Work Text:
Pain was the first sensation that registered. Dull, gnawing pain, drawing her out of a dreamless void. Rey tossed and turned like this for some unmeasured length of time, lingering on the edge of sleep. But when she rolled onto her left side, a sharp pang spiked between her hip and ribcage. Her eyes flew open.
She had gone to sleep in the tiny stone hut on Ach-to that housed her cot and the few supplies she’d brought with her from D’Qar; she could remember that, at least. But now she found herself at the center of a vast chamber with a golden floor and sheer gold walls that ascended in a circle around her, and a domed ceiling adorned with strange patterns etched in bronze. She’d seen luxury like this in books, but now that it surrounded her she felt almost crushed by the weight of it.
There was a man before her, reclining on an ornate throne, his thin, pale-skinned frame swathed in saffron robes. Something resembling a man. His face was unclear to her, whether by distance or haziness or the unwillingness of her bewildered eyes to process it. Though there was nothing in the sight that should have been innately frightening, a chill like static electricity crawled down her spine.
“Again,” he intoned.
The slow deep voice seemed to come up from beneath her, like vibrations in the earth. Pain shot through her side again, this time as if she’d been struck. She gasped, but no sound emerged. She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. Even her breath was drawn without her control, heavily and out of sync.
She was struck again, but not by her own hand. Not even by the figure on the throne; though the order had come from him, it was being carried out by something else. Someone , whose fist drove repeatedly into her aching side, and who flinched each time, though she herself could not. She looked down at the hands that were not her hands, the long-boned fingers spattered with blood, as they curled back into a fist and prepared to strike again.
“Stop,” the man said, and the fist froze mid-blow, still clutched in a painful knot. When he spoke again, it was softly, drifting through her ears like smoke. “You’re trying to hide your pain, even from me. But pain is not meant to be hidden, it is meant to be felt – by you, and by everyone around you. It will fuel you if you embrace it, and give you a clarity that not even your deepest meditations can bring.”
Clarity. The word stood in sharp contrast to the haze in Rey’s mind as she retreated from the throbbing in her side and the creeping dread his voice inspired. But even as she drew into herself, a new command pulled her back out.
“There is one more wound I told them not to heal,” he said. “The scavenger gave it to you, but you alone allowed yourself to receive it.”
The body she inhabited reacted viscerally to the words, head turning and eyes downcast. The scavenger the scavenger the scavenger.
Despite the obsessive repetition of the epithet and the images that accompanied it, it took her a moment to recognize herself, the memory of her, echoing through their joined minds. The hand touched the face almost methodically, returning to the wound there at the mere thought of her. As they traced it together, from the forehead, over the bridge of the nose, down the sharp cheekbone to the clenched jaw, she remembered the shape of it. Long and smooth, slicing across the face, his face.
“She has marked you ,” the man said, the ice returning to his voice. “She has written your weakness across your face for all to see. ”
Red heat surged from the fingers on his face, lighting up the wound with searing agony. She writhed, struggling in vain to pull the hand away. Even now, the pain came from him , from the one whose tortured body she was trapped in. The looming figure on the throne had never so much as shifted.
There was no way to stop him from doing this to himself, but she refused to bear it with him a moment longer.
Rey’s silent scream ripped across their link, cleaving them into two physical entities, one her and one him. For a split second she saw him outside of herself: a once towering form now shaking and bent inward, a shrinking black spot in the brilliant gold. Then the image blurred and dissolved into gray, the dim interior of the hut and the warmth of her bed becoming tangible again. She returned to her body with a sudden rush that jolted her upright.
It was a dream, it had to have been.
She’d had terrifyingly real dreams before, awakened in her little cot on Jakku with screams and blasts and the roar of engines in her head, more times than she could count. Never pain as intensely real as this had been, but at least it was gone now. Almost gone. Lingering.
She touched her face, and the heat came roaring back, burning a jagged line across her skin.
This time the scream that escaped her was loud and clear. She jerked her hand away, but the fire in her flesh remained, no less acute than when she had felt it through his body. Her mind reached out wildly, attempting to severe whatever link still stretched between them, as she stumbled out of bed and groped for the door.
Luke. Find Luke. It was the only thought clear enough to cut through the agony. Cold air rushed into her lungs as she ran out onto the wet grass, but the sensations were dull and distant, miles beneath her. With rising panic she felt herself being pulled back into him .
Hands wrapped around her arms, stopping her in place and steadying her as she swayed. Her mouth moved, struggling incoherently to tell Luke what was happening, but all she could get out was it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, her knees buckling under the strain of resisting the shadowy connection. She crouched on the ground, clutching frantically at the invisible cut, until he gently pried her hand away and replaced it with his own.
Slowly the burning cooled, drawn out of her like poison, and the last shreds of the mental link shriveled away.
