Last time I updated this story I apparently still enjoyed morning coffee, which alone tells me that it has been far too long (and for that I extend my sincerest apologies!). For general house-keeping purposes, I thought I would let everyone know that I am in the process of making a few minor adjustments to the previous chapters (mostly paring back some laboriously descriptive parts, because wow did 2015-me love adjectives more than anything); they won't impact much, so there's no need to re-read them unless you feel so inclined! And now for the long overdue chapter five...

Slow Burn

She didn't fight the Stormtroopers as they swarmed her, seizing her arms and binding them behind her. No, what she fought for was his gaze—one moment aflame with malevolence and rage and the next ever elusive; Kylo Ren's eyes followed his lightsaber as he returned it to the nightstand, remained there as the metal restraints tightened around her wrists, frigid against her bare skin. She opened her mouth to say something, but breath merely welled in her lungs, some sort of wrangled tension that ached with words she wanted to say but could not find, though she supposed that it did not matter anyways in the end. Brusque, the Stormtroopers barked that it was time for her to return to her cell and yanked her towards the door; the sheer force and abruptness of their movements, combined with the fear still trembling electric in her bones sent her toppling to the ground.

With a strangled whine she landed, tailbone slamming against the ground and sending pain hurtling up the column of her spine. At the sound, Kylo Ren's eyes flickered towards her, dark with a peculiar pain that was gone the moment she recognized it; the apathy that swallowed it up, the indifference that steered his attention back to the empty viewport posted on the wall stung far more than a wound ever would.

"You're a monster." The words dripped from her lips, venomous and spiteful and petulant.

His shoulders tensed, muscles straining beneath his scarred flesh. As the Stormtroopers hauled her back onto her feet, she glanced at his knuckles, which were pale against the dark gray sheets clenched in his fists.

Say something, she demanded, goaded. But whatever bond had snapped into place between them earlier had grown silent, severed; on his end, she felt nothing but cold silence, knew that her words were only echoing within the confines of her own mind.

In the grasp of the Stormtroopers, she slumped, resigning herself as they began to march her into the adjoining corridor. They guided her over the threshold, and she craned her neck to look over her shoulder at the man left behind, footsteps meandering as he remained impossibly still, frozen in an eternal moment of frustration.

But, when it seemed she was out of view, his head dropped, fists relaxing and sheets sagging in relief. He sank onto his back, rolling onto his uninjured side and tugging the sheets up to his shoulders. Seconds later, the lights flickered off all at once, darkness swallowing its prince, and the door slid shut. But she had seen it all the same, could not shake the image nor the chaos it wrought in her heart. Later, she would regret not soaking in every detail of the corridors they hauled her down, not noting any possible vents or gaps she might be small enough to fit into, any areas where she might stow away, lying in wait to overpower someone who could give her the resources to make a daring escape.

No, even when they shoved her into the cell and she stumbled forward, falling to her knees beside the single cot inside, she was not focused on her imprisonment—on how much she wished she was anywhere else in the galaxy and hated that every moment away proved she had waited her whole life for nothing at all.

What she hated was the brief look of devastation that had passed over Kylo Ren's handsome features; the guilt that weighed in her stomach like lead.

The room was red. Not the brilliant scarlet of flame or the ruddy crimson of bloodshed, but the muddy rust color that only comes with a desert sky at dusk. It glazed everything in its path, enveloping the heap of threadbare blankets in the corner and the decaying wooden table in the center and the dusty, flaking helmet on top of it. As he grazed the gloved tips of his fingers along the chipped insignia of the Rebellion stamped on the side, he knew whose home he was in, didn't have to look behind him when the metal door slammed shut with a rude clang! and soft footfalls announced that he was no longer alone.

But perhaps the fact that he knew who he would find if he did look forced his gaze over his shoulder.

Her features were contorted with exhaustion and frustration, despair weighing heavy on her trembling lower lip, the damp corners of her eyes. The ridges of skin scrunched together between her brows quivered as she pursed her lips, as the strong line of her jaw tightened beneath sand-weathered skin. One of her hands clawed at the goggles dangling from the base of her throat, yanking at them, while the other remained limp at her side, clutching a wrapped package of powder. With a light pop, the elastic band of the goggles snapped, and she tossed them aside, scratched lenses clattering to the ground.

