Author's Note: For anyone still reading this silly thing, thank you! I'm so sorry about the absurd amount of time between updates.

Kylo Ren dismissed love as a weakness long ago, as something for the silly and sentimental. Men like him could not afford to love, to be driven by the whims of compassion or kindness. For him there was only white-cold power, the whipping winds of standing above the world.

Ben Solo, the foolish, anemic child, had known little of love. People said that his parents were a grand romance, but Ben wasted nights and nights peering down the stairway, the voices chasing away his sleep. Han and Leia occupied most of their time together arguing, and most of their time apart in the arms of someone else. Even a mother's love was limited, Ben thought, as he was abandoned to Luke Skywalker.

Desire was allowed, Kylo Ren later told himself. Hot, blood-beating want was acceptable, crushing his mouth against a woman he would never see again, who served only as a relief from the drumming in his ears and the emptiness of being alone. Yes, that was tolerable – except for the time that he had dragged his fingertips against her disappearing hand and whispered with a hateful plaintiveness stay. The word hung in the air, suspended by embarrassment. She looked back at him with red-rimmed eyes brimming with something – pity? Loathing? – before closing the door behind her.

Kylo Ren didn't visit another woman after that.

So when he first felt Rey in his head, when he carried her into his ship like a groom cradling his bride, he assumed that want was all that lay between them. And when he confronted her again in the snow, watching her twist and turn away from him, chest heaving as she slipped farther into the forest, desire was the only motivation for following her. But something indefinable shifted when he reached up to cup her face, Rey's hand against his chest, marveling at the something else between them.

And then, in that singular moment of quaking breath and half-repressed touch, all of his ideas about love melted away into her.

In the days and weeks that followed, where there was once terrible, wounded darkness, a dagger-thin glow settled. And now, stretched on the sofa in Luke's little cabin, staring at the ceiling, he had fallen into something dangerous and wonderful with the girl behind the door. He was desperate to be next to her, to curve around her like a shadow around a flame. He wanted nothing but to kiss her, to take her, to fold into her. But what would happen if he did? Wouldn't he destroy her, like the way everything good seemed to shatter at his touch? Wouldn't it be better if he left, forgot this little tryst, dismissed it as fantasy, and accepted whatever waited for him with Snoke?

To his surprise, for the first time in memory, Kylo Ren stared into the darkness and turned away. And just for that, he thought as he closed his eyes, he could stay with her forever.

It was strange, knowing that Kylo Ren was just there beyond the doorway. He was asleep, pressed against the pillows like the boy she imagined he was once. Rey, though, couldn't close her eyes.

She felt Kylo Ren's trust, his relief, at rejecting Snoke. It wrapped around him still as he slept, cool and comforting. Rey had never felt so unsure.

Yes, being with him felt right. No, not just right – being with him felt like the only right, the only way that she could exist without waning into something else. Still, she wondered if she had been meant to reject the rightness offered by Kylo Ren, if in grasping his hand she emerged as a refraction of her intended self. She felt his darkness pulling at her like a thread waiting to unravel, hoping so desperately that she wouldn't lose herself in him. Though Ren had thrown his saber down and pressed her to him, when she closed her eyes she still saw the man in her dream, a shadow crowned in black stars.

"Rey," he had come up behind her, shaking her out of her thoughts. His hands were on her shoulders now, his touch hesitant. Rey tipped her head back to meet his eyes, the lips that pressed against her forehead. His brows were knitted together, mouth set. She still had never seen him smile.

"You're up." He sat across from her at the table. Kylo Ren spotted this place, the house on a crest of stone that Luke Skywalker must have once called home. After their long walk back from the temple, fingers entwined, she collapsed onto Luke's small bed. Ren lingered in front of the fire, his mind snapped shut, a mystery. Rey thought he would come to her, but she found him draped across the sofa in the morning, legs dangling over the end.

"I was up late, thinking." Ren drummed his fingers against the table. "You landed the Falcon here? Probably at the bottom of the mountain?"

"Yes."

"We should take it and leave. Go somewhere. We shouldn't have even stayed the night."

