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He shouldn’t be here.
He should not be sitting here: in his quarters, at the edge of his bed, in spaces too small for his body and his station both. Ben Solo wouldn’t be sitting blankly on the bed like this, he thinks, feet planted firmly on the floor because he’s not taken his boots off either; Ben would have remembered to take his boots off, probably, although he does have to admit that has more to do with discomfort in his clothes and in his skin than necessarily diligence. But it’s diligence that would have him sitting on the floor properly, were he trying to commune with the Force in Kylo Ren’s place, or at least would have his spine straight as he sits all wrong. Wouldn’t be covering his eyes with his hands like he doesn’t trust himself not to blink and Ren shouldn’t be either.
He is breathing.
He is not very good at it.
Both of them—all of him—would expect to be told off for this, in a wide variety of ways. There’s no one to tell him no any more. No one to tell him he’s doing things wrong. It turns out they’d been superfluous and he doesn’t know how long. It’s just that knowing better can’t make him act right.
Folded over on himself, cutting off his own breath as if tailored to avoid success at any traditional form of meditation, grounding himself in the worst possible way with his hands on his face, too listless to panic, Kylo Ren reaches for the Force and finds that nothing reaches back.
It’s the usual way of things. It makes him tired. He was already tired.
(If he wanted to use it for something, that would be different, that would be easy, that would be energizing, that would entail something that’s come naturally to him for longer than people even knew to fear it. His own powers, his own energies, are easily within his grasp. It’s anything beyond the limits of his own skin—which is to say, every authority agrees, anything worth doing or knowing or even consciously avoiding—that escapes him.)
Ren gives up on even this idle thinking that shouldn’t call itself a mental exercise and lets himself fall backward, curled in on his side, fully dressed. His boots hang awkwardly off the bed that’s barely large enough for him at the best of times. He still—just as he does many things, and about as successfully—he still sleeps like an overgrown child.
He is entitled to more than this; he was even before, held back not by explicit commands of enforced asceticism but by the faintest traces of implied disapproval from Snoke. Not that Ren could even tell if he was reading those signals, any signals, correctly, save being forcibly informed of it, but—it was Snoke. So he played it safe every way he could, in that as in all else, and gained precious little from it. In that as in all else.
It’s not that he would’t even like to take advantage of his stature now, both practically and for image’s sake, as opposed to his more unshakable stature continuing somewhat to hamstring him. It would be good to have quarters that fit him and that befit his station. There has never been any real benefit in folding himself into corners and edges and margins and less than he deserves. That’s for people below him. That’s for people who’d fit in the first place were they to make the attempt, instead of being predisposed, inevitably, to failure.
But the idea of actually dealing with it, like many other things (like too many other things, like everything; like always, because nothing real has changed), is paralyzing. It would be trivially simple, an administrative request no one could resent—especially, he thinks grimly, given the lack of competition, the newfound surfeit of space, when so much of their command is dead—but doing so contains within itself, by necessity, the admission that he hadn’t done it before. The admission, in other words, of a mistake. Weakness. By definition. So he doesn’t, doesn’t do any of it, doesn’t do that. So it gets worse.
No one would even notice. The one who pays—paid, paid—that minute of attention to him is dead and Ren doesn’t even know if he’d really have cared. Realistically, whether or not Ren had originally acted on Snoke’s intent, he’d still have realized that there was something there and used it against Ren accordingly as soon as Ren gave any noticeable mind to it, and Ren realizes this with the dull reverb of no revelation at all. Perhaps the only trait to outstrip Snoke’s sadism in magnitude was his opportunism, and in practice they fed on each other so as to be indistinguishable anyway. So it wouldn’t have mattered.
It’s such a small, sordid way to work it out, to work out that he already knew. And it doesn’t matter. And he knew that too.
He can’t find somewhere to place his arms, Ren finds, irritation at it being slightly out of his reach; if he shifts to relieve the awkwardness something protests in his shoulder, his side. Even having ignored—spited, really, in as many ways as physically possible—all medical compulsion offered to him, the bowcaster wound is little more than a scar now, nothing with any business reminding Ren of itself. Nothing to spare caution or pity or softness for, even in something so meaninglessly trivial as how he lays his body down and even if Kylo Ren had it in himself to harbor such things in any context, to accept or to enact them.
