f2020 | Backdated Adventures

Glory is such a simple word to say.

Had he ever felt it like this, before becoming champion of the grand Arena? Kylo can't recall a time he'd ever found such satisfaction. The dead lie at his feet. Every part of his body hums with power— all but glows with the overabundance of it. He breathes dread magnificence as the crowd roars, the weight of its collective attention settling on him like a rich, heavy mantle.

Brutality, Kylo's come to realise, is a freedom they all covet. That's why they gather to watch him work, not that most of them would admit it. Most prefer to keep a safe distance from the question rather than ask themselves what it is they enjoy about watching the carnage... but not all. Sometimes, Kylo catches an edge of panic or a moment of revulsion. Rarely, he feels a fascination stirring and refusing to resolve— and that's when he knows someone in the audience won't be satisfied with anything less than a conversation.

He's a generous monster. Once he's stalked the perimeter of the arena as if marking territory, Kylo retires to his personal chambers to remove his armour and have whatever wounds he's received treated. He doesn't have the door locked.

Anyone seeking an audience is welcome to come find him there: there's a good chance he's expecting a visit.

She had felt flickers of him and their bond, like ghosts at the edges of her mind. Always on the cusp of waking and sleep, always hazy enough that she can't be sure they aren't just memories or her subconscious looking to heal a broken connection when she was too tired to maintain the stubborn denial that she cared not to find him.

As a junior parliamentarian she's privy to the gossips and going-ons that make their way through the White Tower. She had heard the rumors of the new champion, a hulking monster, pale and dark and ruthlessly brutal, so when the opportunity for a diplomatic visit came, she, perhaps a little too eagerly, volunteered.

Her heart pounds, the pumping of her own blood seemingly deafening the cheers of the crowd all around her. It's as if they don't exist. As if there is only him and her watching him work.

Some other members of her faction had warned her before she went, treating her as if she was delicate and that her ferocity was limited to the debate floor and that a simmering pit of wrath and violence didn't roil under her skin barely contained. The arena made sense in a way that the politicking didn't, and she's enraptured as she watches Kylo shed the restraint and control that shackles her.

She excuses herself with a speed that has the rest of the delegate assuming that she is emptying her stomach rather than searching for the source of the terrifying show of power.

She doesn't knock - apparently the manners she had learned in the White Tower are easily shed. Breathlessly, she bursts through his door.

"Ben."

Kylo, as he prefers to be called, might have been expecting an interruption. He might even have been expecting that interruption to be Rey of the White Tower, formerly a scavenger girl from Jakku, though the expression on his face suggests otherwise. He certainly wasn't expecting to hear that name.

He lifts his hand, and the young healer seeing to a deep gash sliced through the meat of his arm dips his head in acknowledgement and slips away, obedient as any medical droid. Kylo rises from his chair.

"You," he says, as if she's handed him the solution to a puzzle he's been unable to solve for years. It isn't clear if he's pleased or irritated about it.

"I felt you, but I thought it was just a memory," murmuring mostly to herself as she stalks closer to him, closing the distance like he's a tame pet rather than a feral, vicious beast. Her eyes flick over his face, searching as if she's looking for something deeper.

"When I head the rumors... I didn't want to believe them. I thought you would chase me."

Kylo watches her approach without taking a single step forward or back, unapologetically solid as a fixture. Something within her has changed, since the last time they met. He can see it— feel it, too. She had wanted him to chase her, somehow. Had she changed her mind about his offer?

"I've been busy," he points out lightly, letting their surroundings fill in the context. "And I've never been difficult to find."

Her eyes narrow, scrutinizing him. Yes, it had been years several years since she had stepped through the porter, but he is not quite as she remembered him.

She's sharpened her barbs in that time, "No. The rumors of a Champion make it all the way to the White Tower. I just didn't think you would be content to serve another master."

Kylo's eyebrows raise slightly. True, his personal chambers are hardly palatial, but he's provided with more than he needs and given anything he asks for.

"Everything you see here exists to serve me," he says. "You were in the stands. You felt it. This is my Arena."

She shakes her head. He is a tool. A means to an end for executing the will of another. What then will happen when another more powerful champion steps through the porter? She doesn't why he would choose this illusion of freedom when it exists in reality in her grasp.

