The irony that Freya was freely admitting to the darkness in her wasn't lost on either of them. After all the time and energy Kylo had spent trying to convince Rey of the same, here she was, offering it up to him on a silver platter. That should have made Kyle smug. At the very least, it should have left him with the satisfaction of knowing that once again, he'd been right. He'd been right about the Dark side, that it was always in their nature, and he'd been right that one day she would join him.
After all, he'd just seen it.
Now, though, his victory over her barely registered. He was far too distracted by the careful movements of her hand along his, his attention almost solely focused on her fingers circling around his wrist. Freya's skin was impossibly soft against the rougher texture of his own, something that created the smallest bit of friction between them that felt wholly separate from the electricity generated from each touch through the Force. Kyle was at once surprised by the amount of detail he could feel in every touch from her and also desperate to know more.
There was no amount of training that could have prepared him for this. No amount of faking it either. He was completely out of his element with her, from anything even Kylo had previously experienced with Rey, and yet Kyle didn't feel backed into a corner. He felt a genuine sense of peace, like she said. Balance. In that moment he knew she might be right, too.
So deep he'd plunged inside their charged connection that the sudden tightening of her fingers at his wrist took him briefly by surprise, a small gasp leaving him with the jolt of electricity that ignited his insides as Kyle at once reflexively twisted his hand to grab onto her wrist in return. But he didn't let go. After the lengths he had gone to in order to keep her at a distance, now when she was the closest she'd ever been to him, Kyle didn't attempt to remove himself. The thought of doing so didn't even cross his mind, but after a pause, he did consciously loosen his grip on her wrist as her words sunk in.
"Friend." Kyle tried the word out, glancing down at their hands before meeting her gaze again, almost hesitantly. As if she'd just unearthed a shameful secret about him, one Kyle hadn't even realized he'd been keeping until that moment. He didn't know what it was to have a friend.
So much of his life had been structured in such a way that having any kind of a relationship with others was impossible. He had his parents, once. He had his guardian once. He had the other Resistance leaders, who were as much his colleagues as they were his enemies. Never his equals. He had the people who taught him, who molded him into the Resistance's idea of a fierce killing machine, though he had yet to take a life himself. He was tasked with molding the minds and bodies of others now the way his had once been, but they were not his friends. They were his subordinates. For as long as Kyle had known, he'd always been kept separate from those that had come to exist around him.
Kyle didn't know the first thing about how to be someone's friend, and yet she wanted to be his? Why? The idea was at once so absurd and intriguing that he felt something foreign immediately bubble up in his throat before he viciously swallowed it back down out of fear of the unknown. A laugh, and not a cruel one. The impulse was gone before it could be missed, but Kyle was looking at her strangely now, almost regretfully as his dark eyes held hers. "I don't have friends."