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“Did you believe them, when they said we’d bring about the end of the world?”
It comes out a bit more strained than she’d like, the very first words to pass between them in the handful of hours since the sun sunk into the horizon for the very last time in this history, but Rey appreciates that her voice is still able to convey humor rather than pain in its breathlessness.
Perhaps Kylo does too, because what little of him she manages to glimpse in her peripheral vision reveals the slightest smirk tugging at his lips.
“Not really,” he murmurs, voice about as thready as one would expect from a god who has been slowly bleeding out since she sank a thorn-blade into his side an hour ago – the final blow traded between them, the one that had sent first him then her tumbling to the ground from their shared pain.
It’s a tricky thing, being soul-bound to your eternal enemy.
Maybe they’ll have a better go of it the next time around.
“I suppose I always suspected what they might’ve seen, the Fates,” Kylo muses, his voice sounding further away than it should as he lies dying just five feet away from her. The thought occurs to Rey that if she just closes her eyes, maybe all of this would melt away, maybe all the centuries and bloodshed and betrayal would just disappear into thin air and she could pretend, even if just for a second, that they’re back in the bed they shared as newlyweds, her husband’s voice taking on a distant quality as he loses himself in a decades-old memory and regales her with tales of the pantheon’s antics that predate her ascension.
But then again, if she closes her eyes now she also runs the risk of never opening them again, and she’d actually quite like to hear what Kylo has to say about the prophecy that killed first their marriage, then the universe, and now, finally, here at the end of all things, them.
So she keeps her eyes open and steels herself to gasp out a single word. “But?”
Her throat grows tight with something other than a lack of oxygen as Kylo uses what might be the last of his strength to heave himself onto his side, letting out a heart-wrenching grunt as the motion applies pressure to the wound in his side.
All this, just so he can smile at her.
What a fucking idiot.
Her fucking idiot, even now, even still.
“But I wanted them to be wrong, so I pretended they were,” he says with that big, goofy smile of his she hasn’t seen in three hundred and seventy-one years, the one that he’d always reserved only for her. It doesn’t last long, and Rey hates that she can’t tell if the smile slips from his lips because of the pain he feels in the moment or the pain that accompanies his next words. “I wanted to have faith in us. I still want to have faith in us.”
The thing is, the both of them have always been idiots for each other.
So she gathers her strength, grits her teeth, and rolls herself onto her side to meet his beseeching eyes, even though doing so brings her even closer to death than she already is, the final lingering remnants of her lifeforce slowly leeching back into the dead soil that demands repayment for all that she’s taken from it over the course of this decades-long war.
This close, she finally gets her first proper look at him since they both collapsed, illuminated only by a succession of stars giving off one last brilliant flare before they blink out of existence. He’s pale now, paler even than the dying sun was when she caught her final glimpse of it, paler still than the moondust which rained upon this world when he commanded the destruction of its twin moons mere days ago to unleash tidal chaos. His breathing is labored even though she can tell he’s trying to keep it even for her sake, his hair is matted with blood from when she knocked him over and his head struck the sharpest point of the cliff, and silvery tracks down his cheeks belie the silent tears he must have shed in the hours before she found her voice.
And despite centuries of vowing to kill her husband, despite countless occasions of dealing what should have been death blows to him, it is only in this moment that she finally allows her heart to break with the realization of what it really means to have been the goddess – the warrior – the person to do this to him.
“I still want to have faith in us too,” Rey finally confesses to him and herself and the universe, choking back a sob before she decides she’s done pretending in her final moments of life and allows the dam to break.
The ground beneath her greedily soaks up every single tear, but she’s too busy reaching out for the trembling hand Kylo is slowly, painstakingly extending to her.
No matter what the Fates prophesized, no matter the enmity their opposing natures had doomed them to, this was always going to be the final page of their story: two halves of a whole, clinging desperately to each other, unwilling to let go until the very end.
Just as it began, in the garden where they’d first met all those millennia ago, a nature goddess tentatively accepting her connection with life and an underworld god trying to sever his with death, both feeling utterly lost and out of step from their respective halves of the pantheon, each promising the other that they would never have to feel lonely again.