Tears blurred her returning vision as she sank forward, grasping gratefully at the damp earth. “What was that?” she whispered hoarsely, when she could speak again.
“Breathe, Rey,” Luke said. “Remember your surroundings. You’re safe here.”
Safe here . But she had been taken somewhere else, some place too vivid to have been a construct of her mind. Dragged into his mind, and his body. There was no safety from that. She shook her head vaguely, unable to stop the tears.
“What happened?” he was asking her. “What did you see?”
“I--I don’t know,” she answered, truthfully enough. “There was...a man. A twisted man on a gold throne. He told me to do it, and I couldn’t stop, because I...” Even as the words rose to her mouth, she bit them back. Something at the back of her mind warned her to keep him a secret, not even to speak his name. Not out loud. Not to Luke.
As for Luke, whatever thoughts were passing behind his hooded eyes, he kept them just as close. “It’s all right,” he told her. “We can talk about this in the morning. Right now you need to sleep.” He helped her up, and they walked back to her hut.
“In the morning,” she echoed, managing a small smile as she shut the door. This was Luke Skywalker, the last Jedi master. Even that man, dark and nameless as death itself, would be no match for him. He would know what to do.
She laid down on the bed and closed her eyes, relieved to finally see nothing at all. Nothing except a shadow, bent and broken, huddled in the depths of her mind.
---
Breathe, Rey reminded herself again. So much of Luke’s philosophy summed up in a single word. Let go of emotion, attachment, voluntary thought. Become lungs, become nothing more than air.
Light and slow, she inhaled the crisp coolness of morning. This was real, the fragrant grass and the soft dirt and the wind brushing loose strands of hair against her face. The calming presence of Luke beside her, already deep within his own meditation.
She shut her eyes tighter, focusing again on the ebb and flow of oxygen, spreading from her core to the tips of her fingers. This was her body, her anchor in the rushing current of the Force. No one else could inhabit her body, and she could inhabit no one else’s. The mind could be pulled and shaped and overtaken, but the body was inviolable.
She told herself this over and over, like a mantra. The body is inviolable.
No matter what it was that had happened last night, it would not happen again. She had beaten him twice: once mentally, once physically. There was no power he had that she had not summarily crushed. Whether he had allowed it or not, the scar that had burned them both so fiercely was put there by her. And if he ever dared to cross her again, she would give him another.
She breathed in deep, relishing the glow of heat the thought inspired. The light was hers, and all the power and serenity it brought with it; the darkness he personified was nothing but a shade, shrinking and cowering, utterly impotent.
Her mind climbed higher, stretching out into the stream of the Force, expanding in all directions. Whispers drifted through the ether, fading in and out on the edge of hearing. Thoughts, both spoken and unspoken, of countless creatures. Nothing concrete enough to understand, nothing except...one thought, keener than the rest, crystallizing into a word. A word with a voice behind it, still too enshrouded in the fluctuating sounds of the living Force to identify.
Before she could even reach out toward the sound, it came to her.
Compassion.
The whisper echoed in her head, growing in strength and clarity until it consumed all the others. Compassion. But it was just that, a word– not a concept, not an idea, but the word itself, strangely hollow.
The flow of the Force had stilled, isolating her with the voice that now seemed to come from all around her. More words took shape and joined the first in pulsating repetition.
You have compassion for her.
She recoiled from the utterance, stung by some cryptic truth it carried. She opened her eyes, and a cold pit of dread coalesced in her stomach.
In place of green and blue there was gold and bronze, lit with a cruel gleam by some unseen source of light. She was there again, rooted to the glittering floor, under the unrelenting gaze of the pale man. The haze around his face was gone now, leaving no barrier between her and the terrible glazed eyes that saw everything and betrayed nothing.
“It isn’t her strength that’s making you fail,” he said. “It’s your weakness. ”
The word froze her blood, heavy with condemnation. No, not her blood, but his– the shadow of a man with whom she had once again fused. His entire being rebelled against it, the mere idea of it. Limbs tensed, stomach tightened, breath came fast and shallow. He shook his head and opened his mouth to speak, but the pale man held up a dismissive hand.
“I told you to bring her to me,” he went on. “She would have made a powerful ally to us. But where is she now?”
He was silent.
“ Where is she? ” the pale man asked again.
Their shared body trembled. From fear, Rey thought at first. Teeth gritted, fists clenched, eyes fixed resolutely on the floor. A chill touched the edge of their mind, pushing against it, testing its resolve with veiled but terrifying strength. The pale man’s eyes narrowed, and the prodding force pulled back.
It wasn’t fear, Rey realized with shock. It was strain , the overwhelming effort it took him to conceal the answer his master sought.
The pale man settled back in his throne, mouth twisted into a vague sneer. “Even after she humiliated you, still you protect her. This is what makes you weak. Do you think your grandfather would have allowed sentiment to cloud his judgment?”