When he told himself that impulses like that, lenience and mercy and—he told himself they could at least be used for something and he was lying. He was weak and he was lying and even the Light would’ve known it of him. It would have known for the wrong reasons, from the infinite host of cowardly rejection upon rejection that undergirds it, but it would know.
What did trying get him? When Rey had laid aside her spite and denied his name and he let that go as the price paid for one outstretched hand what did that get him? At most what he reaped was the loss of her enmity, something that he could use; and the deaths of two masters he should have disposed with earlier, at too high a cost to even matter; and Crait; and—nothing. Not even what he sowed, just nothing. He will never get any of it back.
Even throwing him away Rey didn’t get any of her malice back—the hate—and it was at least something, if only he could have left her with it, as she left him; and maybe even this sick erosion of what little he had there was Snoke’s backup plan all along. Ren wouldn’t put it past him, can’t put anything past him any more, not when for decades he didn’t dare and now he can never know.
So he saw determination in her eyes, and conviction, but under that, still, somehow, against him, that thing like kindness. Beneficence. Because she couldn’t have the sense or the respect or even the actual grace to fear him any more and she couldn’t give him hope by at least acting for herself. Luke set him up as rabid and incomprehensible and unforgivable even before Ren was any of those things but Ren still had to find out the hard way that even that was better than being some kind of wounded animal. Than no sadism, and no real will to injure, and little satisfaction, beyond I’m not going to do this any more but this is better for both of us—it’s for your good too, Ben, it is, I still hope you see that.
And then still knowing enough for an instant longer to know that somehow she wasn’t even lying.
What does it matter that it was all Snoke’s fault now? No sins Ren can lay at his feet will stick, they’ll just come back to haunt Ren with the consequences and he’s still the one to blame, Snoke’s dead. Unlike Luke he couldn’t even manage it on purpose but still he won’t just be a failure for Ren to be free of. It was Snoke’s fault and if he were still alive he’d lie whether or not anything had been planned and Ren still could’ve not taken the bait in the first place. He could’ve done anything. He should’ve done something.
The things he did do don’t count. That’s the point. He’s the unstoppable engine, he’s the juggernaut, he can’t be anything else and nor was he made to be capable of it, and so none of that acts in his favor when his enemies can always just sidestep. Everyone he fought still won because Ren can’t let himself do anything but lose.
Ben Solo was too much and too large for any space that ostensibly claimed it could or would or wanted to take him. Kylo Ren’s just a coward. A wasteful, pathetic coward who could take anything he put his mind to and won’t even act on this: that he deserves better than staring blankly at a wall because opting instead for staring at the ceiling means awareness of the overhang of his useful underutilized overabundance of legs becomes inevitable.
Which is strictly unnecessary. The legs. The disjoint. Both. What has his height done for him, anyway, besides being a force multiplier on humiliation whenever people realize they can get one over on him anyway? He battles with it but that’s barely a virtue beyond being a necessity, when Snoke encouraged it in him but Luke was right—Luke was right, spoke out of the Light’s infantile fears and not any real strategy or utilitarianism and he was right anyway—what being this way has done for him is: it let Rey cut him and it let Luke—
So he rolls over anyway (like a child, he’s still an overgrown child, he has to remind himself of that now because those who’d at least take it out of his hands to make sure he’s aware of that perpetual failure are all dead or otherwise they’re afraid to and that does nothing, less than, to its persistent truth value, so Ren has to do it himself now) to strike himself in the side, and then he pulls the punch.
Half of what stops him is memory, jarring, enough to freeze his hand and his breath and kick his heart up into his throat so it’s the only part of him that moves and it speeds as if to make up the difference: and how much good did that do you last time, you stupid boy, how obvious a mistake do you have to make and how many times before it occurs to you to actually learn something?
The rest, maybe stronger, maybe worse:
It’s a scar. It’s just a scar. On Ren’s own scale of such things it wouldn’t even hurt.