"Why not?" Ren looked at her with obvious eyes.

"My ship has a tracker. The First Order will be expecting me back, expecting us back. When we don't return they'll come looking for us." Rey sighed, her head in her hands.

"Where then? Surely you don't mean we should join the Resistance?"

"No. I certainly don't mean that." He dropped his eyes, his voice hard. Rey reached across the table to his hand, threaded her fingers through his.

"Is that a no for now or a no forever?" Kylo Ren didn't answer, just stared down at their hands joined.

"Rey," he said finally, dragging his thumb across the back of her palm, "you don't regret this, do you?" He was looking at her again now, his eyes filled with something indefinable. She felt it, his fear of her answer. Please say no.

"No," she said, squeezing his hand. "I don't." Rey smiled, but hoped her mind was not as easy to read as his.

They decided on Coruscant. A few other places were mentioned – Jakku, even, though First Order interest there was too strong now – until Kylo Ren suggested Coruscant softly and slowly, with a strange expression on his face. Rey wrinkled her nose, trying to place the name.

"Coruscant?" She remembered the planet from a postcard she found in the sand, a picture of jewel-blue neon towers stretching endlessly into the sky. And later from a swaggering gambler at Nima Outpost, who bragged about winning a high-stakes game of sabacc deep in the Coruscant underworld. A place so black, he said with glinting eyes, that those who never left claimed the sun was a legend. Rey shuddered at that, watching her sun pebble the dunes with shadow. She couldn't imagine living in the dark.

"Yes," Ren replied. "The capital of the Old Republic."

"Do you mean to hide in the underworld there?" Ren frowned, and Rey thought she almost saw a smile hug the corners of his mouth.

"Not if we don't have to. What do you know of the Coruscant underworld, anyway?"

"Not much," Rey admitted, crossing her arms defensively. "Just things I've heard. Don't assume I don't know anything about the galaxy, Kylo Ren." Ren did smile now. Thin and a little unsteady, boyishly shy, but still a smile.

"I would never assume that." He was looking out the window at the rain, at the mist shrouding the world in heather. Rey twisted towards him at the table, aching to see him smile again.

"Where, then?" It took him a moment to answer.

"My mother still has a house there. Several houses, probably. I imagine an imperial residence, too." He trailed off, eyes back on the plumes of rain. Rey frowned.

"An imperial residence? What do you mean?"

"As princess of Alderaan." Ren took in her shock with placid eyes. "You didn't know?"

"She only called herself 'general.'" Kylo Ren reached out to her, tangled her hand in his.

"She would. It doesn't matter," he said quietly. Rey freed her fingers to touch his arm, the side of his face, the thin curls of hair behind his ear. If only the flickering light in him would catch, ignite into flame.

"I wish you'd smile again," she whispered. Ren gazed down at her, eyes soft.

"Then kiss me again." Rey breathed in, her head swimming in the wan light of morning.

She reached up to brush her lips against his, softer than she meant. Ren kissed her back gently, still restrained, almost still unsure. Finally she buried her hands in his hair, pulled him closer, kissed him harder. After a few slow, honeyed seconds they pulled apart, foreheads still together, grinning into each other's mouths.

"Better," she whispered. He just kissed her again, lifting her onto the windowsill. Rey wrapped her legs around him, absorbing the hungry way he held her, how demandingly he was gripping her waist. With his mouth on hers he was endearingly transparent. She felt suddenly everything that she had only guessed at, all the heavy hesitation and self-loathing and need behind his touch.

Ren groaned at the closeness of them, tipping her too far backwards, through the open window and into the rain.

Rey screamed in surprise as the water hit her face, tumbled over her in thick drops. Kylo Ren pulled her back, but she was laughing, holding her hands out to the sky, collecting the water in her palms.

"I'm sorry," he said, kissing the wetness of her face, her hair, the slippery slope of her collarbone.

"Don't be." She stared into his dark eyes, cheeks flushed, breathing fast. "I love the rain."

