When the elevator doors finally pull open, the hall is dead silent and there is no movement before me, but that doesn't stop the hesitancy of my slow footing as I creep out and look both ways before sprinting to my destination.
I felt as if my lungs were slowly filling with water, as if there was less space in them for the air to sink into. Inflating them felt like pushing up a lead weight on my chest. I sucked in the air as if it was ice flooding my system instead of fear.
When I finally reach the hatch to the Escape Bay, I am grateful that I don't have to use what little energy I had left to try and pry it open, for it is already unlocked.
I walked into the empty, darkened bay, the vaulted ceiling gaping like an empty void overhead and the silvery slants of starlight, piercing through the window that beamed all around the endless tables with beeping monitors. I cradle my arm to my chest, which was now turning into a mess of purple and blacks.
On one of the desks, a workers lunch is rotting away in the crisp air whilst a knife and fork sit criss-crossed on the plate. I grabbed the dull knife, that was as intimidating as a pencil and hooked it into the band of my skirt.
The silence gnawed at my twisting insides. Like a gaping void, needing to be filled with sounds, words, anything to focus my mind away from the grief, fear and apprehension, but the silence was only poisonous in its nothingness and eerily unnatural, like a battle devoid of gunfire.
Swallowing my last bit of nerves, I cast an eerie look around the room, it was empty, there was nobody here. Locking the hatch behind me, I gave it no more than a sidewards glance as I slipped past with nothing more than a whisper of bravery and the slight scuff of my soft, soled boots that were coated in both, my own blood and Five's, as I walked down the stairs with shaking knees.
When I pull out the data drive and open the metal motor-box that was dead-bolted into the wall beside all the closed Escape Pods, I sigh as I try to remember where it belonged
As my fingers pry away the wires surrounding the ports, the silence stretched thinner and thinner, like a balloon blown too big, until the temptation to rupture was lingering in the air.
My breathing which was shaky, thick and heavy in my chest, started to fill the void, but wherever I moved, that silence still somehow, followed, always watching and never fading. My own, personal shadow.
Fragments of thought, splinters of words, and droplets of silence spun into a kaleidoscopic jumble, shifting infinitesimally, and then falling into an incredible new pattern as I choked on the tears that began to form in my frustrations when I was trying to recall which port the data drive belonged to.
"Six."
Coughing on my own breath, I spin around abruptly to the sound and heave myself against the box to create a further distance between him and I.
My eyes were trained on the spectre, my heavy eyelids a fraction too slow to blink, as the irises expanded and nearly shoved away all the colour around him. My head tilted upwards to his face, eyes sliding into focus among the brown.
It was as if my brain was suffering a massive short circuit and was struggling to compute as I stuttered incoherent words to him. He moved into my line of sight beneath the blinkering lights of the Escape Bay.
I couldn't find the right thing to say out of a million forming cries in my brain to be held in his grip, but with one glance at the dull saber that he held in his hands, not alight but threatening to be, I kept my distance and uttered the only thing that sounded right on my tongue,
"How did you get here so fast?"
His mouth slightly flickers upwards, "I know this ship better than you do."
I swallow the lump of nervous bile in my throat. Again, I was so close to freedom, but he was blocking it once again. I can feel the silver butter knife that is tucked into my skirt but I don't even bother to retract it as Kylo eyes it.
His pain is mine. I feel it raging in his violent soul and it turns my veins to ash. Staring into his eyes, I recall the love that was bound in the brilliant browns which had somehow morphed into a fading warmth that only blazed with betrayal.
It seems most of my new enemies had started out as loved ones, but when I cast a fragile look into his soul, I find the true enemy of love is when emotional indifference takes command by the name of loyalty. But his loyalty to The First Order didn't swell in the vessels of his beating heart, I did – The First Order were only a Supreme Leader who sat on his shoulder.
Indeed, love doesn't command both of our higher logic and our primitive drive to survival, but it still lingers in the magnetic pull between us, somehow still alive and frail as it is being stretched so thin, it may eventually break.
When my face drops before him, I realise I feel incomplete without Kylo, for every time I look at him, I feel love and inspiration coursing through me. Standing tall and digging its heels into the ruthless battlegrounds around us.
