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***
It isn’t Hux’s alarm that wakes Kylo. It’s the flurry of movement, the muttered profanities, and the rasp of war, following Hux like a second shadow.
The lights automatically dial up with the motion, glaring at seventy-five percent directly into Kylo’s skull. He tugs at the skewed bedding--his own, standard-issue--and presses his face into the pillow. The pressure hammers a spike of pain through his jaw. He flinches.
The fucking bruise. Good luck forgetting about that for a moment. Snoke’s marks don’t vanish overnight.
Kylo swears and turns back over.
“Did I wake you?” Hux stands at the foot of the bed, holding his rumpled jacket by the collar.
Kylo pushes hair out of his face. “What do you think?”
Hux’s hackles go up. Of course they do. “I was attempting to be quiet.”
“Great job.”
Problems Ben Solo never had: a three-bar general clambering out of his bed at 0530 hours, dialing up the lights, and scouring the floor for uniform pieces.
Hux scoffs exasperation and snaps his jacket over his arm. He takes a few steps, eyes on the floor, then picks up his jodhpurs. He smoothes them out, brushing phantom lint off the polyblend.
His hair is a mess, hanging nearly into his eyes, and his freckled arms jut like skeletonized remains from the loose sleeves of his designated sleepwear.
He insists he’ll wake up cold, so after sex--without fail--he gets up, cleans up, and puts on his spare gray gym shirt and black shorts, like he’s still a skinny cadet about to barely make his physical training requirements.
And then he gets up at 0530 hours and turns on the motherfucking lights.
Knowing this, it should have been easy to resist last night. It was well into gamma shift by the time Kylo got back to the Finalizer, and the ship’s taking him directly from Snoke’s hands to the scorched-ground campaign on Falleen. If Hux’s aura is anything to go by, it’s been bloody on both sides.
What Kylo actually needed--between training and counterinsurgency operations--was a break. And even after four years, sex with Hux isn’t exactly relaxing.
But the murmur of the war, the tangle of rasping voices, vanished once Hux’s fingers were on the clasps of his mask. From there, it was easier to keep drowning it out.
Hux didn’t mind the purple-green contusion spreading across Kylo’s jaw, nor the collage of bacta patches plastering his ribcage. The sick fuck. He pressed his thumb to the center of the bruise until it buzzed in Kylo’s teeth.
“You let him do this,” he said, as if that were personally disappointing.
But then he kissed him, deliberate and possessive, and the leather of his gloves was cool as he cupped Kylo’s neck.
Now, he picks one of them off the floor and scans for its mate, swearing quietly.
“Dresser,” Kylo sighs. “With your sidearm.”
“Shit. Yes.” Hux whirls toward the dresser, where his right glove glints next to his blaster. He crosses the floor and sets the left one next to it. The pistol’s muzzle is pointed out toward hyperspace. Safe direction. He turns to Kylo.
“Will you be working this cycle?” he asks, leveling each syllable to form an accusation, not a question.
He was in Kylo’s arms last night, still out of breath, when he said there were five detainees in the brig. They resisted FOSB tactics and require your skillset.
Kylo inhales. “Yeah, I’ll be fucking working. Am I not allowed to go in at beta shift?”
Hux picks up his belt. “I’m not your CO.”
“Damn straight.”
Hux glances at the ceiling and sweeps into the refresher with his uniform. His flare of irritation radiates into the Force, lingers like the halo of an ancient flashbulb, before it too dissipates, leaving only the shadow of Falleen.
Even with Hux out of arm’s reach, the shadow seeps out beneath the crack of the refresher door like ink from shattered vials, releasing wordless voices into the room. They blend into a low rushing sound, like the scratch of pen to parchment. It buzzes through the air. Thickens it.
Kylo swallows, clenches his eyes shut. Focus. Tune it out.
Beneath the whispers, the tap runs.
Kylo breathes in and out.
A part of him wants to follow Hux in there, press his lips to his neck and press his body against the counter and touch him until he’s just a man again. Ankle deep in the shadow, and Hux’s bones moving under his hands.
The tap goes off. The sonic whistles.
Kylo doesn’t move. He runs through breathing exercises, the ones wired in by Skywalker, the ones branded in by Snoke.
This is strength.
It doesn’t feel like it, but the proof is that he can even feel this shit. A week with Snoke, and of course he’s more receptive to the Force.
