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It’s well into the evening when the pad beside her door blinks and beeps, signalling a visitor on the other side.
Well after the hour where any student should be out of their bunks, too. With only herself, some droids and the children at the temple right now, who else could possibly be calling on her? Rose visited last week, Finn and Poe the week before, their next supply shipment and family day isn’t due for another two days, and a certain someone is already here keeping her sheets warm.
Knock, knock, knock, this time.
Rey’s fond sigh joins the deep chorus of snoring coming from the man beside her as she reluctantly rolls back off the bed she’d only just clambered onto, grateful she hadn’t yet slipped into her night clothes. She strides through her dark quarters, flicking a light or two back on as she goes, already unprepared to scold whoever is waiting outside, even as gently as she tends to. Both her bedroom door and the hallway door slide shut behind her after a quick wave of her hand, and with two satisfactory barriers between herself and her guest and her bed guest, she’s content to place a palm against her keypad and startle the young girl waiting for her out in the corridor.
“S-Sorry, Master Rey!” she squeaks. “I… I didn’t mean to…”
“It’s okay, Kyla, I wasn’t asleep… Besides, what have I told you about apologies?”
The old book she clutches nearly slips from her small arms when she reaches up to swat a ringlet of white-blonde hair from her face, huffing and looking rather flustered for a nine-year old who should be sound asleep in her own bunk. “Umm… save them for when I’ve done something wrong?”
“Perfect,” Rey chuckles before raising her arm out to summon the girl into her side, a gesture she accepts with a bright, dimpled smile. Then she nudges her playfully by the shoulder and tilts her head back toward her quarters. “Come.”
Perhaps she should maintain more of a distance between herself and her students, treat them more as a Master and less like a gaggle of rather small friends, but perhaps she also sees too much of herself in this young girl and many of the others. So much slowly-mending loneliness born from uncertainty. Fear. Too much to not offer them something as simple as a hug when they need it. A tiny bit of warmth that the old masters who followed the old ways are likely baulking at if they’re out there somewhere watching her from afar. She’ll be damned if she forces herself and her students to follow such archaic beliefs.
“Why were you outside of my quarters rather than asleep inside your own?” Rey asks kindly.
“I read something today, Master Rey, during free-time,” Kyla says as she hops up onto the lounge in the center of the sitting area, patting the old text she’d arrived with clutched tightly to her chest. “In this.”
Smiling, Rey fixes her student with an arched brow. “Oh?”
“I didn’t understand it, that’s all… It’s something you’ve never taught us in our lessons,” she continues. “I just thought I might come and ask you about it.”
Rey claps her hands together in her lap. “Ask away.”
The girl begins to thumb carefully through the old tome with a hard frown of concentration, soon arriving at the page she was seeking with a victorious, “Ah-ha! Here!”
Sitting opposite, Rey leans forward but still can’t make out the page’s contents, upside down as it is and in the dim evening light. “What is it?”
“A…. Dyad?”
A Dyad.
Something she, too, would’ve had a load of questions about a year ago if she’d found herself without such a patient tutor. Someone to teach her the very meaning of the word, then show her all of the wonderful benefits that come with it. Other things apart from feeling the constant presence of someone else in her mind.
“It’s a bond that two people share,” Rey tells her. “A bond in the Force.”
Those young eyes light with fascination. “In the Force? So it’s something strong and powerful?”
“Very.”
“How do you make one? I mean— How do you make it happen?!”
“You can’t,” she replies. “It’s more of a gift. Something a master and apprentice might share, or maybe two members of the same family.”
Or two people in love, she nearly adds.
Kyla looks back down at the book in her lap, eyes flickering as she reads. “But the text says that it’s such a rare thing, Master Rey, so… How do you know?”
Should she answer that question? Probably not. But at the same time she can’t bring herself to turn away her student with either a half-truth or some entirely fanciful story. Rey only smiles and dips her head closer, acting as though she’s about to gossip in a whisper.
“Master Ben and I,” she says, her voice low. “We are a Dyad in the Force.”
There’s a long pause during which her student runs her fingers back and forth over the page’s faded illustrations, like she’s lost in thought and absorbing her master’s revelation. Then something changes. Rey watches that frown of confusion smoothe out, and the wide, curious eyes beneath start to glimmer all of a sudden.
… Glimmer mischievously.
Oh dear.
“Oh, so it’s a, umm…” the girl pauses, either unsure or hesitant, then scrunches her nose with a giggle, “a romantic thing?”
