Chapter Text
Interference
1
He hates her.
He hates her face. He hates the way she moves, as though she were the current of a river flowing without the slightest effort. He hates the light she carries without even realizing it, and even the way she can hold his gaze, as if there were nothing in the entire galaxy capable of making her falter; as if she felt no hesitation whatsoever about peering into the seams of his dark and wretched soul.
He hates her.
Deeply.
And that is precisely why it is so infuriating to realize that she is still there, once again occupying his thoughts, as though driving her out of them were as impossible as tearing her from the Force itself.
It was absolutely exasperating.
Even more so because, since Crait, the bond had never manifested the way it used to. It had not interrupted the middle of a strategic briefing. It had not appeared without warning while he walked the corridors of his flagship. He had not found her standing before him again, watching him with that infuriating blend of defiance and curiosity she seemed to reserve for him alone.
Nothing.
Only silence.
A void so complete that, at times, he found it difficult to believe that connection had ever existed at all.
And yet, it had.
He knew it with an almost pathological certainty.
Because if it hadn't, he wouldn't still be thinking about her.
He could still recall the damp air of Ahch-To, the warmth of the hut, and the lingering sensation of her hand brushing against his.
He remembered how those unexpected encounters had gradually become a constant presence; a second consciousness settled somewhere in the back of his mind.
Until the moment he saw her turn away.
Until the instant when, still kneeling on the red salt, he watched her disappear up the Falcon's ramp without looking back.
He could no longer remember exactly what he had felt as he watched her leave. There had been anger, certainly. Frustration too. A fury so consuming that, for weeks, it had spared him from examining anything beyond it.
And yet, the only thing he remembered with absolute clarity was the sound of the hatch sealing shut.
Sometimes it seemed absurd that he could recall that sound with such perfect precision.
From that moment on, the bond had vanished.
It did not feel broken. At least, not in the way things break.
It was simply... absent, as though something that had always been there had suddenly stopped answering, without warning, from one day to the next.
At first, he expected it to return. To catch him off guard again in the middle of a training session or during one of those endless nights aboard his flagship.
To find her watching him with that impossible-to-read expression, poised somewhere between defiance and curiosity, as though she were still trying to solve a riddle that stubbornly refused to behave like one.
But it never happened.
Days turned into weeks. Weeks into months. And the silence remained.
At times, he found himself wondering whether it had been a conscious decision on her part; whether she had found a way to shut him out, to raise walls where none had existed before. As though she had taken their connection and buried it beneath layer upon layer of reinforced steel.
As though he were a disease.
A virus.
A contamination she had finally managed to rid herself of.
She had never hesitated once she believed she was doing the right thing. She possessed an almost infuriating ability to choose a direction and keep moving forward without ever looking back. Shutting him out, apparently, had simply been another one of those decisions: precise, cold, and final.
It should have satisfied him.
After all, it was exactly what he had wanted: not to see her, not to hear her, not to endure that infuriating ability she had to look beyond Kylo Ren's mask and find something he had spent years trying to destroy.
It should have been a relief.
So why did her absence still feel so much like a wound?
A wound he could not stop picking at.
Beyond the wide windows of his quarters, the stars stretched across the darkness. His flagship moved forward at a steady pace, wrapped in the mechanical silence of a vessel so immense that, at times, it felt less like a ship than a city suspended in the void.
Kylo barely noticed them.
He had been standing motionless for several minutes, his hands clasped behind his back, his gaze fixed somewhere beyond the transparisteel, staring out at a galaxy that, in theory, belonged to him. And yet, the vaster it seemed, the less room he could find in his mind for anything else.
He had done an admirable job over the past several months of avoiding any thoughts of the scavenger.
He had buried those memories beneath military campaigns, intelligence reports, strategic briefings, and days so relentlessly long they left him barely enough time to sleep.
And all it had taken was the fleeting fragment of a dream to unravel it all.
Damn her a thousand times over.
Because it had been so brief that, when he awoke, he was not even certain what he had seen. Barely an instant. A feeling. The fleeting impression of sharing the same space.
And yet, he had recognized her presence immediately.
He had not seen clearly where they were, nor had he had time to understand what she was doing there—or, for that matter, what he was doing there.
He had only known that they were together.
Again.
But it had vanished as quickly as it had come. That first night, he had barely had time to react before jolting awake in his quarters.
For several long seconds, he had remained perfectly still, staring into the darkness above him.
Then came the anger.
A searing, irrational anger, because some part of him could not help wondering whether it had been her doing. Whether she had sensed his presence. Whether she had recognized the intrusion. And whether she had simply chosen to cast him out.
As though his presence were so unwelcome that it was not even worth tolerating for a few seconds.
He sat up at once, his jaw clenched so tightly that his teeth ached. The Force answered his fury before he was even fully aware of it. An object shot violently across the room and exploded against the wall, the crash echoing through the silence of his quarters.
And yet, it had done nothing to ease that unbearable feeling: the sense of having been cast aside as effortlessly as one brushes a speck of dust from a sleeve.
It did not happen again until several days later.
Before he realized it, that same black sky, scattered with motionless stars, stretched out above him once more.
He did not recognize the place.
