“Kylo lowers his cowl. He creeps forward and places his gloved hands against the wall opposite him, and he feels them rather than sees them in the dimness. The marks. All those marks, from the floor to the ceiling, one after another, one for each grueling day. There are neat rows, and there are smaller, messier rows fit in-between the first rows, and then there are diagonal marks crammed into the corners and whatever spaces she could find. Like someone who is writing and runs out of room on the page, so they scrawl the last few letters in one corner. Fourteen years’ worth of marks.
They are less a way of measuring the time than they are a testament to it. One of those routines that keeps you from insanity, that gives your time meaning even as it slips by you into the void of meaninglessness. The marks are senseless to anyone but Rey. For her, the marks constituted the only sense she had in her life until the day she left. Kylo cannot bear it, it hurts to look at. He tugs his gloves off with his teeth and presses his palms to the rusted surface of the metal panel, his shaking fingers curling over the scratched-out tallies. He closes his eyes and feels them instead. Five and five and five all over again, four marks connected by the fifth slash, which is always angrier than the rest. The four are methodical, but the fifth is like a wound. All that futile determination, all that waiting for something she knew wasn’t coming, that still hasn’t come, and never will.
Rey has not returned here. Kylo would have been able to sense the difference in its energy if she had. This place is still trapped in her pain, in the void of her loneliness and denial. She has accepted that her parents are not coming for her, that they are not worth seeking out, that they are dead and gone and better for it. If she had come back here with that grieving acceptance in her heart, this place would not be a wound any longer. It would have stitched itself shut and scarred over. But it is still here, trapped, and bleeding.
All the wasted years… the wasted years… if only I had known, Kylo thinks deliriously. Of course, there is no way he ever could have known who she was or what she would mean to him one day, so it’s useless for him to think like that. And even if he had known, what could he have done? Nothing would have changed. She would have wasted that time anyway, friendless and wanting. What happened in this place is not his burden to carry.
And yet, its weight drags at him all the same.”
So this is an excerpt from my WIP Post-canon Reylo fanfic, Blue Star. I couldn’t help myself, I had to draw this scene. I felt obligated. Of course, I didn’t realize I would end up spending 12+ hours on the damn thing, but here we are. (¬_¬)
We Are What We Feel 