Ren squeezes his eyes shut, hard as he can, just as certain as he knows he’s supposed to be relaxed to get this anything like right. He breathes. (Or more accurate—maybe—to say: he tries to. He tries.) Failure, leaving himself locked in his own body, without the ability to do the one thing he’s ever been truly good for, is horrible. Not horrible enough to make him come at this properly, somehow. Always horrible enough to keep trying. He doesn’t know how to not.
Only when meditation works—and against all odds, as if brute force were an option for the spiritual, like he gets luckier the more miserable he is in one very specific way, it works—when works, it’s worse. The cold comes, like air, but it can’t fill him, and if he reaches for it further than the tantalizing ghost that barely exceeds the column of his own spine—curled in spite of himself but horizontal now, because he’s himself, like always—he’ll lose his balance, such as it even is. That gift, his rudimentary grasp of it, is the only reason he’s worth anything, Ren knew long before anyone else could truly fear it, only he’s had all but three decades to hone it as such and he’s still here. So he knows—how could he not?—he knows that his master will be furious if he backslides again just as he knows he always will and as he knows that Rey was right, that he’ll never equal his grandfather, either, because Anakin Skywalker suffered gifts upon gifts but greatest among them was that of choice, still, such that in wielding the Dark by his will alone he was enough.
Ren doesn’t have that. Ren doesn’t get to have that. Only a compromise with the Light could make him good enough, and he at least has the potential to manage it, if he didn’t the Supreme Leader would have just left him alone; but he is, he is, at least, capable of it, capable of wielding the Dark and bending the Light to his will without it getting that horrible miasmic say in the matter alike, only at best his truce with it is uneasy—it shouldn’t be a truce, it should be conquest—and as soon as he thinks about it, which is often, it’s not even that, it’s nothing, except that can’t even mean the Light escapes him, because as soon as he can’t stop it any more it wholly overruns him again—
And it can’t quite shake the Dark at his core but that cold is cold comfort, comfort isn’t what it’s for; and the Light takes his mind, not his body, like when he was a child and Snoke just a distant everpresent mental companion, not a master, not even something known for certain to exist, and how Snoke ignored Ren’s body too until it could be used to prove a point against him when he deserved that and Ren took it and would’ve even without knowing already and always that he deserved worse from the master who saved him and who he couldn’t manage even slightly to pay back and knowing getting angry made it worse besides because you can’t resent what you deserve only if anyone could fail even in that of course it would be Kylo Ren so just like Ben Solo he got angry every time and he didn’t want it but that didn’t matter—
So the Light fills his mind when he lets it, when he fails to keep it away, and it hurts, it always hurts, it hurts worse than any mere injury could dream; pain should let him find himself but everywhere the Light so much as brushes is agony pure and useless and unrelenting, without features either distinguishing or redeemable. Neither of them are capable of anything else or ever will be, Ren’s had more than long enough to prove it. And the Light doesn't care: it sees any unguarded empty space of him he fails to hide, it takes. It takes everything. It takes everything.
It took Rey, gladly, when she decided that was where to put her spite and certainty and clarity of purpose, when she smothered everything that had mattered between them in such a way as to make even the memories meaningless, leaching the sharp surety of being known by an equal from monster and murderer and cold-blooded snake and her aid ending Snoke and her hand in his own, reaching into the past to suffocate it all under her newfound purpose because somehow and for some reason it was still the most appealing thing in the Galaxy, just as soon as someone found the option, to leave him and try to save Ben Solo.
But Ben Solo is dead.
Ben Solo is dead. Luke Skywalker is dead. Supreme Leader Snoke is dead.
And Kylo Ren, for all that, is lost. Still. Always. He is empty and alone and adrift, and…
Ren breathes in, a reflex, a sudden static shock, and even as he does the universe around him turns very still.
The Supreme Leader is dead. The Supreme Leader is dead and Snoke was the one who pushed him toward this balance he can’t control and can’t sustain, his only and impossible goal. Snoke was the only one. Snoke through whom Ren knew that nothing else would suffice despite that no one had ever done the like and few seemed to desire it. Snoke whose singlehanded overriding overruling nurture should outweigh history and evidence and nature and every desire Ren stifled half-formed and the few he didn’t manage to do that with.
