[console]

[no_light]

[Oh look, it's Kylo Ren and he is looking grumpy. Wow. This has never happened before.]

If anybody knows a small annoying green creature with green hair, could you point me her way? I need to speak to her about something important.

[He hesitates before continuing, frowning at the camera for a while and apparently struggling with himself.]

I take it nobody knows what became of Padme Amidala, Anakin Skywalker and Galen Marek. I found their houses abandoned.

[And then it's back to annoyance again, since there is one more thing he might as well address while has everybody's attention.] As for the person who thought it amusing to send me flowers: I don't appreciate you littering my house with weeds.

Comments

[no_light]

But I don't know him at all. [ And he sounds so bitter about it, and so very defeated, even the restless anger is calming for a moment as he is overcome by bone-deep weariness. ] I don't know if I've ever known him, but if I did it was twenty years ago.

[ He sinks down on the chair placed in front of the console, and glances at her. Yes, there are the tears he'd heard in her voice, and it sends a pang through him. Hurt, still, that she feels she has any right to shed tears over Han Solo, that his father had given her the right to feel such grief when Kylo had lost his so many years ago... And yet it feels almost good, as good as anything could feel when nothing is good, to know someone shares his grief. How long has it been since he had that?

He sighs heavily. ] I don't know what you were told, but my family broke apart long before I... left. I don't know if we were ever not broken. My father and I did not know another... [ He snorts derisively. ] He could barely ever stand me at all.

[sensitively]

[ Rey sniffles away her tears almost petulantly, processing what he tells her. Han was his father — how could he not have known him? but he goes on to tell her that his family had been broken, that he hadn't seen his father in years, long before he'd gone to train with Luke she assumed.

so many years gone by without communication — what would that have done to someone? she thought; would it have been a similar feeling of abandonment, as she'd felt? Ren had grown up in luxury in contrast to her, with his mother at least, but his life had been no more emotionally stable than her own.

she stares at him through the feed, still disbelieving but with the cold reality of his words sinking in; her voice cracks over the words. ] How do you know he couldn't stand you? How do you know it wasn't some other reason that he left, when you were young — perhaps it was because of something else, someone else...

[ she's not sure how she's come to this point, where she realizes with a twinge of horror that she's empathizing with Kylo Ren — but she can see his grief, can feel it through that strange, tenuous bond they share... and if there is anything she fully understands, it's having someone not there when she's needed them. ]

[no_light]

[ There's a special horror to looking at your enemy and recognising something of yourself in them - a horror Kylo has already known on the Finalizer.

But right now he doesn't connect her loneliness and feelings of abandonment to his own, not quite yet; he's too caught up in the firm belief that nobody will ever empathize, or even care to try. ]

There was always something for sure... races to win, adventures to have. Just like my mother was married to politics.

[ Giving away far more than he ever intended to, but it's been so long... and once you start unraveling this, it's hard to stop and walk away. Even if he knows Rey is the last person he should share it with. ]

I don't know what picture you have of my family, scavenger, but... [ He stands up again. ] It doesn't matter. Believe what you will.

[sensitively]

— No, wait, [ she finds herself saying when he stands to his feet, before she can even stop herself; ] — I don't have a picture of your family. It was your family, not mine; I know that. I've only known your parents for a fraction of an instant of their lives.

But I want to know more. I don't want to believe something that isn't the truth. That's all I've ever wanted, was to know the truth — even if it hurts, even if it's something I didn't want to know. [ like Maz Kanata, in the basement of her castle, holding her hand in her tiny withered ones and gently telling her the truth she'd denied to herself for so long, that her family had never planned to retrieve her from her hell on Jakku.

she scrubs the last vestiges of her tears away with her fists, looking at him afterward with determination. ] I just don't want to be lied to, any longer.

[no_light]

[ Her plea to wait shouldn't have made him still, and yet it does. He waits, and watches, and listens as she struggles through her plea.

And he doesn't know how to respond to it, for it hits far too close to home. But... ] Your family. They... [ They didn't give you the truth, they didn't give you anything, just an empty promise they never fulfilled. Did they ever mean to fulfill it at all? But something stills him from voicing such cruel words. He knows this pain, feels it resonate deep within him, and is loathe to cause her such. At least right now. No, not now.

Too much compassion, a voice far too much like Snoke's mocks in the back of his mind. Just an echo now, cut off as he is from his Master, and isn't it ironic that his own mind will summon Snoke even when he is gone?]

There are many truths. Everybody has their own truths. [ But he, like everybody else, is convinced that his is the right truth. ] I'm sure they did not mean to lie to you. No more than they lie to themselves. [ His face hardens. ] They have to let me go. I wanted them to let me go. He should have left, I told him to leave!