She felt the words sting him, but he showed no outward reaction. Instead he spoke for the first time. “He did, once.”
The sneer faded, and an open scowl took its place. “It’s fortunate, then, that you know what a grave error that was.”
Silence again. But his mind was loud, tumultuous, raging against itself and all that surrounded it. Even now the intensity of the storm increased, so violent that Rey’s own consciousness shrank from it. Fury and despair clashed and interwove, each grasping at him with claws of fire and ice. He was pressing his hands against his head, covering his ears, covering his eyes. In his weakened state, the pale man’s probing renewed, pressing in on all sides. He was everywhere, crawling in through every crack in his consciousness.
As if in a last effort, the shadowy mind turned inward on itself to Rey, who watched in terror at its center. He was reaching for her, groping in the dark.
He was afraid, and in his fear, he had turned to her.
Memories of her rushed into his mind like water, images of her face and echoes of her voice filling him and drowning out all other thought. She felt the warmth of her skin and the softness of her tunic and the weight of her body in his arms and the tension of her wrist in his hand and the burn of her saber on his flesh, the sheer light of her whiting out his vision and pulling him, dragging him out of the darkness–
With a gasp, Rey wrenched herself from him. Reality came cascading down on her all at once in a torrent of color and sound, scattering when her head struck the ground hard. The smell of earth rushed into her nose.
She lay there panting, the world tilting and reeling before her eyes. She was dimly aware of Luke’s presence, his hand on her shoulder, as her vision finally came back into focus and her breathing slowed.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered, tasting again the salt of her own tears in her mouth. “I don’t understand….”
“Rey, you have to tell me what’s going on.”
“I don’t know!” she sobbed. She looked wildly around her, half expecting to find herself once again immersed in it. “I never know when it will happen, when I’ll feel him--”
“Who, Rey?”
She looked up at him through her tears. He was searching her face intently, but that was all she could glean from his expression in her bewildered state. She hesitated, still resisting the words.
“Kylo Ren,” she whispered at last.
She looked down again, overtaken with a creeping sense of shame. Shame at having allowed herself to be so weak, to allow this monster to haunt her waking dreams and compel her to share in the torment he had brought upon himself. And she could not hide her shame from Luke, who slowly withdrew the soothing weight of his hand.
He knew the monster as well as she did. Better.
She was grateful that he didn't make her stand up, but instead brought himself down to her level, both of them kneeling in the grass with a wall of silence between them. She could feel the turbulence in him, nearly as strong as her own. It frightened her: the great Jedi himself was brought to his knees, with no more stoicism left than his volatile apprentice.
At length he spoke, low and heavy. “Do you know what a Force bond is, Rey?”
She shook her head helplessly. “No.”
“The Force….” He crossed his legs and folded his hands, as if preparing to resume meditation. “The Force sometimes works in ways we don’t fully understand. It flows from one being to the next, binding all life like a great web. And sometimes, there are strands in this web that are bound more closely than others. When two beings are connected like this, they become two parts of the same whole. Thoughts, emotions, even physical sensations...what one experiences, the other does as well. This is called a Force bond.” He paused, took a slow breath. “And over this bond...we have no control.”
Rey nodded blankly. She understood, and yet she didn’t quite believe it. Not with Kylo Ren, at least. Surely a creature as miserable as himself would be somehow exempt from this sort of connection. Surely not even the Force itself could be strong enough to bind such extremes of light and dark together.
Luke was waiting for her to respond, but she couldn’t. Not yet.
“What you feel through this link,” he said at last, “is what he feels, moment to moment, as if you inhabited the same body. You would feel his joy, his sorrow, his anger--”
“Pain,” Rey interjected, dazed by the memory of it. “He’s...in so much pain.”
“And you feel that pain too, I know,” Luke said, with just a hint of bitterness. He wouldn’t say it, but it was clear he blamed himself. “But these things...they can be overcome. You may not be able to severe it, but with practice, with meditation, you can learn to dull the effects. You can learn to guard your mind from him.”
“From your nephew,” she said mechanically, and he flinched at the word. “From Kylo Ren.”
“From him, yes. The rest of your training can wait; starting today, our imperative is blocking him out.”
This was what she had been hoping to hear, and yet now that she did, it felt...wrong. As if something inside her had tipped ever so slightly off balance. “Blocking him out...completely?” she faltered.
A strangely familiar shadow fell over Luke’s eyes– one that she had seen before, but not on him. “Rey, listen to me, and listen closely. A bond like this will change you, if you let it. It will draw you out of yourself and into him, and with every second you spend in his mind, you will become more like him.”
“I’m not like him,” she replied, struggling to maintain an even tone as emotion roiled up inside her. “I can resist it, I’m strong enough.”
“No!” His voice was louder than usual, more urgent. “Not even a Master is strong enough to engage in a Force Bond without being affected by it. It would consume you, Rey.”
