who: Ben Solo Kylo Ren when: Thursday, May 24 where: Near the Military base What: Kylo got something from the portal. warnings: None that I can think of really. status: COMPLETE.
It was a small object, cylindrical, it could be worn at his belt and there was no reason why it ought to have felt as heavy as it did in his hand.
Kylo Ren was making his way away from the military base having picked up the object that the portal had spit out for him, and while he was trying to keep his emotions contained, his current face was no sabaac face. He was a storm of emotions, and anyone near him in the Force would likely have picked up on it, even as he stopped to try to pull those in.
At any time, this particular gift would have created a swirl of emotions, but at this particular time, coming as it did on the heels of memories that he hadn't asked for, but that had forced him to recognize truths about himself that he would have liked to have ignored, it felt like far too much to carry - as if he was having to pull on the Force itself to keep moving with it, to keep carrying it.
Away from the base, he stopped, on a state road a long ways from anywhere, and he pulled his hand up, staring at the hilt in it. It was not unfamiliar, and he could feel the kyber crystal within, just as he could with his current lightsaber, but this one - when he switched it on - something he did now - it was blue.
The sound of it was familiar, comforting even, it was the light itself, the shade of the color that felt wrong to him, and yet.
He'd had to make the lightsaber that he had, and of recent he'd felt as if he struggled with that particular weapon. He'd taken it apart at Christmas, giving the kyber crystal to Eliot, and that had seemed the right decision at the time, as had putting the weapon back together on the Cruise - which had been good because of the monsters and pirates they'd had to fight, ultimately. Since their return he'd struggled with what to do with it. The crystal was fractured, and maybe there was something poetic about that, because he felt fractured, neither truly Kylo Ren, nor Ben Solo, and constantly stretched between two identities, answering to both, depending upon who made the request - and this weapon felt at once instantly familiar, and distinctly foreign.
"What color would you be today?" He asked, moving the blade back in forth, in a basic practice move.
Not blue, he suspected.
But.
He would not again turn a crystal red.
Slowly he moved the blade across the sky, then switched it off, and instead of continuing to carry it, he put it on his belt, where his other one had sat.
Lyrics he'd heard somewhere, from Eliot? Or maybe the shop? - the only way out is to go so far in.
Which was different from letting the past die. It was more like going in, digging in, pulling up every aspect of it, wading through it, and into it, and pulling out the other side without it, but with it. Like an archivist or a museum curator, neither were a job Kylo would ever have believed that he might want.
His fingers touched the hilt and he frowned. What did that even mean in this instance? For a moment he held, the hilt bringing back its own memories of home, of training, of ideals disrupted, fears stirred, hopes squashed, decisions made that could never be unmade, just moved through and from, with a determination to remake himself and to be the sort of man he wanted to be, not who everyone else thought he should be, or shouldn't be. He lifted his fingers from the hilt, and he headed back towards the Physical Cottage, and back in.