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The tropical rain on Ajan Kloss made everything taste like copper and wet grass. Rey’s palms were raw from the training staves, and Leia kept making her circle back to the beginning, balance, breath, feel the force the echo before the strike.
‘Again,’ Leia said, gently and patiently. Rey closed her eyes, let the force guide her toward the training remote. She felt the downpour bead the small hairs at her temple. Big inhale, she felt herself floating off the ground. The world sharpened until she could hear the rain hitting leaves in different notes, a drip like a metronome, a far off antenna ticking in the same beat as her own pulse.
A seam opened in the air.
Not a voice. Not a face. A pull. The bond unspooled like wire through her ribs, bright and fast. So fast she didn’t have a chance to unwind from her stance, she fell to the ground but propped herself back up.
It started with sound, his breath, steady, somewhere not here. Rey blinked water out of her lashes and found herself seeing two skies at once: Ajan Kloss’s green dusk and a pane of star-black above polished durasteel. Kylo Ren stood alone, helmet-less, shoulders squared. And when he lifted his head in that spare, insolent way, she knew he wasn’t Ben. Ben with the stubborn sad eyes.
‘Still counting breaths?’ he asked.
Rey’s grip tightened on the staff. ‘Still trying to forget your face.’
He had the gall to almost smile. ‘I’ve tried to forget yours. It doesn’t hold.’
‘Good,’ Rey said. ‘Then remember this.’
She cut the bond without cutting it, the way she’d learned, like slamming a door but leaving her fingers in the jamb. It stung her. Rey clenched her jaw and finished the form anyway. Leia watched, expression unreadable, then nodded once. ‘Don’t over exert yourself. Have a break. Have a drink.’ she said, and stepped back under the awning.
Rey didn’t drink. She pressed her palms to her eyes and counted to four, then eight, then- stop. The bond wouldn’t be ignored, it never was. She refused to let herself be overpowered by a strange invisible string tying her to evil.
‘I’m going to run the training course, again.’ She said grabbing her blast helmet. She ran drills until her arms shook, until the pull dulled from command to suggestion.
But it came back that night.
She lay in her bunk, eyes open to the dark of her shed, when the canvas ceiling blinked away and a hangar bloomed around her. He stood there close to her, hair loose, eyes steady.
‘You always come when you say you won’t,’ he said.
Rey didn’t answer and looked away, trying to severe the connection, but she hesitated, and the moment was gone. She pursed her lips and opened her eyes to find him looking at her with amused eyes.
His mouth tilted, not quite a smile. ‘You’re getting stronger,’ he murmured appraisingly.
‘So are you,’ she said without thinkinh, and hated that it sounded like an acknowledgment.
The vision thinned, leaving only sensation, like a change in altitude or pressure. When sleep finally took her, it was shallow, restless, and full of corridors she didn’t remember walking.
—
A week later the Resistance stole coordinates for a First Order fuel depot welded into a dead moon. Rey volunteered to scout. She told herself it was about fuel. It was.
And it wasn’t.
The depot stood on the burnt ground that once held a flourishing city, it was now an iron forest laced with sickly lights and vents that exhaled old heat. Rey moved through it like a memory. By the time the storm rolled across the moon’s thin sky, the steel decks were slick, her boots slipping on the grates. She was traversing one of the depot’s catwalk when the bond drew taut, like a string plucked hard. She felt him before the soldiers’ footfalls reached her. She hid behind an awning in a corridor, hand on her saber.
‘Don’t,’ she whispered to no one.
Then he stepped in her line of vision. No mask, with wet hair in his eyes, rain pearled on his lashes. The guards fanned behind him, ready to strike.
‘Leave us,’ he said without turning, and something in his voice made the stormtroopers answer without question. They ventured deeper into the corridor, their footsteps echoing off the walls, until they vanished around a bend, leaving her alone with Kylo Ren.
‘Always dramatic,’ Rey said. Her saber sprang to life with that brilliant blue light illuminating her face.
‘If you wanted quiet,’ Kylo said, igniting his own blade, ‘you shouldn’t keep showing up in my mind.’
‘Funny,’ Rey said, stepping forward, ‘I was going to say the same.’