“But he’s killing him!” she blurted out.
Luke froze. “Who?”
“Snoke.” The words escaped her faster than she could process them. “I’ve seen his training. I’ve felt what he’s doing to Kylo. He intends to break him.”
“What you must focus on now,” Luke said, with visible effort, “is your own training.”
“We have to help him, we have to do something–”
“You have a responsibility to the Resistance and to the galaxy!” He almost shouted it. “You have no responsibility to him!”
“He’s your nephew!” she cried. “He was your apprentice, he was just like me! You’re the one who has a responsibility to him!”
Luke stood in a single swift motion, recoiling from her. She didn’t follow, but waited, pleading for something she couldn’t voice. The wall of silence fell between them again, heavy and cold as the mountain air.
She knew where she had seen the shadow in his eyes now, because the image was seared in her memory. The shadow was red as a dying sun when it crossed Kylo Ren’s face, red and black as he ignited his saber through flesh and bone.
“Not anymore,” Luke said.
---
That night, the bond was quiet.
Rey dreamed of it– only dreamed, this time. She was Kylo Ren, bound from head to foot in black, mute and frozen in place. The golden walls stretched miles above them, opening up to a black sky where the ceiling had once been.
The pale man– Snoke, as she now knew him, the name she’d heard whispered during her short time with the Resistance, always tinged with dread and loathing– rose from his throne and grew, grew till he towered over them like a thundercloud, and his twisted form blotted out the stars.
When she awoke, she went to Luke. She offered no explanation for her decision, and he didn’t ask for one. As he had promised, he told her all the grand defenses and small tricks the Jedi had developed to guard the mind, going systematically down the list with the difficulty and efficacy of each one.
She listened, silent and expressionless, as the sun climbed. She didn’t regret her harsh words, but now that her head had cooled, she recognized the rationality in Luke’s response. Kylo Ren was a man– weak and broken, maybe, enslaved to a power greater than she dared to comprehend– but a man still, not a child. He had made his choice, and now Rey was making hers.
Reason over emotion and wisdom over passion. It was the Jedi way.
Holding this principle in her mind, she raised a mental barrier around herself, focusing all her energy on withstanding Luke as he reached out toward her through the Force. He circled her consciousness, checking for weak points, but she held firm.
“Good,” he said. “The wall technique is most effective against a broader invasion, such as...the unwanted touch of another mind. Its lack of focus will enable you to keep it at bay as long as you remain calm and decentered. Let go of individual thoughts; broaden yourself out to all corners. Whatever you’re guarding, don’t return to it until the threat has passed.”
She closed her eyes as he spoke, following the instructions meticulously until his voice receded to a distant hum. It was soothing, letting a quiet emptiness fill her, and knowing she was safe inside herself, with no one in her head but her. She had no intention of repeating yesterday’s mistake. In her eagerness to protect her body, she realized, she had left her mind unguarded. The sensations she felt through Kylo Ren had been but a physical manifestation of a much deeper problem.
She had allowed him into her mind. There was no other explanation; one way or another, she must have invited him in.
Her wall wavered as she berated herself for it. In his desperation he had latched onto her, and she would have to steel herself to repel him. No matter how much pain he was in, she reminded herself, no matter how bitterly he regretted the choices he’d made, she had allowed him to sway her for the last time.
But the wall was weakening now, and something hovered just beyond it. The presence brushed against her, all too familiar in its burning touch. Instantly she recoiled into herself, renewing her outward pressure, straining to keep it out.
To keep him out.
As if through a frosted window she saw the shadow, looking in at her. There was something oddly forlorn about it, this vast consciousness lingering in the ether, unable in spite of all its power to enter the refuge it sought.
She heard him then, not speaking, but calling out to her through the Force, faint and far away despite his proximity. The disembodied plea took the form of one word only, a breath escaped from collapsing lungs.
Rey.
She scarcely registered it as her own name, so foreign was the sound when he thought it. Like the name of some distant god, spoken of only in the reverent whispers of the faithful. There was fear in it, awe. Supplication.
Slow and trance-like, she extended a single tendril of her mind. Past the wall, past the confines of her body itself. There were no masters here, no light or shadow, neither Luke nor Snoke exerting their influence. Like swimmers floating in an empty sea they met in the gray.
Who are you?
...I don’t know.
Why are you here?
I don’t know.
Do you know who I am?
Rey.
Have you felt me? In your mind?
Yes.
I’ve felt you. I couldn’t stop feeling you.
Yes.
How did this happen?
I don’t know.
...There’s no way to stop it, is there?
I don’t know.
Do you want to stop it?
...No.
The shadow drew in close around her, clinging to the small part of herself that she had exposed. And she, in turn, found herself drawing toward him, drifting farther from the body that still sat motionless in the sunlight.
