These Violent Delights

Chapter 51: A Dyad in the Force

It felt as though Kylo was caught in the current of the speed of light itself.

He couldn't scream or even breathe as warped voices flew by him, glimpses of light and movement rippling along the fabric of this strange vacuum in space. He thought it was over for him, that he would die here, but when he finally slowed, Kylo was granted his second vision of Anakin. He was sitting beside Chancellor Palpatine before he revealed his true identity as a Sith Lord.

"You ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?" Palpatine asked, his shrill, mischievous voice scraping the inside of Kylo's eardrums. "He was so powerful and wise, he could use the Force to influence the midi-chlorians to create life..."

Thunderous applause. A hysterical cackle. Noise and light rapidly moved past him again until another vision came into focus. This time, it was of a woman he had never seen before. Her skin was sun-kissed and smudged with dirt as though she worked outside under blazing suns, just like the man that stood behind her and watched her with hungry eyes.

Peering into the mirror, she tilted her chin down as she toyed with a purple crystal pendant around her neck. A horrible seed of understanding sprouted in Kylo's stomach. That wasn't just any pendant. It was the one Luke tried to give him on the Batuu. The one that Organa gave to Kitten. And if he was right, and they were telling the truth...the woman in the vision was Kitten's mother.

"Look what I found today," she said with a devilish smirk on her lips, twirling the crystal between her fingers. "Doesn't it make me look like a queen?"

"Yes," the man replied as he embraced her from behind, nuzzling his face into the crook of her neck. "My queen."

Panting. Moaning. Flesh slapping together. As Kylo continued to fall, the hallucination shattered into pieces, but he could still catch fragments of their intimacy, her nails digging into his back as his hand wrapped around her throat. But then—screaming. Hands clawing at burning flesh as the purple crystal necklace that had made her feel like royalty seared her skin. Palpatine's crystal necklace. The one that granted Kitten her powers.

Kylo groaned, he could feel a fire in his sternum, the most piercing pain he had ever felt. Panicked hands tried to grip his chest as he continued to spiral down, but in this void he tumbled through, his arms felt miles away from the rest of his body. All he could do was scream. He screamed bloody murder until he saw her again—Kitten's mother lying on her back as she clutched her engorged belly, twisting her head side to side as tears bled down her face. "Something isn't right! Somebody, please help me!"

The pain intensified, growing inside him as it expanded down to his navel. Kylo found relief when he slammed his eyes shut, but then the winds came, loud and howling as they slammed tiny, hot particles against his face. It was miserable yet inescapable, and from behind his eyelids, he saw Kitten as a little girl, screaming as she looked to the sky. "NO, COME BACK!"

Unkar Plutt's rough, cruel demand snarled all around him. "Quiet, girl!"

The vision eroded away into sand, sending a cloud of dust and debris in his face that made Kylo cough and choke as he tried to find the tether out of this place. But there was no way out. He was free-falling out of control, stuck in the current of an angry sea of sand, and the harder he resisted, the more it pulled him in, forcing him to hear and watch and feel the pain of Kitten's past. But when her mother flashed before him again, she was suddenly morphed into somebody else—his grandmother. Writhing in pain as a baby's cry reverberated around her, a desperate plea fell from her dying lips.

"Anakin...help me, please..."

He blinked, and like drops of rain plopping into a pond, the manifestation of Padme blended into the Chancellor sitting beside Anakin once again. "Plagueis had such a knowledge of the dark side...he could even keep the ones he cared about from dying."

Kylo's pulse quickened as he plummeted down faster. Everything felt more important, more urgent now as those harrowing mourning bells clanged once again. They were loud and discordant as a flicker of Anakin and Padme passed him by, dripping in moonlight as they stood on the balcony of their high-rise living quarters. This apparition was so clear, he could feel the soft breeze on his face and hear the subtle hum of traffic as they held each other tight.

"I had another nightmare...you died in childbirth," Anakin's wavering voice rippled all around him. "I will do everything in my power to stop that from happening. Everything."

