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They call her the nothing.
Snoke calls her his apprentice like that had been his plan all along, like there hadn’t been others once. He curls in her mind like he owns her. Like she couldn’t give herself her own damn name if she wanted one so badly.
She remembers the old one. The thing she had gone by once, before she became something greater. She has no use for Rey, and yet she tucks it into the hollow place inside her anyway, to rattle around with her hunger and her power.
There’s a strength, she thinks, in keeping something thought stolen from you. Even if you don’t want it anymore.
-
Ben is seven years old when he learns the true danger of what he’s called.
Life on Jakku is hard and he hates it, but every now and then someone comes along to remind him that people can be good. That even in this place, with the sun burning his ears and the sand swallowing the bodies of his parents (he hates sand), a stranger can still find it in their heart to be kind.
“What’s your name, kid?” the alien rasps, handing him a waterskin. He sips politely, trying his best to pretend like his throat isn’t screaming out for him to snatch it and run. This planet has a way of making you just as thirsty for company.
“Ben,” he says after one last sweet sip, holding the waterskin back. His shoulders ache; his haul had been nearly as big as him today (and he’ll learn in a month or two not to do that, that some scavengers are just as willing to pick over a child as the slowly rotting ship carcases out in the dunes). “Ben Solo.”
He doesn’t know what kind of alien this person is, joining him on the outskirts of Niima outpost (and he’ll figure out in a day or two, that sometimes civilisation is more dangerous than the wilderness). Threepio would, but Threepio is a rusting hunk of metal that Ben has already sold for portions. So Ben doesn’t recognise the eagerness in the alien’s tone, or maybe he’s still too busy believing in the general goodness of people to notice it.
“Solo, eh? Any relation to that general that went down back in--”
“My dad,” he says hurriedly, because remembering that is easier than remembering the battle and everything that came after, and that’s how Ben Solo finds himself trussed up and ready for transport to the First Order.
Because people might still be good, but not on Jakku. Not when your life is worth more than the ticket off-planet.
(Unkar Plutt finds the alien’s body the next day. “Musta choked on the sand,” he snorts, because it’s not like Jakku does autopsies.)
The boy tells the next person who asks that his name is Kylo. He fills his own waterskins.
-
She eats the others. It’s not enough.
She’s not the first Force sensitive Snoke has gathered to him. Just the last one left alive. She feels his irritation at first, as she consumes first the cluster of those he acquired before her, and then each one he manages to procure after. Eventually, she doesn’t even have to touch them.
It’s enough to know they’re there. She feels them in the Force, the pulse of energy beating a thousand times stronger than the lackies assigned to watch her. She feels them, hungers for them, aches--
And eats. All that sweet energy flooding from them into her, filling that hollow in her gut for just long enough that she gets a sense of what it would be, to be satiated. To be satisfied.
Then it’s gone, and she’s hungry again.
Snoke’s irritation fades into fear or fervour, she can’t tell which. He thinks she’ll eat him. He thinks he can use her, and the truth is that he’s almost right on that first count, right up until he delivers her first planet.
Dantooine might be old and empty of people, but it is rich in the Force. It might not be central enough for a demonstration of power, but it makes for an effective test. She stands barefoot in the rolling fields, reaching out to feel the death of old crops, the potential for new life sitting in the soil under them. There are crystals in caves full of monsters, new settlements built over the old bones of Jedi temples, the push and pull of the Force threaded through all of it.
She closes her eyes, and she eats.
-
Kylo feels each one wink out.
He throws up the first time - a waste of food, but he’s too busy being horrified by the vastly growing absence in the galaxy to care. It’s not a sudden thing (he thinks that might have killed him); it takes days of careful hollowing out. He wastes days of work hurling into his latrine, and by the time he’s empty, so is that one small section of the galaxy.
He lies outside his AT-AT at night, staring up at the sky like he’ll see it wink out. When he can finally rouse himself, he stumbles through his work in a daze, wondering how anyone on this forsaken planet can continue business per usual when the galaxy is in such turmoil.
