35. Chapter 35

General Organa gives her a nod and a tight, grim smile as Rey slips out. Rey tries to smile back but the General looks away before she can manage it, giving a sharp look to the squad of eight soldiers who arrived with her, all armed with heavy plasma rifles. They train their guns on the door and the General squares her shoulders, holds her head up high, and pulls open the door, marching in to confront Kylo.

Kylo’s anxiety and anger grate in her head, and Rey pulls as far back from him as she can so as not to eavesdrop.  She counts her breaths, focuses on them to keep herself calm and centered. Ten. Twenty. Forty. Eighty. More than she’d expected, fewer than she’d hoped. The door slams open and then crashes back shut. General Organa has tears in her eyes but she is otherwise stone, face set and posture erect.  A scream rips the air as Kylo’s rage breaks through the dam in his head. Eight rifles come back up instinctively, aimed at the door as unearthly sounds of destruction filter into the hall.

“Stand down.” General Organa waves an imperious hand at the guards, absolute in her control even as she raises her voice to be heard over the din. They relax by only a hair, fingers still on triggers, stances ready to fight. The General motions to Rey. “Give her an hour with him. Absolutely no one else is allowed in that cell. That’s an order.”  

Rey moves to the quaking door and the General catches her hand as she passes, gives it a squeeze, quick and urgent. “Please,” Leia whispers, so low she almost misses it. Then she’s gone, prowling down the hall after a sharp gesture to the guards to remain.

The bond is razorwire and acid, undulating, flailing, cutting into her. Rey takes several deep breaths, trying to find tranquility while preparing herself for the worst.  She’s done this before.  She’s seen what’s inside him. She can do this. She pushes open the door.

The room inside is chaos. Savage wind rips through her hair, tearing it out of its loose knot. A light fixture shatters above her and she throws up a Force shield before the glass can cut her or the cyclone can slam debris into her body. As the shield solidifies around her and the maelstrom rages, she catches sight of him, the still center of the whirling hurricane.  He’s howling and she can feel the pain, even if she can’t hear him over the roaring around her. For a moment she is afraid of him, but she throws that part of herself away, dismisses it, and walks through the storm to him.

It parts around her as the shield holds strong against the onslaught. A hunk of masonry crashes into the barrier and explodes in a rain of stones that pit the walls. The basket she’d carried their breakfast in speeds past, food disgorged and smashes against the ceiling. Stuffing from the shredded mattress eddies around where the shield meets the floor.  One long spear of wood pinwheels up from a torn storage crate, inches from her nose, and imbeds itself in the ceiling. She ignores it all, focuses only on calm, on the stars steady in her head, on the man before her. Rey pushes through the barrage and into the stillness at its center.

Kylo has stopped screaming and the quiet is almost eerie.  He’s still tense and the muscles of his neck and jaw are twitching as he grinds his teeth.  His eyes are open, burning and unfocused. He doesn’t see her.  She can’t get too close to his mind without her own catching fire or sinking down into his pit of misery, so instead she drops her shield and raises her hands to cup his face. The touch stirs something in him and his eyes shift to hers before he closes them and silent tears course down his face.  

Breathing in, letting his terrible misery wrack her bones, Rey opens the floodgates of their connection. She knows what to expect this time and she’s learning more control over what they share. She rides the the bleeding torrent of dark power, uses it to pull them up into the space they’ve built together.  She makes the night sky darker, the stars brighter. The black pool floods, swamping their feet, reflecting the endless sky in all directions. She holds it down, filters it into the sky and the stars. His hands are cold when he lifts them to cradle her face and they stand until his hot tears have dried on her fingers and the trance is broken.

Rey lets out a shaky sigh as her physical eyes slide open and meet his, sunken, red, and haunted. The storm is frozen around them, hundreds of jagged fragments suspended erratically in the air. Kylo drags his thumb along her cheek and the debris clatters to the ground. He falls with it, folding  around her shoulders, legs giving out under him.

She lowers him to the floor, supports his weight with her back and shoulders, arms resting around his chest as his head sags forward. “So,” she begins, hesitant. “How was your talk with the General?” She can’t imagine hating anyone like he seems to hate Leia Organa.

His shoulders twitch around her, his intent to push her away failing in the face of his complete breakdown.

Rey slides one hand under his shirt, across his back, up his neck. Through the contact she pushes all her concern, all her affection into the empty void inside him. She nudges against the last walls, digs down as deep as she’s ever explored. These boxes are old, stuffed full to bursting, untouched for years. Let me help you.

He squeezes his eyes tight and slides his hand up to her arm, long fingers circling her bicep. His other hand slips under her shirt, digs into her hip as he bows forward, presses his forehead against hers.