Even if it’s the receptiveness of a raw fucking nerve--
He inhales. Counts out an exhale.
--whatever it takes.
Snoke didn’t bring him off Supremacy this time; he didn’t have to. They spent it in a sealed training bay, as suffocating as a Class-II atmosphere.
He hardly knew he was in that training bay. He hardly knew he was in space, or that he was twenty-seven years old. (The bruise was the least of it.)
His fingers wander to the raised edges of the bacta patches.
Snoke’s criticism ricochets through his brain.
Snoke’s blows reverb through his skin.
The knife Snoke put in his hand trembles in his mind’s eye. The blade pierces his own skin, and the serrated line of blood trails down his abdomen, and the pain is a single, focused point, like the unerring arc of a blaster bolt, through a tangle of sensations. The ancient, clawing terror of too much, of not good enough. A hundred stained shapes in the Force. A hundred death rattles and restive shrieks.
Kylo picks at the middle patch. The corner comes up, stinging, and he works his finger beneath the adhesive. He traces the roughness of the scab. And he shouldn’t do it, but he pushes his thumb into it. The flesh hasn’t healed enough, but he slowly peels it back. Blood beads along the reopened wound. The live skin at the edges burns.
“Did you need some help with that?”
Out of the refresher, Hux stands at the foot of the bed again, hair and uniform in place. His gaze tracks the movement of Kylo’s hand under the sheet. Fuck’s sake. His lips pull into a smirk.
Kylo’s face warms. Hux isn’t about to get an explanation. But that doesn’t mean he’s winning the point.
Kylo levels his chin at him. “You offering?”
“I’ve got to be on the bridge,” Hux says, but he steps toward the bed.
And it’s on Kylo’s tongue, lodged in his throat: Please, baby. Come on.
But as Hux moves toward him, the shadow spills around his feet.
The whispers swell, and all Kylo can picture is Hux’s beautiful, thin hands on him, dripping bruise-dark onto his legs. Hux just showered, but his uniform will reek of burned metal, the rubble of orbital bombardments. He’ll bite his lips and taste ink.
Kylo blinks, and the image dissolves. He swipes at the covers, exposing his hand.
Hux’s eyes follow the movement, land on the crescents of blood beneath Kylo’s fingernails. For a second, his lips part, and the ripple that crosses his face could be fear. But it passes. His mouth settles into a beleaguered line, and his eyes track to the top bacta patch.
“Please don’t fuck with those,” he says.
Kylo curls his fist. “I’m not fucking with them.”
Hux turns and crosses to the dresser. “Why don’t you just get up?”
To his credit, he doesn’t invoke the detainees.
The detainees, who require Kylo to splinter their minds and slip in through the cracks, tear open the contents like a well-placed bomb and sift through the rubble.
And it should be easy.
You observed Snoke’s tactics all week.
Kylo’s breath catches in his throat, but he swallows, trying to school his face.
“I need to sleep,” he manages.
Hux sighs as he tugs his gloves on, glances at Kylo like he’s a missed fleck of lint. He checks his sidearm’s safety and holsters it. “Then I’ll see you at twelve hundred.”
“Yeah.”
Kylo makes a point of rolling over but flips back around as Hux approaches the doorway. The doors whir apart, and his charcoal-black form merges with the corridor outside.
The doors click shut, and silence spreads. He lies back, trying to let the muted gray of the room soak into him.
When he first came to the Order, this felt so different from his cell on Ossus. The sterile, industrial efficiency of the design, all gleaming surfaces and monochrome--it had a stark beauty compared to a stone hut with only a curtain for a door. These walls shouldn’t close in on him too.
Not now. He’s better. He’s on the right path. But the Force still rasps. The ink still leaks across the floor.
Where the regular contours of Hux’s presence dissolve, the whispers linger. And without Hux’s emotions--such as they are--to dilute them, the voices swell. They take on pitch and dimension. They’re not the indistinct murmur of a crowd, but the hundred thousand voices that form it.
“Run--”
“No--”
“I love you.”
“What was that sound?”
The shadow trickles down the walls.
“It’s my arm--”
“Where will we go now?”
Kylo closes his eyes again.
Just meditate. Get out of here. Clear your mind.
He’s been trained for this by two masters.
But it’s loud, and it’s suffocating, and he can’t, too weak, undisciplined, he can’t--
His eyes fly open.
