Chapter Text
PART I: Rey
Let the past die.
- -
As her face brimmed with emotion, with tears that had just begun to slowly spill, the flickering flames reflected and refracted against the warm golden flecks in her irises and Kylo wondered how he’d never noticed that her eyes sparkled as brilliantly as Alderaanian emeralds.
She looked so young – so profoundly young – and in that moment, he would’ve given anything and everything to have held her close, to wipe the wetness from her face, to murmur quiet promises of peace in her ear.
“You’re not alone,” he said softly instead.
“Neither are you,” Rey replied.
She had bared herself to him, sat before him exposed and vulnerable and bare, dressed in nothing but faith and compassion and gentleness.
He’d seen her like this before, but only in dreams.
Was she truly willing, after all that had happened, after all that he had done?
He winced at the abrupt burst of unadulterated hope within his chest, a painful explosion that felt foreign and yet full.
His heart’s cadence chanted excitedly to him. Accept her (thump thump) … Believe her (thump thump) … Trust her (thump thump).
But his heart had told him many things over the years, had encouraged him to act upon certain things and make certain choices that had caused him nothing but inner turmoil and perpetual pain.
His head, on the other hand, had always served as a counterbalance to the foolhardy hopefulness of his spirit, had always steered him away from those who downplayed and used his powers – Skywalker – and toward those who had provided him with power and passion – Snoke.
As he ran his eyes over her features, from her sun-speckled forehead to the creases in her almond eyes to her small button nose to her moist and rosy lips, Kylo found that his mind had failed him where it usually had not: it remained completely and utterly quiet, which only served to amplify his soul’s rhythmic urging.
Touch her (thump thump) … Show her (thump thump) … Love her (thump thump).
His pulse pounded at his temples and he held his breath as Rey slowly extended her hand toward him. Willing the nausea in his belly to subside, Kylo studied her hand; it looked so small, childlike even, dwarfed by his overly large palm and long fingers, which trembled with nervous anticipation as he pulled off his Corellian leather glove and reached out to her in turn.
Her fingertips were rough and calloused from years of scavenging in the harsh Jakku badlands, and he felt a pang of guilt as he realized how soft his own must be, moisturized by the finest high-end lotions the galaxy had to offer, all sourced directly from the many planets within the First Order’s oversight.
But her touch felt so welcomingly warm, felt so earnest and so true and so caring that he realized what she was willing to do for him, what she would willingly give to him.
In that moment, he had found beautiful deliverance within her very soul.
And then the fire between them abruptly darkened and the hut in which they sat disappeared altogether.
. . .
“No!”
The voice was shrill but familiar. Kylo wiped the budding beads of sweat from his forehead, squinting in the blinding light of the harsh glare overhead sun. His eyes slowly came into focus and he saw her, no older than five, freckled and small and fighting uselessly to rip her tiny arm from the unforgiving grip of a hulking and grotesque Crolute.
“Quiet, girl,” alien gurgled disdainfully.
She paid no attention.
Her desperate protestations strained toward a pair of figures in the near distance. Kylo eyed their backs as they walking away sloppily, clumsily shuffling across the shifting sands beneath their feet. He watched with disdain as the young woman stumbled into the man next to her, sending both into fits of cackling laughter.
“Mama, Papa!”
Kylo’s heart sunk further and further, lower and lower, as the pair continued on their merrily drunken way, without so much as a backwards glance at their discarded daughter.
Rey had begun weeping uncontrollably, her small body trembling with the most horrifying guttural sobs he’d ever heard.
“Please, come back!”
Her cries echoed within his mind, replaying over and over, and Kylo’s vision began to bleed bright red, his veins bursting with molten revulsion and raw rage. His thudding heart pumped adrenaline through his entirety, surging and setting free his ownmemories that had long been forgotten, memories with murky details but vivid with emotion.
Hopelessness.
Abandonment.
Agony.
Hatred.
A lifetime of fantastic pain and unfulfilled promises …
He was plunged into frigid blackness.