"Ben, you don't have to hide here," it's not as if Snoke is here to dig his claws into his mind, and even if he was, he is no match for the pair of them. Unless...

"You haven't seen it yet," she's quiet again as it clicks into place. It explains it really, why he might be content to don a different identity as a Champion for a warlord he could easily best. "And you don't know what we are."

His eyes narrow. To be using that name, he rather suspects she is the one blind to what they are.

"I know exactly what I am," he assures her, a hiss of venom sliding into his voice. "As they all do. Every one of them. I am hiding nothing. Denying nothing."

The implication is deliberate. Kylo hasn't forgotten the fury of her attack in the forest, as much as she appears to have.

"Kylo," she finally yields, saying the name carefully. It's rusty on her tongue. Foolishly she still thought of him as Ben. Over the years it, the jagged edges of his impossible offer wore down in favor of remembering the warmth of his hand pressed to hers and the soft whisper of her voice telling her she wasn't alone.

"I can help you," her offer is as genuine as it was in the turbo lift. "You don't need a master, you can just be--"

"Help."

His dark eyes search hers, the echo of that offer hanging starkly in the space where a response should be. In the stretching agony of his silence the entire concept takes on an absurdity impossible to describe.

Rey isn't the first to offer help. She isn't even the first to hold out the desire to help he can feel humming through every atom of her being, certain as gravity.

"Is that what I need?"

His question gives her pause, but that's nothing new. They challenge each other, no matter how ridiculous she finds the question. Perhaps he doesn't even know he needs it, if he just knew what they had done.

Her answer comes to her quickly then. She rolls it around in her mouth, straightening her shoulders and lifting her chin. There's an urge there too. To touch him. To hold out her hand as if the gesture wasn't laced with pain throughout their history.

Stepping closer, she lays her palm on his chest, looking up at him. She's not afraid.

"You let me help you once."

Edited 2020-10-30 04:18 (UTC)

A ragged breath shivers under her hand— he's too startled by her sudden proximity to scoff at the suggestion. Somehow, as he looks down at that unexpected point of contact, the framing shifts.

Let me help you.

That's what she's saying. That's what she needs, from him.

His recovery takes a heartbeat longer than he would have preferred, but the shock of being touched— of being something she wants to touch— clears. His gaze drags back up from her hand to her face.

"No. I didn't."

This is the longest she's ever touched him, and she half expects Luke to burst through the door. She's so close, she can feel his warmth. She's grown bolder in her time here, taking not just what she needs but increasingly what she wants to.

But his statement feels like a rejection and stings, reminding her of how he offered her a position only in his life. The rush of hope she felt when she stood with him evaporated like water poured across hot stones. Her hand lifts as if she's been burned but she doesn't step away.

Her brows pinch together, shaking her head. She controls her own narrative now. If he knew the moments that she did. She could share it with him, omitting the pain that followed...

"I came to you," her voice is low but firm. "You killed Snoke." She wonders how smoothly she can slip into his mind. There power is different here, but she feels it regardless. Almost as a test she pushes an addendum. For me. For us.

Perhaps arrogantly, she thinks her want, a melding of what she felt in the throne room and the renewed force of it now, can mask the hurt that's branded itself on her heart. It's almost as if she's forgotten the door of their connection swings both ways.

Fear is as unremarkable as background radiation in Kylo's world— particularly here at the barracks in the dark of night, late enough to more accurately be called early morning. There are very few good reasons to be sleeping or attempting to sleep this close to the Arena, after all.

Tonight, however, something catches Kylo's attention and refuses to let go— a splinter of terror too sharply insistent to ignore but too slender to grasp hold of. He tosses and turns irritably for what feels like an hour before giving in, snatching up his robe and stalking out to see which of the condemned needs reminding just how much worse their death will be should they deprive him of sleep.

But the prisoners are not to blame. Kylo's irritation grows with every cell he passes— empty, or the occupant sleeping— until he realises the source lies beyond, across the courtyard. That section of the compound isn't supposed to be in use at all, though it isn't guarded— just locked. Very locked. Still, the mechanism yields to the force of his will, guided with a curl of his fingers. He strides into the dark of the corridor beyond, captivated now. What could be hiding in here?