It’s weeks later when the news starts to filter in through the outposts - of buildings turned to dust, a green planet turned grey and no survivors to share how it happened.
“Glad it wasn’t us,” some scavenger mutters and Kylo wants to kill him, wants to wrap his hands around his throat and strangle the stupidity out of him because of course it wasn’t them, what is left to kill?
He keeps his food down the next time. And the next. The time after that is when he begins to wonder if it will ever end, the slow carving up of the galaxy into easily-digestible chunks. Kylo hasn’t thought of fighting in years, hasn’t thought of much beyond surviving each successive day and (occasionally) what the fuck he’s waiting for.
-
She’s being watched.
She’s spent a lifetime being watched, that’s not the unusual part. No, the thing that has the hairs on the back of her neck raised is that she doesn’t know this presence. She never thought she’d feel relieved to find Snoke in her head, but this stranger is that much worse because she doesn’t know them.
More specifically, she has no idea how they got in her head to begin with. Is it a test? Another challenger sent from her supposed Supreme Leader? She reaches a mental hand out to them, fingers curved, ready to wring the life from them. She expects a fight, expects a struggle, expects the honey taste of someone bringing their best to defeat her only to fail in the face of her hunger.
She doesn’t expect anyone to reach back.
Stop, the stranger says, or are they asking? Isn’t that enough? Stop
-
It’s only later that Kylo realises how close to death he came that night.
At the time he assumes the presence is reaching for him, as lonely as he is. And he finds that the lesson the thought he'd learnt more than two decades before was really just a child sitting on hope, because it hurt too much to look at.
He stands, pacing in the sand. A trembling hand smears over his mouth, holding the words in until he gets a response.
It’s never enough. The voice is so bland, it takes a second for him to identify it as a woman. Why are you here?
Kylo looks out at the endless roiling dunes of Jakku. I don’t know.
-
She thinks that if he’d had a reason, she would have consumed him. One puppet master is already too many; she won’t stand for more requiring things of her.
I don’t know makes no demands. There’s a relief there that she almost shies away from, because what is he doing in her head if not to take something from her?
(she is the nothing she has nothing left to give)
You’re hurting it, the voice says. Tearing wounds in the Force. It’s sickening.
But it’s said with fascination, not accusation. Alone on the remnants of a planet she has made a part of her (there wasn’t much to NaJedha anyway), she settles in the dust. Legs cross, palms on her knees. She rolls her neck, and wonders if the voice can see her.
-
Thought flickers to action lightning fast. Kylo feels her wonder, and then he sees her.
It’s almost enough to wish he hadn’t.
Devastation surround her, worse because of the quiet of it. No crumbled buildings, no craters or scars in the land around her. The planet is simply...grey. Still. Dust clings to the edges of her robes, although her body is the only thing that could have stirred it. There’s not even a wind.
The broken planet should horrify him, but it’s the mask that consumes his attention. Smooth, black as her robes, there are no discernable gapes in it. The durasteel dips into the vaguest gesture at facial features - hollows where eyes would be, the proud bridge of a nose sweeping down to a flat plane with no mouth.
He bites back the urge to scream. Somehow, he knows that just makes her smile.
If the Force didn’t want me to eat, she says, it shouldn’t have made me so hungry.
I don’t understand.
The silence stretches on for so long and she is so still that Kylo has to wonder if she’s real. If any of this is actually happening, or if it’s just a figment of a mind ruined by the monotony of Jakku.
There’s a certain irony there, in summoning your own companion only to find yourself unable to make it work.
But a gloved hand reaches out to him from the endless folds of her robes.
Then let me show you.
-
This is the reason Snoke is still alive.
She hadn’t meant to kill the others, at first. She had only wanted to show them, in the hopes that maybe one of them would understand. That if someone else could just know, maybe she wouldn’t feel so hollowed out.
The emptiness had killed them. So she had eaten them up in the hopes that maybe that was the answer. And for all that her focus has become the eating rather than the showing, that hasn’t stopped her from the attempt. A small ritual, the last lingering piece of Rey in the midst of all that nothing.
