Chapter Text
Rey wakes to utter blackness, a disorienting lack of knowledge of where she is, and a piece of metal pressing painfully into her side.
“Ow!” she shouts as the offending implement jabs her again. She bolts into a sitting position and glances wildly around, barely able to see her hands in front of her and the faint gleam of a human-sized something to her right. The corner where she slept at the Resistance base was open to the jungle air and never this dark, and why would C-3PO be hovering over her—
“Mistress Rey, are you awake? From my calculations, it is abnormal and potentially worrisome for a human to sleep for this long.”
And it all comes crashing down on her.
Rey allows herself to slide slowly back down, wishing for the darkness to consume her again and erase every memory accrued since she left the mess hall in search of fresh air. After lying prone with her eyes closed for several breaths, trying to muster the strength to fight the weight of the dread that has pinned her body to the mattress, she asks measuredly: “And how long is that?”
“One and a half standard day cycles. It is just past 0900 hours by this Destroyer’s central chronometer.”
She has never slept for that long in her life. Rey cracks one eye and looks at the protocol droid’s shining outline. “Has anyone tried to enter my rooms?”
“An unidentifiable astromech entered the external sitting area and deposited objects two-point-one-three hours prior. I have not sensed any sentient being within twenty square metres for the entirety of your rest.”
The knot in her chest loosens, infinitesimally. “Thanks, Kate. Can you turn on the lights?”
Rey makes a quick trip to the refresher to rinse her mouth and refasten her hair, her buns having turned oblong during her hours of rest. Curiosity at the items that await her in the next room hurry her movements.
Whatever she expected to see after creeping tentatively down the hall, it was not her own tattered satchel, somehow having traveled from where she dropped it near the Resistance base entrance on Ajan Kloss.
A wild spark of hope lights in her as she runs to it, itching for the legacy saber, anything she can use as a weapon other than the makeshift wrench that has been tucked in the waistband of her leggings since Kate’s improvised modifications. But as she rifles through her hastily packed belongings, it becomes clear that someone else has done the same—her collection of usual gadgets is missing, and all that remains are the couple days’ worth of spare clothing that she threw in while vacating her sleeping area.
The three Jedi texts originally pilfered from Ahch-To are also conspicuously absent.
Rey ponders this as she notices the tray that sits on the table beside her bag and tentatively picks through its offerings, selecting a warm and dense bread that reassuringly resembles a polystarch portion. Infinitely more flavourful, though, as she discovers when she bites into it. She gives the two kinds of meat and fluffy yellow substance a longing glance but abstains for now.
What does the First Order’s Supreme Leader want with ancient texts that he has no doubt had access to before, as Luke’s padawan if not after? Unless his motive is less about his own gain and more to do with safeguarding valuable—and potentially dangerous—information. All other items that could serve as weapons had been removed from her pack.
This thought only strengthen her resolve to take the texts back at the earliest opportunity and redouble her efforts to decipher them.
Sitting cross-legged on one of the two couches, Rey rests her head against its back and stares at the black striated ceiling. She can hear the soft taps of Kate moving in the inner room, hopefully keeping to household chores while unsupervised. By her count, she has been on the Steadfast for about two standard day cycles, and she still cannot believe that she has been allowed to spend these in relative isolation. The unease that was implanted with the fertility suppressant continues to fester, humming through her limbs and rubbing roughly at each nerve. It is possible that her rooms have been outfitted with motion sensors—or worse, surveillance cams, and her waking may trigger any number of events.
And Rey has never been one to be caught unprepared.
She scans the sitting area with a critical eye, putting skills honed over years to use. The legs of the other couch are connected by a solid-looking metal bar in some sleek and minimalistic design, and she quickly sets about detaching it from its companions with a combination of her wrench, a screwdriver supplied by Kate, and a well-positioned push with the Force. Rey gives the bar a few test swings, eliciting worried exclamations from the droid, and smiles at the similarity in feel and balance to her quarterstaff.
Returning to her previous position upon the only intact piece of furniture, she holds her new weapon at the ready and glares at the durasteel and carbon fiber paneling of the main door. She dares it to open and reveal the man who has captured her and left her to rot like a carcass in the desert sun, until the perverse whim to torment her seizes him again.
She waits.
And waits.
By 1300 hours, her legs jitter restlessly, and she is periodically stealing bites of food from the trays. Breakfast is still deliciously succulent when cold, and a light vegetable dish—fresh, not rehydrated—was delivered by droid through a sliding panel hidden in the wall.
Kate comments haughtily that if she desired food, she shouldn’t have asked an R5-series for it. Rey testily retorts that she’d like to see the protocol droid do better.
