Chapter Text
The decades-old truck rumbles down a mottled gravel road, running over weeds and potholes, passing by old master's paintings of fields and creeks, thick oaks, and throng after throng of cattle and horses.
It should've been a beautiful day by anyone's standards, except for the person in the passenger seat of the faded-metal Chevy, who indeed thought — most impassionately — otherwise. The windows of the truck are rolled down, because there is a cool breeze and delightfully crispy sunshine, and also because the window cannot roll up.
"Sun's out, there's a fine breeze... hope you don't mind the windows down, kid. They can't roll up anyway." That was all the driver had said to him so far, really, after the older man realized that his passenger was the surly sort and not likely to contribute to any sort of courteous or polite conversation.
He keeps his head out the window with his arms folded and his dark hair flipping in and out of his eyes, stinging his cheeks. He kind of likes the sensation, gives him something to really feel sour about, because the sky is so blue and the clouds are so immense and vast and thick like piles of ice cream that he almost wants to try and feel good about this.
But he can't.
"It'll be about five minutes, and then you'll be free from this death trap, I daresay. Chin up."
Kylo rolls his eyes and goes on ignoring the old man who is his new caretaker.
The fields stretch on. For a while, he watches the farm animals, who all huddle behind long spreads of fertile pasture and paint-chipped wooden fences and wire, grazing and wandering, careless and unbothered. It smells like hay and dirt and farm here, and just like the old man says, in five minutes, the chunky brakes come to life and they ease into a long stretch of dirt trail that goes between an arching, vintage wood sign that says “SKYWALKER RANCH” in white paint against handmade engravings. It clatters as they go underneath it, and finally, Kylo sees his new home.
It's as storybook as all the things before it. Coming from the city, his idea of a farm was the dopey kid's book pictures and the PETA campaigns plastered all over the high school's walls. This was neither.
The dappled grass stretched up to a large, old looking thing that he gathered was a home. It looked like a falling apart dollhouse, in a way, except it was life-sized and furnished for people. The walls were once painted a pretty apple red, but time had eroded the color into patchwork claret and rundown browns and greys of aged wood. The roof was tin-looking and the gutter was rusty and sporting clumps of grass and weeds from it, and as the wind came by, cheery and frustrating, the rocking chairs on the sagging front porch did as they were meant to, and the wind chimes did, too.
The truck's doors had to be slammed in order to shut properly, and it made the windows of the house rattle.
"It isn't too much, I'm afraid," says the old man, crossing his arms and beaming up at the farmhouse. "But it's home."
And that was what Kylo hated most of all.
They fish out his luggage (which was sparse) and heft it to the front porch, and Kylo is coughing by this point from the dust and the scent of old wood, and the old man bumps the rickety screen door open with no effort. Kylo slides in behind him — the door was nearly off of his hinges, accounting for its lightness of swing — and it slams shut. The front door immediately led into a stuffy little parlor that smelled like cinnamon and old person and dogs.
"Rey!" The codger calls, dropping the luggage and pulling out a handkerchief to wipe his brow. His beard, too. "Rey, we're here! Come on down and introduce yourself."
Kylo's stomach tightens and so does his throat. He was acutely aware of the crumpled note in his pocket, suddenly, and felt stiff as he heard a chipper voice yell, "Coming, Uncle Luke!"
Dear Kylo,
Hello! My name is Rey Skywalker and I am your new host person. I am 17 and I live on Skywalker Ranch which is about 789 miles away from you according to Google Maps. My Uncle Luke told me yesterday that we would be housing some young ruffian to help take care of the farm and try and whip him into shape, and he said that it would probably be really nice if I wrote you a letter first to say hi.
So, hi!
Anyway, I'm sure that you're probably really mad, or scared, or sad, or all of those things. And I'm awfully sorry if you are. I want you to know that our farm is a really great place and there's always a lot of fun things to do. I'll try my best to keep you from being bored as long as you promise to try your best, too. We're nice people and we're not going to be mean to you! I haven't had many friends out here since I live so far out in the middle of nowhere haha. I only have penpals. So I'm looking forward to meeting you! And I hope that we're going to become friends, or maybe future penpals, even, while you're here. But if you want to keep to yourself that's cool too.