The single locked door at the far end of the passage gives way and yawns open, slow. It's time to find out.

The room is empty. That is, at least, the impression it gives before the hole in the center of the floor becomes apparent. The mouth of an oubliette.

Where a dungeon ought to be visible below, through the metal bars of the trapdoor, there's something even stranger. The rounded walls are covered in lush greenery, flowers blooming out of nothing, with the sun nowhere in sight. A circular bed covers most of the floor, absurdly luxurious for its location, with black satin sheets and an overabundance of pillows. It looks like the cage of a very spoiled pet.

And then there's the source of Kylo's irritation: a boy sprawled in the middle of the bed, nude besides the blanket he's managed to tangle around his body. His pale skin is inexplicably illuminated by moonlight despite the absence of windows, long black hair sticky with sweat, chest rapidly rising and falling on the verge of hyperventilation. The arm flung over his face is wrapped in bandages stained with old blood. He's too far lost in his terror to even notice he's not alone anymore.

Whatever Kylo was expecting to find, it wasn't this. He stops at the edge of the hole, staring down in silence at the strange tableau as if a few more moments will make sense of it— or quiet the stirring sense that somehow, somewhere, he's seen all this before.

It doesn't work.

"You aren't one of mine," Kylo says.

He crouches at the mouth of the dungeon, running his fingers curiously over the metal bars as if trying to determine their function. Surely the opening itself would be out of reach for the boy inside?

"Are you."

The boy freezes, holding his breath, as if keeping still enough might make him disappear. When the futility of it hits him, he slowly pulls his arm away from his face. His wide, impossibly blue eyes fix on Kylo as if he's trying to work out whether anyone is actually there or whether it's a dream - which is funny, because if anything looks like a dream, it's the boy and his cell.

He sits up, slow and cautious, to get a better look. It takes him a second or two to recognize his visitor, and when he does, he's shaken to the core. He scrambles backwards like a startled animal, to the edge of the bed, without taking his eyes off Kylo.

"You're the monster," he says. "Did they send you to kill me?"

Kylo's head tilts slightly, his unblinking eyes locked on the boy's face. Shrouded in his long black robe and peering down from above, the contrast between his dark, menacing bulk and the pale, frightened boy below is almost comical. Of course he's the monster. What else would he be?

"I am," Kylo agrees. He likes the way the boy says it: the monster. Singular. Exceptional. But—

"No-one sent me," he continues, fascinated. "I heard you."

The boy's shoulders sink - not with relief, but with disappointment. That immediately gives way to confusion.

"Heard me?"

He hadn't thought he'd made a sound. When he was new, he used to scream, but it's been ages since that impulse was beaten out of him. He'd sooner bite his tongue until it bleeds. He must be far gone if he's made enough noise to draw the monster out.

Kylo lifts a hand, tapping a finger to his temple as an explanation. A very slight and decidedly unpleasant smile pulls at his mouth.

"I heard you," he repeats— a low, dangerous murmur, coloured with something like amusement. "Perhaps you didn't know. It's not one of my most... entertaining talents."

Oh.

"I'll try to keep it down," the boy says, though it's obviously too late for that. Nothing about Kylo suggests that he intends to leave anytime soon, even if he doesn't look particularly angry. Maybe he's the type to play with his food.

"I'm sure you will."

His hand drifts back to the bars of the trap door, fingers curling around one slowly, thoughtfully. He absolutely is the type to play with his food. Other people's, too.

"But I know where you are, now."

The boy swallows, his eyes following the exploration of Kylo's hand. There isn't much in the way of security on that side of the door. It's meant to keep the monsters from escaping, not from entering. Flip one little switch and the door opens, the ladder descends, and the beast can be down here with him.

"What do you want?"

If not to shut him up.

Kylo considers. His fingers still, his gaze dragging over the boy in his lusciously verdant dungeon.

What does he want?

"I was promised," he murmurs. "This— all of this. I would be given the Arena, and the Arena would be given every criminal. Every delinquent. But you... you're not one of mine. I wasn't even told you were here."

That doesn't seem to surprise the boy.

After all, his entire existence is wrapped in secrecy. His name has been forgotten, his old life lost, his family - as far as he knows - wiped from the face of the Earth.