Screaming. So much screaming as their faces disintegrated into Coruscant's night sky like dying pixels on a holoscreen, sweeping them away and taking Kylo with them. Then came the heat as he was engulfed in flickers of orange, fiery light, his mouth opening in a silent scream as spitting lava gurgled from every side. Hot, molten goo singed his skin, eating him alive, but when he finally found his voice, all that came out were the words of the dead.

"Stop now! Come back!" Padme cried, "I love you!"

"LIAR!" came the voice of Anakin, but it wasn't really him. It was just a shell of the man Anakin used to be, rotted from the inside out from seeds of darkness planted by Palpatine.

Pressure seized Kylo by the throat. He coughed and sputtered as an invisible hand curled around his windpipe, pulling him down even faster now as Obi-Wan's voice sliced through his mind. "Let her go, Anakin!"

Mourning bells closed in on him once again, their reverberations taking up space and narrowing the walls of the void Kylo fell deeper into. They pressed into him from all sides, smothering the lava into burning embers as the sinister voice of Emperor Palpatine crinkled around him like static.

"Lord Vader, can you hear me?"

"Yes, Master," Darth Vader replied, voice heavily modulated through his breathing apparatus. "Where is Padme? Is she safe?"

Kylo could feel Palpatine's sick surge of satisfaction. "It seems in your anger, you killed her."

Crunching metal. Shattering glass. Wails of agony. Harmonizing chants. Heavy footsteps. Strained gasping and Vader's blood-curdling scream. "NOOOOOOO!"

It was heavy, full of grief and pain and shame, so dense that it invaded Kylo and catapulted him even farther down, but this time not into lava or sand or nothingness, but into the mouth of a smiling demon, of pure evil, of Palpatine. Terror. Kylo felt sheer terror as the Sith Lord unlatched his jaw like a snake to consume him, his eyes glowing red and his skin gray and papery thin as he had no choice but to plummet inside. He tensed in anticipation of being torn apart, but after falling past rows of his speared teeth and into the wet, sticky walls of Palpatine's throat, Kylo landed on cool, hard stone with a thud.

"Fuck," he moaned, clutching his stomach as he curled up on his side. "Fuck, fuck, fuck." The Supreme Leader rocked back and forth, attempting to let his body readjust to the sensation of gravity once again. Everything hurt—his arms, his chest, his face. But he still had no idea where the fuck he was, so with groans of protest, he forced himself onto his back.

Grimacing, he looked up, hopeful that he'd see his white, vaulted ceiling back on the Steadfast, but of course—no such luck. The black sky that peeked through the crumbling stone confirmed he was still asleep and astral projecting, stuck in some fucked up world that spawned from Kitten's dreamscape. "Kill me," he muttered, taking a deep breath and closing his eyes. "Just fucking kill me."

Wincing the whole time, Kylo rolled over and pushed himself to his feet. He moved in the direction he entered, but with a slow spin, he took in his surroundings and realized there wasn't a way out. He was fucking trapped. Exhausted, pissed, and completely trapped. "You've got to be fucking kidding me," he said before cupping his hands around his mouth to yell, "HELLO?"

Hello, hello, hello...bounced off his stone prison before silence enveloped him again. Shifting his stance, he tried again. "Grandfather, why am I here?"

Here, here, here...echoed back at him as the ground rumbled and shook. A colossal crack snapped above him, and Kylo looked up to see the same back mass that had just spat him out. It was small at first, but then the edges expanded like a ravenous sarlacc opening its mouth. It devoured the summit of the temple until all that was left was a hot, swirling vortex that spewed grating, inharmonious sounds and flecks of dark matter.

Taking a step back, Kylo raised an arm to shield his face from the falling debris. He had to crouch down when the mass expelled a gust of shrieking wind, worried it would take him once again, but a few minutes later, it collapsed on itself. Before it did, it chucked something out that emitted a high-pitched clang as it crashed to the ground. Blaring silence settled into the pyramid, and Kylo rose to his feet and walked to retrieve whatever it had dropped. Crossing the floor, he glanced cautiously above him, wary of any further chaotic spirals of death, and came to a halt when he saw what it was—a lightsaber. Not just any lightsaber, but one that had been rumored to be lost forever after it had fallen into Cloud City's atmosphere.