I don’t understand. I nearly killed you. I could have…. I wanted to.
You marked me.
He told you that.
He is wise.
He hurt you.
So did you.
...Then why come to me? After all I did, after all I watched you do...why me?
There’s no one else.
What do you mean?
We are alone in the world.
That’s not true. I have Finn, and the General, and my master--
I am alone.
Your mother. Your uncle. They want you back.
Not me. Ben Solo.
But that’s--
They want Ben Solo back. And that isn’t me.
But it used to be.
No. There is no Ben Solo. There never was.
His thoughts crashed into hers then, like a tidal wave, washing over her with such fury that she barely had time to catch her breath before going under.
She saw trees engulfed by fire, bodies strewn over scorched and blackened ground, a beam of red light streaking across the sky. She stood watching it, wanting to stop it, wanting to scream, but unable to move. She heard explosions and engines and gunfire and screams , screams from hundreds and thousands of voices that cried out to him in terror before falling abruptly silent.
The images would not stop coming, images of war, destruction, death. Fear welled up in her own mind, but was quickly overwhelmed by something deeper, more bitter– guilt. Shame. She was no longer herself, no longer human. She was him. The most wretched being in the universe.
The initial onslaught had barely subdued before another wave came, and the pain came with it. In place of blasts and screams and the roar of engines, a deep quiet settled over their joined minds, broken by the rise and fall of voices– voices she knew.
She saw Luke, framed by smoke and ruin, the same deep sadness in his eyes that had greeted her at their first meeting.
She saw Han– saw him smiling and demonstrating the proper use of a blaster, saw him walking away with a small wave of his hand, saw him reach out and touch his face. The face of his son.
And a woman, small but impossibly strong, with eyes too much like his own. A woman whose arms encircled him, filled him with the warmth of a thousand suns, held his towering frame as if it were a child’s. A woman he longed for with an ache she herself knew all too well. Mother.
A sharp surge of agony propelled her forward, deeper into his mind, and a slow dripping whisper began to gather on the edge of hearing. They hurtled backward in time, from man to adolescent to child to newborn, until she saw him at the very beginning, curled in the warm dark of his mother’s womb.
This was the origin of the whisper, implanted in his unawakened brain like a virus. And as the years of his life raced forward before her eyes, the whisper remained, a dark cloud hanging over him, swelling with lightning and rain until it covered everything in inescapable shadow. She could discern no words, but the voice of the pale man was not soon forgotten.
I tried to fight it. I tried to be Ben Solo.
She watched helplessly as he woke screaming, pressed his hands over his ears, struck beds and trees and flesh with his childish fists, knocked his head against the wall, cried in corners and behind doors, ran and ran until his legs gave out and he no longer knew where he was, again and again and again.
But it was always there, at the back of my mind.
She saw Luke and Han and Leia again, each trying in their own way to calm him, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing. One by one she watched the terrible realization darken their eyes, and the soothing words gave way to admonishments– don’t let it in, don’t think it, don’t feel it, maybe if you tried harder, why aren’t you trying harder– and the admonishments in turn grew to shouts and demands and tears.
And after that, after all efforts had been exhausted and there was no one left to hurt– silence. A silence that numbed the mind and body, broken only by the ever-present whisper.
There was more; she could feel the jagged edges of whatever lay beyond that void seething and twisting at the edge of his subconscious, but these thoughts he kept vehemently at bay. Nothing defined could slip through, but the sheer heat of it singed her mind, thick with the scent of blood.
...And then?
I began.
You became...Kylo Ren.
I became what I always was.
...How?
The great turmoil strained at the barrier he had erected, but he held fast.
Ask Luke Skywalker.
He won’t speak of it.
Silence. Then, low and bitter: What’s done is done.
The storm was receding slowly, reluctantly, dissipating into the darkness at the gray sea’s edge. She let it go, but her thoughts followed at a distance until it vanished.
The fear and rage and heartache were a constant throughout his mind, coloring even the faintest memories, but she had felt the core of all his guilt concealed within that storm– the dark eye around which all else circled. Whatever happened in the shadows of that final stage, he had emerged from it drenched in death, a faceless monster crawling out of a black forest with blood on its teeth.
She drew away from him for a moment, remembering all at once the steely blankness of the mask he had removed for her, and the strangeness of the face behind it. A creature, she had called him, disdainful and defiant to cover up the underlying fear. A creature in a mask. And the heart of that fear remained– a fear so primal it could not be cast out with the Force or beaten down with a lightsaber.
In her conscious mind she knew he was that creature still, an emissary of death clothed in shadow and flame. But there was something else, too, under the clothing, under the skin– something he guarded even more fiercely than the violent storm. So deeply buried that she could only just begin to sense it.
He drew back, too, sharp and sudden, drawing his thoughts in around himself like a cloak.
I shouldn’t have come here.
But you wanted to.