Uncle Luke is really nice, by the way. Be nice to him! He has soooo many guns!! Hahahaha just kidding. He does have guns, but you don't have to be afraid of him.
I have two dogs and a cat, too. I hope you like pets! Their names are Artoo, Threepio, and Beebee, and they’re my very very very best friends.
I'll see you soon, Kylo! Have a safe trip okay?
Regards,
Rey Skywalker
Kylo had read the letter so many times that it had faded and acquired several tears and punctures. It was his only connection to this bizarre world he was going to be a part of now, the only hint and clue to his new life and "family". It was both comforting and repulsive. He spent hours sulking in his room, in the dark, scouring the internet for farms and institutions and camps that parents sent their children to, and he read horror stories, and he would be lying if he said that he did not react badly.
There’s a light patter of feet on the stairs — multiple pairs — and with a flip of not-too-long hair, the very girl who had given him some semblance of hope appears. She makes a large hop that skips the last five steps, and behind her bounds a shaggy, small grey dog with mismatched eyes followed by a skittish golden retriever.
"Hiya!" says Rey Skywalker, and she smiles the biggest smile. Her cheeks were pink with sun and dappled with freckles. Her hair was sherry-colored and stringy. Her hands looked calloused and dextrous, and she wore well-beaten overalls.
At once, Kylo sucks in a breath he didn't realize he hadn't gotten yet, and chokes on it, and sputters, averting his gaze as he replies, "Hello..." It comes out much more angrily than intended, but that was probably due to years of practice.
Rey's smile seems to falter a little at his less-than-joyful response, but she is undeterred.
"So you're Kylo, huh?" she chimes in, all determined and sunshiney. Kylo didn't want to reply to such an obvious statement, and she thankfully went on, "I'm glad you both made it back safe! I know the dirt roads can be kinda nasty if you're not used to them. How was it?"
"Fine," he replies, and embarrassment fills the pit of his stomach. He was very aware of how recalcitrant he was coming off and how he couldn't bring himself to be more... friendly.
The old man could sense the tension that was coming off of him, and chortles, clapping a hand on his shoulder and giving him a cordial shake. "Now now, lad, Rey won't bite! I've raised her tough, but she's not lost her manners yet."
There was definitely some unwelcome heat in his cheeks now, and then matters became so much worse, because Rey steps closer, and holds out her hand with another smile.
"I'm Rey, but you already know that," she beams. Kylo couldn't bring himself to look her in the eye. In fact, he was in the middle of convincing himself that he didn't deserve it. He had gone from spending two months agonizing over being sent to a concentration camp for delinquent teens, to completely 180ing and being greeted by genuinely kind people.
It was bizarre. It was something he wasn't used to. Didn't they get at least a fucking form on him? Some folder that formulaically laid out page after page of idiotic shit and choices he had made? Maybe they were only told he was a tough kid, no details. A bitter voice in his head laughed.
With great effort, Kylo looks up, and forces his mouth to at least slightly turn up in the corners.
"I'm Kylo," he says dully, and he clasps her outstretched hand in his as they shake. Her grip is surprisingly strong, and a pleased grin spreads across her face.
"It's a pleasure to meet you."
"You too," he mumbles.
"Let us get your bags up to your room, and Rey will give you the grand tour of the house, all right, kid?"
So they did that. Kylo hurries to scoop up all of his bags, but Rey frowns and takes one in each hand before they climb back up the creaking stairs. And the dogs, who he could only assume to be Artoo and Threepio, follow.
"Sooo," Rey began. "Did you get my letter?"
The paper was crinkling over and over again in a little folded square in his pocket, and Kylo wants to groan, but he just says, "Yeah." A voice pipes up in his head, and calls him a fucking coward, though, so he goes on: "I... really appreciated it. It was really nice."