"No fucking way," he said, squatting to pick it up. A flash of red lightning pierced through the tattered slabs above as he wrapped his hand around the hilt of the weapon. He thumbed the activation switch to bring the blade alive, casting the blue glow that illuminated his astonished face. "Anakin's lightsaber."

Then came a deep, booming voice. "My lightsaber."

Kylo's head snapped up to see Darth Vader peering down at him through his mask. Chills came over him as he got on his feet. Standing tall in his black armor with puffs of mechanical breaths filtering through his helmet, his grandfather looked exactly like he imagined he looked in his prime—domineering, terrifying, powerful. Simply being in his presence stunned him into silence, and all he could manage to do was deactivate the saber and hesitantly outstretch his hand to pass it off.

Vader didn't move to take it. "That belongs to you now."

It took Kylo a moment to process this. His grandfather's long lost weapon was now his courtesy of a dark whirling cavity that had regurgitated it from the past. But he didn't question it; he needed a lot more pressing answers from his ancestor, and he didn't know how much time they had left. Clipping the saber on his belt, he let out a shaky breath and locked his gaze on Vader's mask.

"Where are we?" he asked, cautiously darting his eyes around the dim, decrepit pyramid. "Am I in the Other World?"

"No. You're not dead. Yet," he said, and if Kylo wasn't mistaken, he heard a thread of amusement in his tone. "We are in the in-between, where the deceased can speak to the living."

Shock slapped him in the face. "How? I was in a dreamscape, and I, she..." Kylo trailed off, swallowing thickly. "It's true, isn't it, Grandfather? About the crystal. The girl used to have powers, didn't she?"

"Did I drag you through the bleak past for nothing, young Solo?"

His apathy struck a nerve in the Supreme Leader. "Why didn't you tell me this sooner?" he asked, voice dripping with sharp accusal. "I asked for your guidance months ago. All you gave me were riddles, but I...I needed you."

Over the rhythmic swells of his breathing, Vader spoke with an exaggerated wryness. "I said the answers you seek were hidden below, did I not? Luke retrieved the crystal that belongs to her from the vergence, where it was hidden below the surface. As I said."

Kylo spat out a bitter scoff. "So that's been it, the whole time? She drove me crazy all because she's Force-sensitive?"

"No, Ben," Vader bellowed, a clap of thunder punctuating his intensity. "She is not just Force-sensitive. You are a dyad in the Force. You belong together."

Kylo's heart dropped. The air fled from his lungs. He couldn't speak. Couldn't move. All he did was stand there as a gust of wind burst through the cracks in the temple, tossing both of their robes to the side. He stood in stunned silence as he let the Force react inside him, testing the validity of Vader's words. It invaded his bloodstream, pumping through his veins to carry it from head to toe, and when a warm sensation tingled in his chest, he finally had the answer he had been seeking all along. His obsession with her, his desire to overdose on the air she breathed was all justified. More than that, it was fate.

Because she was, quite literally, Kylo's other half.

But the all-consuming warmth that spread through his body froze over just as fast as it came. None of this mattered if she didn't want him back. He had just offered her the galaxy, and she still didn't want him back. Kylo turned away from Vader, his shoulders low and eyes glossed over as his empty voice bounced off the archaic walls of the temple.

"You are too late, Lord Vader. She is gone."

There was a moment of stillness, and then, a young voice spoke out from behind him. "No one's ever really gone."

Kylo's eyes flashed back over his shoulder. Dumbstruck, he slowly pivoted toward his grandfather. But it was no longer Vader that faced him. "Anakin," he said, bewilderment in his tone. "Why...why are you here?"

"What? You only like me when I look big and tough?" he teased, his form morphing into Vader right before Kylo's eyes. But then he blinked, and his grandfather became a Jedi once again. With light brown, wavy hair and his dark tunic, he looked just as he did in the visions. The only difference was his lightsaber was no longer on his belt. It was on Kylo's.

For the first time in a long time, the Supreme Leader struggled to speak. "I...you..."