He already senses it.
...What did you tell him?
I don’t have to tell him.
But you kept him out of your mind. I felt him...trying to get in.
I’ve learned ways to keep him out. But only for a little while. Soon he’ll be back.
He reads your mind?
He inhabits it. He comes and goes, but he always comes back.
Inhabits. A chill crept over her with the memory of Luke’s words.
You are...bonded to him?
He was pulling away, anxiety seeping in from the corners.
I’ve been gone too long.
Wait.
He’ll know, he’ll know I’ve been here.
Wait, just–
He’ll find you.
His thoughts retreated one after the other, scattering back into the shadows as if they were being pursued. Rey reached after the the remnant of him that lingered, as unwilling to disconnect from her as she was from him. In spite of herself, in spite of everything, she let the thought leave her.
Don’t go.
She hadn’t meant to send so much with it, for it to echo with the memory of every time she had said it and every person she had said it to. But it was there, heavy with the same fear and loneliness and desperation, too late to be taken back.
For a moment he paused, and they clung together, suspended in the great silence around them.
He’s here.
It was the last thought that escaped before he ripped away from her, tearing the gray world away with him.
The ground rushed up to meet her as she fell back into herself, ears still ringing with his voice, eyes burning with the sudden return of daylight. And then a single tear– the instinctive response of her body even before she had regained control of it.
Luke was speaking to her, she knew, but the cacophony in her head drowned him out. Reason, emotion, wisdom, passion, all the lofty doctrines of the Jedi fell away like a robe slipping from her shoulders. She was naked in the stream, stripped of all she ever knew by the raging flood of the Force.
But she did not drown. Giving herself up to the current, she rose , through darkness and light and the bounds of her body and every memory she’d ever had, until one thought alone pierced through with absolute clarity.
Him.
She knew now what she had to do, and the knowledge clothed her in impenetrable armor as she returned to herself, an intention so concentrated that the flood itself could not sway it.
Save him.
The Force had made its choice, and so had she.
----
She didn’t tell Luke.
Under cover of night, she stole out of her hut and went down the stone steps to the Falcon. It was the only way off the island, as far as she knew. But she wouldn’t strand them there. She would find him, get him out, bring him back. Beyond that…
She kept the question firmly from her mind as the ship took flight, focusing instead on the strand of him that linked them at all times, following it like a path across the void of space. There was no map that could lead her to him, but she could feel his presence growing gradually stronger as she approached the Inner Rim, where the stars were closer together and huge Republic freighters sailed by.
He was close now. Very close.
Finally she saw it: a massive star destroyer, nearly as black as the space around it, his consciousness burning somewhere deep within its confines. She ran through the logistics of it methodically, fast enough that doubt had no time to slip in. She didn’t know how heavily manned the average First Order destroyer was at any given time, but through the Force she could detect thousands of life forms.
Stealth was her best option, but even that would only be possible if she eliminated all who saw her enter before they could sound the alarm. So, elimination, then stealth, and alternating between the two as often as was necessary.
When the Falcon came to a landing in the hangar, she took out her lightsaber and readied her thumb on the ignition. She could feel the inspectors moving closer, confused speculations darting back and forth between them. They wouldn’t be expecting her. Good.
She lowered the entry ramp and waited in the hallway, muscles tensed. One, two, three, four of them. She’d taken more on at once with her staff. And now she had a blade.
Attack before they can take proper aim.
Just before they rounded the corner to find her, she leapt out and swung. The first stormtrooper went down without a sound, but the others were already shouting and fumbling with their weapons. She sliced off a blaster hand, finger poised on the trigger, then sliced through the body. Ducking beneath a swinging arm, she stabbed through white armor, whipped around, and slashed the last one remaining even as the cold barrel of his blaster knocked against her shoulder.
No shots to alert the others. She’d been lucky this time. But she counted five more scattered around the hangar and two in the control tower. Those two would have to be dealt with first, or the entire destroyer would be alerted to her presence. She peered out one of the small windows and saw them seated behind a glass pane, probably blaster-proof, about twenty feet off the ground. Too far away for an accurate blaster shot, even if it could pierce the transparisteel.
She’d used a mind trick on a stormtrooper before, but at a distance of barely a yard. Was there a limit to it? She closed her eyes and groped outward, seeking those two points of consciousness. There was no limit to the Force, Luke had told her. No place the Force could not reach.
She found them, minds too weak or too preoccupied to sense her touch.
You will leave this room and go back to your quarters
Nothing. Even weaker minds had a wall around them.
The five troopers on the ground were starting to take notice that no one had come out yet. She forced herself to take a breath, recenter, and try again. She pushed against the mental walls with all the energy she could focus, slipping in through the crevices that opened up.
You will leave this room and go back to your quarters.
For a moment, still no reaction. Then the idea took over, spreading through both their minds like a virus. Even as the five approached the Falcon, the two in the control tower got up silently and left.