But, I can't stay, no matter how much my heart wishes I could.
"I'm sorry, Kylo." I sobbed, shaking my head. "I lied. I was a traitor and at times, I did use you, but I needed to get out of here..."
Kylo takes a few feet forwards. I tumble around the wall and near over to the escape pods to create distance between my racing heart and the dull saber in his homely hands.
My back presses up against the hatch of a pod, and I squish myself against it tightly, flinching when he draws close with a dark face.
I gulp and continue as the tears begin to fall.
"I know you don't care for me anymore, but even though I did all those horrible things, that doesn't mean I never loved you – I'll always love you."
Right when there is barely inches between us, he stops his footing and looks down upon me. His mouth twitches slightly whilst he lowers his head and sighs, flicking his sight to the saber in his right hand.
The silence he causes is still eating my soul up. My Universe swirled around me and so did my uneasy stomach. My heart would've shattered into a million pieces just by that one look if it hadn't already been broken a million times before.
"That is something which I will never lie about." I whisper.
When his meet mine once more, there is a glass man around them and his walls suddenly come crumbling down around our feet.
His voice comes soft and sceptical, "How can you be so sure that you love me? You tried to leave me." He says for the second time today.
He puts the lightsaber into his holster and I watch him with crumbling features as I breathed between the short distance of our hearts, "I know I love you because the reason I wished to leave was to save you too."
Touching my cheek with the side of his leather thumb, his lips form into pensive grin – Ignoring the specks of blood upon my skin. Kylo's face is passive, but his cheeks tint a light red and I am unsure if that is because he will regret killing me when the time eventually comes.
For a split second, I am content with the death that is to come, so long as I let him know he had nursed my heart before he ever slayed it.
His mouth was slightly turned down and his eyebrows were curved downwards too. He's strong, he doesn't usually cry over things like this, but the thought was there. His face showed feelings of sorrow, I could see it all bleed into the honey brown coat.
I'm leaning into his touch, trying to imprint it into my skin before his hands turn violent, but they never do.
"Six, I can't leave The First Order." Kylo mutters and I feel his pensive breath fan my face cooly. "And I can't refuse the order's of my Supreme Leader, either.
I know tensing against the shaking of my limbs beneath him is useless but I do it instinctively, trying to suppress for a few more moments what I know I cannot. I need to drink in the silence to counteract the apprehension that threatens to engulf me, I want to open my heart and all my greatest fears to him, but he will never return the favour. I want to beg him to place the data drive in the right slot and leave with me, but this kind of thick silence only lays our love bare.
He brings a warm chill to me, so confusing in the hot goosebumps that lace my skin when my nostrils fill with his addictive musk. In a moment, the tension is devoid of even the stars comfort, but beneath the crimson lips, they work like a salve to my frayed nerves.
My eyes flicker and quiet tears fall whilst they pool in his own. "Why not? You can leave, you don't have to bow down to him anymore... Stay with me, I love you."
Kylo heaves a short and quick breath in, and he shakes his head as his face caves. I know he's hiding a truth from me, of how much this is really to do with sadness and the scars that just won't heal. Yet, his hand never leaves my cheek and the thumb never stops brushing delicate circles.
"I– No." He stutters and I sob into his hand, turning away from his gaze but he only pushes my eyes back to him.
In his browns is where my heart was buried and I can see my grave beginning to hollow out the irises. In this stance, I stayed in his grip, yet my humanity still wished him far away. I wished him to be already living another life of love without me and that very notion broke me some more, releasing tears into the cold air. Ben Solo was gone, leaving only the cold chest of Kylo Ren, which I had thought I once warmed, if it is not me who can do it, then I hope another can bring Ben home, for I am meeting a different fate by his soft hands.
Leaning on his other hand that he lifted and rests on the hatch behind me, he looks deeply around my features as if he is trying to savour their individual canvassing, he leans in shortly and I await the lightsaber to ignite once more out of his holster, ready to embrace the plummet into my pulsating heart.
But the burning sensation never comes, only the press of his soft lips against my own. The kiss was slow and comforting in ways that life could never be. His hand rested below my ear, his thumb caressing my tear-stained cheek as our breaths mingled.
