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He stripped off his tunic with difficulty and discarded it onto the floor. An ache flashed across his side and he clutched at his ribs as if to hold them together. Panting slightly, he glanced up reflectively through his hair and caught himself in the mirror. A narrow, sallow, dismal-looking face stared back at him.
His eyes fell on his body and noticed how his pale skin seemed to be a canvas for wounds in varying stages of healing. Bruises fading from dark violet and blue to a sickly shade of yellow speckled his skin. Not to mention the fair amount of angry red gashes that were in the process of closing only to become pink, raised scars. His gaze drifted from his bandaged side up to the long, thin scar that snaked from his eye down to his collarbone.
With a flick of his fingers his tunic lifted from off the ground and hit the mirror, obscuring his view of himself for a moment before he turned away. It fell to the ground again in a heap behind him.
His hand still splayed over his ribcage, he gingerly tottered over to one of the artfully placed chairs in his quarters and collapsed into it. He hissed through his teeth as the impact caused pain to ricochet through him before calming into a dull ache. Blowing out his breath slowly, he relaxed his neck and rested his head in his hands. A heaviness seemed to weigh on him and the more still he became, the more aware of it he started to be. However he couldn’t muster the will to move and distract himself, not right now.
He felt a slight tingle at the back of his head and a shift in the air pressure but ignored it, instead pressing the heels of his hands deeper into his eyes until stars of all colors began to erupt from behind his lids like blaster beams.
Her presence seemed to call to him, whispering his given name, but he knew she said nothing. She never did.
He did not acknowledge that she had appeared. He gave her too much power by caring that she was there at all. A quiet that consisted of their breathing followed, only to be broken by the soft padding of her footsteps as she traveled around his chair. He could feel her eyes warily trace the battered planes of his body as she passed by.
“Are you alright?” the softness of her voice cut through the silence sharply. He was shocked that she spoke at all but forced himself not to raise his head in acknowledgment. She had sounded like she was directly in front of him and close.
Reluctantly, he slowly lifted his head, pursing his lips and blinking until everything came into focus. His room was dark but she seemed to stand out brightly like a flame. She was crouched in front of him about a meter away, studying him curiously. The look in her eyes, he couldn’t quite put his finger on it, almost seemed...sad.
He realized that he hadn’t answered her question and also that he was staring at her. She didn’t seemed put off by it, in fact she just seemed to grow steadily more morose as she took his silence and the expression on his face as an answer.
He drew his attention inwardly to check the muscles in his face just to understand exactly what she was seeing. His eyebrows were being drawn together into a frown and his lips were pressed in a line as he regarded her.
Her face was practically a mirror of his.
She broke from his stare to look down at his bare torso.
“You’re hurt?” She asked softly, her eyes flicking back up to his.
So they were playing nice, were they? What new tactic was this?
“You care?” He heard himself scoff out, his voice husky with disuse.
Her mouth twitched and the furrow between her brows deepened but she said nothing.
“Is it bad?” She opted to ask.
He wanted to scream at her for sounding so concerned. He licked his dry lips.
“I’ll heal.”
She rolled back onto her heels and lowered herself onto the floor, drawing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them.
“What happened?”
Kriff, she was not giving up. What did she want? What was her end goal with this conversation? There had to be something. She was never this polite.
He pressed his hand against his ribs again, almost as if to conceal the wound.
“Does it matter?”
She shrugged. “I’m just trying to make conversation until this goes away.”
“Well did you consider that I don’t want to talk to you?” He snapped.
She vanished shortly afterwards, her expression unreadable. He felt regret about his final words but then remembered that he hated her. He had to.
In addition to their more drawn-out interludes together, they would experience smatters of seconds where they jumped across the galaxy and into each others’ lives. He would be enduring a meeting and suddenly she would be there, standing behind Hux just long enough to destroy Kylo’s train of thought before vanishing.
There were times when he would be marching down the hall only to catch her walking alongside him or even in the opposite direction. In times like that he would sometimes whirl around to catch another sight of her to make sure she we real before she vanished. Sometimes she would just be sitting or standing idly by, acknowledging him occasionally, while other times she would not even look up from what she was tinkering on or who she was talking to.
These unwarranted appearances happened just enough to start to drive him mad.
She didn’t seem to be intentionally doing it, yet he loathed her as if she was. He loathed her regardless—she had betrayed him.
She seemed to be so nonplussed every time he saw her, as if she were at peace with being a ghost in his life and having him be one in hers.
These thoughts ran hotly through his mind as the doors of his room hissed closed behind him. His body screamed for rest but his mind was too worked up and agitated for that. He undid his doublet and was about to slip it from off of his shoulders and step into the fresher when he felt that he was not alone. He could have hurled something across the room if it would have made a difference. She had already appeared not once, but four other times that day and he was beginning to feel more than a little unhinged.
His hands fell from his shirt down to his sides as he balled them into fists. “Can you for once just try and stay on your side of the galaxy?” He spat, whirling around to face her.
She turned around as well, but this time did not meet his gaze with that same, even look. There was something off about her and in that moment she appeared just as unbalanced as him.
There was a beat of silence between them.
He exhaled shakily, she inhaled, and then opened her mouth to speak.
“Don’t you for one second think...” she began slowly, her voice gradually rising in volume, “...that I want any of this at all!” Her cry hung in the air between them and it was then that he noticed that she had appeared unbalanced because he had been crying. Fresh tears filled her pinched eyes and her chin trembled. However, she was not done.
“Do you think I enjoy having you appear in my life? Do you think that I want you around like some ghost? Like some reminder of—“ she broke off, her mouth tightening into a grimace as if her words were repulsive to the taste.
