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He still gets melancholy sometimes.
It’s not that he is unhappy with his life; he is happy. He is happier than he has ever been. But some days, it feels like he is too happy. Kylo Ren doesn’t deserve peace. Kylo Ren doesn’t deserve to smile. He should be dead, or in prison, or exiled to some lonely world with no one for company.
Yet here he is, smiling. Here he is, alive. Here he is, holding Rey’s hand, meeting life at her side.
He had always been a moody child, according to his parents. They’d written it off as the Force — as the ever-growing well of darkness that threatened to swallow him in his youth. They presumed that it would steal all his light and leave him a withered husk of a man, just like his grandfather. But they’d never looked deeper. They’d never taken the time to see that, beneath the darkness Palpatine wound so tightly around him, that moodiness was intrinsically, irrevocably Ben.
It has been nearly a year since he chose to step into the light. In that time, Rey has already come to understand him like no one ever has.
When the old, familiar darkness threatens to overwhelm him, she does not shy away or look at him with disgust. She accepts his rainy skies as much as she does his cloudless days, teaching him to take his own moods in stride. Teaching him to grow, as surely as she coaxes the buds from the ground each spring, with gentle hands and even gentler understanding.
And if the galaxy is just too much for him some days, that’s okay too, Rey tells him. She smooths his hair back from his face and kisses his forehead.
“The best flowers take the longest to bloom,” she says, smiling, and Ben smiles, too.