She wishes she hadn’t when Kate torches the rest of her vegetables. She isn’t sure if the gesture is in retaliation or an honest attempt to follow her directive.
By 1530 hours, Rey eats them anyway.
By 1700 hours, her gaze is no longer fixed on the door. An odd assortment of objects float in a misshapen semicircle around her: a bolt from her dissection of the other couch, a utensil from the tray, her wrench, a clean sock from her satchel. She practices manipulating the threads of the Force with small, deft tugs as opposed to her typical haphazard pulls, levitating each object to be level with her face before lowering it back to the height of the others.
The items drop and her hand lunges for the metal bar whenever a living presence brushes the corner of her mind she keeps extended towards the door.
By 2000 hours, Rey wishes something would blast through her door. Not him, but a couple of stormtroopers or junior officers who she could test her makeshift quarterstaff on, if only to temporarily ease the apprehension that knots her gut.
She shakes out stiff limbs and shifts in her chair. Moves the metal bar beside her one inch to the right and takes a bite of a delectable root-vegetable-and-red-meat pastry.
Desperate for something, anything to keep occupied, she closes her eyes and pushes her awareness into the fluid energy of the Force once more, spearing out, and out, brushing against the oblivious minds in the ship levels above and below her as if grazing their shoulder in a crowded hallway. And still she pushes out. She reaches a point stories above her where the ship becomes space, then moves laterally, occasionally detecting brief sparks of Force sensitivity from those who may perceive her as a gust from an errant air duct, or the breath of someone behind them.
Rey does not allow herself to contemplate if her search is aimless or purposeful.
Her energy is drifting like an unmoored ship near the top of Steadfast’s starboard side when she brushes the first tendrils of roiling darkness. She grapples within herself, attempting to withdraw, but a part of her moves towards his presence, morbidly drawn by its depth and familiarity in a world of cold, bland steel.
And then the darkness brushes back, a gentle caress so at odds with the wall of power that she has fetched up against. Curiosity is woven into its threads, a questioning not confined to mere words, yet so purely him that she can almost hear his acerbic baritone accompanying it.
She rips her energy away from his, yanking her consciousness back along the length of the ship and into her body in one dizzy, sickening pull.
Rey finds herself sprawled on the floor, limbs askew and chest heaving. Cutlery, tools and clothing clatter down like a strange domestic hailstorm.
To her credit, Kate assesses the mess without comment and begins dutifully collecting the objects while Rey regains her breath. Only when the room is back to its former austerity does the droid speak.
“If you want a calisthenics routine, I can recommend one much better than that. It would be more productive than staring at a door all day. And by my body mass index calculations, weight gain would improve your health and physique.”
“And an oil bath would improve your attitude,” Rey mutters, dragging herself unsteadily to her feet. Her words remind her of one of her last thoughts about a different droid, and she feels a hot rush of shame. “I’m sorry, Kate, I didn’t mean it. I should go to bed. I haven’t even begun to process the last few days. Or my feelings about this horrid mess I’m in.”
The droid stares at her. Fluorescent eyes seem to glow brighter with something akin to wonder.
“Thank you, Mistress. I do not believe that I have ever received an apology before. And while I do not have any personal experience in the matter, my databank suggests that emotions are a natural part of the human experience.” Kate is silent for a moment, processing. “Shall I scan for life forms while you rest?”
Tears prick at her eyes as she realizes that this droid is the first who has performed an act of thoughtfulness while on this godsforsaken ship.
For longer than that, if she is being honest with herself.
“Yes, please.”
She takes painstaking care to fortify her mental walls before she retires.
The first thing Rey knows when she stumbles into the sitting room, having maintained her blissful ignorance for just a few seconds less, is that she will succumb to the numbness hovering at the edges of her mind if she spends another day watching the door.
The second thing is that even she cannot bear the smell of her three—four?—day old clothing any longer.
The desert heat tends to wick away sweat before its odor settles, but temp-controlled air decidedly does not.
Once she has fished out a spare tunic, leggings, and underthings in the same light shades she wears currently, she makes her way to the refresher. Even a backwater Jakkuvian is aware that there is little point in putting clean fabric on top of sweat and grime.
Rey strips her clothing off with clinical efficiency after carefully locking the refresher door. Stepping into the transparisteel-framed cubicle, she spins a dial—and screams in shock when hot liquid rains down on her hair and skin.
Water has kissed her body on a handful of occasions during her stays on Ahch-To and Ajan Kloss, and she was able to bear the disorientating experience through a mixture of mental preparation and necessity. She even enjoys some interaction with the substance—on her own terms. But shock bolts down her spine when her skin receives it instead of sonic-pressured air, and from across the Steadfast’s vast length she feels an answering shift, the equivalent of turning one’s head at a loud noise nearby.
