Chapter Text
There are exactly two indulgences Kylo Ren allows himself to carry with him at all times. One is Darth Vader’s helm, a prize he is entirely unwilling to let out of his reach, and the other is a pot of high quality cosmetics in the exact same shade as the thin skin covering his wrists. Supreme Leader Snoke knows of the former, and Ren has taken pains to make sure he doesn’t know about the latter. There’s hardly any call for Ren’s wrists to be visible, thankfully. He has gloves and sleeves and, should one of those be absent, color smeared over his skin so no one can see the Name there.
Sith have never carried Names.
Ben Solo has a Name though. It’s scrawled across his wrist in tight, precise lettering, same as it always has been, except for the texture of the skin beneath it, where Kylo Ren had once tried to excise it. He’d loved his Name when he was young. All of four and he’d had more interest in writing out Rey on every scrap of paper than practicing his own name. When he did learn it, Ben sometimes marked his name above the one on his wrist, painstakingly lining up B over R, two E’s stacked together, then an N and a Y. It was always a particular delight to him that they matched; short, three-letter names that fit together just right. By the time he was ten and training with Uncle Luke, Ben hadn’t stopped loving his Name, but he had started worrying about it.
As a child, Names meant one thing to him: someone will love you, perfectly. It was a childish belief, and though strong, it seemed everything in Ben’s life was meant to batter it down. He knew his mother and father had each other’s Names, and yet they couldn’t be called perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Ben grew up learning all the imperfections that could be in a relationship, and how much it cost to know in your own skin someone is meant for you, but still makes you hurt.
When he learned that his infamous grandfather had a Name, the cost of having one grew higher in his mind. For all that Darth Vader was Dark, he was powerful, the Name on his wrist bringing the only weakness Ben knew of him. Compassion, Luke told him, was something Anakin Skywalker could never shake, not when he wore it like a brand on his skin, not when his children were there to remind him of Padme and the man he had been when she loved him.
Ben learns about his grandfather in tiny pieces, pulled together from Luke’s stories and Leia’s bitterness and whispered legends. He becomes Ben’s hero, a man who almost left behind the pull of that Name, that one weakness he nearly shook off when Padme died. Ben’s Name sits like a rash on his skin when he thinks about all it could give him and all he could lose for it. He looks at the people he knows with Names, looks at people like Poe and Luke who don’t have them, and decides the risk can’t be worth the reward. There is no such thing as perfection, Ben tells himself when he is fourteen, but there is greatness.
It isn’t until he’s eighteen and firmly Kylo Ren that he thinks perhaps it wasn’t his own voice telling him greatness was what he could achieve. Snoke has been the whisper in the back of his head for so long he sometimes has trouble keeping track of which thoughts started with whom. He supposes it doesn’t matter anymore. Snoke’s mission is his mission, the thought process doesn’t matter. He doesn’t bother keeping secrets from the Supreme Leader, because what of his messy life is worth hiding from Snoke? There is always that one patch of skin secreted away, however. Physically and mentally, Ren smuggles his Name, never letting on that the Force or something vast and more mysterious has chosen someone for him, given her to him by name.
There is a moment of weakness when he tries to just be rid of the Name. It’s delicate skin across his wrist, thin and pale, and he’s clumsy with his left hand. Kylo Ren is no stranger to pain, but the careful, slow cuts make him flinch in a way nothing else has. He peels it back, bleeding all over his own hands so that he can’t tell if he’s cut deep enough. A few layers of skin should do it, but he digs in like it’s a parasite instead of the blessing he was taught as a child. His wrist heals slowly. The rough rectangle of an open wound, it scabs and reopens and bleeds and eventually heals, and Rey is still there, more stark than ever against the white scar tissue.
He doesn’t try to cut it out again, having no patience for the healing if it will do him no good. He can’t leave it alone though. Most days he forgets about it, going from action to sleep to waking again without even glancing at his wrist. But every so often, he’ll turn his hand just right or catch sight of his bare wrists in the ‘fresher and reread her name; his downfall if he can’t be rid of it.
-
The scavenger is just that when he sees her – a scavenger, nothing more. A thorn in his side and tangled in the web of Rebels and Han Solo and a map to the last Jedi, but no one important in her own right. She’s a frightened slip of a thing when he catches her in the forests of Takodana, and he doesn’t resist toying with her. Her blaster is useless, but the chase is some small measure of entertainment, and he takes it. She cowers before him and so he is frightening. And then, once he has a chance to investigate her mind, she is suddenly useful.