The boxes open and the memories seep out, sticky oozes of darkness that bleed into the clear water of her thoughts and diffuse, spreading until it’s all she sees.

Ben Solo is four years old, and there’s a voice in his head, high and curious. Who are you? He looks around, searching for the speaker. He’s playing in the room he shares with Mama when Dad and Uncle Chewie are away. He can’t see anyone. He looks under the big bed, in the closet where Mama’s clothes hang, where he likes to hide sometimes. No one’s there.  The voice pokes him again, a strange, half-realized feeling that he doesn’t understand. I’m Ben, he says, before the door opens and he runs, laughing, into Mama’s skirts.

He’s five, and the voice has become his constant companion. It talks to him when he’s left all alone with books and toys that are for babies, and he’s not a baby any more. No, you’re not , His Friend agrees, serious and grown up, just like Ben is. His Friend keeps him company when Mama is working, in the long boring meetings where he sits under the tables by himself, when Dad and Uncle Chewie are off wherever they go. It seems like their trips last longer and longer, their visits home more infrequent, each year. The other kids on the compound don’t like him anymore, not after he broke Jori’s arm that one time. He doesn’t know how it happened - they were playing Rebels and Empire and Jori said something that had made Ben angry, and then Jori was crying and everyone was yelling. Ben apologized even though he couldn’t have done it - the other kids are all older, so much bigger than he is. Mama says it wasn’t his fault, but that he has to be careful, and Ben doesn’t know what that means. Don’t worry about it. His Friend consoles him. They weren’t very good friends anyway. They go get cookies from the cafeteria and His Friend makes Ben laugh until he forgets all about Jori.

His Friend leaves when he turns six and Uncle Luke comes to visit. Ben’s head feels too big, echoing empty, and he wants to tell someone about it but His Friend said they wouldn’t understand and he’d get in trouble, so he doesn’t say anything.  He asks Uncle Luke about the Force, about being a Jedi, about his adventures.  He laughs, pulls Ben up onto his lap, and says he’ll tell him all about it when he’s older.

Ben can’t wait to get off base. He’s left by himself more often than not now. Seven years old is too big to go to meetings with Mom, but somehow not big enough to go flying with Dad. He mostly reads, alone in his room. The school on the base isn’t bad. The teachers talk about the war, about battles and heroes, the Empire and the Republic, and Ben drinks it all in. Uncle Luke is a hero, and Ben wants to be just like him.  Soon, but not soon enough, he’ll get to go train to be a Jedi. For now, he practices with His Friend in secret.  Uncle Luke will be so excited, so proud when Ben shows him how easily he can levitate books, how long he can stand on his hands, how well he can meditate. Meditation is fun, especially with His Friend telling him stories, whispering secrets that make Ben’s head spin.

Mom and Dad are shouting in the other room. Dad came back late with another model ship for Ben’s shelf and stories about another daring escape. Ben tried to show him the book Uncle Luke gave him, but Dad didn’t want to see it, didn’t care at all about the cool pictures of the Jedi Masters of the past. It’s the day after his eighth birthday and Ben cries and cries but he can’t fall asleep.

Ben is nine and Uncle Luke won’t tell him about Darth Vader.  He says that the Jedi value knowledge over ignorance, but that can’t be true because Ben is always asking questions and no one ever tells him anything. Mom and Dad just look at each other when he asks, quick and nervous. Dad ruffles his hair and tells him it isn’t important. Ben hates that. Mom doesn’t say anything, just goes into the other room to work, and he hates that more. The voice in his head whispers that they are hiding something important, that they don’t trust him , and Ben is pretty sure His Friend is right. His Friend always answers his questions.

Ben hadn’t cried when he’d left the base, when Dad ruffled his hair and told him to be good, when Mom kissed his cheek, when Uncle Chewie picked him up and given him one last piggy back ride around the Falcon . Sometimes he cries when he thinks about them, though, and that’s bad. Ten year old boys who are going to be heroes aren’t supposed to cry. Jedi aren’t supposed to have emotional attachments.  The other initiates at the temple like him because he’s strong. They ask for his advice about meditation - how does it come so easily to you?  He lies, makes something up about clearing his mind. His Friend is shy, and Ben doesn’t want Uncle Luke, who he’s supposed to call Master Skywalker, to think he’s meditating incorrectly.  The Force is strong here and His Friend seems to be stronger, too.  He talks all the time now and that’s good because sometimes Ben is so nervous it scares him and he hates being scared. He misses his Mom but she said he had to go, that it was time to become a hero, but the voice is soothing, kind in her absence. His Friend tells him stories about his grandfather when he can’t sleep, which is almost every night, stories that make his head hurt a little because they’re different than the ones his teachers told him.  His Friend says that Darth Vader was a hero, and that someday Ben will be a hero just like his grandfather. That makes Ben feel good, proud, brave.