When he pulls away, I am left dazed and confused, parting my wet, lonely lips and whispering his name.
He does the same and in my anxiety stricken heart, a new flame burns that emotion and leaves it with a passion that is too strong to drown. Loosing myself into those eyes, I breathe in the soul that the brown exudes.
The flesh of my cheek forms sparks beneath the leather which spirals down every corner of my body; And the next thing I know, he has slammed his lips back to mine, nearly knocked all wind from my lungs in his eager force.
I hardly had a moment to react before he pressed his tongue to the seam of my lips and, at my grant of access, delved inside my mouth. It was a very sloppy kiss with the strong scent of need in our billowing breaths. My arms reached up and tangled around his thick, strong neck.
Arching up against his chest, I leaned my lower back against the hatch, but with a loud hiss by my ears, the scanner granted access to Kylo's, now bare, hand and opens behind me.
He pushes me into the small space with shifting feet and never withdraws his mouth from my own as I now twine my fingers into the fabric of his uniform.
Leaning me against the window of the escape pod, I flinch my bruised arm away from him when he tries to pin it around my head, deciding to instead lay it along his broad shoulders.
Our kiss is needy and long and in the tingles it brings to my skin, I know we are both saying a tender goodbye with the silk of our tongues.
He withdraws for a short second and stares me down once more with an expression that I couldn't quite place. Swallowing, he looks nervous as his Adam's apple bobs and his chest rises.
When he says the words, my heart screams to be connected till both of our last breaths. I want to spend an eternity of love with him. Unconditional, irrevocable devotion. My soul which is deep in my gut, swells with pride and I wish this one second could last an eternity, with Kylo standing so fragile before me, who is made from the same fibre.
"I have never felt this way before, so I don't even know if it is what it must be... But my heart only beats for you and it will be yours forever-more. " He croaks, his voice barely audible but it punches its way into my core, "And though it only gave you a cruel destiny in return, I can never take away the fact that I do love you."
Unexpectedly, his hand drifted to my hip, settling there and pulling me closer. I inhaled sharply and leaned into his warm chest, chiseled to perfection as I listened to the heart that was now mine. I splayed my hand against it and his breathing quickened as did mine.
He loved me. He truely did.
These feelings I have for him can't end until my body ceases to function and my soul is released for whatever comes after. I hope that somehow they are embedded into my soul, that our love will endure even when death finally consumes me.
Even if my end does come by his hands that hold me close, I still love him and I would never regret ever doing so, for I am willing to repeat the action over and over. A million times over. I had hurt him several times and he had hurt me too, yet here we both stand, like we are each-other's hope. His icy heart melted by my fire, and embracing mine with the flutter of wild feelings that I had never felt before I had met him.
I see it now, that destiny and fate are two different things. Destiny can be changed by an individual, but fate is written by another. He is my treasure and my poet. Kylo taught me to live fearlessly, and love limitlessly, though he didn't know what love even was.
Meeting him was destiny, but falling for him was fate. It was bound to happen. Kylo is the one who paints my monochrome Universe and gives me a purpose to breathe. He was the one who kept me shielded and tried till the very end to defend me from the brutality that was my true destiny.
And for that, he will be the one I will die a thousand times for.
"I love you." I say again, but no matter how many times I do, the three words will truely never confess how deeply I adored him. I glance to the lightsaber in his holster and pull slightly away, giving him a small, sad smile and nodding, "It's okay."
He could shield me from everything, but not from himself.
Kylo made a noise in the back of his throat, a noise that tried to keep the tears that welded at bay. He nodded too and slowly withdrew his weapon.
He kissed me once more, but it was short and delicate. So faint, it only whispered his love.
My limp body began to tremble uncontrollably as I pulled away and he took a slight step back to ignite his saber.
In those open and loving eyes, they became my own soul in the months we had spent together. When he touched me me with those gentle but deadly hands, I was made anew, no longer as glass, but as if my body was reborn in its most perfect form, born to love in its purpose. And so, in this love there is a deep gratitude, a sense that what he gave to me was sacred and transient, passing in time into the eternal cycles of living and death.
"I love you, Ben." My last words will be.
Taking another step back, ready to swing the lightsaber into my heart, he lifts it up and shakes his head.
