Allegiance | Kylo Ren

LXXIII

Over the course of a couple weeks, I had lost everything that I cared about.

Mason was dead, cut down at the hand of someone I had believed to be my friend.

Malia was shot mercilessly in the line of duty, a young life taken far too soon.

And Kylo might as well have been dead. He was no longer my friend; he was nothing to me.

I had lost everything.

After the Resistance fighters had been discovered within the city limits, the other troopers had wasted no time in calling for reinforcements to destroy the city while I entered the government building. Kylo and his troops charged the city like an avalanche, crushing everything—and everyone—in sight. The entire center of civilization had crashed to the ground overnight. The light emitted from the many fires had ignited the early morning air, the smell of smoke hanging thickly in the air as we pulled out of the ruins, leaving any unlikely survivors to fend entirely for themselves.

The engine I had heard was an emergency Resistance extraction ship; somehow, Rey, Poe, and Luke had managed to escape unscathed once again. But I didn't care.

The ride back to base seemed much longer than it probably was. I could not shake the image of Malia's lifeless body hitting the ground as I lay helplessly in front of her.

I stared at the newly empty bed next to mine in the barracks. It had been emptied by the maintenance crew, cleaned and left to be reassigned to the next trooper staying there. Malia's absence weighed heavily on me. I could almost hear her tinkling laugh, almost see her warm brown eyes crinkling as she smiled. But all evidence that she had ever existed had been extinguished, scrubbed out by careless hands.

Luckily for both of us, Kylo did not attempt to contact me while I grieved. I do not know what I would have said to him if he had—or if I would have said anything. He remained a mere name in the back of a mind, the ghost of someone I once loved.

His loss almost hurt more than the others', probably because he was still alive. I had the physical ability to go and visit him whenever I wanted to, but everything had changed. The thing was, I wanted desperately to be able to go talk to him, to spend countless hours lost in conversation. But those days were behind us—the Kylo in those memory was a different person. The moment his lightsaber made contact with Mason's skin, he changed in my mind—he became a warped illustration of who he had once been, a twisted image of who I had once seen him as.

The days dragged on. I found myself completely and utterly alone. I drifted around the base, unsure of what to do with myself. It almost seemed that the troopers were avoiding me more than usual, giving me an unnecessarily wide berth as they passed in the hallways.

I helped out in the hospital wing occasionally, but it didn't spark my interest as it once had. My fingers felt clumsy, unresponsive, as I tried to perform some of the basic treatments I had watched Mason do countless times. I caught the nurses casting me sympathetic glances whenever they thought I wasn't looking, and that only brought embarrassment—I didn't want their pity. I wanted things to be as they once were. I wanted Malia, and Mason, and—Kylo.

I went to the roof once. Mason's words echoed in my ears as I climbed the stairs, reminding me that it was a good place to go when you needed to think. But the sky was clouded over that night; not a single star shone. I gazed out at the forest numbly, a deep ache in my heart, before I promptly turned and left. I knew I would probably never go back up there.

The only place I felt even remotely comfortable was on missions. There were no major assignments, but I volunteered for even the smallest ones, mainly because they were something to pass the time. They never lasted more than a day, though, and I found myself back in my bed at night, that familiar loneliness pulsing in my bones.

Two weeks passed, and I found myself in a repetitive haze. I needed to find a way to break out of this cycle, but I couldn't. I knew I needed to move on, to continue with my own life, but there was suddenly nothing that interested me, nothing to look forward to. I was helplessly trapped in a shallow stream of life, the current carrying me despite my every struggle to fight it.

At the end of the second week, I found myself hoping—praying—for something to happen that would make my life worth living again.