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Drop the Lockstep

Chapter 26: Artist

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Time used to be like numbers clicking from one second to the next. One minute gone, one hour, and Rey lived every instant of it. Whether asleep or awake, time was always accounted for in some way.

Now it skips and hops, then drags over the ground, picking up bits of gravel. Rey will open her eyes to lucidity and find that she’s been absent for nearly a day without ever having missed it. Other times, she’ll open her eyes after an eternity, and find it’s only been a minute or two.

The walls don’t talk here, but Rey still asks them things. Mumbles requests. She asks for Heim, for Ansa. If the sounds falling out of her mouth aren’t too jumbled, a large hand will bring her what she needs.

“How are you feeling?” is what comes with the hand. 

Rey feels too many things. For a long while, she can’t tell whether the things she feels are from memory, or are happening right this minute.

When she manages to creak her eyes open and get them focused through the prickly static, she finds metal walls boxing her in. Sometimes she forgets that these are different walls than the ones she’d spent long windowless days staring at, waiting for the next bout of Lockstep.

Her hands jerk and reach, and most of the time she’ll find Kylo with them. Grips him tight, whatever part she can access, fingers pinching into his skin, but he doesn’t flinch back.

She spends most of her time in a bed, a big one so Kylo can join her. At first they’d had her in a pod down at the medcenter, wearables stamped over the skin of her wrist and neck and head so they could monitor her. 

There in the beginning, a lot of the times when she’d wake up with the pod crowding around the newborn egg of her, Kylo would be gone. 

“He’s still here,” the medperson would tell her in a smooth voice that would make Rey hate them all the more. “He’s in the Given Place. He’ll be back—soon, he said. Promise.”

They’d check and check her stats, as if any of them could show why Rey’s brain is all bent to shit.

So she’d wait and stare at the stupid tab hooked into the ceiling. Not all the med pods have those—not here in the Given Place, anyway—but apparently Kylo shelled out buckets of funds so she could have an extra cushy stay.

Sometimes she could last until Kylo came back. Most of the time, though, she didn’t, falling into a frenetic slumber.

He’d wake her up with his lips on her forehead, right below the wearable monitoring the boop-boop-boop of her brainwave. 

“I’m sorry,” he would always tell her. 

If she could make her voice work, she’d ask him, “Why?”

“For taking so long.”

And she would know that he wasn’t talking about the here and now. He meant before.

“They’re going to come back for me,” Rey would often say in her delirium. She’d catch these words warbling off her tongue, not quite understanding that she was the one saying them. “They’ll keep testing. I’m the only one—the only one. They’re going to come and get me. They didn’t finish.”

For a while, Kylo would do his best to shush her back to calm. Sometimes it was the medpeople doing it instead, but their voices may as well have been lost with the wind, so when she would get bad they’d always call Kylo back as quick as he can to stop her thrashing, her hoarse cries.

Maybe he didn’t want to stress her out with shit she didn’t need to know yet. Or maybe he was still unsure, still checking his sources. Still hunting them down, wherever they’d fled to. But one day, Kylo told her something else instead of the usual hush-hush-it’s-fine nonsense.

“Hitstand isn’t coming back,” he’d told her, his nose pointing straight at her. 

In her mind, the picture of Daus with her hand outstretched. Snarky sounds in her mouth, swinging black hair. Hitstand pushed back and back against the wall so they couldn’t move a muscle. 

“Daus killed them,” Rey had said, self-soothing. “Daus did it, right? Didn’t—didn’t she? Didn’t she kill them? Why didn’t you just tell me that at—at the first?” It took her a long while to get the words out, smeared as they were. 

But when she was finally done, Kylo had shaken his head, his nose rocking back and forth. “Daus wouldn’t do it. Wouldn’t let me do it, either. She still believes in the cause—she’s high up, you know. Right up there with the top brass. She’s always been told a whole lot more than I have. It took a shit ton of convincing to find out where they took you, and even then, the best I could get from her was a rescue mission. Once we were in the clear, she let Hitstand go.”

His face broke again in that thousand-cracked-stain-glass way. Broke and reformed new and shiny, but still cracked all the same. 

Wetness had trickled into her ears from the tears rolling down her temples. “Then they’ll come for me. They—they need me for the…”

She couldn’t say it then. The name of it, the Lockstep. She could think it, but the word wouldn’t come to her lips. 

Kylo wiped her tears with his thumb. “No. They’re not coming, Rey. I promise.” He leaned in closer, like he was telling her secrets. “I just heard back, just today. They’ve worked out the kinks in the Lock—in their tool. They don’t need you anymore, not for anything. You’re safe.”

Rey had cried and cried, but the silent kind. Her eyes didn’t burn and her throat had stayed calm and open. 

“You’re lying,” she had said. 

It wasn’t until Kylo got her out of there—“We’re not learning shit,” he’d told the medpeople objecting as he’d hoisted Rey into his arms like a bundle of laundry—that she began to feel like he might have been telling the truth.

Because if Hitstand really was coming, then they wouldn’t still be in the Given Place. They’d be running.

