Work Text:
There were only two moments in his life that stood out and somehow, they were both green. The first was Uncle Luke’s lightsaber penetrating the dark above him as he slept. The old masters said this was a life-defining moment. Color moments weren’t just because of soulmates, sometimes when your path changed, when destiny struck you, you could see color, just so. Emerald in the darkness.
And emerald in the wood, the first time he saw her. His helmet dimmed the color reaching his eyes, dulled it out. He knew it was green because he’d been on Takodana before, as a brat of a kid annoyed that his dad was taking forever when talking to Maz. But he shouldn’t be seeing emerald-like-Uncle-Luke’s-Lightsaber through his visor.
It took him a moment to realize that the girl he was swinging his lightsaber at, the one who was blasting him and running, afraid—that she was a moment of destiny too.
Just a different kind of destiny.
-
“You’re a monster,” she spat at him from where was strapped to the chair, her arms at her side. The colors were brighter whenever she was around. The pulsing red of starship commands: they were rubies. His lightsaber burned brighter and hotter than he’d ever seen it. Her skin wasn’t just tan from wherever she came from, it was golden and his mouth watered when he looked at it for too long.
The color made everything vivid. He felt like that one time he tried a deathstick and his irises blew open. The world was brighter then, but the colors stayed the same.
“Maybe,” he whispered back, his heart in his chest louder than the voice in his throat. She was afraid and he could tell from the way her olive eyes darted around the room, the way her irises expanded and retracted, that she was seeing color too.
It didn’t matter that she rejected him—the people he loved always did. This was par for the course. But maybe, in time, she would change her mind, the way the people he loved always did, just in a different direction.
And when he reached for her mind, trying to break through defenses that shouldn’t be so strong for one untrained—he didn’t know if it was her loneliness that left a silver tint to his awareness, or his own.
-
That lightsaber—a brighter yet darker blue than the sky—was the most brilliant thing he’d ever seen in her hand. Her rage, etched in every snarling line of her face—that was beautiful too. He deserved her wrath. Maybe one day she’d understand. Maybe one day she’d fill the emptiness that his father’s death hadn’t managed to. He’d wanted to feel more whole when he killed Han Solo, but he didn’t. Maybe she’d understand the way he was clawing to understand a destiny he couldn’t comprehend just yet because she was a part of that destiny.
For the briefest, brightest moment, there was hope. Hope that it didn’t have to be this way, that it could be different, that he didn’t have to be alone in all of this.
Even when she beat him and escaped into the stars, the colors were vivid. In the days that followed, every time the blue was bluer, the yellow yellower, he thought of her and knew she was out there, somewhere safe.
Which was why, when he woke up one day and the color was normal again, he knew down in his gut, down in the very essence of his being, that she had died.
-
He hadn’t realized just how mundane the world was, promised as he had been his whole life that he would ascend to greatness. How had he lived this long with colors just being colors? One week with the scavenger to change his outlook on everything.
Uncle Luke’s lightsaber had been the only moment of bold green, so it had been easy to leave it behind. She had changed his world. Changed his paradigm. Changed him.
For one moment, he’d had hope, a breath of wind that whispered that things would change and maybe the agony of existence would stop.
And now she was gone, and he was bereft.
-
Time sped forward. Time always did. And life felt more like existing now. Somehow it was harder to continue with hope destroyed than it was when he hadn’t known he could hope.
There was no freeing himself from his master; there was no freeing himself from the brokenness of the galaxy, the supposed-good and supposed-bad. There was just monotony, and continuance. There was no flash of inspiration, no moment of sacrifice. Sometimes things were the way they were. He could see that now. It was easier to see it when she was dead—far more than it had been before he’d known she was alive.
-
It goes on for years. The First Order rises to power; Snoke achieves his goal, then is replaced by Palpatine; he exchanges one master for another. System after system bends or breaks before the Empire. Resistance is futile, the Resistance is silent, and colors are just colors.
They call him the new Vader, but he doesn’t feel like Vader. Vader wasn’t a shell of a man who once knew he could have love but lost it in the end. Vader was ever the Emperor’s servant, devoted to the cause and the man. Kylo just had no better options.
He suspected his mother was dead or else the Resistance wouldn’t be so silent. Her death was mundane, like the dulled vantage of the world behind his visor. Leia Organa should have gone out in glory, but he didn’t even know for sure that she was dead; he just knew it the way that he knew the scavenger was. At some point, loss and pain had numbed him down and he could summon neither rage nor grief that his mother was dead.
There were whispers, too, that Skywalker was still alive, but his coward of an uncle wasn’t coming to face him, so what did it matter? He felt neither triumph nor despair that his uncle’s legacy of bringing an end to the Empire was gone like ash in the wind.
None of it mattered. It turned out that nothing had ever mattered, and nothing ever would. All the things that people said mattered—family, love, honor, liberty—none of them were real. So what else could possibly matter.