"No," he confirms. "I'm not yours."

He doesn't like that. Hates it, in fact.

"Then why are you here?" he asks, a touch of venom slipping into the question.

The boy puts his hands up, as if giving an exaggerated shrug, before he extends his arms to gesture all around him. The flowers, the moonlight, the magic Kylo can't see or appreciate from so far above.

Fine.

Kylo seizes hold of the metal grating, exhales... and wrenches it out of its bracketing, seemingly uninterested in discovering any of the dungeon's hidden mechanisms. The resulting tangle of deformed iron clangs discordantly as he tosses it aside.

And then he finds the ladder. A vicious tug has it unfolding and reforming into a narrow flight of stairs, which saves him the trouble of grasping the edge of the hole and dropping down into the boy's cage.

The boy flinches at the sound. He nearly dives off the bed when the stairs descend, but thinks better of it. There's barely two feet between the edge of it and the wall. He's not nearly small enough to go skittering around on hands and knees.

Alright, then. He squares his shoulders and raises his fists instead. He's nowhere near as strong as he once was, half-starved and feverish with sickness, but he'd rather lose a fight than take a beating.

It's... cute, watching the boy prepare himself for a fight he has no chance of winning. Amusing, certainly, and almost admirable. Kylo all but flows down the last few steps of the ladder, an overlarge shadow looming over the pale figure raising his fists from the spill of sheets on his oversized bed.

"You'll fall," he notes, advice over attack. His gaze drags from the blanket tangled unhelpfully around the boy's body to the rest of his surroundings, then back to the startling blue of his eyes. His own narrow.

"You're sick," he realises aloud, frowning. "Where's your healer?"

Realizing that Kylo is 100% correct and also doesn't seem intent on hurting him after all, the boy slowly lowers his arms and slumps back. That fight would have ended quickly, anyway. He can barely keep himself upright, he's so exhausted.

"You tell me," he says. "I never know where anyone is."

"Except when they're visiting you."

Kylo would likely be more annoyed at the non-answer had it not been prefaced by that strangely satisfying demonstration of something rarer than simple obedience. It isn't often that people listen to his advice, consider and then choose to follow it.

Admittedly the crushing weight of fatigue hanging over him probably had more of a role than anything else. Kylo's rarely encountered such miserable exhaustion even among prisoners deliberately deprived of sleep for the purposes of interrogation, but he sees no devices or instruments nearby. The boy's bed is warm and soft, bathed only in the gentlest moonlight.

He glances back up the ladder to the mouth of the dungeon.

"You can't control it," he murmurs, attention swinging back to the boy's face. "Can you. What is it? Shape-shifting?"

Edited (too many kylos) 2020-10-20 06:12 (UTC)

"Something like that."

The boy also glances upward, considering the path to escape right in front of him yet making no attempt to even inch toward it. Instead, he rearranges the blanket so it's a bit less twisted around his limbs.

"If you could hear me from all the way outside, shouldn't you already know what it is?"

Kylo fixes the boy with a particularly flat stare.

"If you heard someone screaming. All the way outside. Would you know what was happening?"

"Usually," the boy says, "they bring me something to help. But sometimes, if I get too calm, they won't get the results they want. So they leave me like this. They know I won't be able to hold it off forever."

None of that is precisely an answer, though the boy seems to think it might be. Everything's out of focus for him, cognitively. He's tipping to one side and hasn't noticed yet, despite the increasing likelihood he's going to topple off the edge of the bed.

"We all sleep eventually," Kylo murmurs.

He thinks of the condemned in their cells across the courtyard, curled in on themselves and oblivious to the passing of time. Safe if only for now, hidden away in an untouchable world that exists only for them. Fear is a strange paralytic, in the end.

The boy is drifting in front of his eyes.

Why, he couldn't explain if asked. Perhaps it's because he feels like he's wandered into a liminal space where actions don't necessarily have consequence. Perhaps it's that part of him believes he must be imagining all of this— the secret chamber with the secret prisoner, the terror in the night that only he can hear. But he reaches out a hand and a thought, and the air the boy is about to tumble through becomes an emptiness his exhausted body can lean on.

"Even me."

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