"It's okay. Words are hard." With a smirk and wink, Anakin turned around, calling out from over his shoulder. "Follow me. I want to show you something."

As he watched his grandfather slink away into the vast darkness of the pyramid, Kylo resisted the urge to smack himself, positive this was just a fever dream from his injuries and sleep deprivation. But as Anakin's very real footsteps echoed around him, he forced himself forward, using only the Force to navigate through the pitch-black portion of the ruins. Eventually, red flashes of lightning flooded through the holes of the roof again, providing them enough light to guide them to the stairwell in the back of the temple.

The Supreme Leader grimaced as they spiraled up to the stairs scored into the face of the mountain. Below him, the mossy, slimy steps squelched under his boots, and as they emerged onto the rotting balcony, the sky was still bleeding its vile muck.

Anakin clasped his hands behind his back and faced him as though they were having a pleasant conversation about the weather. "Look over the edge, Grandson. Tell me what you see."

After keeping his wary eyes on him for a long pause, Kylo stepped to the edge of the balcony. He shielded his face from the shit falling from the sky and peered out, seeing nothing but the black, gritty lake and dead, blackened lands. He frowned. "Um." His eyes darted aimlessly from left and right as he spoke with a flat tone. "I see a miserable wasteland."

"Correct," came Anakin's enthused response from behind, stepping forward to join him. Kylo tilted his head to the left, watching as he let out a melancholy sigh. "This place used to be beautiful, and now look at it." He met Kylo's gaze, a bright gleam in his eyes. "It's a shame, isn't it?"

Unable to suppress his impatience, the Supreme Leader turned to face him. "Grandfather, what is this about?"

"A lesson," he said, mirroring Kylo's change in position. Then, his amused expression withered away, leaving nothing but somberness behind. "You have yet to ask about what else you saw, Ben."

There was a significant pause, allowing the howling wind to carry the tormenting sounds he had heard in the vision. Mourning bells...a baby crying...a woman screaming for help. Kylo's throat tightened. He was talking about Padme. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry for what happened to her."

"I don't want your pity. I want you to understand," Anakin said with harsh emphasis as he stepped away from the edge, moving around Kylo to stand in front of him. "If you continue down this path, you will lose everything. You will lose her. Just as I lost your grandmother."

Kylo yearned to understand, but he just didn't. "Please, I need your counsel. I need the girl, but—"

"Your obsession to have her by your side will only keep you apart," Anakin asserted as the vicious wind battered the temple. "You must let her go, Ben. You must."

Kylo's heart jumped to his throat, shaking his head with rapid movements. "But you said we belong together."

"You do."

"Then how could I possibly let her go?"

"You are her fate. She is your destiny. What is meant to be, will be."

If this wasn't his dead grandfather's ghost, the Supreme Leader would choke the ever-living shit out of him for spinning more riddles at a time like this. Instead, he bit his tongue. He wouldn't waste his breath telling Anakin that he was asking Kylo to do the impossible. He could not and would not ever let Kitten go. And that was that.

"Thank you for your guidance, Grandfather," came his stiff and controlled response, a stark contrast to the chaotic swirl of grime encasing them. "When the time comes, I will finish what you started."

The shift in his ancestor's face was immediate. A wicked gleam replaced the gravity in his eyes, and a slight smirk washed away the hard line of his lips. Placing a hand flat on his grandson's chest, his mouth twisted around four little words dripping with satire. "I wish you wouldn't."

First, confusion flickered across Kylo's face. Then a surprised grunt tore from his lips as Anakin pushed him off the edge of the balcony. He tumbled over the edge, shock instantly replaced by betrayal as his grandfather peered down at him from the temple where they had just stood. The wind thrashed his robes around him as he fell, and the sickening gurgle of the black, oily basin vibrated below him. He tensed as those long, rangy claws that had sought to entrap him earlier came into view, and sure enough, the moment he fell into the lake of tar, greedy hands pulled him in every direction.