Snoke is the only one to survive. The only one to survey the desolate wasteland inside her and not go mad with it, and the only one to pull himself out again. He had looked upon the wound in her soul and she had felt his fear and his malice and his cruelty, and they had both said--
Good.
Kylo Ren’s hand closes around hers, fingers pale against the stark black of her glove. She remembers whispering sorry, once, in the beginning.
She clenches his hand in hers, and opens her maw.
-
The inside of her is Jakku.
He is on the edge of the Sinking Fields and then he’s just in them. The sand grasps at his body, sucking him under for no reason at all except that he is there and so are they. That’s the cruelty of Jakku; it doesn’t care that you’re there. It doesn’t seek you out, doesn’t chase you. The two of you are simply there together, until it consumes you.
“Why stay here?”
Kylo startles, which is hard to do when you’re weighed down with desert. He opens his mouth to reply and the sand sifts in, soaking up all the moisture in his mouth, funneling down his throat and threatening to fill him up (he really, really hates sand).
It occurs to him, there in the choking darkness, that he doesn’t know which one of them asked the question.
-
She watches him drown.
Not with her eyes, but with herself. She surrounds him, stifles him, feels his energy pass through her and around her like some sick kind of dance. He doesn’t fight her, but he doesn’t die either.
He’s still in the middle of her. Like he’s waiting for something.
Why stay here?
“Because there’s nowhere else to go.”
She could leave Snoke at any time, kill him and be done with it, but for what purpose? A creature like that won’t ease her hunger any more than the rest have, not when whole planets have fallen before her, and with him gone she will simply be alone.
The nothing.
-
He could leave this place, but there’s no regaining what he’s lost. He could go to Naboo, Coruscant, Nar Shaddaa, any of the millions of planets scattered far and wide throughout the galaxy and the dark places beyond, and Ben Solo will still be dead.
Everything that he was and everything that he was meant to be has been taken from him. He could leave this place, but why bother?
It fits him so well.
-
The inside of her is Jakku.
She’s never been to this planet before in her life, and yet she aches to know it. This is not a desert that holds secret life in the night, that is worth it in some ways despite its hardships. This is just sand, and the endless work of eking a survival from it.
And somewhere in the middle of it all, she is holding Kylo Ren’s hand.
For a moment, she just eyes him. A generous mouth open and gasping, thick lashes screwed tight against sharp cheekbones. His nose is too long, and she considers that she’s never had an opinion on noses before.
His hair, sweat-soaked and slicked to his face. Slowly, she reaches out with her other hand. Scrapes her fingers back through the thick locks, following the wave of them down over his face. Her thumb caresses his jaw, and she is so, so hungry.
But he is alive.
And so is he.
-
The ship that comes to Niima Outpost is small, nondescript. Unkar Plutt shuffles eagerly towards it, ready to extract his fee for landing rights, only then he doesn’t. Kylo watches as the entire shitty port forgets to crane their heads at this new arrival, going about their daily drudgery as the ramp lowers.
His heart is in his throat, or maybe his stomach. He has never in his life been so aware of his internal organs.
A woman walks calmly out into the sun. Still swathed in black, the sand immediately clings to her robes. Kylo thinks he could happily set the whole desert on fire but she barely seems to notice it, pacing across the yard to where he leans up against one of the stalls.
If the mask had ever been real, it’s gone now. Her face is sweet, the corner of her mouth ticked up slightly like she knows exactly what she’s doing to his insides.
She knows exactly what she’s doing to his insides.
She’s tall for a human woman, still half a foot or more shorter than him. His hands ache to reach for her, but he curls them into fists and he waits.
-
Rey squints against the brightness of this new sun, setting her hands on her hips. A breeze scours her face, so gritty and arid that it brings no relief from the heat.
She looks up at Kylo, the way his whole body seems to lean in towards her, barely restrained.
Rey is a black hole. She will consume him, one way or another.
“I can eat it,” she offers, reaching one ungloved hand out to him. “If you’re done here.”
-
Kylo smiles. It feels alien on his face and he doesn’t care, tangling his fingers with hers.
“Please.”