Do her cheeks pale like snow or flush a deep shade of red mortification? Regardless of which, Rey can only hope the young girl sitting before her, giggling relentlessly, isn’t old enough to notice or understand. She stands up in a rush and props her hands on her hips, hoping she looks authoritative even with an amused smile tugging at her lips.
“And just who put that idea into your head?” Rey asks. “Hmm?”
Predictably, the girl remains unbothered. “Well, Jarrel and two of the others saw Master Ben holding your hand in the courtyard once.”
She fiddles with his hand as they walk, flipping it over between her own to idly examine his knuckles one moment, then his palm the next.
“Your skin is rough,” she states, for no reason at all.
Ben snorts, twisting his hand free before slotting his fingers back between hers, letting their arms practically swing between them like something out of a silly romantic holodrama. “So is yours.”
Calluses. Hers from a life of hardship, his from a life of training. Just another small, kind-of nice thing they share.
“Oh they did, did they?”
“Uh-huh! Then Sha’ree and Kip said they saw you hug Master Ben when he came back from Coruscant—”
Ben flings his arms around her waist while hers form a tight circle around his neck, then just as her face buries itself in warm skin and the smell of him, the ground disappears from beneath her boots. Feet dangling and legs swinging, Ben lifts her against him in the tightest of lung-crushing embraces.
“I… can’t… breathe,” she rasps, playful despite her mild oxygen deprivation.
“Then get your nose out of my neck,” he replies, mumbling into her hair.
Rey blinks the memory away as quickly as she can. “Then perhaps they shouldn’t be spying on their masters or—”
“— and Jace reckons he saw Master Ben watching you while you were teaching us forms last week, and he said he never once looked away! And that he was smiling the whole time!” the girl continues, too exuberant to care about talking right over the top of her master.
Rey waits for her overly-excited companion to finish her tirade and, much to her chagrin, is left feeling like a child herself. One who’s been caught doing something naughty. Not that she needs to explain herself to her students when she could and maybe should just scold the girl and send her scurrying from her quarters with a warning about nosiness to share with the others. But to say this is embarrassing would be an understatement; being made painfully aware of just how transparent their attempts at discretion have apparently been.
Is their affection that obvious? Does Ben actually sit there and watch her as she teaches? Or worse, has she been doing the same? Has she been sitting there wearing a dopey smile as he works through forms with the children? It’s a miracle that she manages not to physically cringe as each question and mortifying possibility rolls through her mind.
Is there a problem? asks a deep, rumbling voice.
Ignoring him for a moment, Rey eyes the impishly grinning girl before her. “… Are you finished?”
“Nope!” she chirps back. “And yesterday… I saw you kiss him.”
The sky above Ajan Kloss looks particularly beautiful tonight, painting the forest and the temple at their backs in pinks, reds and yellows as the sun slowly sets. Plus the wind is gentle and warm, ruffling his hair against her forehead as she sits with her cheek pressed, or squished rather, against his shoulder. So really, it would be such a horrible waste of such a lovely backdrop if she didn’t tug his chin around and down into a kiss.
Those last rays of sun are warm on their skin, but his lips moving soft and slow against hers are even warmer.
We’ve been sprung, Rey grumbles back to the man keeping her bed warm only two worryingly thin walls away.
… Sprung?
Yes, sprung.
Sprung how badly?
Bad enough, Master Solo!
How adept is her young pupil when it comes to sensing another’s presence so close? Not very, if luck is on her side. The absolute last thing she needs is for that cheeky grin to grow even more cheeky, and for the girl in question to dash back to the others with another juicy titbit of gossip about their masters. Maker, she can almost hear it…
“I went to see Master Rey just now,” Kyla would say, whispering like a devious little delinquent. “And she was hiding Master Ben in her quarters!”
The young ones wouldn’t understand, they’d just gasp and giggle as small children tend to do. It’s the older ones she’d have to worry about. Those teenagers who do their own fair share of age-typical sneaking about, usually after dark or in between lessons. The thought of that makes her cringe so hard she nearly shudders as she sits back down.
Don’t you dare so much as move or breathe, Rey warns her bed-warmer, just in case.
Then she turns her attention back to the mischievous girl sitting opposite. First she gnaws on her lip, then she sighs in resignation. “… I haven’t had the chance to teach you about love yet,” she says.
“Love?”
Rey leans forward again, smiling like she was earlier. “Yes. It’s probably the only thing stronger than the Force itself.”