He resisted and fought like hell, but in this pit of blackness, Kylo was finally able to see. Behind his eyelids, he was granted the answers Vader wouldn't give him, starting when Kitten's mother first found Palpatine's pendant. Living in the Jakku desert, she was a junk trader who had scavenged and swapped it for a speeder's compressor, wanting to feel pretty in something so unique and beautiful, only to unwittingly conceive a dangerously-gifted Force-sensitive child in the process. Already a not-so-happy surprise, Kitten's parents had thought about putting her up for adoption after the challenging birth, but they tried to raise her instead. It wasn't until the extent of her powers depicted her as a problem child, and fearing for their safety, they sold her to Unkar Plutt.

The rest unfolded quickly. He saw glimpses into the summer they spent together, then it zeroed in on the day Ben had to leave her behind. The wind of the departing Falcon blew her hair back as she tipped her chin to the sky, tears bleeding down her cheeks, and a horrible feeling settled into his gut as the perspective of her shifted. Suddenly, Kylo was viewing her crying atop the temple through someone else's eyes. Luke Skywalker's eyes.

She was terrified as the Jedi approached, and had every right to be. There was a crazed look in his eyes, the same desperate and unhinged look that Kylo recognized from the night he woke up to a green lightsaber ignited over his cot. Luke was locked in on the crystal pendant around young Kitten's throat, and even through the vision, the Supreme Leader could feel Palpatine's influence lingering in the artifact. It sparked raw, palpable fear within Luke, and unblinking and shaking, the Jedi cautiously outstretched his hand to look into her mind, and Kylo's senses were flooded with the harrowing prophecy that drove his uncle to do the unspeakable.

Death. Destruction. Blood and violence. But most of all, power as Kylo stood by her side. Not her standing by his side, no, no, no. She was an Empress. His Empress. Their powers perfectly matched and in sync. Above all, she was his from the moment they met as kids. Undoubtedly and devotedly so. They were meant to grow together, learn together. Be together. But Luke took that from them.

It sparked fury in his chest, spreading an uncontrollable wrath throughout his sinking body as he watched his uncle flee in panic, seeking out the only source of energy that could match something as strong as her—the vergence on Exegol. What the Jedi did on the Sith planet was just a blur, instead redirecting to his return on Coruscant once more.

He took Kitten to Vader's Retreat again, her happy place where they had played hide and seek in the temple just days before. Skywalker had erased the process from her mind, but what he did to her in the name of the greater good was terrible and painful as he siphoned her powers back into Palpatine's crystal. He took the pendant from the little girl when he was done, not only robbing her of her strength, but also the opportunity to have a home. To grow up with people just like her, like him.

Kylo was too disgusted and irate to watch the rest, opening his mouth to scream beneath the vat of oil sucking him deeper into darkness. And in that darkness, he saw a smiling mouth with blindingly white teeth waiting for him at the bottom, and it was so sinister, he was sure it was Palpatine again. But no, it was Hux. Grinning over Kylo's dead body as far-off voices enveloped his head like a shadow.

"Long live...the Supreme Leader..."

"You said to trust you!"

"Two armies and heavy ground support, just for one shot fired? Truly unheard of."

"Master Ren, can you hear us?"

"I'm not strong enough to stop them. I'm sorry. Please forgive me, Nephew..."

"Master Ren!"

"I will always find you..."

"You need to get up. You're his only hope."

"Supreme Leader, please, wake up."

"You're a fighter. Now, fight."

"Wake up, Master Ren!"

As the undead pulled him down and Kylo sputtered on the last bit of air leaving his lungs, the voices got louder, beckoning him to come closer. He focused on the sound, letting them raise him to consciousness and pull him away from his soul-sucking tormentors. It gave him a surge of adrenaline, allowing him to kick his feet harder as he clung onto the voices of familiarity like a lifeline.

"MASTER REN!"

With a violent fight to suck down oxygen, Kylo was thrust back into his body on the Steadfast. Coughing and gasping, he lurched forward, desperate to expel the oil he felt in his lungs, but after a few violent dry heaves, nothing came up. He vaguely sensed his knights with him, but he remained on his hands and knees, panting in a cold sweat as he tried to calm his screaming pulse.