"The light inside of me is dead." He reminds me once more but I only smile, for he is so wrong. The light in him isn't truely tarnished, for the man inside Kylo Ren is my anchor, he is the one that gives me hope when the darkness creeps in.
He speaks once more.
"But he lives through you now."
My lips part and I become perplexed.
Just when he begins to strike, I immediately flinch and await the burning death, but I am only met with the scene of Kylo dulling his weapon as he nears. In a quick swap, he snatches the forgotten, butter knife out of my skirt and it swipes the skin beneath it in a slight pinch. Gasping, the look in his eyes is rushed, but as he held it high above his head, aiming at me below, the silver glistened in the starlight as if it could slice up even the distant sun-rays slowly.
Kylo's expression is exaggerated by the dark shadows around his eyes, and all at once, he plummets the knife into my abdomen, slicing it straight through my scar and twisting the organs behind it.
My cry was a brilliant sound, guttural chokes mixed with an agonised roar. Sinking to my knees whilst continuing to scream, I was convulsing and trembling as I hunched over my wound with my hand pressed tightly against it. Thick blood flowed freely from the gaping hole, running through my fingers and dripping onto the floor.
"You were born with an ability, and as long as you have it, nobody will stop forcing you to live the life that The First Order had compelled into a purpose." Kylo whispers.
The pain throbs in my guts, it's deep and warm in its sharpness but the knife is no longer lodged into my inner organs. I can only hold still, breathe slow and deep as I look up to him with pain swirling without mercy in my eyes.
He had stabbed me. But he had also taken away my only tool as it was torn to shreds inside of me.
Suddenly, when I believe the lightsaber is about to light back up and finish the job, blood begins to fill my mouth and I am awaiting the next blow but he only backtracks out of the pod.
The hatch closes. My eyes grow wide and despite the pain, I pull myself up and bang on the door.
My crimson blood smears on the white.
Looking at him through the small window in the thick panelling, he stares at me with sorrowful features.
"Kylo!" I scream, "What are you doing?!"
I can taste the metallic, but the horror overthrows my senses.
He shakes his head once more and his chin trembles. I can hear his ungloved hand key something into the coder on the side of the pod and my heart threatens to burst.
"Goodbye, Six." He farewelled.
"No!" I wail and the tears begin to flood. "Kylo, please no! You can kill me but don't leave me!"
I tried to open the door, my bare hands pushing and pulling against the smooth surface of the locked hatch. It was all in vain. The door stood stubbornly in its place and so did Kylo on the other-side. A shudder ran through me.
"I'm sorry." Kylo mumbled.
I screamed and cried with more violence than any gale, any war. Not to have him on the other-side of the hatch was a torture to my soul. Being alive despite all the odds, was a ravage to my heart.
"Please don't do this!" I cried.
He shifts the pod into release mode. I can hear all the gears shift.
"I love you." He says last and with a short turn on his heel, that is the last I ever see of him.
I search for something, anything, a crevice, a seal, but the walls are a shiny surface that just barricades the tight air-seal and locks behind it. I'm screaming and I'm banging on the window for an escape, but none of my weak punches can fight my way out as the escape pod begins to float off into space.
Blood is trapped beneath my fingernails and my abdomen is tensing even though that causes more pain.
The Supremacy grows smaller and smaller, but the tug between Kylo and I, only grows.
My prison is a perfect pod, the corners just reachable if I extend my arms and smear blood on all of its surfaces as I break knuckles on the walls. I start pacing or moving around irrationally. The arguments in my head get so fast and so disturbing that my brain shuts down my body. The sweat has completely covered my skin and my heart feels like it's going to explode.
When I turn to the wide window, a ragged breath gets caught in my throat as I near a new ship onwards.
I let out a strangled scream and feel blood well into my throat from the tongue I had just bitten through in vain attempt to keep the stab wound's pain, minimal.
As I near the new ship, darkness is beginning to claw its way into my senses as I am becoming weak in my blood loss. I fall onto my hands and knees as blood pools onto the floor, soaking the bleak uniform with a brilliant colour.
Nausea swirls in my stomach and rises into my throat, but nothing is as sickening as the ache in my heart.