He stepped closer. Her eyes were bright with anger and glittered with tears as she regarded him.
“What? Reminder of what?” He said lowly.
Her chin jutted out as she inhaled shakily through her nose and hot tears slid down her face like rain as she said, “of what I’m going to have to do .”
The chilling acceptance in her voice turned his blood cold.
She saw the hint of the question in his face and did not force his lips to ask it.
“You know how this is going to have to end. You and me,” she whispered, the pain in her face slowly dissipating and being replaced with raw honesty.
How he would have given anything for her anger again. Anger was such such a comparatively beautiful distraction. It blocked out everything else and stuck the two of them unmoving in one spot, endlessly circling one another but never fully striking. Feints here or there but never stabbing true.
What he would have given for anything but the inevitable. But it had hung waiting like a suspended blaster beam for long enough, waiting to tear into either of them.
“You know all of this could have been avoided,” he started. He felt his breath start to shake. He was beginning to feel such a magnitude of something inside of him come to a boil. He felt that it was a culmination of many emotions by the way it eclipsed his reason, but he quickly wrote it off as anger and responded in kind.
She sensed it, of course she did, from wherever she was in the universe, and he felt her sag with exhaustion.
“What do you want from me, Ben?” She whispered.
He drooped forward so that his face was level with hers. “What do I want?” he repeated. The written off emotions—the anger, blazed through him, igniting every particle of his being. He willed it to.
He straightened up and flung his out arm, sending a chair careening across the floor and into the wall.
“I wanted you to join me!” He roared. His rage filled the room to the point that it felt almost palpable. It thrummed around him like white noise only to be replaced by the light clatter of trembling objects as the room began to shake. Despite her distance across the galaxy, he knew that she could feel it too.
“I wanted you to not betray me, to not abandon me just like everyone else !”
It was then that the room fell apart. His mirror shattered, blowing glass everywhere and the rest of his furnishings flew in opposite directions, smashing against the ceiling and walls as if caught in a whirlwind.
He stood there panting in front of her.
Hurt , something whispered to his senses. Hurt and fear is what you feel .
He willed this not to show, instead waiting for her to flee or at least to recoil or draw her lightsaber or something .
But she didn’t.
Instead she stared at him quietly with those same weary eyes before glancing down at his side and then back to him, now with a light veil of concern.
“You opened your wounds.”
He heatedly held her gaze for a moment more before letting his own flick down. Sure enough, red was blooming under his bandages. He swore under his breath and, forgetting about her for a moment, began to undo the wrappings to survey the damage.
He glanced up and was pulled in by her expression. Her conflicted gaze was trained on him and her lips were parted to speak. She considered her words once more, as if she were tasting them on her tongue.
“Ben...” she began lowly and then was snatched from his sight.
He blinked, taking in the empty space before him that she had once occupied.
What had she been going to say?
He was pulled back to the present by the warmth of his blood against his palm.
The next time that he saw her, she did not know he was there. He had turned around only to find her curled up in one of the dark corners of his room.
He approached her quietly. Honestly this bond between the two of them was making less and less sense. The frequency of their seeing each other was increasing and now she wasn’t even conscious when it was happening.
Had she ever appeared while he had been asleep? The thought both intrigued and discomforted him so he brushed it away.
He stood over her small frame like a shadow. She had curled herself into a ball so that the grey, threadbare blanket that was over her would cover more of her body. How cold was it where she was? He craned his neck slightly to better see her face.
It surprised him how different she looked when she slept. But then again, whenever he saw her she always had on a cool mask of indifference or she was spitting angry or even crying. Devoid of all of that it was as if a completely different person lay before him. Her face was slack and her lips were slightly parted and her hair hung loose around her face and shoulders. She shifted and he instantly hardened in his stance before slowly allowing himself to relax again. She had merely been readjusting herself and continued to dream.
He turned his head and looked at where her blanket had slid off of her shoulders, revealing a twisted scar on her upper arm. A memory flashed across his mind of the blade of a praetorian guard cutting across her, drawing a scream from her lips that had jarred him. He blinked and it was gone.
He glanced over his shoulder at the rich, warm covers that haphazardly covered his bed. They were thin but designed for the cold of space.
He knew that he shouldn’t care if she were cold or not, she was his enemy after all and had let him down and abandoned him again and again.
The blanket hissed slightly as it dragged over the durasteel floor. His gloved hand held a corner of it crumpled in his fist as he glanced from it to her. Then, releasing a heavy breath, he draped it over her sleeping form. Part of him expected it to go right through her just as her blaster beam had gone through him the first time that the Force had connected them. However, it made contact with her skin and stayed pressed against her. She seemed to relax slightly in her sleep and he felt something small stir within him.
Was this him showing compassion or testing the limits of their bond? He didn’t care enough to answer. To his relief and surprise she didn’t wake. He went into the fresher to remove his robes and retire to bed. When he returned she had disappeared.
You have compassion for her , the ghost of Snoke’s voice sneered.
Rather than reflectively brush this away, Kylo let the words ring true in his mind as he settled in his bed. His mind tentatively began to explore why that may be, what it was about her that stayed his blade or even caused him to extend his hand to her. The hint of the answer began to reveal itself from behind one of the dark corners in his head. He clenched his jaw and conjured up a door, slamming it closed before it could fully reveal itself.
He had been too late however. The answer had slipped through and settled comfortably into his consciousness like a parasite. He willed himself to sleep, to escape this damning train of pervading thought.
What will you do now that you know the truth? It whispered sweetly to him.
I don’t know , a part of him answered miserably without permission. It settled over him like the blanket that he had given her, his motives in doing so now clear.
I don’t know.