Through tears, Rey knows Kylo has travelled back in time with her, back to a time before the war of the gods forced them first to argue opposing stances and later to lead opposing factions. How could they have known, during those long summer days lazing under the lilac tree she’d grown for him and those endless winter nights curled up in the home he’d built for her, that the price of their love would be the end of this universe?
It doesn’t need to be, she’d insisted at the beginning of the end, when lesser gods began reporting back of dying stars and fading immortality, there must be some kind of compromise we can agree on.
But if there ever was even the slightest sliver of middle ground between his willingness to let all humans die in exchange for keeping her alive and her insistence on protecting the humans with her last breath, they never did find it.
And now, with less than a handful of stars remaining in the sky, racing towards their brilliant, explosive deaths, she knows that the time has finally come to admit that they never stood a chance – not in this life, at least.
Kylo squeezes her hand as resignation and acceptance flow from her end of the bond to his, and she blinks away tears to capture what she knows will be her final memory of him, to hold close for however little time it takes her to follow him.
“Rey,” he begins, an urgency taking hold of his words even as his voice grows weaker, his lips trembling in a painful attempt at a smile even as the light begins to leave his eyes, “You have to know – I would do it all over again, so long as…”
He’s never sunk a blade into her, not even once in retaliation, but watching him struggle to speak, knowing these are his final words – it feels as if she’s taken a hundred daggers to her heart.
Time is running out, and he knows it as well as she does, his lips twisting into one final, melancholic smile as he forces out his final promise to her between shuddering gasps. “I love you. I have always loved you. And I will always love you, no matter how many tries it takes for us to get this right.”
She wants to rage against the injustice of it all, of the Fates binding their souls together yet condemning them to this endless cycle of heartbreak and death.
She wants to channel the last of her life force into him just so she doesn’t have to watch him die, even though she knows she loves him too much to condemn him to watching her die instead.
She wants… here at the end of all things, she wants to kiss her husband one last time.
And so she does, ignoring his weak protests as she uses the last of her strength to surge forward and press her lips, bloodied from the pain she’s just endured, to his, cold from the greedy pull of death.
“I love you too,” she whispers fervently against his lips, forcing herself to put some distance between them just so she can look at him one last time. “And I promise we’ll get it right next time, Ben.”
He closes his eyes as she utters his birth name, the one bestowed upon him in secret by his mortal father, the one he’d only ever entrusted her with, and Rey knows even as she dips in for one more kiss that he’ll never open them again, never kiss her back again – not in this lifetime.
She doesn’t allow herself to cry when his cold lips fall away from hers, doesn’t allow herself to look up and see the sight of her dead husband. In her mind’s eye, he is alive and whole and happy, as he was the day they found each other, and she clings tightly to the imagined warmth of his arms and her happiness and the sun in that brilliant, golden memory to wrest back just enough energy from the dead earth and call upon her powers of life for the first time in decades.
Rey had stopped summoning life the day they officially declared themselves on opposing ends of the war, had exchanged her ability to give life to the earth for the terrible curse of taking life and converting it into power. Still, all these years later, the ability comes naturally to her, as easy as – or even easier than, in this case – breathing.
She wishes Kylo – Ben – could have seen her summon life one last time.
With the very last of her energy, Rey summons a blanket of lilacs to wrap around the both of them as she fits herself into the familiar cradle of his arms, hiding them away from this world until it is ready to be kinder to them.
.
.
.
.
.
In another lifetime, in another world, a man chases his wayward puppy into a familiar garden that instantly feels like home and a woman looks up from tending to her lilacs to find a stranger she’s been missing all her life.
“So um,” Kylo Ren, fearsome king of the underworld, stammers as his immortal heart beats a dozen miles an hour and Cerberus nips at his heels, “what do those stand for anyway?”
Rey Niima, budding goddess of nature, can only laugh as her heart fills with fondness. “Depends on who you ask,” she shrugs, “but I like to think they symbolize first love.”
And this time, somehow, someway, they get it right.