#listen I can‘t unsee it??

[j4degoyl]

also for my fellow Ra.ven C.ycle enjoyers: Will is basically Matthew fjfkdndmdmdl

[korgosse-moved]

listen this is such a simon song & I can‘t unsee it :)))

[waypathfinder]

Crimson Lane - Chapter 7 - Shadow

Moodboard by @ashtyntaytertot  Beta’d by @kathknight and @ashtyntaytertot

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Chapter Text 

It was a record. The third consecutive day temperatures had reached over 45 degrees Celsius. A searing, bone-dry fierceness that parched Rey’s mouth and dried her eyes.

It was the worst time to be homeless, without a water supply or reliable shade.

Rey skulked through the alleyways of Jakku in worn earth-toned rags. The inhabitants watched her, eyeing the swag she clutched at her side. 

The streets of Niima were the most run down in Jakku, attracting transients and tramps, the abandoned and abhorred. It was her hunting ground now, but there were still treasures to find if you knew where to look. And dangers too, if you didn’t.

She’d left this place ten years ago, but it hadn’t changed. The barren streets, run-down cars, walls of graffiti and pawn shops had shifted over time, but they still felt the same. A mirage of heat waves danced above the cracked and spongy roads, and the dilapidated state of the sewers left a rotting odour rising through the ground grates.

It was the last place most people would want to be, but to Rey, it was home.

She was just 16 then, gangly armed, skinny and flat-chested. A bag of bones, rubbery sinew and wiry muscles. Easy pickings.

But Rey knew these streets like the back of her hand, easily navigating through laneways and leaping across rooftops. The roads were quiet in this part of the region, but she was never alone. There was the feeling she was being watched from the shadows, sized up for the bounty of an attack. She had nothing of value: a spare change of clothes, a comb, some tissues, a toothbrush, a screwdriver and a Swiss Army knife.

Her only saving grace was that she was too poor to rob. More trouble than she was worth. So she was bold and reckless, casing up abandoned shacks that might still have food, and learning to squat in forgotten rooms and apartments.

Stepping around the broken bottles and flattened piles of cardboard box beds, she rounded the corner to a block of flats. Ex-state housing apartments that had fallen into disrepair. It was a favourite among squatters and drug dealers. A dangerous junkyard to those who didn’t know better.

She stood silently, gazing up at the boarded and smashed windows. It looked smaller than she remembered and dirtier. The fire escapes had become loose and corroded in parts, but it was still functional.

This was the reason she was here. She drew a deep breath and took a running leap, reaching out to grab the half-collapsed fire escape. It groaned and shuddered as she made contact, threatening to collapse. But it was holding her weight, and that was all she needed.

Rey climbed like a lizard, passing sections where the steps had rusted through. Three floors up, she found what she was looking for.

Someone had already broken the window, and it was large enough for her to shimmy inside. She kicked the remaining shards of glass aside with her boot, enjoying the sound of them smashing on the ground below.

The stairway had come away from the building here, leaving a good metre distance between herself and the window, with a sheer drop to the concrete below.

Hopefully, she would just have to make this jump once.

Clutching the scalding metal of the fire escape, she took a big breath and threw herself off the ledge.  

Oof. Her chest and abdomen crashed against the exterior wall as she grasped hold of the window frame, pulling her body over the serrated edges of glass and onto the kitchen bench beneath the window.

There was a stench of rotting food and mould. Cigarettes and empty bongs lined the kitchen sink, and a thick layer of dust and white powder littered the bench

“Gross,” she muttered, as a swarm of cockroaches scattered into the open cupboards and beneath the fridge when she landed on the lino floor.  

Home.

Her    home.

Or at least it had been before they had sent her away.

***

“It’ll be for the best, Kira,” her mother had told her, tucking her hair into three tidy buns.

“Don’t cry, scout,” her dad added. “It’s just until we get back on our feet. Then you won’t be so much of a—-”

Burden. They didn’t need to say it; she had heard them talking about it last night in their bedroom.

She broke down, and then yelled, and then kicked off a juvenile riot of one, throwing papers and placemats at them until, at last, she planted her five-year-old feet on the floor and refused to move until the worker from Children's Services dragged her out to the van.

Once she was tightly buckled into her seat in the van, she risked one last look back to the place that had been her only home for five years. To wave, to blow them kisses, and big forgiveness for her outburst.

But her parents weren’t there. They didn’t even watch her leave.

That was 11 years ago and they never asked her to come back. When she arrived in Jakku, 16 and homeless again, a fellow scavenger had told her the couple died months ago. It hadn’t been the biggest surprise; they were wasting away before her eyes, even as a young child. She wouldn’t be a burden to them any more, she could provide for herself and for them, budget, repair things abandoned and broken.

They never gave her the chance. Her eyes stung at the thought. As always, she was alone.

“Oh well. That’s nothing new,” she told herself, as she kicked away the shattered glass on grey slate tiles. She would at least make the best of it here. That dodgy fire escape had deterred other squatters. The water still worked, albeit tinged brown. And there was that acrid stink of chemicals that she hoped to air out, but sometimes that smell never left.

The only issue was the bed. Someone had gone to town on it, possibly with a machete. The pillow top was shredded, the spring coils bent out of shape and broken in a sea of discoloured stuffing. She sure as hell wasn’t sleeping on the floor with the roach faeces everywhere. Two blocks away, she had spotted a double-sized dog bed on the side of the road; she could use that.

The paint was cracked, it had a serious cockroach infestation, and she was pretty sure someone had defecated in the loungeroom.

But it would do. It would do nicely.

________________________________________________________________

That was how the dream started, memories of the past, smells, feelings, emotions. Taking her back to that place she had tried so desperately to make home.