Across the gray slate of the ceiling, villas crumble into heaps of dust and green stucco. Smoke plumes rise over a skyline. Stormtrooper armor chars, cracks, bursts. Bloodied faces stare without eyes.
“Falleen.” Hux’s lips had brushed his ear. He was beautiful and breathless. “I need you on Falleen.”
Kylo tears his gaze from the carnage.
The whispers rush like wind.
“It’s over.”
Across the chamber, ink pools under a low plinth, where the warped and burned-out remnant of his grandfather stares up at him, ever-present. (Ever-vacant.)
“Tell your sister--”
A chill infuses the air. Kylo’s rapid breathing fogs before his lips. His heart hammers in his ears, in the seams of his cuts, and he has to get it together, he has to leave, needs silence or sensation or work or a hail of blasterfire--
“There’s good in him.”
He should’ve just gotten up. He should’ve joined Hux in the shower. He should’ve grabbed Hux’s hand and told him to drink his tea in here, anything--
“Ben.”
The single syllable rises above the roar. The other voices cease, as if some transmission were abruptly jammed.
“Ben.”
The deadname reverbs through the stillness of the room.
Kylo’s pulse skyrockets.
This isn’t the echoes of Falleen’s dead, nor even the hues of emotion that sometimes radiate from Vader’s relic. It’s the distinct aura of another sentient being--but about as strongly as he’d sense it a half-klick away. He isn’t alone.
But he shouldn’t be able to hear a being who feels that distant. It’s wrong. Vertigo rushes over him; his ears ring. But he scrabbles upright, groping for his saber. It’s in the fucking floor, fuck --
The voice fills the air itself, like an aftershock of thunder, still far off. “Do you really think that would help?”
Whatever this thing--this presence --is, it clocked his movement. Even more reason to have a weapon in his hand.
“Let’s find out,” he says, as his heart hammers his breastbone.
He reaches for the saber, willing it toward him across the particles of air and the threads of the Force. It moves in the floor beside the dresser, a single feeble twitch. It doesn’t rise.
He tries again, straining against the Force, like he’s eleven years old again and grasping for praise. But it’s like the blood beneath his nails is pure duracrete. It’s too much to bear. His hand falls to the bed, quivering.
“What the hell,” he breathes.
But there’s no time to try again. He scrambles out of bed, half-dressed and bandaged, making for the weapon.
The voice rings out again, at the pitch of a whisper, but it permeates the room. “What are you going to do?” it asks. “Duel me?”
Kylo freezes in his tracks and wheels around, scanning for a target.
“You can’t fight this,” the voice continues.
Across the room, the dark, fluid shadow seeps from beneath the plinth. It matches the void-black of the eye sockets, impenetrable.
Kylo’s diaphragm twists. “Who are you?” he demands, as if he doesn’t know the answer.
As if this isn’t the very thing he’s spent three years begging for. He’s spent it on his knees in his bedroom floor, in front of a charred hunk of metal that might actually understand him. That belonged to the one person in the galaxy who ever would have.
“Someone who’s heard you,” the voice replies.
For a moment, relief washes the fear from him.
“What took you so long?” Kylo asks, taking a step toward Vader’s mask. His own is at his feet, discarded last night. He walks past it.
The voice hums; soft static crackles on the air. “You can finally sense it.”
“I’m strong enough now?” Kylo returns, managing skepticism.
“I fear that’s the case.”
The relief evaporates, but the air stays charged, frigid as night on Starkiller, the blizzard clouds low. It’s the same kind of anticipation.
Kylo wets his lips. “What do you mean, fear?”
The shadow reaches a meter out from the base of the plinth now, and Kylo steps into it. It isn’t inky liquid-- it isn’t real, it isn’t here--but it’s cool around his bare feet and ankles, brushing them like a mist.
“You’re so strong in the Darkness that you can sense what this is.” The shadow ripples around Kylo’s feet. “What you’re taking part in.”
This is praise.
It’s validation, not from Snoke but from his own flesh and blood, that this is all working. (That it’s worth it.) But the ice drifting around his diaphragm doesn’t feel like applause.
Kylo stops at the low seat he keeps in front of the plinth.
“Right,” he replies. His shaking breath clouds the air like a dragon’s smoke. “I mean, we’re at war--”
He starts to sit in front of the mask, where he’s supposed to sit, where he’s supposed to be when he finally reaches Vader, but the voice stops him.
“Don’t look at that,” it says, and the air ripples.