Immediately followed by the same wordless question that she received last night.
Rey launches herself naked and dripping out of the shower cubicle and throws all her figurative weight against her mental barriers, desperately blocking out their connection.
Kate is framed in the doorway a second later, somehow having circumvented the locking technology.
“Are you well, Mistress?” she asks, seemingly unfazed by Rey’s naked state. Kate’s blush-toned head swivels back and forth, almost comically. “The pitch of your exclamation suggested distress so intense, I wondered if an enemy was in there with you. Possibly Supreme Leader Ren, from your wariness of him.”
“What?”
The alarm that accompanies that thought rips through her so viscerally that she clenches her fists and sends the nearest towel careening into her grasp. She feels hot and itchy, so uncomfortable that she can only label the sensation disgust.
The sensation of the water was preferable to this.
Latching onto that lifeline, Rey scans the drops that speckle her bronze skin and the pools that scatter the polished floor. She imagines the sheer cost that every acquaintance of hers would pay to lap it off the gleaming surface and feels her revulsion grow.
How dare the First Order expend something so precious so frivolously.
Much safer to add that to his ever-growing list of sins than to examine the heat that his awareness brought to her bare skin.
“What is this called?” Rey asks Kate, cross-legged in the sitting room and holding up a slice of fruit in her hand. Might as well know what the sweet-yet-tangy thing is, so she can ask for more of it if given the chance. It’s refreshing, sharp taste is unlike anything she has ever consumed before and may have just brought a lone tear to her eye.
“A Meiloorun fruit. A type of citrus fruit native to the planet Lothal.”
“And what’s this?”
“Fried Bantha-veal. Typically from the rump or leg of a juvenile B—”
“Actually, I might not want to know.” And she realizes that it has taken her this long to recognize the wealth of information she has at her fingertips.
Information she can use to do something.
“Kate… do you have access to the blueprints of the Steadfast, the ship we’re currently on?
“Unfortunately, Mistress, information about the Steadfast is highly classified, as it is the flagship of the Supreme Leader. But by my calculations, it is likely quite similar in design and build to other Resurgent-class Star Destroyers, and older blueprints are readily accessible via the HoloNet.”
“Perfect. Can you pull one up?”
The droid projects a three-dimensional translucent, blue miniature of the triangular behemoth and Rey feels herself slip into sharp, analytical thinking. It is comforting in its familiarity, and her greatest tool in her past life when an often life-threatening problem did not present with an immediate solution. She instructs Kate to enlarge the image and moves methodically through its floors, estimating where her quarters may be located by her mental exploration of the ship’s boundaries the day before. A handful of control systems and data storage banks are noted, promising for their proximity.
Then she slings her crude weapon over her shoulder and goes scavenging.
Moving down the hall on silent feet, it takes her mere minutes to locate the closest small control station by following her visuospatial knowledge of her surroundings. The station likely holds no operational intelligence of true value but could give information about the Steadfast handy in efforts to cripple or destroy it.
The door, almost identical to hers, requires a code to release its hydraulics, but she bypasses this with a wave of her hand and a slight push into the Force.
So far, so good.
She steps into the room just as she begins to hear footsteps rise in an organized rhythm from further down the hall.
Slamming the inside button to shut the door, Rey turns to the central keypad, currently silent and grey, and tentatively pushes a button at random. The controls power to life with soft beeps and whirls. It takes her a moment to sound out the symbols that are emblazoned in red across the rectangular screen.
To access… system, submit… biological… credits? Credentials?
She only possesses a loose grasp on Aurebesh, comprised of flight simulation and compusystem terminology gleaned from the shipwrecked Empire tech. These words are more familiar to her than the abstract Jedi texts, but Rey hopes she is misunderstanding as she places her finger against a pad that blinks invitingly at her right.
The instant her skin connects, the system emits a loud tone that can only be interpreted as reprimanding and all signs of life wink out.
Shit.
She performs the same action another two times, with the same disheartening results. Loath to call attention to her explorations by activating the inevitable alarm, Rey scans the outside corridor for life and extracts herself from the station, consulting her mental map and plotting her next destinations.
Over the next handful of hours, she learns that she can unseal practically any door or panel with help from the Force, and move turbolifts using similar tactics, but her attempts to gain entry to all systems are thwarted by the requirement of approved biological credentials. Rey feels her frustration grow with every loudly beeped denial.
She is about to expand her search to the level below her when the door of the turbolift she has called opens to reveal a small phalanx of stormtroopers. Their posture, already that of soldiers, grows stiffer with surprise.
