Okay I haven't really had time to re-read this but I have to leave for work in like five minutes so I wanted it up before I left. Apologies for mistakes. This story got so away from what I'd originally planned on investing into it, that's why I just didn't write for a month. I'm sorry about that but I've been working full time and I have my personal writing projects and I hate to have any of my writing feel like a job. Fanfic this past bit was work, an obligation instead of something fun so I put it off. That being said, I'm flattered so many people like this and I'm grateful for your understanding. I'm not sure this story will go on much longer because I really don't want to write a novel, but I'll try to wrap it up at least fairly neatly.

The scramble to get to the medical wing was nothing short of organized chaos, or at least that's how it felt to Rey. In reality it was her tripping as she launched out of bed, bare feet hitting the cold floor and causing her to startle. She'd been laying down too long and the only thing that stopped her from just hitting the ground in her vertigo was Finn's quick thinking.

"Waking up or woken up?" she asked, still half standing under Finn's power. Her hand gripped his bicep but her mind was spinning with a mess of protocol. Kylo was a prisoner. Leia was their general and his mother. Leia should be the one handling this.

"Waking up," Poe clarified. "As in not quite conscious but ever monitor including BB-8 is telling me that's not going to last."

"Okay, um, let's go," Rey said, scrambling and finally realizing she was the only one who was on hand to handle this. Leia was passed out and the rest of the people not trying to kill or at least ignore Kylo was already there. She'd fought him a hundred times but now the thought of finding out what had happened had her scrambling for what to do. He was easy while he was unconscious.

Minutes later and Rey was dressed and standing in the spare room where Kylo had been moved. She stood over him, watching as his breathing grew more pronounced and the jagged blue of the monitor tracking his vitals sped up. For the first time since finding him in the woods she saw him furrow his brow and take a breath that was conscious, his head turning slightly to the side as he woke up. His eyes opened and he blinked for a few times, staring somewhere in the region of her belt where her saber was hung. She'd built her own a long time ago, letting Luke have his back.

Slowly, his eyes traveled up to rest on her face. He just stared at her, his expression blank until he finally moved his hand to rest on his ribs and closed his eyes. "It worked," he breathed.

Whatever she expected his first words to be, it hadn't been that. She stared at him, then glanced at Poe, who was standing across the bed with his hand on a blaster just in case. Finn and Chewbacca were outside again acting as guards, though now it felt like they were there to keep Kylo contained instead of the rest of the base.

"What worked?"

Kylo's lips twitched into something that looked like a humorless smile and he opened his eyes again. They were impossibly dark, something Rey somehow managed to forget between each fight with him. He reached up a hand and caught hers with surprising strength, and before she quite realized what he was doing her mind flooded with memories not her own.

General Hux was insufferable, but he was as disgusted with Snoke as Kylo was. They had different reasons, but that didn't matter.

"You're certain you can pull this off?" he asked, one ginger eyebrow raised with disdain.

"If I don't we'll both be too dead to care," Kylo snapped back. His arms were crossed as the two men stared each other down.

The room they were in was shadowy and nebulous, and Rey wondered if Ben was strong enough with the force that he could project a view outside of himself or if this vision was from someone else's mind entirely.

"Your death is already set up," Kylo was saying, going through a shelf and putting barely-defined objects into a case. "I went off in a fit, finally killed you in my illness and the troopers didn't have enough to bring back to bury." He turned and shoved a case into Hux's hands, his expression hard, his eyes like chips of obsidian. "Which will be true if you don't keep your end of things"

Hux's lips thinned and his eyes narrowed, but he took the case and nodded curtly. "You're a special form of suicidal, Ren."

Kylo narrowed his eyes. "We'll see." He turned his back on Hux and rolled up his sleeve, jabbing himself with a needle and injecting the contents in a fluid motion. Hux watched from behind with a grim fascination before Kylo turned in a blur of his shadowy robes and the scene changed.

The next impressions Rey got were a haze of red, black, heat, pain, of trying to breathe and trying to remember when breathing was easy, of feeling completely isolated from everything that made you strong. There was a furious, crushing presence surrounding Kylo's body, damaging it and his force presence with biting blows and desperate, angry scrabbling, like someone digging for something they knew they weren't going to find. Finally, after torment beyond what Rey could imagine surviving, the assault stopped and Kylo's limp, bleeding body was taken from Snoke's presence.

He was dumped unceremoniously to be incinerated with the garbage.

That's when gloved hands worked their way under his collar and felt for a pulse. Hux knelt into view, his body solidifying out of the murky light the vision was casting, his mouth moving with words Rey couldn't hear. A few men, storm troopers from the way they carried themselves though they wore no uniform, lifted Kylo and took him to a tiny ship where Hux took one last glance at the base before he strode aboard.