Kylo’s ears pop, some of the pressure lightening. He turns from the shriveled mask to the foot of his bed. He springs to his feet. And reaches again for his saber before he can think.
On his side of the bed, mussed and turned down, the sheet pulls tight around a humanoid shape, covered head to foot. The form is still. Shrouded and lifeless.
Kylo stumbles back, before he can even fully register--
Or maybe it only just now materializes--the second he glances at the foot of the bed and tears his eyes away from the dead form long enough to take in anything else--but he freezes entirely.
Past the foot of the corpse-shape stands a blue-limned figure, more vivid than any hologram. Brown hair curls to his shoulders. A white scar marks his cheek. He’s younger than Kylo. Better looking by almost anyone’s standard.
Kylo’s fist curls at his side, even as the blood drains from his head.
“What--” he murmurs. “What is this?”
The figure steps toward him. “A choice,” it says, simply. “You still have one.”
Kylo swallows. “About what?”
The figure seems to shift, flicker like a trick image. Some optical illusion, where you’re supposed to see either the gundark or the fir-tree, never both at once.
The figure’s jawline tenses. Burn scars stamp its neck, crawling toward its face, blotchy and twisted. Its eyes flash jaundiced amber.
“Whether you remain like this.” A ragged, metallic hiss fills the air, like a bad respirator. “Whether you stay on my path.”
“This is where I’m supposed to be,” Kylo replies.
The figure’s scars dissolve. Its irises wash out to hyperspace blue. “Does it feel that way?” it asks.
It reaches for Kylo’s face with a gloved hand, its fingers grazing the bruise on his cheek. He can’t feel it, not like the pressure of flesh on flesh--Hux’s touch and the warmth of his mouth--but a chill accompanies it, like the black mist around his feet. It seeps into Kylo’s skin, but he can’t bring himself to pull away.
“It’s going to be worth it,” he murmurs. He insists. “I have to become stronger. And then we’re going to defeat the Republic. We’re going to change the galaxy.”
The figure’s hand drops. “You believe them when they say that.”
Kylo bristles. He can’t step back, so he steps around the ghost. “Of course I do.”
“Right.” The figure matches his step, as if to circle him. It flickers, shifts. Its eyes bore into him like gold bullets recovered from some Sith ruin. “You have to. What’s left for you if you don’t?”
Kylo says nothing. Snoke’s phantom touch slides down his neck like ice water.
“So,” the ghost continues, “you’re no Jedi, but you’ve found a better way to save the galaxy. Even if it hurts.”
“Yeah,” Kylo replies, catching his breath, “exactly. It isn’t like Skywalker’s teachings are going to accomplish anything.”
At the name, the ghost’s face both twists and softens, like Kylo’s prodded some old wound.
“They definitely won’t,” it says, almost sadly, “if he just has to keep fighting you.”
Kylo’s fingers curl at his sides. “That’s not my problem. If he picked the wrong side.”
“‘Wrong’?” the ghost echoes. It takes another step around Kylo.
Kylo matches it, moving farther from the plinth. When he turns, the ghost’s mouth is burned and warped.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” it continues.
“That Snoke’s apprentice thinks the Jedi are the wrong side?” Kylo scoffs, even around the tightness in his throat. “There’s a real secret.”
“Because you’re so convinced this side is the right one.”
The shadow hisses cool and damp around Kylo’s feet. Turning back toward his bed, the shrouded form still spans it.
He’s seen as much by now in liberated villages. The mass graves and half-rotted corpses. The price of joining the First Order.
It might be a trick of the light, but a black burn marks the center of the sheet.
Kylo blinks, tears his eyes away. He stands above his lightsaber now, where it’s half-buried in the plasma-singed fabric of his cowl. Too many near headshots. Thank the Force for the mask. (Sure. Right.)
“I already tried the other side,” Kylo returns. “I’d never go back. No matter if this is…”
Kylo trails off, and the ghost’s features soften again. Its shoulders drop, and it gives him a crooked grin.
“Miserable?” Anakin Skywalker supplies.
“I’m not--” Kylo starts. He weaves around the scuffed crown of his helmet, clasps undone as Hux left them.
“You don’t want to be here any more than you wanted to be with your uncle,” Anakin counters.
“That isn’t true.”
“Look around you.” The ghost cuts off his path, forcing him to sidestep. Its mouth curls. “Look at yourself.”
