is more animal than human.

Her fingers are still outstretched. “Ben?”

He takes a breath. A second. A third, deep and jagged. He tries to shove all of it down again because if he has to keep feeling this, he’s going to do damage to something and his only target is her.

“You are the only one,” he finally manages, “that I will ever willingly suffer to touch me. That I will hear that name from. Whatever that means to you. Whatever that means to me. But if you touch me now, I will break your arm for it.”

The crease between her eyebrows flares into existence and then oddly smooths out.

She moves forward so easily, a knee down between his sprawled legs so close that the heat of her sparks through the fabric. Her traitor hand is on his hip for balance a heartbeat later and then the fingers of her other hand are sliding along his jaw. They don’t stop until they curl behind his ear and his hand flashes up much, much too late to do anything more than lock spasmodically over her wrist.

Her breath brushes across his face again and this time he is not the one in control.

“Do you know what I keep telling myself?” she says. Her eyes are flickering over his face and he feels his fingers tightening, staring to grind the delicate bones together under her skin.

“No.”

“Yes. I keep telling myself no. I tell myself that you chose this. I tell myself that who you are is who you want to be. I tell myself to stop caring about what you feel, even as you force me to feel it too.”

“Jedi.” His heart twists at the confirmation. Skywalker has so much to answer for. He wants him dead again and again and again. “And do you?”

“Feel? You know I do.”

“But you don’t want to.” He would snarl but nothing seems to want to work. He would laugh and it would too raw to be anything she’d want to hear.

“Don’t tell me what I want. Don’t you dare think you can tell me who I am.” Her thumb brushes the hinge of his jaw then and he turns his face away. “Why aren’t you breaking my arm?”

He says nothing.

“Kylo Ren.” Her fingers dig into his hair, shaking him slightly. “Why aren’t you breaking my arm.”

She leans into him harder, her grip tightening on his hip, fingertips digging into his scalp. He gasps involuntarily, caught between the two small sensations edged at the whirlpool of all the rest. He wonders if she’s going to shake him again, what that is going to feel like, but then she makes an odd noise. She looks down.

He looks too.

She lifts her hand from the black cloth. His blood everywhere, wet and shining on her fingers, coating her in life. She’s kneeling in it, staining her leggings.

His lips twist into a smile finally. It seems oddly fitting.

“Ben. Ben, you’re hurt. ”

He drags his gaze up to hers, to the sudden comprehension so wide in her eyes.

It doesn’t take much to lean forward, close the gap. A minor earthquake. A shiver of tsunami. Touches his lips to hers as softly as he can, barely anything at all.

“Ben’s dead, remember? He has no mother. And I cut out his ghost every time he wants you to live.”

Her hand tightens in his hair and her lips move in a shudder against his and he takes that with him as the bond dissolves and he’s left alone.