Rey opened her eyes, almost smiling. The next part would be much easier.
It was over in less than a minute, though these ones had been more prepared than the last. The saber was incredibly light in her hands after so many years swinging the metal staff, slicing cleanly through armor and flesh alike. When she’d struck assailants on Jakku, they usually got back up again. But these ones stayed down.
She didn’t search the Force to find out for sure. It was best not to know.
Retracing her escape from Starkiller to the best of her ability, she crept through the emptiest corridors she could find, hiding when she heard footsteps approaching and employing the mind trick when there was nowhere to hide.
She was deep inside now, so close to him she could feel his breathing. Slow and measured, but too deliberate, as if he were having to keep each one under control. She tried to make contact with him, but his mind was closed off with a formidable barrier.
At the very end of an isolated hall she found the door, as stark and gray as the wall around it, marked only by an access panel. She laid her hand flat against the smooth steel, closed her eyes and bent her head.
Kylo.
No response came.
I’m here, Kylo.
Beyond the door she could sense a room, cube-shaped and smaller than she expected. No windows, no furnishings but a cot on the floor. Little more than a prison cell, but he was not locked in. She was locked out.
I’m here.
Though the silence remained, she could feel him mere inches away now, pressed to the other side of the door, body vibrating with a barely contained energy. Once more she called out to him, straining against the equivalent barrier around his mind.
Let me in.
His body withdrew. A moment passed. Then the door shifted, sliding upward with the low scrape of metal on metal. Rey stepped back, watching the dark beyond the doorway widen and swallow the already dim light from outside. She stepped forward.
A streak of red light pierced the darkness and the shadow moved sudden and violent, the frantic spring of a wounded animal. Rey’s head struck metal as she was shoved backward against the wall, a hand like iron pinioning her wrist. The blade burned crosswise between them, inches from her neck, illuminating the shadow as it leaned in over her.
She had seen him like this in her nightmares almost every night since she’d last looked on him, face bathed in blood red, brows knit and teeth bared. And the scar, not yet healed, still aching. Her mark on him.
The thought made her bold. She raised her eyes to his. “You know why I’m here.”
He did know. She sensed his recognition of the fact, his confusion and irrational anger at it. “It doesn’t matter. You shouldn’t have come here.”
“I’m going to get you out.”
He snarled, jerking the blade closer, so close Rey could feel the sparks flickering around it. His jaw worked as his eyes searched her face. “I could take you to him now.” Unspoken, she heard the thought continue.
I failed once. I won’t fail again. I can’t.
“Is that what you want?”
“What I want ,” he hissed, “is to serve the Supreme Leader, and to see the Jedi destroyed.”
It was a mechanical response despite its vehemence, another reiteration of the mantra she’d heard him deliver before.
The Supreme Leader is wise.
“The Jedi?” She met his gaze with equal fierceness. “Is that what you think I am?”
Baring her mind to him, she let loose a torrent of thought and memory no less furious than his own, every surge of anger and pit of despair and cold chill of fear she had ever felt. And loneliness, sharp and keen and constant, hanging over every day and every sleepless night, as far back as she could remember.
I don’t belong to the light any more than you belong to the dark.
She showed him the last moment they had seen each other, when she had circled him like a beast circling its fallen prey, the slow sinister whisper urging her to finish it.
That choice was taken from me. But you still have yours.
The iron hand was trembling now. His eyes fell, staring out at something only he could see. Only now did Rey become aware of the pain, still coiled deep in his side, snaking throughout his body, more vicious than it had been the last time she felt it. He was withering with every passing moment, all his strength forced into his hands and feet, struggling to hold himself upright even as he held her down.
I can feel your pain.
His wall was sinking along with his body, dragged under by the weight of it.
I can feel how much it hurts.
She said it low and smooth, tendrils of her consciousness twining slowly around his.
I can feel what he’s done to you. What he’s doing.
He made no attempt to deny it, but he was still fighting her with mind and body, leaning heavily against the wall on the hand that gripped her wrist and grasping at the ragged edges of darkness at the back of his subconscious. His mouth twitched, lips pressed together so tightly no breath could enter or escape.
Let go of him.
As he struggled against the soft-spoken command, Rey lifted her free hand, and hesitated. For a moment she lingered there, a hairsbreadth from the hilt of her saber. He was blind to her, all of her but the inexorable draw of the bond that wound in ever-tightening coils around them.
She reached across the inches between them, charged with heat from the still-ignited blade, and touched the scar. Somehow– she didn’t fully understand how– an energy flowed from her skin into his, for a brief moment fusing the wound and the hand that gave it.
And the burning cooled.
We are alone in the world.
The thought came from both of them, and neither. It simply existed now, a universal truth that they were only just now beginning to perceive.