Rey hums a note of happiness and says, "I'm glad! I'm really big on letter writing and stuff like that. It was kind of short, but that's because I knew I was seeing you and I didn't want to totally give away all of my secrets before you met me. Oh! So this is upstairs. The pictures are all his family and kin like that, but most of them have passed away. I got adopted after. That's why I live with Uncle Luke."
The stairwell was not only creaky, but the walls were decorated with a peeling and yellowing floral wallpaper that had stacks of wood and tarnished frames with varying family members.
"Oh," Kylo said dumbly. Because he didn't know what else to say to this girl, who was being nice to him, and talking far too much.
She goes on, though, as they reach the top of the stairs. There’s a sort of living room area, with a frumpy couch that has cracking leather and a garage sale coffee table with fresh flowers in it. In fact, he realizes that a lot of the room had flowers in it. Big, swollen sunflowers that look ripe and yellower than yellow, mostly, and they sat by the windows and next to picture frames and on side tables and desks. He was glad he wasn't allergic.
"This is the sitting room! I like to tinker in here sometimes, but mostly it's the dogs’ room."
He notices, off by the bay window, is a large, fur-covered dog bed, and from next to Rey, the grey dog's tail sweeps back and forth appreciatively. It peeked through its curtain of hair at him, and god, the mutt's mismatched colored eyes were unsettling.
"I have never seen so many sunflowers." Kylo has the decency to contribute to the conversation. It was mostly muttered, but Rey hears, and laughs kind of bashfully, crossing her arms tightly.
"Yeaaah... Sunflowers are my favorite. Uncle Luke grows a lot of them..." She seems to think that Kylo is put off by the flowers, and he resists the urge to slam his head on the nearest window pane.
"They look... nice." Was that appropriate? He clears his throat, and says with more sureness, "I mean, they're very... girthy. They are very big flowers. Colorful.” Pause. “You did a good job displaying them."
The words come out from his mouth stiff, and somewhat grunted, and Kylo feels heat and heat and heat around his ears and collar and very enthusiastically looks out the window instead of at Rey.
"Oh! Well, thank you! Anyway, here's the hallway, and this is where my room is."
The first door to the left jams a little as Rey pushes it open, but she gets it and there's a cozy room with cream yellow walls and a bed in the corner with an old quilt on it, rafters overhanging. Like the rest of the upstairs, it is full of sunflowers in tins, but it is also accompanied with out-of-place modern posters (The Princess Bride, The Cranberries, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, a calendar of... muscle cars?) and some electronic reading instruments sit off to the side by a messy writing desk. There's also a rifle by the bed, and Kylo just restrains a laugh.
"This is my room! It's kinda messy so ignore that. Over here is the bathroom, and this is just a closet, and this is the extra guest room. The room over there leads to the attic stairs. But look! This is where you're gonna be staying.” Rey leads him back downstairs and down the other hall where she pushes open a plain door. “What do you think?"
Rey talks a mile a minute like a songbird and she scoots inside, relieving his luggage and earnestly watching his reaction.
Empty walls, minus a small still life. A small bed with old fashioned sheets. A nightstand and a meager lamp, with a dresser against the wall. The floor creaked under his feet.
Well. It was different. That was what Kylo decided, tersely.
Home, as it were, was a modest house, with a sparse yard and a broken wooden fence. Home, far away, was suffocating and bloated, with no drawings on the fridge and nobody there when school was over. Home was beer cans and a loud washing machine and the puttering motor of a car that meant "Fuck, Dad's home", and a deep feeling of misery washed through Kylo and he looked at the wood floor.
"Sorry," he grumbled in spite of himself. Not really caring any more, he drops to the floor, crossing his legs and arms and putting his head down. Everything hit him at once. "Sorry. I just..."
This wasn't exactly how he'd planned the visit to go. Expectations included, but were not limited to, cussing at whoever picked him up, not talking to anyone, not looking at anyone, being completely assholeish and unreasonable, living out his detention in silence until it was time to go (whenever that was), and possibly just running away.