By now, they knew each other’s first steps: her standard feint high, his habitual side slip, the pivot that nearly always led to the double bind if she let him drive. Their footsteps played a game, leading them out onto a balcony. They met in the middle of the rain and the red blue clash of their sabers reflecting into the rainy dark sky and onto their determined faces.
He was stronger since Crait. Or she was. It didn’t matter. They were matched in the way a wound matches the blade that made it.
‘Why fuel this time?’ he asked through the press and twist, and saber smacking sounds. ‘What does your little rebellion think it can burn?’
‘Fire can warm,’ she said, parry, catch, release. ‘It can cleanse.’
‘It can starve,’ he said softly, almost at her ear as their hilts locked and slid bringing them closer to one another.
‘You did that,’ she snapped, bringing her blade back and striking harsh. Their blades skated down into spark. ‘You.’
He flinched, barely, not with guilt, she recognized guilt in him by now, but with recognition: yes, I, and what would you have me do with it?
Steam rose from the blades in white banners. Rey felt the force unfolding in the fight. He switched lines, drove her left, pressed the advantage, then misjudged the slick underfoot. His heel slid; her blade hammered his guard; he dropped, one knee down, red slash angled to hold her at bay. A heartbeat later, they were both still.
Her saber’s edge hovered near his face. His eyes found hers through the blue.
'Go ahead,’ he said. No challenge in it, just an offer.
Something in her chest cracked and unfurled. The bond surged, reckless with honesty. And they were nowhere near the depot. They were in a cabin that had never been built, the kind of place that only exists after a war: a table, two cups, a window that turned the rain to beads and a warm fire. The bond did this, stitched scenes out of want and fear both. The room was detailed enough to hurt. His hands were clean. Her hands were clean. The blue of her blade was a lampshade, and the red of his was the fire light. He held the same pose, on her knees in front of her. With the same look in his eyes.
Rey,’ he said softly. Just her name, and it felt like hearing it for the first time after a long silence. His hand lifted, not toward a weapon but toward her wrist. In the vision’s cabin, his fingertips brushed her pulse.
In the depot, the storm roared, electricity wild as a flock. His glove hovered over her skin, not quite touching.
He leaned in. She didn’t move. Their breaths found the same rhythm. Rey felt her body choose for her, felt the Force swivel toward some terrifying mercy.
Then the alarms wailed.
The troopers had found the breach she didn’t make, the one her distraction had quietly helped along. The Resistance’s fleets flashed alive across the far gantries as they left behind the detonators, the little brilliant act of sabotage that was going to make this depot slow bleed the First Order for months.
Kylo’s head turned, just enough. The cabin shattered, glass and lamp and pain. Rey stepped back, broke their bond, almost with a gasp, and brought her blade up. He rose in a single predatory motion.
‘You did this,’ he said, his voice accusatory. Was he talking about the cabin scene? Or was it the act of sabotage?
They moved again, but something had unlatched, causing them to move more forcefully and precisely with a vengeance. She flowed past him, not to kill, but to delay, to twist the red away from the path her comrades were taking. He read it, anger flaring, and tried to box her, but she leapt, caught a patched cable, swung from the balcony onto solid ground, and ran. A blast tore the air into shrapnel. He was there again, a shadow following behind her. Their blades met again in a final grind that rattled her teeth. He caught her guard and, with a punishingly gentle twist, disarmed her.
The blue skittered across the wet deck, sputtered against a grating and died.
She stared at him, chest heaving. He did not level his blade at her throat. He held it aside, rain making a red ladder in the air.
‘Go,’ he said, and in that moment, she mistook it for a command. But, when she recalled the encounter later that night, she realized it was actually a plea.
Rey turned. She didn’t run so much as arrive somewhere else: a swinging door, a narrow catwalk, the mouth of a lift already unlatched by Rose’s precise hands. She fled into the night and vanished while the depot bled its fuel in shuddering sighs.
He did not follow.
—
Rain hammered the awnings until the camp sounded like a thousand drums. Leia made Rey run the circle again, then again when Rey’s saber tip wavered.
‘Again.’ Leia spoke in a calm yet firm tone. Her mood mirrored Rey’s execrable state ever since her return from her triumphant mission.
Rey’s jaw ached from clenching. She moved through the form too fast, shoulders tight, cut too hard. The saber snarled, skidding in the rain slick air. Her balance slipped and she caught herself before falling on her knees, and swore under her breath.
