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At first, Rey thought the Force to be a river or an ocean. A great body that seemed smooth and soft at first glance, but with wild currents that tugged and pulled her underneath. The goal was to let yourself go to its whims but to keep your head afloat, for it always tried to pull you under. And Rey had tasted its urges, in the snow on a fractured Starkiller, with a broken man heaving beneath her, his face split in two.
Let go , it whispered to her; pulled her down, down, until the weight of its currents pressed against her chest, urging her to gasp and drown. Kill him .
It would be so easy to reach out and strike down the man who murdered Han, but then the voice faded and she gasped for breath and the world shattered at her feet, and he lived.
But on those nights she wondered what would have happened if she listened and the waves of the Force reached out to her and crooned,
Fall into me and see .
~
She traveled across stars to a planet made of water and rock where she found a man who locked himself away in a prison of his own making. At first glance, he was the same face found on all the holos scattered across the galaxy; the face of a boy burdened with bringing a monster to his knees but it took until they shared a night in the rain as she hunted him down.
There was a flash -- so fast Rey wasn’t sure if it was lightning or the light of her saber illuminated across his skin -- and she saw him , down there, in the pool, stranded and lost without a raft.
The Force took him and carried him gently until it came as easy as breathing and Luke Skywalker oscillated from man to myth to monster. Thick shadowy tendrils fell from his beard, from his shoulders, where his lightsaber lit up in a mockery of the staff he used instead. Old, thin lips parted to reveal jagged teeth and eyes that have seen too much: all the pain and suffering in the world marked by his claws on his cheeks.
And in that flash, that split second of a moment where he told her of his fault, of his action that set the galaxy on its edge at the hands of Ben Solo, that shadow of a shape of a man reached out to Rey and whispered,
Look upon me and see your fate .
~
When she boarded the Falcon to cross the galaxy to find him, Rey’s heart beat in time to Luke Skywalker’s last words. And she could only hear them slither through her mind with the efficacy of the shadowed Force bleeding through.
It’s time for the Jedi to end .
~
Rey learned on Ach-To that the Force was not a river. It was not an ocean
There is no light and no dark.
There is just the Force, and however much you are willing to give yourself away to its whims. It was a thing that reached across space-time and heaved and breathed in time with her. The further in she fell to its grasp, the less she recognized herself. Each action was a give and take; how much could she give, before she lost her way?
She felt him as they fought back to back in Snoke’s throne room, the whispering tendrils trailing from him to her. They laid across her chest with an inky blackness that stained and latched on with each reach he made into the Force. Kylo Ren would ask of the Force, and it would give willingly, but not before taking what it desired. And when she reached out to the Force, it did the same to her, calling her and whispering dread longings in her ear, cloaking her until she came up for air and saw the slaughter she left in her wake.
But Rey didn’t see Kylo’s shape then. It wasn’t until he knelt at her feet as she boarded the Falcon, his posture hunched and his soul split. His shadows roared, but then fell silent as he looked up to her; the Supreme Leader brought to his knees by nothing.
And the shadows built by the pits of the Force fled for a single moment and Rey could see him without fault: a boy lost and built up by the longings of the Force he gave everything to. She saw the thing with hair that fell to the floor, the twisted shape that oscillated from man to monster.
There was a cost to the power of the Force and Rey looked upon Kylo Ren and saw what it looked like to pay.
~
Luke Skywalker nearly fell to the void of the Force, but he pulled himself back, though not without cost. Kylo Ren gave himself away to it and wandered around blindly, lost without any direction in the ether.
Rey heard it’s call, felt its signature on her skin, but when she fell into its currents, she swam with all her might to keep her head above the surface, even though the waves crashed over her head, begging her to drown.
~
She never knew what she looked like in the Force. She knew what she felt like, and she knew what others appeared to her. Some nights she would dream of waking in a shifting world of limitless power and her teeth were replaced with fangs, her eyes with refined sight and the hunger of a beast that hasn't fed in far too long.
But whenever she found a mirror, her reflection was blank and then she would wake and the dream was gone, save for his phantom arms around her, holding her in place as she cried for a reason she couldn’t determine.
~
“Show me,” she says when she finds him again. Rey never thought she’d see him like this again, so close; close enough to reach out and touch and twist her fingers in his hair, to touch the scar she left on him as the monsters in her mind begged her to kill him. She left him time and time again, leaving him down in the dirt, looking up to her. And he came back in the same way. Ben Solo looks up to her from his knees, before slowly rising to stand at her side. “Show me what I look like.”
He wasn’t the Supreme Leader and she wasn’t a Jedi. The distinctions faded, though the names the galaxy called them varied day by day. Whatever they were changed nearly as often. Not that Rey minds. No matter what happens to her, Rey has the Force. She is one with the Force, and no matter what comes, she is not alone.
Still, she would like to see.
“The Force breeds monsters,” he says quietly, an admission, an apology.
Rey had met her monsters and faced her fears. She saw what the Force made them. She saw what they became and where she once feared the face of herself in the Force, the truth of it gnawed at her bones. It broke Luke Skywalker, it consumed Kylo Ren before spitting him out into the mangled remains of Ben Solo. But what was Rey?
She leans into him, persistant. “I’ll know what I am.”
Holding her gaze, he presses his hand -- bare and calloused and scarred -- to her temple and her world goes dark. And then she blinks and sees and smiles.
She is herself and not -- a girl in a monster’s body, skin cracking, ready to explode, her back protruding with not quite spines: the Force, contained in a vessel, seeking it’s way out.
His hand falls away and she sees him through her own eyes. What she sees fades into the Force until his shadow overtakes, his scar elongates and his fangs drip with blood. Those heavy brown eyes that look into her with such clarity widen and whiten until he is nothing but the eyes of the Force; his feet shift into paws, heavy claws digging up the earth.
And then she blinks and it’s gone, and it’s just him. Just Ben, with his hair almost too long, his heavy hands pulling back from her face. And she is just Rey, a girl on a strange planet with a galaxy in her mind, and a voice begging to pull her down into the void of power.
But just as one can fall to the whims of the Force, one can rise above it.
“We are not monsters,” she says quietly as she turns around and he follows on her heel. His fingers trail out, drifting across her hand and Rey grabs them and holds on as they turn and follow the sliver the Force laid out for them. “We are more.”