None of that was going to fly here. Not a single one.
A gentle hand comes down on his shoulder, like an angel.
“It’s all right,” Rey says, quietly, “I’m sorry. I bet it’s a lot.”
“No,” Kylo mumbles into his arms, “it’s not. I’m fine.”
“You sure don’t look fine,” Rey says, and Kylo sighs, because she’s obviously right and he’s being a big idiot baby.
“You said you were adopted,” he changes the subject to something that she said, “so where were you from before all this?”
It was interesting how both of them, as different as they were, had funneled somehow to the same place.
Rey’s quiet is odd. She’s not a quiet girl, he knows this already. Kylo peeks up, still angsty, but sees the girl looking markedly crestfallen, her shoulders drooping and her eyes on the ground where her feet are.
Fuck. He shouldn’t have asked.
“My parents had to give me up when I was five,” she says, and the sparkle in her voice is missing now, and it feels like a bullet, “and I got fostered by a guy for a while. He sucked but I ended up with Uncle Luke after and things got better.”
Kylo sulks over that information, unhappy that Rey had been treated poorly; she wasn’t the type of person that deserved it, though part of him is perversely empathetic to her plight. They both came from troubled backgrounds, so to speak — but Kylo knew better than to compare his gilded cage to her more visceral torment.
“Luke seems nice,” Kylo says, lamely.
“He is nice!” She perks up. He’s glad to see her smiling again, though he’s loath to admit it. “I owe him a lot. C’mon, let’s get some sweet tea. I’m thirsty.”
—
Kylo’s first week goes... alright.
He sleeps in the first day, and wakes up to find he’s missed breakfast and Rey is already mostly done with her morning chores. The embarrassment at being left behind is palpable, and unwilling to be made fun of, especially so early in his stay, drives him to putz around the property and ignore any actual work to be done. He kicks rocks, he breaks off tree branches, he climbs on top of the firewood pile.
Luke lets it slide. For now.
Strangely, they all sit down for dinner at night — pork chops and green beans and dinner rolls — and eat together at the same table, not like a pack of wolves but more like a family in a churchy television show in black and white. At first, it’s stifling and Kylo hates it, tries to think of a way to excuse himself. He comes up with nothing.
But the pork chops smell really good. Kylo hasn’t eaten anything since some jerky in the afternoon. Luke and Rey are talking about some show that he doesn’t know, leaving him to his own devices, and he reluctantly cuts into the meat and takes a bite.
It tastes as good as it smells.
Kylo hasn’t had anything homecooked like this in... a long time.
He devours it ravenously. It’s made with love, he can taste it, and that makes him sick but he persists because he has to, because the food is healing something in him. Luke asks him if the cooking’s any good and Kylo just furiously nods, doesn’t verbalize an answer — he doesn’t want to admit it out loud yet. His mother never cooked meals. His father’s cooking was sparse and limited. He spent a lot of time fending for himself.
He certainly didn’t have family dinners.
Nobody at this table makes fun of him for it, at least. Luke takes the reins of the conversation gently and reorients it to chores; he lists off some of the things that needed to get done tomorrow, and Kylo warily notes the air of expectation surrounding it. The thought of skipping out again crosses his mind for a vile, poisonous minute, but he can already imagine the shame in Rey’s eyes and he hates to admit how it gives him pause.
He could suck it up. Probably.
When Kylo wakes up the next morning, it’s to an alarm spouting off way too early, and there’s just barely light coming through the window. Fuck. He hadn’t been up this early since freshman orientation. His feet kick off the covers and he drags himself to the bathroom to splash water on his face.
By the time he gets out, Rey is already up and dressed, and has a cup of coffee in her hand.
“Good morning,” she sing-songs, and it’s too fucking early for this amount of cheer. “Want some caffeine?”
“No,” Kylo says automatically. It was also too early for his stomach to accept anything without immediately feeling ill.
“Okay! I’m gonna polish this off while you get dressed. Meet me out front?”