From there, Kylo brought her to a new place with more metal walls and no pod to cradle her. Instead she had his arms and his chest, always there to hold her tight when she needs it. 

And she does need it. Oh, how she needs it.

Kylo tends to her all on his own, and she’s glad for it. She’d never realized he held such sweetness in that enormous body of his, but his touch is gentle as silk on her skin. 

At first he doesn’t make her do a thing besides sleep. Bathes her, feeds her by hand, dresses her. All the things that Hitstand’s people did for her at the Kelenk facility. But he does nicer stuff, too. Tells her stories, maybe made up or maybe not. Massages her limbs when her nerves get too sparkly and sharp from the memory of the Lockstep. Sometimes, if she asks, he’ll just sit there and let her look at him so she can reassure herself that he’s actually here, squinting through the static.

No matter what she needs, so long as she can articulate it, he makes it happen. He’s got this, you know, this caretaker complex.

This is all in between bouts of getting lost.

The shaking goes away first, but apart from that it’s slow going for recovery. Even with Rey’s bent up sense of time, she can tell that much. She’s taking forever to be okay again.

Her brain just doesn’t want to cooperate. Bones creak, muscles sting and jump when she attempts to sit up on her own, her nervous system sending down loopy signals that shouldn’t be there. Everything’s been plugged in backwards, and the way Kylo tells it, all the medpeople in the world can’t help, because the Lockstep is brand-dimdamn-new. 

Nobody knows what the issue is with her. The only one who might is Hitstand, and they’re sure not responding to Kylo’s desperate pings.

“Am I home yet?” Rey asks him sometimes. The bits of where she used to live, both burghs and stacks, she tries to piece them together into a real picture, but they refuse to resolve into a clear memory.

“No,” he’ll tell her. “We’re still in the Given Place.”

It’s three months later before she thinks to ask how this city-size hole in the desert came to be.

Kylo smiles, and he pulls up pictures on his tab, one he stole from the Edge. A crisp and clean one, nothing like the black-backed bricks they’ve got here. He shows her pictures and tells her the story of great masses of dirt and decaying plant matter being pulled from the ground in bricks the size of buildings. Pulled from the earth with massive machines and shot into space, that’s what made this big hole.

After all, when constructing all those habitats in the sat ring, people had to get the earth from somewhere. Why not take it from a climate that most people had given up on?

The days get longer. Rey’s eyes are open more, and sometimes they even focus on what’s in front of her. The not-so-subtle tremor in her limbs goes away. Rey wonders if that means she’s getting better.

But her brain still doesn’t cooperate. Rey imagines how the Lockstep must’ve shaved down all those neural pathways, making every sensation, every impulse harsh and raw. Her thoughts slip around too quick for her tongue to catch most of the time, so it’s a miracle whenever she can get a few words out. 

The day she realizes she can’t picture what she looks like, it’s the first time she screams since leaving the facility. 

Rey can remember. She knows who she was, now. Who she should be once she gets better. She knows she had a flat, and a father that wasn’t really her father, and a garden some years. She remembers how much she loved to draw. What foods were good to her tongue, what foods weren’t. 

But she can’t picture any of it. The images have been shattered to pieces, then fitted back together in odd ways that don’t make sense. What should be a memory of her face is just smeared-over visual noise.

Walking comes first, because Rey finds that she actually hates being waited on. The next time Kylo takes an absence for supplies, she hoists herself up on those spindly wasted sticks that used to be strong. And, unexpectedly, they obey her. She has to hold the wall the entire way to the kitchenette, and sure, she scuffs her toes with every step, but for the first time in months she’s walking.

When Kylo returns, Rey is swallowing great mouthfuls of water. It pours over the sides of the glass and slops down her neck. Feels nice.

After that, Kylo makes her do what he calls ‘therapy’. 

At first it’s just physical stuff. Standing, walking, crawling, jumping. Throwing a ball around. Washing her own hair. Moving her body around comes back far easier than Rey had expected, and she gets cocky, thinking recovery is just on the other side of tomorrow. 

Rey never thought she’d be so proud of brushing her own teeth.

Then he pulls out the tab, and he makes her really work. 

It reminds Rey of when she was being onboarded for the study, how Quto asked her all these bizarre-o questions, making her sing songs from memory and point out what shapes don’t belong. Kylo will pull up tests on the tab so vague that sometimes, Rey doesn’t even understand what it’s supposed to be testing for.

But she knows when she gets it wrong. She knows every time, because of the drawn-down look on Kylo’s face.

He shows her a simple picture, then has her try to draw it from memory. She does her best and at times even feels confident, but somehow the result compared to the original is just a scribbly mess. The images won’t come.

She does math, does color-matching. Numbers come okay, but anything visual, she may as well set her fingers on the tab and make them go random. 

Rey can remember that the house in the picture shown is blue, the word blue stuck on her tongue, but she can’t pick out that blue to save her life. When she’s looking in a mirror, her face is true as can be. Just how it should be. 

But when she looks away and tries to picture it in her mind, it’s just noise.

~*~

“I want to go home,” Rey tells him one day.

