Let The Past Die (Kylo Ren x reader)

14. A Path To The Dark Side

"Am I being an idiot?" I asked into thin air. "Am I risking the lives of everyone on this ship?" Resting my head in my shaking hands, I stared down into the deck. All my life I had only seemed to make one stupid mistake after another, saving exactly none of the people I cared for.

"Yes" Ruqess shouted from the cockpit.

She was right, but I didn't want to hear it. I already knew I was doing the wrong thing yet again. Despite how right it felt to seek out Kylo Ren, I couldn't ignore the knot in my stomach. All I saw before my eyes was a body dressed in black under a starry night sky, a growing pool of blood on a bright stone floor, and the shock in Fern's eyes as he looked at me one last time. The longer it played on repeat in my head, the heavier my heartfelt. I tried to focus on the tangible; the rising and sinking of my chest in pace with my breathing, Thoria's feet in front of me, the ridges in the metal deck under her boots. I imagined Thoria's hostile glare at Ruqess' remark, but her eyes were soft, worried, when she sank down and forced me to look at her. She looked a little worse for wear from the fight, and I found myself thinking she should be resting in one of the cabins. My hands fell, elbows propping me up on my knees.

"It wasn't your fault" she said as if she had read my mind. "You didn't kill him."

"I brought him into this" I shot back. My heart was racing suddenly. Drawing one impossibly deep breath after another, I couldn't seem to get my body over the threshold to a comfortable state. "I brought all of you into this. And it only ends one way. What if it really is me they're tracking?"

Thoria took my hand with both of hers, holding it gently.

"Fern wanted to leave the First Order" she reminded me. "You gave him that. You gave him the chance to die a free man."

As if dying free was better than living to see another day.

"If I hadn't, he'd still be alive."

"And if you hadn't come back for me, I'd be in chains right now" she asserted.

I swallowed a lump in my throat.

"I shouldn't have let you fight Kylo... Ren." The name felt strange to say out loud; in my mind, he had been mine, my secret, for so long, separate from Thoria and the rest of them. The months I'd spent with him felt like another life, another me. "He could have killed you. He would have killed you. Actually, I don't know why he didn't..." I rambled.

"Honestly?" Her brows shot up. "He didn't really seem like he was trying" she pondered. "He fended off my lightsaber, but he never really came for me. Not what I had expected from the notoriously ferocious Supreme Leader of the First Order."

My cheeks grew hot reflexively as she spoke of him. In the back of my head, a memory nudged its way forward, and I was thrust back to my parents' house, the conversation reminding me of when my mother had asked me about a neighboring boy whom she suspected I'd had an innocent little crush on. This was not the same. This was so much more. If only Thoria knew who she was talking about; if only she knew what I had done, how far I had fallen, how much he meant to me. If only she had seen his face.

C3PX came around the corner, his eyes no longer red. I almost expected a calculated comment from him, but he veered off into the cockpit with only a turn of his head our way.

"You freed us" Thoria said with determination, steering the conversation back to the reason for my pitiful behavior. "What we choose to do after that is, frankly, our responsibility- our choice, not yours." She pressed the back of my hand against her blue lips, keeping it there for a while.

Without thinking, I raised my free hand to her face, brushing a stray eyelash off her cheek with my thumb. She was warm and smooth, and I remembered a similar moment, long ago. As younglings at the temple, no more than twelve years old, I had just been informed of my parents' deaths, and on that dark day when Thoria had left for Jedha, I picked an eyelash off her cheek. "Make a wish" I had told her, holding the lash out towards her on my little fingertip.