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Rey stands astride his inert form, saberstaff clutched in trembling fists she begs—wills—to steady.
Rey’s eyes sting with wind and snow, but no tears. She has shed her last tear for the Skywalker family. She refuses to shed another drop.
“Did you know?” Rey asks him. She toes him savagely in his side, not caring if she reopens the gash on his torso. “Did you know—when you killed him? When you cut down your own father?”
Kylo’s pale face is tilted up at the starry night sky. Streams of moonlight cast his entirely too still form in eerie shadows.
His lack of a response boils her blood. She knows he’s not dead—can sense his life-force, faint though it is—winding around the both of them in a loose curl. Rey wishes Kylo’s life-force were a tangible thing so that she might be able to slash at it with her saberstaff and cut him down for good.
His bloodied lips part and spittle, tinged pink, collects at the corner of his mouth.
“I did not know,” he manages to gasp out on a dying breath.
Kylo—Ben—lifts a gloved hand. To her? To Rey? She squeezes her saberstaff even more tightly, fighting the dark tendrils that coil in her gut and urge her to strike him down. Urge her to end this, once and for all. For some reason, she wants to hear what he has to say.
“I found out… too late,” he says. There is wetness on his cheeks that Rey tells herself is melted snow. “I still would have—would have done it. If I’d known.”
He doesn’t sound boastful, though. Kylo almost sounds sad.
“You killed my father. You tore apart a family I never even knew I had,” she hisses. “Give me one reason I shouldn’t strike you down right here and now.”
Kylo closes his eyes and lets his hand come to rest over his torn, bloody chest. “You ought to,” he says, sighing. His breath rattles in his lungs, wet and rasping. “But in doing so, you will lose yourself to the Dark side. I came to that fork in the road once, sister. I made the wrong choice.”
Rey lowers her staff slowly.
The dark tendrils that had wrapped themselves around her like the stays of a robe slowly loosen and fall away. She can’t kill him. She can’t destroy what’s already been lost. He’s going to die anyway, in a matter of minutes. Seconds, even.
“I’ll never forgive you,” she tells him, kneeling beside his body. Kylo shudders. Rey touches his shoulder gently. “But I’ll stay here with you until you…you leave. You won’t be alone, brother.”
Kylo’s—Ben’s head nods forward a bit, though Rey doesn’t think it’s by his own volition. She can feel his life-force growing weaker and weaker.
His lips move, though no sound comes out. She can make out the shape of words though. His dying voice whispers—may the Force be with you, Breha—across the back of her mind, as the life-force tethering him to her, to their family finally snaps and floats free.
Rey closes her eyes and lets her hand slip free of her brother’s shoulder. Now the tears do flow freely, running in hot tracks down her cheeks, dripping onto Ben’s lifeless body. She isn’t crying for him, the wound of losing her father, Han, and so many others to her brother’s hands or his command still too raw and painful. His hands will always be covered in the blood of her loved ones and nothing, no one will ever be able to wash the stains out.
Rather, she cries for Leia, her mother, who’s lost her son for a second time. For Luke, who’s lost his nephew more times than he can count. For those who had once loved Ben Solo. For the millions of lives lost because of him.
Rey cries for herself. Cries for the loss of a kind, loving, generous brother she can’t remember. Cries for the death and cruelty and unkindness that replaced him. Cries for all he took from her.
After she’s used up all her tears—tears she hadn’t known she had left in her—Rey lifts her commlink to her mouth with a shaking hand. She tells herself it’s just the cold that’s begun to seep into her bones.
“General,” she says, her voice wavering, “it’s me. Rey. I…I’m fine. I need transport for—for myself. And a body.”