Her fingers flutter over the color wheel, adjusting to the absolute correct color of pale pink, she’s sure of it. She shifts the wheel so it’s not blocking the area of the wall that she wants to work on.

It was a birthday present, the walltab. Bigger than she would have ever asked for. It probably had to be shipped in from somewhere, since almost nobody has walltabs in the Given Place.

Ever since she got it, Rey’s been making outright tapestries. It’s her new therapy, she tells him. 

Kylo leans against the wall just past the edge of the tab. “We can’t,” he says.

“Not yet, you mean?”

“Not ever.” His eyes follow her hand as she paints quick, delicate strokes across the screen with her fingertips. “Hitstand’s back there again, and so are Daus and Quto and most of the others. I found out a few months back.”

Rey laughs. “Back at the stacks? No way. They’d get arrested in a cricket-minute if they stepped foot there.”

She rotates the color wheel, curving the pink into more of a rosewood for the shadow. Her fingers skitter, and she pauses.

Every few seconds, she’s glancing at Kylo’s face. Finding the shade, noting highlights. 

Kylo sighs and tucks his hands in his pockets. He’s got that tight look around his jaw where she can tell he has something to say, but he just refuses to spit it out. 

Rey knows to wait. She tickles the underside of a line, smoothing it. Shaping it just perfect.

“Hitstand has already been selected as one of the top governing Harms,” Kylo murmurs. “The big leagues.”

Rey about drops through the floor. “What—? Why would they—?”

He stares at the ceiling as he talks. “They ran the Lockstep there, sounds like. Then after they were sure there’d be no opposition, they pitched it as a breaking new device to set the city rolling towards new growth and prosperity. Apparently not one single person saw anything bad about it. Quite the opposite, actually. Hitstand’s being hailed as a genius now.”

The color wheel dawdles where she’d left it, shifting through pinks and peaches.

“So it’s being used?” she asks, anger biting off the ends of her words.

He nods. “Yes. From the stacks to the burghs, it’s in use. Apparently they figured out how to expand the range—or maybe they’ve built more of them.”

“Both,” she says. She finds a dusky black and paints a long stroke of it where she’s already finished. Feels good to slash her arm across the portrait.

Right now, the Lockstep is digging into the skulls of every human being unlucky enough to live in the stacks or burghs. And unlike Rey, a lot of them probably don’t even know they’re being invaded. Changed. Warped to fit someone else’s idea of human, for the sake of fucking progress.

Without meaning to, they’ve all begun to march as one. Programmed easy as ants.

Rey lets out another laugh, a thick one. She smudges a pocket of detail. “So, what, Hitstand just gets to decide what everyone thinks and feels?”

“There are rules, I’m sure—but yes. Hitstand, or whoever gets their hands on it.” Kylo must’ve been keeping this to himself for a while. His voice lilts downward in that exhausted way. “It’s only a matter of time before the Lockstep is integrated elsewhere. As far as I’ve heard, the results in the stacks have been…rather explosive. Aggressive expansion, trade deals and unprecedented technological innovation. They’re going fast, and they’re going hard. Other citystates are noticing. It’s going to spread.”

She grits her teeth. “So you’re saying they could bring it here.”

Kylo seems to hesitate, then nods.

“Then we’ll run. We’ll run to wherever they refuse to use it.” She gives him a long, hard look. “I’m never letting that fucking thing in my head again.”

“Never,” Kylo agrees.

Rey touches up the highlights. She reaches tall as she can to hit the uppermost corners. This is her largest painting yet, filling nearly the entire walltab with vibrant color.

She takes a deep breath, then lets it out. Steps back one, two, three feet. And she looks.

“Did I get it?” Rey asks, glancing from the real life Kylo to his could-be portrait. His should-be face on the wall.

Kylo steps back as well and gives it a stare. All Rey can see is a whirlwind of color, shapes fitted together in the oddest ways. A puzzle gone wrong. But maybe this time—this time she managed to capture something real. Maybe she’s finally starting to get it back.

Kylo wraps an arm around her shoulders and presses his lips to her temple. 

“Not quite.”

Notes:

Hope you all liked the fic! If you made it all the way to the end, I'd love to hear your thoughts - good or bad, the feedback helps! This fic was intended to be a prequel so I hope it did its job in fleshing out the world!

(For what it's worth I originally intended for a bit of a parent-finding arc to explain why Unkar had her but the story just did not go that way. Sorry!!)

If you liked this, please consider checking out my other Reylo works!

Rot - Trapped on a deserted island together
Drop the Lockstep - Far future sci-fi mystery
Bicuspid - Rock star Ben and stalker Rey
In Pieces - Rey makes a deal with the grim reaper
Fingernails - Dr. Ben kidnaps himself a girlfriend
Comic Sans - Uncle Ben shows his niece how to be a proper office assistant
Stalks - Rey gets sacrificed to a demon
The Ghost - Rey's landlord is not a kind man
READY THAT BEAUTIFUL SMILE - Dystopia and disabilities
A Nice Thing - Ben helps Rey escape her abusive mother
Obedience - Handmaid's Tale Reylo AU
The Grand and Terrible Bathtub Mimic - Dr. Ben gives Rey a controversial treatment.