The top cut stings where he reopened it, and the ghost’s eyes sweep his body. Gooseflesh stands up. He feels suddenly exposed, in a way that not even Hux’s demanding gaze brings on.
Hux knows him well enough by now not to expect any better, not to expect anything but a wreck. But this man finds him wanting. The plastered together remains of a should-be Jedi Knight. But it would be worse to acknowledge it. To fold into himself and pick up his clothes like some kind of veil. He stands firm.
The sigh of a respirator fills the air. Influx and out. Ebb tide, flow.
“So you want this?” The words hiss low through a vocabulator, though Vader’s scarred face remains human and uncovered. “You want your master to tear you to pieces? You want your general to end five worlds?”
“I don’t have anything to do with Starkiller--” Kylo starts.
The shadow churns cool around his feet. It’s spread with each step he’s taken.
The ghost moves closer. “You refuse to understand.”
Kylo’s breath catches, but defiance wins out over fear. “What’s to understand?” he retorts. “The First Order uses whatever means it has to. I can’t control that.”
“Yet you remain here.” Vader’s voice thrums low underfoot.
“I told you. I don’t have another--”
“You want this,” the ghost repeats. It’s a statement now, though. Objective and incontrovertible. “You want to break minds. Lead massacres. Burn worlds.”
“I didn’t say that,” Kylo returns. “I said I have to.”
The ghost scoffs. “Because you have no control.”
A stone lodges in Kylo’s throat, but a part of him wants to burst out laughing.
You think? You fucking think?
You try spending thirteen years in a death cult, you try suffering at the hands of the Dark Side--
A chill runs up Kylo’s arms. The breath leaves him. There’s a reason he always assumed Vader would understand him.
But the ghost takes his silence as an answer. “So take back control. Choose something else.”
“I’ve never--” Kylo stops, thins his lips against a tremor. “I didn’t have a choice before either, with the Jedi. I don’t--“
The golden eyes flash. A cybernetic hand sweeps from the shadow to the shroud. “Whose dead do you think these are?”
The murmur of voices rises again from the black pool around Kylo’s feet. The mist has congealed into something cold, black, and viscous. Whispers curl up from it, around him, like so much vapor.
“Stop, my kids--”
“I’ll tell you anything--”
“Do you think your general has just marked you?” The ghost laughs, a low vibration that hums in Kylo’s jaw.
“What do you want from us?”
“I surrender, please--”
The ghost circles, walking him closer to the bed. “Do you think they’re all mine?”
“Ben, please--”
“Ben, you killed him--”
“Ben, don’t--”
“Ben--”
“Ben--”
“Stop!” Kylo shouts aloud, hands pressed to his ears.
A ripple runs through the raised sheet. His voice resonates in the floor, in the durasteel paneling, threaded through with the Dark. The shadow doesn’t recede, but he can move his feet again. His eyes prickle, and he curls into himself.
“Stop,” he breathes, tinny and unsteady in his own ears. “That isn’t my name.”
The whispers die to nothing, as if carried off on a gust of wind.
When Kylo looks up, the ghost’s face is beautiful again, the only thing marring it that thin white scar. But its eyes glitter gold, and its jaw is taut. Its mouth twists.
“So you have some power after all.”
Kylo’s breath comes short. Ben Solo was always someone else. “That kid died,” he says.
The ghost’s grin is a knife. “Which one of them?”
The voices swirl.
“What is that, Mom?”
“Go away!”
“Please--”
“Fuck,” Kylo murmurs, covering his face. His inhales come in shallow gasps. He’s fucking hyperventilating. A sob tangles wet in his voicebox. “Fuck, I can’t--”
“Hey.” Blue flashes in Kylo’s periphery. The ghost is close to him, a breath away. He looks up, meets its eyes. They’re light again, and its mouth is soft.
“Sweetheart,” it says, “you don’t have to be this. You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be.”
Kylo inhales unsteadily. “I know.”
“What you have to do then--” The ghost steps back. Burns crawl across its mangled face, pushing the boyish features aside like melting makeup. “--is choose.”
“I have chosen,” Kylo replies.
He stands beside the bed now, back at the head of it. The shrouded form lies under the sheet, just centimeters from his fingertips. It isn’t real, it can’t be real. Not any more than the specter talking to him. Than the dark mist, the spilled ink, following him across the floor.