‘Your center’s gone,’ Leia said evenly. ‘Try to find it.’
‘I’m trying,’ Rey snapped, already moving again.
‘You’re not listening to the force,’ Leia said patiently. ‘Again. Slower.’
Rey slowed for a beat- and then didn’t. Rage pressed behind her ribs. Every time she found the rhythm, the bond tugged at the edge of her senses, a phantom hand at her wrist, a breath that wasn’t hers. Blue light flashed wrong angled through rain. She missed a step and the form collapsed.
‘Again,’ Leia said, stepping in, tapping Rey’s forearm with two knuckles, precise and irritatingly calm. ‘Elbow under the line. Move with your hips and breathe on the turn.’
‘Stop- telling me- how to breathe,’ Rey grit out, resetting, breathless. She attacked the air like it owed her something. The stance blew open, her footing went, and he saber dipped.
‘Again,’ Leia said, closer now. ‘You’re strong enough to do this right and angry enough to do it wrong. Choose.’
‘Choose?’ Rey laughed, harsh, sitting in the mud. ‘Is that what you told him?’
Leia’s eyes flicked, just once, her voice colder now. ‘Again.’
Rey moved, ruined it, moved again. The bond tugged, hot, insistent. Ben’s name rose like bile in her throat, and she shoved it down so hard it burned. Her next cut went wild. Leia’s force caught Rey’s wrist, just a firm touch, not a restraint, a correction, and that was the spark to ignite her ire.
‘Don’t do that!’ Rey yanked free, breath ragged. ‘Don’t stand there and tell me to breathe like I’m not drowning in him every time I close my eyes!’
Silence hit harder than rain.
Leia didn’t step back. ‘Finish the form.’
‘The form?’ Rey’s voice broke into a jagged laugh. ‘Your forms don’t fix this. Your wisdom doesn’t fix this. Your-‘ The word carved its way out, fierce and filthy with hurt. ‘Your son is corrupt. That boy is corrupt. He crawls into my head and- he-‘ She gestured uselessly, blade humming. ‘He’s rotting every clean thing I’ve got left, and you want me to tuck my elbow?’
Leia absorbed it like the general that she was. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t defend. She didn’t break. When she spoke, the words were easy and measured.
‘Yes. Tuck your elbow.’
Rey stared, shocked into wordless fury.
‘Because when the storm in your head is loud,’ Leia went on, ‘the only thing that cuts through it is a clean movement. Again.’
‘I hate him.’ Rey’s throat hurt. ‘I hate that he’s in me. I hate that you—‘ She bit down, then spit it anyway. ‘You made him. You raised this. He’s messed me up, and I didn’t even get a choice.’
Leia’s breath left her in a soft, old sound. For a heartbeat, grief passed over her face like a shadow, she was a mother again. Then the general regained her stance.
‘I did make a boy,’ she said. ‘But the galaxy helped make a monster. Both things are true.’ She tipped her chin at the stance markers in the mud.
Rey shook, bright with fury and helpless love she didn’t know where to put. The bond tugged again, come here, say my name, fall-, and she bared her teeth at the empty air.
‘Again,’ Leia said, and this time she didn’t wait. She tapped Rey’s knee, nudged her hip, pressed her shoulder down, quick as a mechanic aligning a ship that wanted to tear itself apart.
Rey slammed the saber through the first cut, which was ugly. The second cut was cleaner. By the fourth, her hands stopped trying to break the hilt. By the eighth, her lungs remembered they weren’t on fire. The bond still hummed, a distant engine, but she kept it distant.
‘Good,’ Leia said, when the form ended where it was meant to end. ‘Again.’
Rey swallowed salt and rain. She set her feet. The anger, still iron-hot, but she’d make use of it now, use it to her advantage. She lifted the blade and moved. On the tenth run, her elbow tucked without being told. On the twelfth, the bond tug at the edge of her mind was a background noise.
Only then did Leia step back beneath the awning. ‘We will resume tomorrow.’
Rey didn’t answer. She finished the form, killed the blade, and stood shaking in the rain. The anger had burned off, leaving only sadness and the ache of defeat. And under all of it, something small endured, hope, flickering like a faulty lamp, in a cabin that waits in the world after the war.