Keeping Your Promise

Not a Fascination

Summary: The other side of tragedy.

WARNINGS: vaginal fisting, needles, inappropriate use of medical equipment.

Bloodied faces, jagged flesh, the smell of iron scorching your nose, screams scraping against your ears and never ending, never faltering no matter how much you did.

All these things, these horrid thoughts, crowded your mind, and all you could do was keep running, keep tumbling through the unfamiliar halls of this place and hope you could get to him in time. Get to Kylo in time.

Because how many chances could the galaxy or the stars or the gods offer you? It felt like you'd used those chances up, maxed them out between Robbie and Snoke and Starkiller.

But you could not think like that, or at least you didn't want to. It was useless, none of those gut-wrenching thoughts could help you or Kylo, and all of them just made you want to crumple to the floor and give up.

If he wasn't okay, if he was dying...

The thought made you stumble forward, your fingers clamping onto a doorframe as you made another tight turn into the next hallway that looked like all the previous. You shot past couplets of workers, their shocked gasps dwindling behind as you raced away from them to wherever your watch was leading you.

CB-7070 raced just behind you, and maybe it appeared as if you were being chased by security, but you couldn't care less, not as you felt the phantom flood of crimson slither along your leg, its ghost a cold, wicked reminder of how bad things could be again. The stormtrooper didn't stop you, though, and you wondered briefly if she had been alerted to Kylo's emergency as well. But it was a fleeting thought, and all you could think of was getting to him and being with him and not letting him go ever again.

Your heart burned in your chest and your legs flew faster than you ever knew they could, fast like your sprint toward the Command Shuttle when the planet was exploding alongside your life. This was all too familiar, too chaotic. You couldn't do this again.

You wouldn't.

The next turn you hurdled past, you promised yourself that you would do everything you could to ensure Kylo would never be helpless like he had been ever again. Trial be damned, license be damned, Snoke be damned! None of it mattered. Nothing mattered. Nothing but him, nothing mattered except him. It was always him.

It would always be him.

The tiny red blip of your radar display became centered, and you looked up just before you met a badge-protected door face first. Before you could process the thought completely, your hand flung to the badge hanging from your collar and slammed it into the scanner on the wall. The door hissed open and you catapulted into whatever room you'd been led to.

And then you connected with a hard wall of heat and muscle. Kylo.

Breath heaved from your lungs as your hands skimmed along his front, assessing for damage and wounds, searching for the sinister slip of blood beneath the tips of your fingers. You were only vaguely aware of the questions fumbling from your trembling lips, your ears ringing and head pounding as your hands took one of his clothed arms and smoothed along its strong length, wandering until they found nothing of concern and shifting to the opposite.

After finding his front and upper half free from injury, you went to spin to his back, but a hand caught your hip – a warm, firm hand that broke through the cloud of panic that'd swallowed you – and kept you from moving. You urged away from it, but it remained and kept you steady, and when you tried a third time, it grasped a little tighter, and you found your way back to the present.