“We have what we need,” Kylo Ren tells the troopers, and he doesn’t stop to think about whether it would be prudent to find the droid as well. He doesn’t question the action of carrying her unconscious body from the forest to his ship. He just does it and it is only in hindsight that he sees the recklessness for what it is – weakness, the one he’d so hoped to shake off.
True, he doesn’t succeed in prying the map from her mind, but that doesn’t mean Ren walks away with nothing. He sees the inconsequential memories of an empty desert, of hopes faded and thin like an old shirt worn too many times. When he presses further, digging carefully through her thoughts, it’s with caution. He can feel how strong she is in the Force, and would hate to damage an asset, and so he proceeds gently.
When she fights him, he abandons care. It becomes a power struggle between them, both straining and then suddenly she slips past him and her consciousness blares so loudly in his mind that he doesn’t notice her perusing his thoughts at first over the noise of her. It isn’t like hearing, not like she’s shouting it, but Ren feels who she is with the strength of her push. She is Rey. No family or title, just Rey. The scavenger, the Name in his skin.
She repeats his fears to him, latching onto the first searing thing she finds, but missing the horror that is awoken at the knowledge of her name. He leaves so fast he forgets to don his mask, but he doesn’t call it a retreat.
She’s gone when he returns, and the rage he lets out on the device meant to hold her is nowhere near satisfying.
-
Even her scream isn’t enough to draw him out of the swirling mess of his emotions as he watches Han Solo fall. It is the first time he can remember wanting his father back, the irony not lost on him. Being shot certainly brings him back to the more pressing matters, however. Rey and Chewbacca and FN-2187 all run, the building crumbling around them. Kylo Ren staggers after them, the pain in his side searing, almost enough to drown out the torment in his mind. He has lost everything he once had, crushed it with his own hand, and he can feel the torn and tattered pieces of who he used to be burning. If he can do this, he can only be Kylo Ren, and yet he has never felt more like Ben Solo than he does tracking them through the snow.
He lets his mind fly open, plucking at the strings of connection where he can still feel Rey tangled at the edges of his thoughts. He finds them easily with that connection to guide him. Rey is desperate, he can sense it, and he has no patience for her attempt at shooting him. He doesn’t think about lifting her off her feet and into the air, he just does it. The Stormtrooper races to her side, and Kylo Ren feels possessive rage bubble up in him uncontrollable and entirely unwelcome. He’s shouting and then muttered Ben’s Name, it’s his, and the deserter has no right to it.
“Traitor!”
He screams it across the snowy forest, intent on blood. If he must destroy everyone in his path to purge himself of this terrible capacity to want, so be it. He’s come too far, done too much, left behind too many things to give in now. So he fights the trooper, brutal, cruel, and careless in his attacks. He knows he’s being heavy handed and does nothing to stop it. When he has the boy backed into a tree, he presses the cross guard of his saber into his flesh and relishes the scream it earns him.
The Stormtrooper loses Vader’s lightsaber when Ren tugs it from his grasp and, after a final stroke that splits his back clean open, Kylo Ren drops his attack to call the saber to him. It has to be all that matters, taking up the inheritance that is rightfully his. There can be no way but forward now.
It flies past him though, bypassing Kylo Ren and landing like a homecoming in Rey’s hand. With equal strength, he hates her and wants her. She is so bright it scorches him, pulls at his untethered edges almost irresistibly. Their fight is so unmatched at first, it makes him think of Takodana, of a game of cat and mouse, but he hadn’t known then. The knowledge of who she is –whose she is – is unforgettable once learned, and he can feel it crawling under his skin.
“You need a teacher,” he tells her, sabers crossed while the earth fractures beneath them. “I can show you the ways of the Force.”
He cannot take his eyes from her face. Somehow, everything seems to hang on this moment, when he’s asked her to choose. If she will only let him, he can keep her. And he doesn’t let himself complete the thought. Keep her safe. It isn’t weakness if it’s possession and she would be a prize. He thinks of Snoke’s pride and approval, and deliberately doesn’t think of someone who will love you, perfectly.
There is no perfection, only greatness.