It was Ap'lek who finally broke the silence. "Master Ren, are you alright? We've been trying to wake you for hours."

"I'm fine," he said, shakily getting to his feet. His legs nearly buckled beneath him as he dragged his bleary eyes across their faces. "Where's Vicrul?"

"Following a lead on M421, sir."

Kylo hated the sliver of hope in his voice. "And?"

"Nothing yet, sir." As the Supreme Leader stood there, dazed and defeated, the others exchanged glances as Ap'lek continued. "Are you sure you're alright, Master? You were in a meditative state for ten hours straight."

It took the Supreme Leader a moment to process what he had said. "No. That's not possible."

"It is, sir," Ap'lek said, the permanent grimace on his face deepening. "We bribed Ibbot to show us the footage from your silencer. You arrived on the Steadfast at 13:06, and your security system shows you were back in your quarters by 13:14. Through the Force, we felt your efforts to astral project at 13:37. It is now 23:49."

He blinked. He knew what he had been through was unlike any he had ever experienced before, but ten fucking hours? Kylo was in shock. Rubbing at his chin and breaking out into an aimless walk, his eyes drifted around his chambers. "When did you get here?"

"We broke in at 18:56, sir, after our messages went unanswered for a prolonged period of time," Cardo chimed in from across the room, where he was leaning against the kitchen table. "You were comatose."

Beside him, Trudgen snorted. "Yeah, you were twitching, and we could only see the whites of your eyes and shit. You looked dead as fuck," he said with a chortle. When Kylo set his blank glare on him, his face immediately became somber up as he shifted his stance. "I mean, you looked dead as fuck...sir."

The others let out an annoyed sigh—even Ushar mumbled a come on, man—but the Supreme Leader was still too disconnected to react. "Dead as fuck, huh?" he muttered, stopping in the center of his living area. He looked up at the ceiling, thankful to see his white walls instead of the black bleeding sky of the in-between, or that swirling black vortex...

Snapping his head down, Kylo moved a hand to his belt. He still had Anakin's lightsaber. Unclipping it, he ignited the legendary Jedi weapon as the knights rotated around him for a better look.

Trudgen stepped closer. "Is that..."

"Yeah," Kylo said, bending his wrist to twirl the blue blade. It felt light in his hand, lighter than his, and with each strike, he felt more and more grounded.

Speaking through their Force-bond, Kuruk sounded surprised. "You saw your grandfather, Master?"

"I did."

It was silent besides the sounds of Kylo swinging Anakin's lightsaber until Ushar cleared his throat. "Did he tell you why he gave that to you, Master Ren?"

"No," came Kylo's curt response, abruptly extinguishing it and clipping it back onto his belt. "Nothing other than it's mine now."

The five warriors exchanged looks again. "Okay then, sir," Ushar continued, pausing for a moment before he spoke again. "Was there...was there anything that he told you?"

"Yes," he said, the flatness of his voice echoing how dead he felt inside. He grabbed his helmet and headed for the door. "The girl is my equal in the Force. A dyad."

As his knights grabbed their helmets and moved to follow, he could sense their efforts to suppress their reaction. Not only did they have no idea Kitten was Force-sensitive, but a dyad was an exceedingly rare bond capable of producing an immeasurable, indestructible power, and if she could recover her abilities from the pendant, her and Kylo's connection would span across space and time. It would allow them to physically interact from different sides of the galaxy, just as they had done while she was near the relic on the Resistance base. Their senses, their feelings, their thoughts...every little thing about them would be interconnected, more than it already was.

Ap'lek didn't speak again until they were almost out of the Supreme Leader's private corridor. "Tell us what you need, Master. We are at your disposal."

"We will search for the crystal pendant that Skywalker had on Batuu," he said, stopping in front of the turbolift to press the up button. "Once we have it, we will find the girl and bring her home." With a cheery ding, the doors slid open, and Kylo walked inside and slipped on his mask. Facing his knights as they flooded in the lift, his voice was just a low rumble as he spoke, his hands curling into fists by his sides. "Where she belongs."