One’s vocoder produces a garbled simile of: “Is that…?”
Another’s toe shuffles forward.
The blaster of a third raises.
And Rey turns and flees blindly in the direction of her quarters and Kate, the only facsimile of a safe haven in a hostile landscape of durasteel and chrome. She pauses to catch her breath when she’s rounded the corner of the hall, her door in sight ahead and no heavy footsteps behind her.
Much later, when she is lying on her too-soft bed, head where her feet should be and gazing blankly out at the constellations beyond her viewport, Rey will turn her reaction over and over in her mind. She will dismay at how far her environment has pushed her from the fearless Jakkuvian girl who attacked first and asked questions later, to the detriment of her relationships with others yet crucial to the preservation of her life, and vow to push back with all her might.
But for now, she trudges back to her rooms with her head hung low and her weapon slung over a shoulder, noticing the security cams that are wedged between the walls and ceiling at regular intervals and realizing any attempts to hide herself were futile.
Rey sequesters herself in her quarters for the entirety of the next day—but she is not idle.
Determined to keep the pessimistic thoughts of last night at bay through any means, she reviews the Star Destroyer blueprints for hours, countering Kate’s impatience with a promise to tune her stiff joints as best she can when finished. She compares the paths she travelled yesterday to the supposed corresponding location in the plans with dogged, methodical care, making verbal notes of the differences that Kate records.
If she lacks the necessary biological credentials to obtain true First Order intelligence, the least she can do is provide the Resistance with an updated layout of the ship, complete with the places where a well-aimed proton torpedo would do the most damage.
Transmitting the information that she discovers is another problem that Rey considers later that evening. Kate’s reset seems to have fully disconnected her from the First Order’s networks, and the droid appears more than capable of sending and receiving information via radio frequencies, but Rey has no idea how to transmit directly to her allies without access to secure channels or knowledge of their personal codes. Broadcasting the information on a publicly accessible channel will no doubt get the attention of the Resistance.
But it would also call that of the Order, and even the most brainless nerfherder would be able to pinpoint her as the culprit of the leak.
She decides to ponder this dilemma further when she actually has any valuable information in her possession.
After a sponge-bath and the inhalation of the two Meiloorun fruits that appeared the next morning, Rey knows that any further progress in mapping the ship must be made experientially. Before shouldering her metal bar, she asks Kate if any information about First Order shift rotations is available on the HoloNet. She is pleasantly surprised when she is advised that on most Resurgent-class Destroyers, it occurs in just under a standard hour. As she waits, Rey plots her course through the projected blueprints, aiming to explore as close as possible to the central bridge tower, at the top and offset slightly to the port side of the massive starship.
She waits just outside her door until she senses several groups of troopers move past. Then she exits for the second time, pushing her limbs to move through a fresh wave of the anxiety that has ebbed and flowed but never truly dissipated since she left the mess hall on Ajan Kloss.
Her journey to the command bridge is uneventful, likely because she stops before every blast door and turbolift to check for signs of life beyond. A strong urge to avoid any interaction with First Order personnel spurs her constant forays into the Force; she is already resigned to being unable to conceal her presence.
She hopes that whoever sees her will think she’s just out to stretch her legs. A harmless, ignorant scavenger, play-acting as a Jedi.
Rey is used to people underestimating her.
By the time the final turbolift spits her out at what should be one of the Steadfast’s uppermost corridors, her head has begun to throb with the constant effort of maintaining expanded awareness. She pauses in the deserted hall, seeing her reflection out of her periphery in the same dark and gleaming panels that line the halls below. She can sense the four troopers that have been posted through the shift change, standing just around the next corner. Spearing out her energy further, Rey infiltrates what they guard, brushing against more minds than she can count and considering that affirmation that she is indeed approaching the main bridge.
The complete absence of a certain and wholly unignorable presence within the milieu heartens her.
Still and contemplating her next move, only one tendril of her mind registers when a being, notable only for the nigh-impenetrable shields surrounding their own, breaks away from the others and passes through the stormtrooper guard. The same exposed, vulnerable sensation that previously triggered her flight response surges again and she scans her environment wildly, flinging out a hand and tugging the lift up with such power that pistons squeal and metal sparks, searching for an alcove, a storage room, anything—
“What do we have here?”
A tall man dressed in dark grey uniform is walking towards her from the left with militant, precise steps. A shock of copper hair similar in colour to Kate’s metal casing is carefully slicked and quaffed atop his head and his thin lips are curled in a sneer, as if he had just tasted a foul piece of food or encountered something comparably disgusting.
Rey knows she is otherwise alone in the corridor, so she assumes it must be her.