Outside of the vision, Rey was aware of Kylo's strength wavering, but he didn't let go. Something deep down told her to trust him and she relaxed, turning her hand to grip his wrist so it wasn't just him holding onto her. She felt something ease in his effort and the final scene played with a sharper image, though everything still flit and flickered like a painted dream.

Hux followed Kylo Ren's coordinates, wondering how long the knight had known where the base was and kept it to himself. He strongly suspected it had been about the same time he'd decided to break from his master. He gazed across the planet, so much green, so much wild land, and set the ship down with a careful dance of switches and buttons. Straightening the jacket he still hadn't quite brought himself to take off, Hux went to the back room where the single medic was working to stabilize Kylo.

"He won't live more than another hour without real care," he said, standing from his place kneeling next to the cargo rack they'd turned into a barely passable sickbed.

"That isn't our concern," Hux said icily. "We completed our end of things. Now set him down in the grass and forget this planet. If he is fortunate enough to survive and the resistance somehow doesn't put a hole through his skull I don't want to give him any reason to track us down."

Hux was of the strong opinion that if he never saw Kylo Ren again in his entire life it would be too soon, but he accompanied his men down the ramp and oversaw them setting him in the grass anyway. He watched the miserable heap Snoke's apprentice had become and he snorted, shaking his head. Never the less, he bent with the final drug needed and pressed it into Kylo's throat himself, depressing the plunger and straightening up, his pale eyes looking for what he hoped was the last time on the knight's face. "May your force serve you better this time, Ren," he said quietly.

Minutes later wind from the engines blew petals and dust across Kylo's body and Hux disappeared.

Kylo's fingers slipped weakly from Rey's wrist and she blinked, shaking away the webs of the vision with a startled expression. Slowly, she let Kylo's wrist go as well, setting his arm down against the bed.

"You did this on purpose," she breathed, staring down at him. He was still conscious but seemed too weary to speak. He only blinked and nodded his head just enough for it to be acknowledgment.

"I'm sorry, he did what on purpose?" Poe interjected. Rey blinked and looked up at him. She'd almost forgotten he was there.

"He's here on purpose. He and Hux got fed up with Snoke," Rey exclaimed, all the hints of emotion and understanding that Kylo had fed her along with the vision unfolding in a timeline that made sense. "He realized that Snoke was using him for his power, so little by little he's been drawing himself away from Snoke, hiding pieces of his force presence away until there was hardly anything left. He let Snoke believe he was drained. Hux didn't like how Snoke was handling things with the First Order and wanted free of him, so he and Kylo made a deal. Kylo would fake Hux's death and help him escape with a defecting group of soldiers still loyal to him, and when Snoke finally tossed Kylo to the side Hux helped him stay alive long enough to get here."

"So Snoke doesn't know where we are?" Poe asked in disbelief. "Kylo planned all of it?"

Rey nodded. "Yes, he did. He made Snoke believe he'd been drained of his power and was no longer useful."

Poe ran a hand through his hair, his eyes wide as he let out a long breath. He looked at Kylo with something like impressed disbelief. "How long has he been working on this?!"

"Since starkiller." It was Kylo that spoke now, his voice raw and exhausted, but his eyes were open again and Rey felt a flare of determination through the force. He was shoring himself up with sheer stubbornness.

"What, really? That long?" Poe said, glancing between Kylo and Rey. "That's four years of planning and pulling apart Snoke's influence."

"It was Han," Rey said softly, seeing the truth in Kylo's eyes even as he turned his head away from her so she couldn't look into them. She could feel the stab of pain and anger from him but he didn't try to stop her talking. "When he killed Han he realized Snoke had been lying to him. Four years is nothing, in the end. Snoke had been draining him for twenty."

"Where is Leia?" Kylo asked, clearly unhappy with the way Rey was sharing his life's story with Poe right in front of him. "I assume she's the only reason I'm alive."

"Buddy, you have no idea," Poe breathed. "She's passed out from doing just that."

Kylo's expression furrowed, and he tensed as though ready to demand an explanation but Rey put a hand on his shoulder to keep him down. "She stopped the others from executing you, yes. So have Poe, and Finn, and Chewbacca, and BB-8 and I. We felt you deserved care and a proper trial. She's been tending you but someone got in, destroyed your life support. We had to work very hard to heal you and she's still unconscious from the effort."

His expression was very difficult for Rey to read, and she wondered if that was because he didn't know how to feel about all of that.

"You gambled your life on us thinking your mother would protect you, didn't you Ben?" she said softly. He shot her a nasty look, but she could see the truth in his eyes. "You just forget that she's more than a piece in your game of survival. She still loves you."

"That's what I bet on," he said nastily, but Rey only furrowed her brow and withdrew her hand.

"You simply didn't bet on still loving her too," she whispered. If he heard her, he pretended not to.