First, that requires clothes.
Kylo goes to his room and digs around his small suitcase, not yet unpacked out of a sense of rebelliousness, and open wide it resembles more of a black hole than a wardrobe. He pulls out a black band t-shirt and a pair of black jeans. Almost everything he owned was that color, and part of him is beginning to worry he will sweat to death in the countryside.
Kylo heads outside with a wary soul.
Rey doesn’t even look twice at his dark getup. As soon as he’s out there, she starts chattering away about feeding the animals, who needs what and how much of it, and he is led to the feed storage to grab buckets. The dogs have evidently been fed already, as they’re full of energy and follow them wherever they go.
The property is many, many acres, but the majority of the action was penned within proximity of the house. Much of it looks to be built by hand, and older. Luke had been here a long time.
At least it’s not hot out yet. The sun wasn’t all the way up. The light does filter in slowly, though; the sky turns from a hesitant, murky blue to more of the burning shades of dawn as they scatter meal for the chickens. There’s quite a few of them.
Next up are the horses. Rey says they’ll need to be brushed later, and that makes Kylo instantly uneasy at the prospect; he’d never been near horses before, and up close, they were utterly fucking huge and admittedly terrifying. Getting kicked or bit was not high up on his list of priorities. He didn’t understand how she could move around them so casually, like Snow fucking White out of a barn.
When the hay is put out, Kylo is glad to be done with it. All that’s left to move onto are the cows, two of them precisely, and they are more than happy to be released to graze at their leisure.
“There! That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
Kylo merely grunts in response. Rey is wiping the filth from her hands onto her overalls, and he doesn’t want to do the same, but doesn’t have a choice. His palms drag down his jeans until they feel less disgusting.
“You’re such a sourpuss,” Rey giggles at him, and Kylo is speechless.
“I am not a sourpuss,” he snaps back, and Rey just laughs harder.
“You’re hangry. Wanna collect eggs with me?”
“Sure? And I am not.”
“Great!” Rey dignifies nothing else with a response.
They go back outside to Luke’s handmade chicken coop, faded red and repaired a few times over. The hens are all puttering around, and they immediately swarm them when they come back out, anticipating food, but they dissipate when they realize there’s nothing for them.
“Here,” Rey says, pointing at a bunch of feathery hay, “look for eggs there.”
Kylo finds six eggs, which is more eggs than he’s ever found in his life, and he doesn’t know what to do with the strange sense of pride he feels. The hens cluck around him, none the wiser, and Rey patiently takes the eggs into her small wicker basket, places them in the cloth inside, before guiding him back to the kitchen with her.
Before he knows it, there’s a pan sizzling and the aroma of warm, cooked breakfast filling the air.
“You’ll eat bacon and eggs, right?” Rey asks from the stove, spatula in hand as she works the pan.
Kylo can’t imagine saying no to that in any lifetime. “Yeah. I will.”
When they’re ready, she presents them on mismatched plates with mismatched silverware, and it’s the first time Kylo notices that none of the dishware in the place matches whatsoever. Hers has little porcelain painted roosters and vines around the edge. His is an old, apple red, and shaped like one.
From the very first bite, he is in heaven.
He could get used to this, is the first thing he thinks to himself, followed by an unfamiliar surge of gratitude towards the girl sitting at the wooden table with him. Kylo looks at her, really looks at her — she’s a slight thing, a little rough around the edges from being outside, but her eyes are bright and perceiving and she has an easy, particular smile. He wouldn’t call her pretty, she was too much of a tomboy for it, but she wasn’t bad-looking.
And she cooked great.
Kylo sits with all of that for a moment. Rey says something about venison that he doesn’t catch, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s swallowing his heart and his pride so he can say what he needs to say.
“Thank you.”
Rey blinks, and it’s cute. “You’re welcome. Do you want more?”
“No,” Kylo says. “No, I’m good for now.”
