the darkness and neon lights (star wars | rey~kylo)

[fiachairecht]

the darkness and neon lights (enclosed in a shrine). star wars sequels, rey~kylo. left alone in space after starkiller, kylo dreams (they're probably dreams). 1k words, rated t.

Softly spins the night around him now and there is nothing, nothing but nothing outside his skin outside his ship. The fighter tumbles through the void, a second metal skin to his pale scarred unbearably human one, each brush of dust against its hull a claw dragged through his flesh.

Alone alone alone, he's alone in a way he hasn't been since he was a child and the dark would only talk back when it chose to, before the Supreme Leader helped him lay his mind bare to it and swallow it whole.

(it was worth it it was always worth it was it worth it even when it swallowed you too)

Now there is just disappointment that presses down on him thick enough to drown, his mother's and his father's and the Supreme Leader's and, worst of all, the girl's.

It is Rey's he feels the most, horror-tinged and eddying around him in the Force — she's far, so far away

(is she ever can she ever be you are joined now too alike and too opposite)

and she projects and she pulls and she is untrained and this is dangerous because he is supposed to train her, she will not untrain him.

She comes to him sometimes as the wolf, bloodstained teeth that drip crimson and black in time with the blood from his cheek, each drop one two three against the deck a deep hum that could replace the beating of his heart.

She comes to him sometimes as the girl, near-transparent in her scavenger's rags except for the light pouring blue and grey from her hands, and those are the nights that he screams.

*

His ship crashes and the ground that rushes up to welcome him is green and alive and it sings and each note is a nail thrust through his eardrum and when unconsciousness cradles him again he thinks that he will take the teeth of the dark he cannot see over the bloom of the light that pretends to hide nothing whenever he can

(you never had a choice and you will never be so lucky that she offers you one)

and yet there is the girl when he closes his eyes and the girl when he opens them and she is not always the wolf but that is all she will ever be to him.

He focuses on the pain of the crash, lets it pass through him, lets it burn, shields of fire that are all heat and no light, twisted into ropes of anger

(to be thrown and used unless she were here and you would let her bind you, oh yes, bound to your anger and bound to her and more)

that he would cast to the sky and climb to freedom until the atmosphere thins and he is crushed, every hollow bone snapping and crumbling into the dark, dust in space again and the only home that can't hurt

(but isn't home supposed to hurt?).

*

She doesn't leave, but she's not real, can't be real, because the last time she was real she cut him open with sabre and mind and only turned away when the ground tore itself in two between them.

She isn't real so he asks her please, reaches out for her with his mind and tangles ghosted hunting fingers in the artfully tattered edges of hers and pulls, says come here come here here where I have made our home.

The girl is feral and the girl is strong and her fires spark against his with a crack that sends him reeling back as if the earth had split apart again. She laughs, or he imagines she laughs on whatever far-off planet she's found herself on, says wrong says weak says not ours, never ours, even if I pulled you to my home.

This Rey, planet-Rey, real and ghost and unreal, doesn't laugh. She watches, flicks her sabre on and off as he huddles against the wreckage of his ship, and doesn't even look like she wants to kill him.

Liar, she's

(just like you because you were never going to kill her either, not before you could see how proud he was of you for capturing the Resistance's darling, how much they hated you for it)

too bright, washing out even the sun because her raw coiled power lights her up in a way fusion never could, and he reaches out with and for the shadows, creeps across the ground and never quite touches the edge of her circle and reminds her that flames too can have their colours drained.

When she turns to him she is the wolf again and she snarls, eyes the unnatural blue of her sabre that ignite his on the ground in response and when the light shivers, unstable and a knife edge from shattering, he feels it in blood, the hunt turned wrong.

*

They are on a planet out of time, locked mind against mind and the earth under their feet would consume them if they had not already taken so much from each other that there is little left 

(and if she were real would she have ever granted you this but if she were unreal should she not have left)

but more than enough to mirror, more than enough to pull.

He sprawls on the grass, flings his arms open to the sky and wishes it to fall, wishes for the pain that she has kept back for too long, for the pain that he had feared instead of the unnatural pale burn that is the pale of her eyes as the wolf and her skin as the girl and everything that she is in the Force. She offers him a hand, pulls him to his knees and no further.

Mine, Rey says, and he sees the flare of the scavenger's triumph behind her eyes from the embers of doubt he can still see lingering at the edges of the victory fire licking at her pupils and dancing around her fingers.

Yours, he says, and he means it to be a challenge; what comes out instead is yours?, a question and a plea and nothing he should ever sound like kneeling so defiantly in front of her

(kneeling at her feet where you belong)

when the lightsaber in her hand has faded because she has no need for it when her presence, physical and Force alike, has him pinned so thoroughly

(because you don't, can't want to break this).

*

Kylo Ren does not leave this world.