I press a limp hand to my abdomen, sealing the wound shut. My eyes are becoming heavy and just as the ship opens its docking bay for the escape pod, I black out for the second time today.
The void added to the grey in my chest and in the fog, the light was cast dim by the promised storm that comes with loss, as if the colours had been stolen away. The monochrome suited the Universe, for in my heart, soul and mind, there were no pinks or greens, no blues or vivid yellows, there was only the black indentation of Kylo.
When my eyes flutter open, I presume all of this to be some cruel dream that my subconscious has welded up, for I am looking into the familiar browns once again.
But they aren't Kylo's eyes, they are his Mother's.
General Leia sits on the side of my hospital bed and no longer am I wearing the lifeless beige that crimson stains, but a white hospital gown instead.
I can feel the fresh stitches in my abdomen and they feel tight when I slightly flinch away from the gentle hand she places on my stomach.
The floor is slate grey and the walls dove. Above, the ceiling is made from squares laid on a grid-like frame. The light is too bright for my eyes, even though it is foggy behind the intruding tears that follow.
My breathing becomes erratic and I shuffle away from her touch, but she only shoves me lightly back against the bed.
"It's okay!" The General soothes, "It's okay."
She brushes the static hair away from my face and as I look into her familiar eyes, I crumple for this is the closest I will ever get to a reminder of Ben Solo.
"I failed." I sobbed, throwing my head back and gripping my fingers into the sheets around me, "They're all dead because of me! And he let me live!"
Staring at The General, the atmosphere of tension had become so severe and pervasive that I could barely see more than a few feet in any direction, unless I was watching her. At her next words, the air becomes so brittle between her stare and mine, that it could snap but by the way her stare had softened and her lips parted slightly, she speaks the truth in a Universe so tainted by lies.
"I know, but you're here now." She promises me, "And you're safe. That is all that matters."
I shake my head and my mouth curves downwards, "Nobody is safe anymore." I crack, "The First Order are going to obliterate this ship!"
General Leia chuckles and glances out of the window beside my hospital bed. She regains her composure after a millisecond, looking back to me and my face softens at her features. Beneath the slight wrinkles, her skin was soft and pale, flawless beneath the starlight. Her eyes seemed to have gotten brighter, more brilliant. They sparkled against the cosmos like a pair of luminescent diamonds, radiant and beautiful – Her voice matched the honey glow in all its smoothness.
"No, they're not."
I swallow, "Yes, they are!"
She heaves a soft breath inwards, nodding her head to the pane and giving me a small smile.
"Six, take one look out the window."
I follow her order.
As I rested my eyes on the view, I thought for a split second that I was seeing double. The large ships giving a notion of permanence to what is always fleeting, always ready to strike as they pointed at one another. The Supremacy and The Resistance ship far off in the distance – Where were we?
"We're in an escape fleet." She hums behind me as if she could read my mind, whilst brushing gentle touches into my stiff shoulders, "The Resistance still lives on... And so will you."
My stomach churned and twisted. My eyebrows furrowed and I glanced back to her.
She was promising me a future. A future filled with freedom, one so tangible and yet, I still somehow, didn't believe her.
"But – I didn't keep to my end of the deal?" I say in a frail tone of perplexity, "Ben is too lost in Kylo Ren, and he–" I look down to my abdomen, "... He tore away my ability to give you a reminder of him even if I had one."
That was the deal for my freedom. Bring Ben back or give her a reminder of him, and I had neither in my reach... So why was she still granting me the destiny I always wished for?
The General smiles, and it suits her face almost perfectly as she does so – Lifting the air with her pearly whites and giving me a safe beacon in their shine. She inched closer to me and holds my cheek in her palm the way Kylo would. A heavy silence settles over us as she hesitated her next words, whilst staring into my soul with those honey eyes.
"Oh, but you do."
Right when I begin to question her words with a puzzled face, the door opens behind her and a girl with bright blonde hair and features similar to a girl I had grown up with and loved, walks in.
Arion gives me a curt smile and there's a rosy tinge to her pale cheeks as she glances from me and then to the bundle of blanket that she cradles in her arms.
Just as I begin to cry, I hear a smaller one erupt from her hold.