-
And then, one day, there was war. They didn’t know where it came from, just that suddenly there were fighters in the stars. Some last stand, some lying in wait, some prey that thinks it can out-brute the predator. There was a salvo on land, too. Spies must have infiltrated or betrayed. It didn’t matter, though.
Kylo was somehow more fearsome when he wasn’t angry than when he was. The rage that had once fueled his every movement died with the scavenger. Numbness made him precise where once he’d been unfettered. Perhaps in this he was like Vader now.
One by one, enemy soldiers fell before him. One by one, he stopped their blasts and reversed their trajectory, killing the gunmen. Once or twice, he even brought one of the fighters down from the stars above to crash and burn on the land at his feet.
None of it mattered—death, life, existence. It didn’t matter. They were all just cogs in a machine.
And then—
It was like dawn, or perhaps a flower blossoming for the first time, petals unfurling in the dewy morning. Suddenly the blaster fire was a little bit brighter, the tan uniforms of the enemy soldiers turning to gold and silver.
It distracted him enough that a blast hit his shoulder. He let out a hiss as he twisted the neck of the distant gunman and stopped his life forever.
He was just doing his job. And so was I. But that didn’t stop a blistering ache from flooding him.
Suddenly, everything was hurting—not around him, not on his surface, deep down in his heart. His uncle trying to kill him, his mother dying in silence, and Rey, Rey, beautiful Rey with the fierce light eyes.
He heard the distinctive buzz of a lightsaber extending and looked up. Through his visor, through the dulled light, there was a brilliant silver. Not sapphire, the way it had been on Starkiller Base, silver like the mist above a sea, silver like the ring his mother had worn when she’d tucked him into bed as a boy.
She stood there, as tall as she had the first time, but this time not afraid. She was wrapped in silver and iron silks, her hair tied in a single low ponytail as she stalked towards him, her olive eyes as brutal as he’d ever seen them.
He didn’t lift his blade.
He couldn’t.
Not when his heart was thrumming in his chest for the first time in years. Not when he felt alive at the sight of her. He couldn’t kill that. He couldn’t fight that. He could only submit to it. Had she been preparing for years to destroy him? What a waste of her time, when her mere presence disarmed and defeated him.
“Monster,” she growled at him as she approached. “Lift your blade.”
He turned his lightsaber off. That enraged her. He could see it in her posture, even from this distance. As he watched, he saw her body relax as she summoned calm the way Jedi did.
So that’s where you were.
But how did you shut it off? How did you make the world dull again?
“Why won’t you fight me, fiend?” She prowled closer, but the demand was laced with curiosity. Whatever she had expected of him, it wasn’t this.
But surely she must have. Surely the world must be bright for her too? She’d mentioned it when he’d caught her the first time. But he supposed she’d always been afraid of it. She must be afraid now.
Funny how distance made the whole thing crystal clear. Funny how his master told him to stoke his rage when he had no rage left to give, and how Uncle Luke told him to control his rage when he couldn’t control anything. Now, he felt pristinely calm, like the surface of a windless lake. Nothing mattered before, because he had thought Rey was gone.
Now the only thing that mattered was Rey; she was the only thing that ever did.
He took off his helmet. As on the ship, the first time she declared him a monster in a mask, the colors only got brighter. She stared at him, her eyes tracing the scar she’d sculpted into his skin.
“Take me as yours,” he whispered, clipping his lightsaber to his hip. “As your prisoner if you like, but yours all the same.”
She exhaled sharply between her teeth, not a hiss, but not a breath either. She was even more beautiful like this. Her golden skin, her mahogany hair, her jade eyes, her rosy lips. He had never seen anything more beautiful in his life.
“Monster,” she tried growl, but it ended up swallowed, like she was confused.
“Maybe,” he shrugged. “But the fight’s gone from me. It has been for years.” Her eyebrows flew up in surprise. “What is there to fight for when your destiny dies?” Her lips popped open, her face suddenly full of beautiful, sweet confusion. He was alight with it. Confusion because that must mean compassion for a monster. Who had ever had compassion for him? “I’ll fight for you. I will fight at your side. But I won’t fight you.” I never could.
Her eyes narrowed. “How do I know this isn’t a trick?”
“What do your eyes tell you? I know what mine tell me.”
Her gaze darted around. The fighting around them had subsided. Every fighter on both sides was staring at them.
She swallowed as she turned back to him. The field was golden in the sunlight, dotted with ruby patches of blood.
“You’re not alone,” he whispered.
He saw it in her eyes, the way resistance crumbled, allowing shining tears to well.
“I see it too,” she choked out, reaching out a hand.
He took it.
Behind him, he heard the blast of a cannon and he whirled around like a cat awaiting a predator. His free hand rose and he caught the blast as easily as he’d once caught a ball his father had thrown in a game of catch. Then with more muscle than he’d ever had as a child—and more ease too—he hurled the blast back where it came from.
None of it mattered; all of it mattered; and he knew what he was fighting for now.