Kyla’s eyes widen in such a sweet, childish way. “More powerful than the Force!?”
“Mmhmm… For those lucky enough to find it, of course.”
“But how do you know?” the girl asks. “How do you know if you’ve found it?”
“You’ll know.”
“But how?”
“You just know… There’s nothing else in the galaxy quite like it.”
Kyla snaps the textbook shut, earning a crack of protest from its old, weary bindings. Then she stares down into her lap with a sigh, suddenly looking thoroughly disheartened. “But I’m too young, right?”
Rey chuckles fondly, “For some types of love maybe, but not all of them.”
Another disheartened noise. “I don’t understand.”
“Your parents?” Rey prompts. “They love you and I’m sure you love them, too, right?”
The example seems to help her understand, and right away her whole face – even as small as it is – crinkles up with a beaming smile. “Yes! They’re coming to visit in two day’s time— I’ve been looking forward to it all week!”
“Well there you go,” Rey answers.
Right away Kyla asks, “But that’s a different type of love, right?”
“Mmm, one of them.”
“And what are the others?” she presses eagerly.
What a strange lesson to be having this late at night, Rey can’t help but think.
Nor can she help but feel horrendously underqualified to be teaching her young pupil about something that she only discovered for herself barely a year or two ago. A good portion of her students have their own friends and family on their own homeworlds, free to come and go whenever they like, and live at her newly-constructed temple by their own choosing in between time. They’ve grown up with the first and most important kind of love, unlike her.
“There’s the love you share with your family,” Rey tells her. “… And another love for your friends, too.”
“And what else?”
She hums thoughtfully. “… A love for things.”
“Things?” Kyla repeats with a confused scrunch of her nose.
“Yeah— Hobbies… Smells or sounds from the world around you… The forest or the sky or the rain on a warm night… Things.”
“Ohhh, right,” the girl answers with a nod before demanding again, “And what else?”
Seems there’s no escaping that other kind of love. The one she knows her overly-perceptive, overly-nosy pupil is figuratively shoving her toward with the stubborn determination only a nine-year old girl could possess. So, unable to stall any longer, Rey fills up her chest with a long breath and gives her the answer she’s waiting for.
“Romantic love.”
“But I’m too young for that one, right?” Kyla asks, once she’s finished stifling her giggles of course.
Rey purses her lips around laughter of her own. “At the age of nine? Perhaps.”
Again, the girl falls sad and silent for a moment, perking up again soon enough. “But… one day, right?”
Sensing the closure of their impromptu lesson – thank the Maker – Rey stands and gently ushers Kyla to follow, waiting until they’ve reached the door before bringing a hand down to rest comfortingly on her shoulder.
“One day,” she agrees, as gentle and warm as ever.
Her young student wavers for a moment like she’s still troubled by something, looking back down at the old Jedi tome in her arms with a deep-set frown.
“Kyla?”
“… Why don’t the books say anything about love if it’s as powerful and wonderful as you say?” she asks.
“The old Jedi forbid it,” Rey tells her truthfully.
“But why would they do that? It’s silly.”
“Well… They thought that things like fear and love would lead them down a path to the dark side.”
“… Stupid Jedi,” Kyla mumbles after a moment.
The grumbly little remark makes Rey laugh, makes her snort out a noise that would be very unbecoming of a Jedi Master, particularly one like those they were just discussing.
“Now— Time for bed?” Rey asks, tilting her head down at the much shorter girl.
“Yeah.” She yawns right on cue, then shuffles closer and snags onto Rey’s waist in a tight hug. “G’night, Master.”
“Goodnight.”
Kyla dips her head in something of a bow – a sweet little gesture that feels entirely unnecessary – and turns to walk back down the corridor. After only a few steps though, she pauses and turns back, quietly calling out to her again. “Master Rey?”
“What is it?” she answers.
Rey watches her from the doorway, somehow already knowing exactly what question she’s about to be asked. Even the man currently sprawled all over her bed like a six-foot, furnace-warm blanket seems to sense it. She feels his mind nudge that much closer to her own, eager in the most amusing, slightly foolish and endearing of ways.
“… Do you love Master Ben?”
Mmm, do you?
Have I not told you enough times? Rey presses back to him sarcastically. Have I not shown you?
Show me again once she’s gone… Just lock the damn door this time.
“Well?” Kyla prompts somewhat bossily. “Do you?”
Really, what else can she do but nod with a sure smile? There’d be little point in denying it now.
“Just as much as he loves me.”