Only the breeze.
And her.
He recognized her immediately.
She was sitting several meters away, cross-legged on the grass, perfectly still, with her back to him, as though she had not even noticed his presence. Or worse, as though she had noticed it and simply chosen to ignore him.
He remembered—with no small amount of embarrassment—striding toward her with almost blind determination.
Two steps.
Three.
Driven by the absurd impulse to seize one of those slender, wiry arms and force her to look at him at last. To demand an explanation. To demand an answer for those months of silence.
He was growing tired of the feeling that she was the one deciding when she appeared and when she vanished, as though the bond belonged more to her than it did to him.
Who the hell was she to decide when he was allowed in and when he was to be shut out, as though their connection answered to her rules alone?
The irritation grew with every step he took, dark, hot, and achingly familiar.
Because no matter how hard he tried to convince himself otherwise, there was something profoundly insulting about how easily she seemed to have erased him from her life.
He never reached her.
His fingers were only inches away from brushing the fabric of her sleeve when the world collapsed around him.
He woke with a start.
For a moment, he remained perfectly still, struggling to catch his breath as the darkness of his quarters replaced that impossible sky strewn with stars.
Then, once again, the anger came.
A side table hurtled into the wall before he was even fully aware that he had reached for the Force. The crash echoed through the room, leaving shards of metal and decorative glass scattered across the floor.
Kylo closed his eyes.
He drew one slow breath.
Then another.
A third.
It did nothing.
The anger was still there, burning beneath his skin—violent, irrational, and, once again, directed at the same person.
For several long seconds, he stared at one of the chairs by the viewport.
The chair quivered, lifting a few inches off the floor.
Just enough to realize that hurling the damned piece of furniture across the room would provide no answers, nor explain why she kept appearing—or why she always vanished before he could reach her.
With an abrupt movement, he looked away.
Damn her.
The third time was different.
Or at least, that was what he believed at first.
For several seconds, he remained exactly where he had appeared, making no attempt to approach her or repeat the stupidity of advancing as he had the last time.
Because something had changed.
The darkness was still there, but it was no longer that impossible void scattered with stars. There was earth beneath his feet. Real earth. He could feel it even through his boots—uneven, damp, and solid.
The air smelled different. Cleaner. Colder.
A gust of wind stirred the dark fabric of his robes, and for the first time since these encounters had begun, he had the unmistakable sensation of standing somewhere real.
Then he heard it.
The sea.
A deep, unbroken sound that seemed to rise from everywhere at once. The endless rhythm of waves crashing again and again against the cliffs, utterly indifferent to the passing of time.
Slowly, he lifted his gaze.
They were standing atop a cliff.
Vegetation blanketed much of the landscape, spreading in dark patches beneath the faint starlight. Low shrubs, wild grass, and trees swayed gently in the night breeze, their branches casting blurred shadows across the ground. Beyond them, the edge of the cliff vanished into the darkness, while the ocean churned far below.
He did not recognize the place.
And yet, he had the strange certainty that it was real.
Not real in the way that empty chamber had been, where the bond had first brought them together years before, nor like the compartments of a starship or the corridors of a military base. This was something different, more solid and more tangible.
Too real not to be.
She was still there.
Seated only a few meters from the edge of the cliff, cross-legged and perfectly still, gazing out over the dark expanse of the ocean with her back to him. As though she had remained in exactly the same position since the last time he had seen her. As though ignoring his presence required less effort than breathing.
The irritation came immediately.
But this time, it was not strong enough to keep him from feeling something else.
Curiosity.
Because, for the first time since Crait, he had the distinct impression that he had stepped into her world rather than dragging her into his.
And that possibility was as unsettling as it was disturbing.
“What are you doing here, Ben?”
The question caught him completely off guard.
Not because it was difficult to answer, but because it was the first time she had spoken to him after all that time.
Her voice sounded strange and soft, as though it were coming from very far away.
His reply emerged, muffled by the vocoder of his helmet.
“I could ask you the same thing.”
She did not answer.
She did not even turn around.
She continued gazing out at the ocean, that vast, restless expanse of darkness that seemed to absorb all of her attention, and Kylo felt the irritation return almost immediately.
“What does this mean?”
The question escaped his lips before he could stop it.
She remained perfectly still.
The wind gently stirred her hair. He couldn't remember ever having seen it loose before.
“Look at me when I'm talking to you,” he demanded.
Nothing.
Not a single word.
His jaw tightened.
“Why are you here?”
The words echoed through the darkness, harsher than he had intended. And far more personal, much to his own disgust.
She lowered her head ever so slightly and spoke over her shoulder.
An almost imperceptible movement.
“I could ask you the same thing.”
Then the world shattered again.
Without warning.
Without explanation.
The cliff vanished.
The sound of the sea faded away.
Darkness swallowed everything.
A heartbeat later, he woke with a violent start in his quarters.
“Damn it!”
He shot upright.
One of the cushions flew across the room before he was even aware he had thrown it. It struck the wall, bounced off with ridiculous indignity, and landed on the floor.
Kylo remained seated on the bed, breathing hard.
Even angrier than before.
Because she had done it again.
Again.
He was going to kill that scavenger.