And then, without warning, she withered against the door, body crumpling onto itself until she was a mess of torn fabric and spindly limbs. Ren flinched as he watched her bring the tiny portion to eye level, as he realized that the shadows lurking beneath her eyes and haunting the sharp lines of her face were not in fact a trick of the light. In place, he stood still when the plastic packet fluttered to the floor beside her and a sniffle sliced through the air, sudden and sibilant and sobering. Seconds later it was followed by another and then another, until finally her resolve eroded into whimpers. Futilely, Ren squeezed his eyes shut, as if that would somehow erase the haunting sobs that echoed around them, shake the chilling cold that crept along the column of his spine as her loneliness, pale and blue, enveloped him.

He never felt tender towards anyone, rarely felt anything really at all actually but rage and hopelessness. Yet, the heavy, aching sobs that echoed within the emptiness of his heart stirred something within him; three steps brought him to her side, where he sank to the ground. She had drawn her knees to her chest, buried her face in the cowl bunched around her shoulders as she cried. A strand of hair slumped from one of her buns, and instinctively Ren reached out to guide it back in place, only to be reminded when it steeled against his touch that this was the past and there was nothing he could do to change it. He was years too late to be anything but an apparition who had threatened to kill the woman that this girl would eventually become only hours before, but who could not imagine doing anything but staying by her side now.

Memory, vivid flashes of times he had fought too hard to forget, overwhelmed him as he settled beside her, the space between them so small and insignificant. Hours seemed to pass before her sobs tempered into rattling whimpers and finally into nothing at all. In the dark and all alone, Rey scrubbed at her wet cheeks and picked herself off of the ground, stooping to retrieve the portion that lie at her feet.

"Please come back." She murmured in a half-prayer, half-plea to the merciless night, her voice hardly louder than the sand whispering against the metal hide of the felled beast she called home.

Blood throbbed in the wound at his side as he flopped onto his back, groaning and opening his eyes to the dark ceiling yawning above him. He didn't dare to look to the side, to the scatter of stars beyond the viewport where he knew he would find the hulking mass of the Supremacy looming in the distance. It would only remind him that he was wayward and foolish and all of the wicked things he had never wanted to be but had become anyways.

Ren couldn't change the past, couldn't change the fact that he had become the very thing everyone had feared he would become; just as he couldn't change that years ago Rey had lived that moment he had just seen in all of its crushing loneliness and despair.

Tension ached in his teeth as he heaved himself up into a sitting position, biting back the pain that bloomed vicious in his wound. But the ambivalence, the gnarled mess of hatred and intrigue and compassion, that the thoughts of Rey inspired for once didn't feel so suffocating, so divisive. He peeled the sheets off his body, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. Against the bare soles of his feet, the coldness of the floor was sudden; sudden as the sense of resolve that rolled over him.

He couldn't change the past, but he could change their futures.

That pale blue loneliness was still on his mind as the inflated holo of the Supreme Leader rippled and fizzed before him, electric fireflies swirling at the base of the projection where he had fixed his gaze.

"...and that is why it is imperative," General Hux prattled on with wild, desperate gestures, "that we dispose of the girl now while we have the chance. We have seen what she can do. She made a mockery of our soldiers on Starkiller Base, almost defeated Ren with no training. We cannot let her get any stronger and return to the Resistance."

He flinched as Hux hissed his name, all the venom in the general's voice doing little to mask the sheer delight of admitting that Ren was still slave to his weaknesses and had almost failed on account of it. Against the floor, his splayed fingertips steadied him as he kneeled before the Supreme Leader, kept him anchored in the moment as the tide of rage crept forth, lapped at his composure and swelled against his resolve. Measuring his breaths, dragging them slow and deep, he conjured the familiar image of his heart sealed in carbonite—solid and unfeeling and invulnerable.

"Very well, General Hux." Snoke drawled at length. He propped an elbow on one of the arms of his throne, his sunken cheek on his clenched fist. When he spoke again, his tone was lazy, disinterested. "You may leave."