—
That night, he lays awake in bed, staring at the cracked ceiling and listening to the obnoxiously loud crickets outside. There’s so much life out here, and half of it doesn’t sleep at night. There’s too many thoughts whorling through his mind, rousing him over and over, and every time he almost reaches unconsciousness something pops up and he has to start all over again.
Fuck it.
He doesn’t even look at the clock when he rolls out of bed shirtless, just grabs his jeans and throws them on before opening the door volumelessly. It’s already cooler this late into the evening, and Kylo pads through the farmhouse without a sound until he reaches the front door.
And then he remembers it squeaks. Fuck. Well, back to the window. He didn’t want to go out the window, but he was left with no choice.
Kylo returns to his room, crawls onto the bed, and grips the frame with both hands. It’s already unlatched, and with a small amount of effort, pries it upwards with only a moderate scraping.
Cool night air filters in immediately. Kylo takes a deep breath, then slips out.
His bare feet land on the ground with a whumph and he’s off.
Except he’s startled by the sky.
Kylo’s neck cranes back, and his whole head goes statically blank as he sees a sea of stars. There’s a faint, milky wisping that seems to jaggedly tear through most of the blackness, and inside of it, around it everywhere are twinkling, powdered celestial bodies. He’s never seen anything like it in his life. He’d heard stories of meteor showers out in the country, where there was no light pollution, but he never in a million years could have pictured this.
He doesn’t realize his jaw is hanging open until he snaps it shut. Decision made, Kylo sneaks towards the tower of firewood and scales it carefully in the dark. It’s been rained on and sat for a while, so it’s fairly sturdy, and he’s not worried about falling anyway. When he’s on top, he sits down, and stares up again.
He doesn’t know how many minutes go by like that, silently observing and taking in the heavens. But eventually he hears footsteps. And like a wild animal, his hackles raise, adrenaline skyrocketing — who was it? Was he in trouble?
In the vague moonlight, Kylo sees the outline of a rifle, and he chokes.
“Kylo?” The figure says, and it’s a small, female voice. Rey.
“Rey,” Kylo splutters, “Rey, it’s me, don’t shoot!”
The barrel of the gun drops to the ground unceremoniously, and he can see her entire form deflate with relief. His heart is beating so fast he feels nauseous. He had almost just gotten killed.
“Jesus H. Christ, Kylo, I thought you were a murderer! I was so anxious!”
“You were about to be one,” he grouses back, and Rey looks up at him from the ground, hands on her hips disapprovingly.
“If you fall off that you’re gonna break your leg,” she warns like some kind of chastising old lady. Kylo snorts.
“What, you won’t catch me?”
“Oh I’ll catch you all right, but you won’t like when I drop you after.”
Kylo rolls his eyes, and offers Rey a hand to help her up onto the woodpile. She stares at it warily for a moment before accepting. Her hand is small in his, calloused, but it’s soft, too, and she has a good grip; he hauls her up, and Rey takes a seat right beside him. Her knee and shoulder brushes up against his.
She looks up at the stars, too.
“Good, clear night tonight,” she remarks, having seen all this a thousand times before. Jealousy rolls through his veins, but he tempers it — it’s just Rey. She came from a place without stars, too. They could both enjoy the stars together.
Kylo wants to tell her he’s never seen it before. He wants to tell her it’s one of the most beautiful things he’s ever witnessed, that he didn’t know something could be so incredible, that seeing the Milky Way (she told him that’s what they were looking at) could change him inside.
He shuts up, instead, and is rewarded with a streak that shoots across the sky like a neon green knife cut. A meteorite.
“Oh! Shooting star, make a wish!”
He was supposed to make a wish. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Rey’s squeezed shut, her hands clasped in front of her like a prayer. Think, think, think — what did he want? He wanted to feel like he did now, but not just fleetingly. Like he was alive. Like he was happy to be alive.
Kylo closes his eyes, and makes his wish.
They don’t stay up much longer after that. He helps Rey down from the wood pile, and they walk back to the house together in whispers as to not wake up the dogs.
Kylo returns to his room, and promptly falls fast asleep.