Rey was waiting for him at the end of a silver hallway, back turned. With a start he realized she was wrapped in black robes, deep and thick as pitch. Her hair was different too – long, coiled braids that rested on her head like amber snakes. He wanted to say something, ask her what had happened, but he was compelled by a strange automation to continue silently forward.

"I finished it," she said, turning towards him with an odd glitter in her eyes. Her face was different, pale, as if all the light from it had been pulled out.

"Show it to me," he found himself whispering. She extended her hand, wrapped her fingers around a golden hilt. It was a saberstaff, he realized, swelling with dread. He knew suddenly what color it would be.

Rey ignited the saber, holding it in front of her like a prize. When she finally looked up at him her eyes were as red as the humming blades.

"Do you like it?" Ren felt the world around him turning, graying, closing. The tunnel of the hallway dissolved, narrowed into darkness again. He heard himself reply through the echo of space.

"Yes."

Kylo Ren shot up in bed, heart racing. It was a dream, he realized, overcome with relief. Rey was next to him, mumbling in her sleep as he moved. Her face was pink, flushed, her hair still bound in three knots. Just a dream. Doubt crept in slowly though; he remembered the way he was propelled forward, how clear and crisp and real it had been. Almost as if it had already happened – or would happen.

A vision.

Jedi and Sith alike had visions of the future, he knew. What Ren didn't know – what Luke refused to tell him long ago – was if they were always inevitable. He had visions as a child, at least pictures he called visions. An image of him pushing a lightsaber through a faceless man on a black catwalk. Grabbing the hand of a girl in flapping white clothes, silhouetted against golden desert sand. The same girl's eyes fading, red eyes, dimming from carmine to brown to nothing. Rey's eyes, he knew now.

Rey sighed, bringing Kylo Ren back to the present. Still half-lying on Ren's arm, she was sprawled on the hidden bed in the Falcon's crew quarters. Like the kitchen, the large bed was installed at Leia's insistence, after she grew tired of dragging a blanket onto the cushions scattered around the ship. It was strange to be sleeping where his parents did, where his mother and father fell in love, where he had now taken this girl, the girl he –

Kylo Ren pried the thoughts from his head. He couldn't remember his father without a stab of regret, of a sadness so heavy it threatened to drown him if he didn't push it away. The familiar whirlwind of anger and pain started to turn in him, urging him to dig down into the shadow inside. Instead he watched Rey sleep, the way her lips parted and chest rose and fell with every breath.

They still hadn't been together, not yet. He rolled on top of her in the bed last night, his head spinning with a heady, drunk desire unlike anything, even a shadow of anything, before. He felt it in her too, in the way her hands dragged down his back, how her heart raced against his chest. Wordlessly, though, both had stopped short of shedding their clothes, of trusting the want between them. There was something too fragile there, as if they balanced on a fraying thread. Rey settled against the crook of his arm, and just sleeping next to her had been more than enough.

Then there was Kylo Ren's own denial, his fear that possessing anything too tightly resulted in its eventual destruction. And now he had seen it, red-eyed Rey balancing a saberstaff, turning towards him like he had failed the best chance he ever got. Maybe a dream and not a vision, something stubborn in him whispered. And maybe the future can change.

Rey's eyes fluttered open, gazing up at him from the curve of his shoulder.

"Couldn't sleep?" She yawned, her hair loosening from the ties as she turned her head.

"Just a bad dream."

"I had a good dream. I don't remember it, though." She kissed the side of his cheek, his chin, his mouth. Ren found himself smiling again. "You were in it."

"Really?" He worked the rest of her hair loose. It fell around her face, dark and sleek. "What was I doing?" Rey stopped suddenly, frowning. She settled back against his shoulder, tracing aimless circles on his stomach.

"I'm not sure. I…" She trailed off, mouth agape. "I don't remember." Ren knew he could nudge into her mind, see the flickering images in her head laid bare. Something stopped him – an irrational fear that she had seen what he saw, red blades and red eyes and an end to everything. Impossible, of course. And yet his heart was beating fast, and a nauseous knowing overfilled him with dread.

"Kylo," she said finally, twisting towards him, "tell me about the Sith."