At eleven years old, he’s the best initiate at the temple, better than the older kids who have been there longer than he has. Master Skywalker keeps telling him that he needs to be less prideful, less arrogant.  His Friend disagrees and Ben believes His Friend when he says that Ben is destined for greatness.  Master Skywalker just doesn’t see it yet. His Friend says he should leave Master Skywalker, come back when he’s too powerful to be ignored.  Ben wonders if His Friend is really his friend, and that thought gives him such a headache his nose bleeds. His Friend gets mad and leaves him alone, all alone, for five days as punishment. Ben doesn’t sleep a wink.

Ben is twelve and is sitting alone, Force-flicking rocks at a tree while the other initiates practice their footwork.  He’s being punished. It’s not fair, it’s not his fault that Pidra fell when they were fencing. If she was focused, if she was strong enough, she’d have been able to escape his trick, but she wasn’t, and that’s not his problem.  Master Skywalker takes his training saber away and sends him into the forest to ‘meditate on his choices.’ Ben hates Master Skywalker and he can’t tell if that thought is his own or someone else's. It doesn’t go away.

No one understands him. His mother says this is normal for thirteen year old boys when he mentions it on their monthly holo-call. Dad shrugs, gives that dumb smirk, and says, “Kid, what the hell do I know about that Jedi stuff?” The other initiates don’t like him anymore. No one wants to train with him, so Master Skywalker always has to assign someone and his partner comes to practice sighing, rolling their eyes, wincing when he looks at them. They are weak , His Friend says, and Ben agrees.  Everyone he knows is weak, foolish.  His Friend says there are other ways to become a hero.

His Friend offers to be his new master, to train him properly, like Darth Vader was trained, when he turns fourteen. No more lifting rocks, no more morning meditation, no more bland food and scratchy blankets.  No more Uncle Luke avoiding his questions, waving them away, telling him about the stupid Jedi Code. Ben asks where His Friend is, how he can get there. His Friend tells him what to do.

Ben is fifteen and there’s blood on his hands, on his face.

Ben Solo is dead. Kylo Ren laughs.

Rey recoils and when the vision fades, she is crying so hard her chest aches. Kylo’s eyes are dry and he moves away from her, pulls back from their connection, but she reaches out to him, climbs into his lap, kisses him hard through the tears. She’s never felt so angry, so helpless, so desperate and empty, and even that is just a shadow of what he’s felt every second of every day for most of his life. She can’t stay this hollow shell, needs something to fill the chasm his memories have opened within her.

Kylo is slow to respond, but he warms under her, begins to come back to life as she threads her hands into his hair.  He reaches up to cup the back of her head in his hand, holding her to him.  Rey opens her lips and he flows into her, heaving a broken sob as she licks into his mouth.  This is not the gentle kiss he’d given her before breakfast. This is hungry, raw, demanding. She’s never seen him this wrecked, this broken before, and that scares her even as sparks flit behind her eyes as his kisses deepen. It’s the first time she’s tasted him without blood in his mouth and the bitter self-loathing is so much worse than that metallic tang.  She wants to burn the memories away, cut them out and cauterize the wound. She knows that she can’t, and even if she could, she wouldn’t. This is who he is. This is what he’s done. This is what’s been done to him. He moves from her mouth, palming her breasts through her shirt, to bite down her neck.

The door rattles in its frame and a booming fist knocks. “Hour’s up!”

Rey jerks her head up, startled. It can’t have been an hour yet. She’s not ready to leave. There’s still so much that needs to be done, to be said. She can’t leave with this agonizing hunger tearing her apart.

Ignore them.  Kylo slides a hand up her neck, tilts her chin back, and sucks a bruising kiss under her ear. His nails rake her back under her shirt and he groans, hot on her skin, as she arches against him. She wants to stay, to pant and sigh into his mouth, to taste his tears and his skin, to knit their bodies together and stitch up their ripped souls.

It takes all the willpower she has to pull away from him, but she has to play by the rules. “Be good,” Rey growls, pressing her palms against his shoulders and rising.

“No.” Kylo reaches up, grabs her by the hips as she stands. His hands are hard on her and he pulls her back down onto him, climbing up from her hips to lace his hands behind her neck. His kiss is crushing now, unyielding, and she wants to fall into him, to let him pull her under. She fights back against it, digging her fingers into his shoulders, biting at his lips.  Rey opens her eyes when he pulls back a breath to murmur her name. His voice has dropped to a husky rasp and his eyes are completely dark.  

“You have to be good,” she whispers. This time she stands and his hands fall away.   Her boots crunch over the broken glass on her way out and she doesn’t look back.