He sank to his knees, the red light winking out as his saber clattered to the floor, leaving them both in darkness.
Rey looked down at him, the faint broken outline of his bowed shoulders, electrified with some strange emotion she could not name. Somewhere between victory and defeat, pity and contempt, compassion and hatred.
They were alone, the two of them, utterly alone in this vast gulf between the dark side and the light. Two halves of the same whole.
---
It was strange, the feeling of him leaning against her as they stumbled down the endless gray corridors. Heavy, but not as heavy as he should have been. The lean, tensed arm clutched over her shoulders, barely supporting the unsteady legs beneath it. Cold even under the thick black sleeve. It was too much like her own body, hard and hungry, etched away by years of near-starvation. And it was strange, to be so close to this hard and hungry creature, and feel no fear.
The alarm rang out before they reached the hangar, loud and shrill. A squadron awaited them there, Rey sensed as they approached: a dozen men with blasters at the ready. She gripped the hilt of her saber, struggling to calm her mind in the few seconds she had left. The blade could block shots, but how many?
She glanced up at him. For all the ferocity she’d come to associate with him, he could barely keep himself upright. The Force would be her only ally.
The captain shouted for them to stop, but they stumbled on. “The Lord Ren is not to leave the ship,” came the cry again, “by order of Supreme Leader Snoke!”
The words bit at her through their bond, chafing like ropes bound too tightly around him. For that split second, he hesitated.
A second was all it took.
Rey felt the static on the back of her neck, the freezing dread in her core. No, no, not now--
A creeping presence reached out toward him, grasping at his consciousness with skeletal fingers. She made a frantic attempt to block it, forcing herself between them.
Get out of his head.
The mind was like the sudden onset of winter, frigid and wraithlike, sucking all the air out of her lungs as it turned its focus on her.
The scavenger, it mused. Kylo Ren has brought you to me at last.
No, she shot back, struggling to wrest her mind away from the vise-like hold. He’s coming with me.
She wasn’t even sure how much time had passed, if any. Her legs seemed to move unnaturally slow, as if in a nightmare, and in front of her, closer and closer as she crawled forward, the stormtroopers raised their blasters just as slowly.
He doesn’t need you anymore.
You believe he needs you now, it replied, freezing her blood with its scorn.
The Supreme Leader latched onto her mind from all sides, filling her with doubt even as she fought it with all her remaining strength.
You believe he’ll walk away from everything he’s fought for, everything he knows...for what?
Desperately she grasped for anything she could hold onto, anything that would anchor her in the onslaught; but he was strong, terrifyingly strong, and she was losing herself.
For you? A motherless, fatherless slave with half a name, dabbling in a power you haven’t even begun to comprehend?
Her vision blurred, and far beneath her the muscles in her legs spasmed and buckled.
A power that will destroy you before it will allow you to wield it?
As if through a broken mirror, she saw the the blasters fire in slow motion, exploding in violent bursts of light. She reached wildly for the Force, but it was somewhere beyond her, beyond the enclosing darkness.
She lifted her arm to shield herself, empty and utterly futile, skin and bone against the red-glowing blasts sliding relentlessly through the empty space.
The arm around her shoulders crushed inwards, pulling her against the body that twisted to cover hers. His arm jerked forward, fingers extended like claws. The twelve pinpoints of light froze in unison, suspended trembling in the air.
For the length of a slow-drawn breath they hung like this, a crown of fire arching over her head and his. Through the teeming fog around her mind, Rey felt his pulse against her cheek, fast and fevered even as the world stood motionless.
The fingers clenched and turned sharply, and plasma, blasters, and men alike were flung backward, striking the floor and wall with a series of sickening cracks. The sound brought Rey back to herself, and with a strike of her own she shattered the shell of darkness and cast it out.
His full weight came down on her shoulders as he collapsed, eyes fluttering blindly and then closing.
More through the Force than her own dwindling strength, she dragged him the few remaining feet to the ship. As soon as the ramp clanged shut, she lowered him to the floor where he lay in a broken heap. Fingers finally unclenched.
She hesitated– only for a second– then ran to the cockpit and started the engine.
First, get out of here. That was the prerogative. Get in, get him, get out. She had planned no further ahead than that. But there was no time to debate her next step. Kylo Ren, master of the Knights of Ren and scourge of the galaxy, was lying unconscious in the back hallway of her ship. Weak, defenseless. Maybe dying. Again her mind turned to the only option left.
Luke. Find Luke. He’ll know what to do.
She set the controls for Ach-to. They might be pursued– probably would be– and there would hardly be a warm welcome waiting for them when they arrived. Danger behind and uncertainty ahead.
She glanced back. Though she couldn’t see him, she could still feel him, just barely, the core of him burning steady under the deep dark of deathlike sleep. She held that small light in her mind as they hurtled through the void. Faint, far away, but impossibly bright– the most distant of all the stars.