Star Wars/HDM Crossover Fic: Why the Leaves Decay
A His Dark Materials twist to The Last Jedi Force bond.
Disclaimer: Star Wars and certain characters belong to Lucasfilm, Walt Disney Pictures, et al.
No profit is gained from this writing-only, hopefully, enjoyment.
Title from W.H. Auden’s villanelle “If I Could Tell You”
***
They eventually found a quiet dead end on the ship and hunkered down, and for the first time in days-they just stopped and breathed. Rey pulled Fiki as close as physically possible, and he tucked himself into his customary spot just beneath her collarbone, a curling bit of brown fur like some stray punctuation mark. Her thumbs rubbed small circles into the dense fur around his neck and ears, and they relaxed in the same second, his tiny body loosening in her hold as her shoulders sagged back against the metal of the Millennium Falcon, the tension in her spine, her gut, and her legs slowly eking away as he stretched out along her forearm.
“What are we going to do?” Fiki finally asked.
How lost they were now, how useless and ashamed and sorrowful.
Some jedi knight she made, some steadfast warrior, always running the wrong way.
Rey winced and shifted, trying to shift away from the mental pain but only managing to shift into the physical, the burn through her shoulder screaming for attention.
But she didn’t want it cleaned. She wanted it to scar.
Rey groaned and closed her eyes, biting her lip and letting her head fall back. It hit the metal with a low satisfying clunk. Then she lifted it and dropped it again.
Clunk.
Clunk.
Clunk.
Tiny claws pressed against her tunic: a rebuke.
“We’ll figure it out,” she murmured, almost exhausted enough to drift off right here in the hallway.
Almost.
If it weren’t for the tiny spike or spur or scrape of emotion still thrumming down along the now familiar pathway.
Ren?
Or was it the last vestiges of Ben?
“Kill the past,” he’d said, but his eyes spoke different words, and another lost voice had whispered to Rey and her daemon, “Don’t let him fool you.”
Lippa, who’d once flown with black-tipped wings.
Plucking at the back of Rey’s head now wasn’t the man’s rage or curiosity. They knew what those felt like, intimately.
They knew too his gloating, knew from within his caustic sense of humor.
What grated now behind her eyes, sticking and chipping within her head like sand or smeared fingerprints against glass or hot tongs finally swinging into sight, was something uglier and more tangled.
Something awful, pointed and dark and gnarled, twisted.
Something wrong.
“Nettles,” Fiki whispered on an exhale, his words but a tiny puff of air against Rey’s skin.
“Shame,” Rey whispered back, bold in her exhaustion, as she idly plucked at the string binding the three of them together.
We hear you, she sent down the pathway.
We know you.
After all, they were three now, she, Fiki, and Kylo Ren, three, when they should have been, could have been, four.
Kylo Ren had killed his past, and he wanted Rey to do the same.
He wanted them to be just two, and she knew it was because he didn’t want to be the only one who was alone anymore.
Rey squeezed Fiki and knew it was already too late to pull away, to huddle back into a corner of her mind just as she was huddled in the ship. The open line seared because it connected them to something injured, something sick and limping and reaching for her and her only.
Kylo wanted Rey. He’d always wanted her.
And it wasn’t that he lied or tried to hide the truth.
He never lied. The truth was his weapon; he wielded it mercilessly.
And he was right. He had successfully transformed. He had indeed killed his past.
But he’d also killed his future.
The agony of this Force bond would eventually drive Rey and Fiki insane. That was the point.
For even without Snoke, Kylo Ren was too far gone, too inhuman.
Almost?
His greatest weapon was his shame, his truth, after all, because the moment he’d consented, the moment he’d reached out and wielded against himself a very specific knife-that was the moment Ben Solo severed himself from his daemon and his past. That was the moment he’d transformed into something other than human and when Kylo Ren was born.
Disclaimer: Star Wars and certain characters belong to Lucasfilm, Walt Disney Pictures, et al.
No profit is gained from this writing-only, hopefully, enjoyment.
Title from W.H. Auden’s villanelle “If I Could Tell You”
***
They eventually found a quiet dead end on the ship and hunkered down, and for the first time in days-they just stopped and breathed. Rey pulled Fiki as close as physically possible, and he tucked himself into his customary spot just beneath her collarbone, a curling bit of brown fur like some stray punctuation mark. Her thumbs rubbed small circles into the dense fur around his neck and ears, and they relaxed in the same second, his tiny body loosening in her hold as her shoulders sagged back against the metal of the Millennium Falcon, the tension in her spine, her gut, and her legs slowly eking away as he stretched out along her forearm.
“What are we going to do?” Fiki finally asked.
How lost they were now, how useless and ashamed and sorrowful.
Some jedi knight she made, some steadfast warrior, always running the wrong way.
Rey winced and shifted, trying to shift away from the mental pain but only managing to shift into the physical, the burn through her shoulder screaming for attention.
But she didn’t want it cleaned. She wanted it to scar.
Rey groaned and closed her eyes, biting her lip and letting her head fall back. It hit the metal with a low satisfying clunk. Then she lifted it and dropped it again.
Clunk.
Clunk.
Clunk.
Tiny claws pressed against her tunic: a rebuke.
“We’ll figure it out,” she murmured, almost exhausted enough to drift off right here in the hallway.
Almost.
If it weren’t for the tiny spike or spur or scrape of emotion still thrumming down along the now familiar pathway.
Ren?
Or was it the last vestiges of Ben?
“Kill the past,” he’d said, but his eyes spoke different words, and another lost voice had whispered to Rey and her daemon, “Don’t let him fool you.”
Lippa, who’d once flown with black-tipped wings.
Plucking at the back of Rey’s head now wasn’t the man’s rage or curiosity. They knew what those felt like, intimately.
They knew too his gloating, knew from within his caustic sense of humor.
What grated now behind her eyes, sticking and chipping within her head like sand or smeared fingerprints against glass or hot tongs finally swinging into sight, was something uglier and more tangled.
Something awful, pointed and dark and gnarled, twisted.
Something wrong.
“Nettles,” Fiki whispered on an exhale, his words but a tiny puff of air against Rey’s skin.
“Shame,” Rey whispered back, bold in her exhaustion, as she idly plucked at the string binding the three of them together.
We hear you, she sent down the pathway.
We know you.
After all, they were three now, she, Fiki, and Kylo Ren, three, when they should have been, could have been, four.
Kylo Ren had killed his past, and he wanted Rey to do the same.
He wanted them to be just two, and she knew it was because he didn’t want to be the only one who was alone anymore.
Rey squeezed Fiki and knew it was already too late to pull away, to huddle back into a corner of her mind just as she was huddled in the ship. The open line seared because it connected them to something injured, something sick and limping and reaching for her and her only.
Kylo wanted Rey. He’d always wanted her.
And it wasn’t that he lied or tried to hide the truth.
He never lied. The truth was his weapon; he wielded it mercilessly.
And he was right. He had successfully transformed. He had indeed killed his past.
But he’d also killed his future.
The agony of this Force bond would eventually drive Rey and Fiki insane. That was the point.
For even without Snoke, Kylo Ren was too far gone, too inhuman.
Almost?
His greatest weapon was his shame, his truth, after all, because the moment he’d consented, the moment he’d reached out and wielded against himself a very specific knife-that was the moment Ben Solo severed himself from his daemon and his past. That was the moment he’d transformed into something other than human and when Kylo Ren was born.