Kylo shivered but remained soundless and still as his sight gradually adjusted to the darkness. He was surrounded by a moonlit sea of endless sand, interrupted only by a series of hilly dunes off in the far distance. The setting was unremarkable, at best.
What did catch his attention was the enormous crater in front of him, the edge of which he stood perilously close to. He gritted his teeth and steeled his balance before backing away from the pit slowly, all the while warily eyeing the dozens of unmoving bodies within, their arms and legs strewn about haphazardly at awkward and unnatural angles.
“This one didn’t last long.”
Kylo glanced to his right, where a filthy man with a strange accent was rolling a heavy sack of … something particularly heavy … across the barren and bleak dunes.
Correction: the sack was actually a body.
Further: it was the body of a young woman; he could tell from the gentle slope of her jaw and from the narrowness of her waist.
The man’s counterpart grunted with effort as he reached down and grabbed a second body: a young well-built man, his mid-length brown hair matted with dried blood and bits of debris. “Neither did this ‘un,” he said, dragging the body carelessly behind him. “Fucking offworlders.”
And the two grave diggers cackled with glee as they unceremoniously flung Rey’s parents into the mass grave, where they landed in unison with a sickening thud.
Kylo hung his head and heaved.
And then time and place shifted once more.
. . .
The sandy terrain and the hell pit of the dead had given way to a dark residence of some sort, and relief flooded him as he inhaled deeply and no longer smelled the rotting heap of decomposing bodies – he had been unsure as to how much more he could take.
Kylo frowned at the durasteel bulkhead before him, taking a step closer to more easily study the white score marks covering the wall’s full height and more than half its length. There were hundreds – no, thousands – of them, each carving all fairly uniform in size and organized into straight rows. He ran the pads of his fingers along them, wondering who had made them and what they were for.
A dull thud at the room’s entryway alerted him to someone’s arrival.
Rey was older now – in her mid-teens, if he had to guess. Her tattered and soiled tunic was nearly identical to the ensemble she’d worn as a child, her hair was parted into the same three-bun style.
She rested a makeshift but sturdy staff against the threshold and lifted the goggles from her face, muttering with frustration as she shook a nearly-impossible amount of sand from the strap and visor before flinging them onto the lumpy mattress in the far corner.
He regarded her warily as she walked toward the white-marked bulkhead, toward exactly where he stood. She stopped to stand next to him, so close that he could feel the heat of her body, could smell the dried sweat in her hair, could count each of her delicate and fluttering eyelashes. He ran his gaze along the easy slope of her petite nose and the gentle curvature of her lips, tracing imaginary lines between the light brown freckles that cascaded down her neck and past her clavicles, disappearing underneath the fabric of her tunic.
But her eyes ...
It was her eyes that had always spoken to him, and it was her eyes that whispered so much to him, even now, even here: they were dim and dull and gloomy, their usual light lifeless and dreary.
Rey withdrew a rusty and ancient macrofuser from her pocket, using its sharp welding tip as a pointed instrument to etch another tally mark upon the wall.
And that was when he knew.
He knew that she’d made these marks.
He knew that she’d spent the last ten years counting the days since she last saw her parents.
He knew that she’d still believed they’d return, that all was not lost, that they would be reunited once again and that her life would then begin anew.
But he knew that it was all a lie.
Her parents would never return.
They’d sold her for an extra credit or two, had given up their only daughter for a couple of drinks at Niima Outpost’s cheapest dive bar.
Her parents were dead and buried in a grave along with hundreds of other derelict outlaws and bottom-feeders.
Her parents hadn’t deserved her to begin with.
Kylo’s soul shattered.
His own upbringing had been less than ideal, as it were, but never had he seen parents dispose of their own child so callously and with such nonchalance. At the very least, he knew his parents had somewhat cared, had loved him in some ways, even if they were limited and saturated in fear and misunderstanding.
And at least he had been the one to leave them.
But it didn’t matter.
Because he would not forsake her.
Not now.
Not ever.
. . .