Chapter Text
When Rey left the star destroyer and Kylo Ren behind, she didn’t know what she was more afraid of: that their connection would open up again or that it wouldn’t.
She’s never going to forget how she felt when she woke up and saw Luke’s lightsaber broken in two pieces and Kylo lying face down on the opposite side of the blood-red room. She was surprised at how she felt seeing him surrounded by dead bodies, given she had always thought of him as the monster. Yet these were people that she had helped kill.
She thought about this as she noticed that their electricity was still there. It was pulsating in the very air that hung between them. It didn’t feel like the balance that Luke had described. It felt alive. Rey spent almost every day of her childhood doing the exact same thing, living out the exact same routine. She doesn’t know where to place this feeling.
His words echoed round in her head, to follow her until she died: You’re nothing. But not to me.
She stood there – wondering what to do, wondering if he was about to wake up, wondering if she wanted him to – and she desperately wanted to believe him. She had wanted so badly to take his hand and jump headfirst into the unknown with him to live a great adventure. To have someone standing by her side, always there and always coming after her. Those used to be things she longed for. He knew that. He had seen into that part of her.
But those words had come from Kylo Ren, not Ben Solo. They were words that tore her to shreds before picking her back up off the ground. He said he wanted to let the past die, but Rey couldn’t forget it. He had tortured her. He had held her captive. He had tried to kill her. She should be dead at his hands. He only admired her so for resisting it.
Rey wanted nothing to do with Kylo Ren.
She was picking up the pieces of Luke’s lightsaber when he started to stir. She froze. He pushed up off the floor, wincing as fresh blood oozed out of the scar down his face. He stood up to meet her, face to face. His gaze was glued onto her. She watched it shift to the fleeing rebel ships.
“So you’re just going to let them die,” Rey said, still furious. Kylo’s eyes moved back to her. “I can’t do that.” As she finished speaking, there was a loud whirring from the end of the red room. The elevator was in motion. Rey’s heart started beating again. It could be a whole fleet of stormtroopers for all she knew.
“You stole Snoke’s escape pod,” Kylo said.
“What?” Kylo picked up a rod off the floor that used to belong to a Praetorian guard.
“You struck me from behind and stole Snoke’s escape pod,” Kylo said. He held the rod out in front of him. Rey stared at him.
“I can’t,” she whispered in disbelief. The whirring stopped.
“Do it,” he said. Rey lifted the rod.
As the pod travelled through space towards the Falcon, Rey kept waiting for their electricity to break. She thought that if she got far enough away, it would snap like a great long stretched piece of string. At the very least, she thought that it would fade away into the back of her mind and she wouldn’t feel its presence any more.
But the opposite happened. Rey could feel it growing inside her. She could feel the pain that she had caused by striking him and knew when he woke up inside that red room to Hux standing over him. She had thought he had a strong bond with Hux but now she knows it is merely wafer thin. Rey recognises the way that Kylo feels because it is what she has been carrying all these years: pure loneliness.
Chewbacca told Rey that he had picked up Leia’s distress signal from Crait and set the coordinates of the Falcon accordingly.
“That was lucky,” Rey said.
She didn’t tell him that she knew Kylo was already there.
As Rey opened her eyes to see all the rocks floating around her, the first thing that she saw was Finn. And without thinking, without breathing, their arms were around each other. This is my family, Rey thought. This is my past. I can’t leave them behind. They shouldn’t have to die so that I can find a future. Kylo could take his destroy everything mission across the galaxy if he wanted. She wasn’t going to part of it. She wasn’t about to abandon the first people in her life to give her more than a second glance. The resistance believed in her long before Kylo did. She would stay by their side.
Once everyone was safely onboard, she channelled their electricity and told Kylo this. That she is done. She can’t be part of his destruction. She shut the door on it, forever, and left him crouched on the ground.
All this plays through Rey’s mind whenever she is asleep. She wakes up halfway through the morning, panting and on the verge of screaming because she doesn’t know where it is supposed to lead. She can’t count the number of days that have passed since they left Crait, and she still always wakes up like this. She has long stopped thinking that one day she might exist without this feeling. She wants to get rid of the electricity coursing through her veins. But no power of thinking will rid her of it. How can she get rid of something that’s inside her?
She wakes up every day feeling the same pull that she felt when she launched out of the Falcon and onto Snoke’s ship to save Ben. She knew he was still there; she hadn’t imagined it.
She had tried to find him and bring him home. She hated thinking that she failed.