Snoke whose reasons to hurt him seemed sound—whose reasons had to be—only when he struck Ren and shocked him and burned him it felt more like the Light than anything otherwise physical had ever managed before or since.
Snoke who in the end even Luke Skywalker has exceeded: who couldn’t even tell he was about to die. Snoke who welcomed his death open-handed because he couldn’t even discern Ren’s enmities enough to see himself.
And that’s not hard.
Ren breathes. He feels his eyelids flicker slightly but they don’t open, not yet. He would have no control, probably, either way, and when his back begins to straighten he regards this at most with vague interest. To his awareness of the scurrying lives around him he grants not even that, nor gratitude when it begins to fade: one does not practice gratitude for the obvious and the natural. At most one may instead practice resentment, for the time before when there is a time before, when they’re withheld.
Ren breathes, and he sits up, fluid and neat. His spine is very straight, for no one’s benefit. Perhaps for his own.
No undeserved gratitude, and no fear, not of things that are right, not even of suffering if it’s been earned. Ren knows this, knows it as one of the few things he’s always known, the bare fraction of himself he even thinks—he’ll never know, but he thinks anyway; and now no one, for better or for worse and for both, can stop him—one of the few parts of himself he still thinks would be present even if Snoke never had been.
He’d reconciled it, before, when merely anticipating almost any interaction with his master brought tears and tremors worse even than Luke ever could and the best Ren could do was get them out of the way and hope Snoke couldn’t tell and know he always would, that his own assessments of what he deserved were just short-sightedly skewed in his own self-serving favor. If the Supreme Leader knew and saw all he should see and know, what Ren was sure of—his wisdom and his base of reference, in this, besides, with knowledge of Ren longer than Ren’s own memory and more unerring—surely it just fell to Ren to understand, the fear another of those uncountable proofs of the failures he was to suffer for in the first place.
But the thing about perfect consistency is that it takes no skill to guess. It doesn’t even take luck. It barely takes a mind.
Snoke, meanwhile, couldn’t tell that Ren hated him.
Of course Ren was hiding it, even from himself, but it was always his master’s place to know Ren better than he knew himself, surely, as surely as Snoke had it easier than every other master twice over: first his running head start, and then the chance that granted him to shape Ren accordingly besides. It’s not as if Snoke didn’t exploit both in every way that occurred to him.
And he’s dead. Still. He’s dead, and Ren’s alive, and the screaming terror hasn’t left Ren, not even nearly, but it’s a false positive—it’s a lie.
By definition.
For the rest of his life.
So put aside Snoke’s last mistake—Ren does, with effort, and though the effort is great it is curiously distant, not by way of simplicity or of ease but instead through an utterly foreign certainty of the inevitability of failure—and the question of whether that mistake was his greatest. (It is. Ren doesn’t think this. He knows this. It seems, even—it seems that it sings.)
Put that unforced error aside, he made others—he made too many others to count—facing the thought is terrifying but this fear is almost new, this fear is novel, and Ren’s shallow breathing is even, even now, as he fears the conclusion but not its consequences because no one is going to force consequences on him now, if he can believe—that—he breathes—
Snoke made mistakes even Ren could’ve avoided, ones Ren forced from his mind at the time with panicked speed and practiced ease before Snoke could see.
And he didn’t. He didn’t see. It worked. Ren hid criticism without calculating it between one breath and the next and Snoke couldn’t even tell he was missing something there and Ren can know that, at least, because Snoke didn’t have it in him to detect a flaw of Ren’s and opt to keep it to himself, so Ren can know. He knows.
Ren breathes, through the awe, through what isn’t panic but is at very least as much as it, and it isn’t easy because it merely is.
It is, and then in the silence around and inside him something shifts.
Snoke made Ren’s mistakes.
Ren has made no error that doesn’t bear Snoke’s fingerprints, not in his life, and he would not have been capable: the mistakes he made were either under Snoke’s direct influence or in his efforts to escape it.
For a long, long moment, then, the rage stops his breath.