Vader’s scars writhe and contort, as if the skin were being burned again. As if it were still burning, on some infinite loop of self-immolation. The golden eyes bore into him, spidered with bloodshot capillaries, obvious at this proximity.
“If you’ve chosen,” the ghost echoes him as its gaze turns to the covered shape, “then look at what you picked.”
Kylo recoils. “No,” he retorts. “What is this? Why would I…” The question withers behind his teeth. But no. His injuries weren’t that bad. There wasn’t even internal bleeding this time. But the evidence in front of him… “Am I already--”
The ghost shakes its head. “I wouldn’t be here if it were too late.”
Confirmation that he’s still alive shouldn’t twist another knot in Kylo’s diaphragm. It really shouldn’t.
“Then what’s--” Kylo breaks off, hand moving toward the edge of the sheet as if drawn by gravity. He stops mid-motion, just in time, balling his fist. He breathes a curse.
He keeps vowing Ben Solo’s gone, but in the Force, nothing is created nor destroyed. Of course there’s some shade of him, some piece of him consigned to the Cosmic Force, still intact enough to be recognizable. Not yet decomposed and digested.
“The dead kid,” Kylo says.
The ghost’s scars dissolve, but its mouth still twists cruelly. “Because he’s definitely your only victim.”
The shadow churns around Kylo’s feet, ice-cold and unctuous, lapping at his skin. The war whispers the same obscenities that follow Hux. The rubble and the eulogies. The sniper bolts. The mushroom clouds.
Interlaced with the echoes of what’s already done are the silhouettes of what’s to come. Of tomorrow and Falleen and the singing of Kylo’s lightsaber. The sparks fly upward. The death rattles wrap around his feet.
Kylo’s lips tremble. His pulse pounds under the bacta.
The five detainees will tense and writhe and scream. One will breathe their last into his mask’s ventilator. It will taste of burned metal. (Of Hux.)
Kylo breathes in. His fingers work at his side. “I already know,” he says.
The ghost’s eyes glint gold. “Then what are you afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid,” Kylo replies, though the quaver of his voice makes him a liar. “I just--”
Vader’s face flickers, softens into boyish gentleness. The blue eyes, though, look ages deep. “You’ll never find balance if you don’t accept what you are. Who you are.” Anakin Skywalker’s mouth tugs, but the smile immediately contorts. Shifts. Fire eats the flesh. “Take it from me.”
The ink swirls, rises to Kylo’s ankles. He shivers.
Looking Vader in the eye--looking Anakin in the face--the conflict etches itself into the Force itself, chilling and heating the air in turns, like something feverish. Diseased.
And maybe that’s the curse of the Chosen One, that true balance is unachievable, that the best Vader could ever have hoped for was division: a magnetic storm contained within one man, the push and pull of dipoles the only thing binding him together. Maybe he was doomed to this half-life. This half-death.
Maybe it was all prophesied.
Maybe he had no control.
The ghost flickers, held in limbo, some two-way transmission, cutting in and out.
Kylo thins his lips.
No. Vader’s choices were his own.
Then how much more so yours?
The days of prophecy are long over. The Jedi are dead, and with them their visions and projections.
There’s only here and now. The green arcs of blasterfire and the yoke of a TIE fighter and the crackle of a hazardous lightsaber. There’s only Hux, and his beautiful hands that know only the work. Only the discarded mask and the smoke of an air campaign.
The future is the Order’s.
And Kylo wants it. He wants it, for all the whispers on the air, for the shadow cold at his feet. That’s his too.
The ghost shifts beside him. The flames warp Vader’s neck and face.
Kylo’s heart pounds, and his fingers shake. But he lifts a hand toward the shroud.
“Don’t be afraid,” the ghost says.
Kylo isn’t. He takes the edge of the sheet, where it’s gathered around the head, and pulls it back. Every muscle in his body is tensed, jaw set, braced for something rotting or skeletonized. Something familiar and staring.
Instead, the pillow is empty. Nothing lies here but rumpled gray linens.
As the sheet peels back, the shape dissolves, collapsing in on itself in a ripple of bedding. Kylo drops his white-knuckled grip on it.
At his feet, the whispers don’t diminish, but blend back together into something soft and almost harmonious, like crashing waves.
There’s nothing to fear.
The ghost, golden-eyed, reaches for his arm. Its impossible touch is warm. Kylo covers the shape of its hand, but his fingers slip through it into empty air.