Hux's swooping bow at the waist hid the expression that eclipsed his visage momentarily—the flared nostrils and the harsh line of his frown—buying him precious time to smooth any signs of displeasure beneath a pall of supplication. He straightened himself, turned on his heel, and took his leave without so much as a glance at Ren.

When the door to the chamber clambered shut, the Supreme Leader chuckled. "You don't agree with him."

Ren hated it—hated when his thoughts were not his own. When he could not tell what was safe from Snoke's power and what was not, if the man's power could discriminate that all of the hate in his heart was not just for the family that had betrayed him. Still, he clenched his jaw, lips pressing into a grim line as he lifted his head to look into the eyes of the Supreme Leader.

"She's powerful, but untrained, vulnerable, and lonely." All the things he had been. His rehearsed words flowed off his tongue effortlessly, voice for once even and without any of the passionate tremors it usually held; without the strain that hinted that he was on the edge of a meltdown wicked as a wildfire. "It's only a matter of time before she surrenders to the dark and becomes a tool for us to use."

The skin of Snoke's broad forehead scrunched and creased as his muscles raised amusement in his brow. Leaning forward ever so slightly, the holo rippling at the edges, he bore his pale, malevolent eyes into those of his apprentice. The tips of Ren's fingers tensed as he swayed beneath the intensity of the Supreme Leader's gaze, as the latent fear of not knowing what was to come thrummed in his limbs. So many times had he kneeled before him like this—nothing more than a child beneath the judicious gaze of a teacher. But there was no compassion in Snoke's eyes, no pride for Ren or hope for who he would become; only flickers of amusement amidst the malice and avarice that eternally held court in his pale blue eyes.

Wrought with tension, Ren's neck ached in surrender, his lungs strangling the air within them until he was left with only shallow breaths that trickled past his parted lips. Though his gaze was steady, unwavering, he knew all too well that his eyes betrayed the maelstrom of emotions within him.

"If she is as powerful and vulnerable as you say, then what would you like to do with her?" Snoke questioned, his voice delighted and patronizing as it had ever been, as if Ren's desires had ever mattered to him at all.

"I want to train her." He answered, but his voice was pitifully quiet, eroding with his resolve.

"And when she turns on you, what then?" The Supreme Leader bared his teeth in a grin that was as gleeful as it was wicked. "Would you kill her?"

"She won't." The words sounded so hollow to his own ears, though he desperately wanted to believe them—that somehow, this girl who was his enemy, who he had brutalized and taunted in horribly wicked ways, who undoubtedly hated him for the things he had done to her, could stay loyal to him when his own family could not.

He expected Snoke to laugh, to mock him for his hubris, to taunt him with the fact that at each opportunity, Ren had been unable to end her. But instead, silence. All-encompassing, abrupt silence that settled heavy like a pall over the chamber. Every moment thereafter passed too slowly, as if time was wading through lead. In his ears, his heartbeat was thick and heady, anxiety spooling along his limbs and prickling warm on the back of his neck. On his throne, Snoke lounged unmoving; his pale eyes were like ice, cold and sharp, as he stared down at Ren.

"Then train her. Bend her to your will before she destroys everything you have worked for." His voice was low and gravelly when he finally spoke; more the growl of a predator than the voice of a man. With a wave of his hand, the holo began to fade, the edges crackling and disintegrating into darkness, oblivion devouring the gnarled visage of the Supreme Leader.

Just before he disappeared entirely, before the tension wrought in Ren's body could ebb with the wave of relief that pulsed through him, Snoke spoke his final words. In his wake, they echoed ominous, rattling the walls of the chamber and whatever semblance of victory Ren thought he had achieved.

"She will become a Knight of Ren, or she will die."

End

I stayed up way too late finishing this up but regret nothing. Biggest thank yous to everyone who returned after the egregious two and a half year wait for this update and to all of my new readers as well! I had a wonderful time writing this chapter and cannot wait to bring the next installment to you all. Also, as a side note, I recently wrote the beginnings of a modern Reylo AU titled "Natural Opposite", wherein Rey and Ben are ballroom dancers; check it out if it sounds interesting to you! And as always, if you would please leave a comment on your way out, I would greatly appreciate it! See you all next time!