It at least should be familiar but somehow even this isn’t: it seizes him, hard and fast and too large, though, to compel him to violence; there is no need for Ren to strike it from himself when he can exist within it with rage eternal to spare; merely screaming would be an insult to its enormity and to himself. The anger dwarfs him and he doesn’t shrink and he is not humbled.
It is not that Ren can be this insofar as he is able. This anger is him. In this moment, which could be forever, it is all he is.
He is a plucked bowstring, a neutron star, he is the blaze of Starkiller’s collapse beyond his sight as it seared itself into his mind through the blood and wrote itself into the pain.
He has wasted everything. He has wasted it for years. Six. Fifteen. Thirty. Everything Ren was and everything he had.
And he can’t—somehow—Ren can’t find a way to make it his own fault. Not for all that, reflexively, extensively, he tries. And he tries.
So Ren isn’t furious. Ren is his own fury. He is one single, perfect instant of refined righteous right and incandescent rage, and nothing more, and needs nothing more.
Then Ren exhales, and it leaves him.
He is nothing, and when he opens his eyes he sees nothing, and where this could harrow him he feels nothing.
Ren breathes, and finally—
Finally—
People who will say the Dark takes are plentiful, and they are easy to find, and it’s the clearest sign of one who doesn’t know what they’re talking about that Ren could imagine. It’s the Light that takes, that takes and takes and takes past the point of scouring and expects to be thanked for the privilege; it’s the Light that leaves nothing behind it but wants then for that nothing to somehow be offered up to it as well, and for that offer, the relinquishment of the having and the left that remain in having nothing left, to be without boundaries or moderation or reason or constraint: to say that it’s demanding flatters it with the idea that the Light does anything like asking—permission or forgiveness, first or afterward or ever—it implies the Light would be itself if it were ever to act as if it needed them.
The Dark seduces: it asks. It offers. And it waits, and it waits, and then—once accepted—then the Dark gives.
Endless. Eternal. Whole.
And it’s been waiting for him for so long, and he’s been waiting for it, and Ren didn’t know this but the Dark did, and it knows him now, so he breathes it in and it fills him entirely and he knows now that brushes he had with it on such grotesque false pretenses were barely a parody of the Dark as it is in itself: cold and empty and emptying and perfect without limit and without compromise and without question whatsoever Ren could ever care to answer with anything but yes.
He didn’t let himself want it, just as it wanted him, and now the hatred earned by every single act and every being and every second that has kept him even slightly from this is beyond language. It is beyond thought. What they deserve is beyond death such that torture is barely a shadow because mere torture approaches death as well. It is impossible—even just among the living—for Ren to enact on even one of them, the most blameless, all that they deserve. But it’s enough—
No. It’s not enough.
It will never be enough.
It can never be enough for Ren to do all he can, but that inadequacy isn’t his, not to suffer or to pay for. It turns outward without taking Ren even as collateral. The Dark demands no penitence because the Dark demands nothing. It extracts from him no debt because Ren owes it nothing.
It offers itself, it offers everything, and Ren takes it, Ren takes it all, Ren takes all that it has to give. It isn’t enough. It will never be enough.
But Kylo Ren himself can be.
He is.
Ren breathes, even, easy, deep. His eyes fall closed. And it’s cold and black and absolute, and it fills him completely, it is everything from his spine to his skin, it is in his mouth and it is flowing into his fingertips. It is everything. It’s what was kept from him, stolen: it’s what he needed.
It fills his mouth and his lungs and his throat entire, not like air and not instead of air because it is air, whole but not solely; the Dark is passing through him, around him, inside him, still and ideal with none of the sick stasis of Light’s enforced idea of peace. He swallows the Dark and it swallows him whole and thus it always has, has always taken him just as it leaves nothing out now, leaves nothing left, nothing wrong.
It would be trivial unto inevitability, Ren supposes, to drown in it, as a smile takes his face with quiet inevitable ease. It would be all but necessary for another to drown, but he belonged to the Dark all along, and Kylo Ren knows how to breathe.
No forgiveness. No compromises. No mercy. No need for them and no tolerance and no space for them to occupy besides. Just power and certainty.
He’ll make it right. He’ll make them bleed.
And the Dark knows this and it knows him, and it fills him, and it sings.