But then, the tide always shifted, like darkness preceding a storm. The natural light of her parent’s abandoned apartment bled into night and the nightmare began.

Not again!    her conscious mind rallied, but she was powerless to stop the images unfurling.

She had come back from a day of trading and haggling, body bathed in sweat from the heat and humidity. Too exhausted to take her usual precautions of listening through the walls, or checking the light shadows beneath the door.

Rey shoved the door open, grasping the handle and throwing her shoulder against it to loosen the swollen timber. She stumbled in behind it clumsily. The apartment was pitch black and silent, just how she left it. Except—the hairs stood up the back of her neck—somehow the air seemed crisper; a sharp tang of bay rum aftershave, sweat and leather.

Rey blinked, squinting her eyes into the dark expanse. Straining to hear any noises that didn‘t belong there, a dripping tap, the street sounds floating in from the kitchen and—breathing.

Shit.  

“Hello?” she asked, her voice shaking as she peered through the darkness. “Is anyone here?”

Strong arms, clamped around her from behind and she screamed as she was lifted off the ground. The room erupted with scurrying feet and sharp hisses.

“The chair!” A voice hissed. “Tie her to the chair.”

She was thrown into a metal chair and pinned against it by multiple unseeing hands. Overhead the light flickered on with an electric buzz and Rey clamped her eyes shut at the sudden glare. The man who had grabbed her from behind kneeled in front of her now, coldly binding her hands and feet with cable ties.

“Stop!” she cried. “I‘m just a scavenger. Can‘t you see I don‘t have anything you would want?”

“Shut up,” her captor hissed, tightening the cable ties around her hands, while another man appraised her. This one was also masked, but with the slightest hints of fiery hair showing at his collar.

“How would you know what we want?” he asked with a British accent, circling around her with his hands clasped before his abdomen.

Rey gulped, feeling weak and dizzy from the heat of the day.  She screamed for help though her mouth was hot and dry, and kicked her tattered boots at the black shapes crowding her.

They dragged her chair across the loungeroom, the grating metal on tile sound reminding her of scraping fingernails down a blackboard. She struggled, strained; it was no use. They dragged her to the middle of the room, where a single bright bulb hung by a wire, rocking overhead and making shadows dance on the walls.

The chair was tilted backward, forcing the white light to clash against her skin. The shadow towered above her, looming beyond the light, his face hidden by a balaclava and his coal-dark eyes melting into the darkness.

She stared at him in terror, unable to blink, body rigid as stone. If only she could get free and run from here and out the fire escape. The rotting emergency route to the street wouldn‘t take their weight; she was barely sure that it would hold hers.

She must have looked that way because her captor followed her gaze. How long had they been here waiting for her?  Did he even know there was another way out - the only way out, she thought, looking at the silent faceless creatures of darkness guarding the doorway.

He took three long strides in her direction and crouched at her feet.

She waited for him to speak, but he only cocked his head to the side considering his catch. With the light blaring onto her face, the surrounding men appeared like dark auras hovering on the outskirts of purgatory, waiting and watching their leader.

“Who    are    you?” Rey dared to ask, squinting her hazel eyes with fear—and curiosity.

“Last month you came into a sum of money…”

“No,” she whimpered, her voice failing her. “I don’t have that.”

“Three-hundred-fucking-grand,” one of the other men sneered from the shadows.

She shook her head wildly, her lips shaped the word “no”, over and over again.

“I know you have it.“ The masked man pounded a gloved hand into his opposite palm, cracking his knuckles with bone-shuddering certainty. She scrunched her face, waiting expectantly for a blow, but it didn‘t come. He paused, searching her face as though he were reading a map - the angles of her cheekbone, along the line of her jaw, focusing on the most minute of details as if to burn them into his memory. And lastly, to her eyes. Considering them with thoughtful curiosity.

“Get on with it.” The red-haired man was pacing a circle around them.

And then the study was over; the eyes in front of her grew dark and she was filled with foreboding. He stood abruptly, reaching for a metal bar that she would come to know as a Tonfa, an Okinawan weapon. He slapped it warningly against his leather palm.

“I know you have the money, and now you‘re going to give it to me.“

No, no, no! Her mind fought against the memory in her dream.

Why did it drag her here every night?

She kicked at him and felt someone poking at her arm, and she batted it away absently.

“Get away from me!” she screamed in the dream, but there was nothing she could do to make him stop, until—-

She woke.

Lifted out of the memory by a pair of powerful arms tucked beneath her knees and back. Her body tightened as though the man from her dreams had manifested before her. Her eyelids fluttered, and she saw the pale jaw, the long, black lashes that brushed shadows on high cheekbones, the hair, thick and dark as the night sky, and those earth brown eyes peering down at her. He held her body a little closer into his chest and a quiet whisper came from his lips.

“Shh. It’s okay.”

Kylo.

Eyes closed, she sleepily slipped her arms around his neck and melted into his hold. Was she still mad at him? She couldn’t remember now that sleep was nipping at her heels. Maybe. But he had saved her from her nightmare. And that was enough.

“I was having a bad dream,” she said lazily. “He was going to hurt me.”

Kylo’s brow furrowed with concern. How tender his eyes were now. In this half-awake state, his body tight to hers, it warmed her, tucking into a cocoon of midnight.

Safe.

“Who was going to hurt you?”

“The man in black. He’s the one I dream about. The centre of my nightmares.”

The heaviness of sleep was bearing down on her before she saw the pain in his eyes, and she wondered why he looked so sad.

She would tell him; it was okay. She was okay. They were just nightmares —

The warmth of the bed swallowed her up, and she curled into the pillow. From far away, she could hear a soft promise: “He won’t hurt you again.”

How sure those words were. As though it were within his power to speak them.

It almost made her believe he could keep her safe from the demons of her dreams.

And maybe he could.