She tightens her grip on her metal staff but does not deign to answer.
“I’ve seen your face before,” he continues. “You’re that Jakkuvian scavenger that Ren has been so fixated on this past year. I was unaware that you had been captured at last.”
Rey tucks that piece of information away for later examination.
“I wonder why you are roaming the ship unfettered instead of shackled in a cell where your ilk belongs.” A cunning gleam in his eye suggests that he believes he already knows. He smooths the already flat lapels of his jacket compulsively, as if just being near her is repulsive. “I would oversee your return to the brig myself if I wasn’t worried about,” his bottom lip twists further, brows furrowing together, “Contamination.”
He glances backwards, clearly thinking.
One polished boot takes one step back towards the command bridge, then pauses.
A fresh wave of panic crests when she realizes that she is no more than a rabid animal to him and means to confine her in much less comfortable quarters. Cornered at the end of the hall with nowhere to run, a different instinct finally takes hold. It’s as familiar to her as the heat of the sun on her skin, and sand between her toes.
“Try it and see what happens,” Rey spits at him. She contorts her face into the most frightening visage she can muster, setting her jaw and feeling the recycled air bite at her bared teeth. The metal bar seems to raise of its own accord.
The man draws a sleek-looking blaster with ease and levels it at her face in response.
“I intend to.” He withdraws a comlink from his pocket with his free hand. “Mitaka, send five of my personal guard to level fifty, the primary bridge. Immediately. And lock turbolift 12-A.”
“You’ll need more than five to take me down,” she says. “I’m not counting you. You may know your way around a blaster, but I bet you couldn’t take an Ewok in a fistfight.”
Her attention is barely on him; Rey is focusing on grounding her awareness, calming her racing thoughts, and reaching out into the Force. She keeps constant focus on the corridor beyond the First Order official—she knows she will not win any fight with a bar stolen from a piece of furniture alone.
The anger that her words stir in the man is palpable in the Force, if she couldn’t read his twisted face and the jump of his blaster’s muzzle as his arm tenses. “Watch your tongue, you disgusting little sand rat. You and your pitiful excuse for a weapon are no match for the most incompetent trooper with the oldest blaster on our ship.”
Her feet lurch, longing to jump towards him and show just how wrong he is. He sends a blaster bolt square at her chest in response.
Rey feels a ripple of warning in the Force a millisecond before he shoots. She barely manages bring the bar across her chest to block it, realizing his weapon was set to stun as the bolt is absorbed by her staff and crackles along its length. It singes her fingers yet does no further damage.
He takes a step forward, finger readying to deliver another blast. Rey immerses herself deeper in the Force, yet she is still unable to quell her fear and the sense of impotence that stems from it. She scrabbles to wrap her mind around his blaster, to wedge her energy into the air between his fingers and the durasteel and wrench it from his grasp. But her connection with the Force around her wavers; it is slippery, it is there and then it isn’t, and then she feels it, an ache of power in her fingers and her blood and her very bones as she curls her outstretched hand and—
The blaster clatters to the floor, the action not of her doing. The man’s hands raise and begin to press, then clutch frantically at the base of his throat as the doors to the turbolift hiss open behind her.
“Stop.”
The voice is devastatingly familiar in tone and deep timbre. It cuts like a knife through her intentions and connection with the Force, and like the rising sun after a long cool night, she knew it was inevitable that she would have to face him again.
As the tide of energy seeps from her and Rey comes back into herself, now able to feel a similar power standing mere inches to her back, she realizes that a hidden part of her is relieved at his sudden intrusion.
No matter what the eventual cost.
Because she does not know how far she would have gone otherwise.
The man in front of her takes a great wheezing breath, his eyes immediately darting up and to her right.
“Supreme Leader, this creature is rabid and unhinged—certainly no Jedi. She is a menace to all on this ship, she should be sent to the brig in chains immediately—”
“You will do no such thing, Hux.”
Heavy fabric brushes the lightest kiss upon Rey’s leg as Kylo Ren maneuvers his large frame around her and stands between her and the man ostensibly called Hux.
Hux. She’s heard that name spat and jeered around the Resistance base—one tale about Rose and biting surfaces from the depths of her memory. Nonetheless, it occurs to her that she now stands within spitting distance of the two most powerful men of the First Order.
She must still be riding on adrenaline, as the knowledge doesn’t cow her as much as it should.
“Ren, be reasonable—please.” The final word is added with a grimace and a gulp when Hux is directed a glare that would make lesser men quake. “We cannot have a filthy, Resistance-allied scavenger running amok and wreaking havoc, think of the security and intelligence risks, the optics if this were to leak—notwithstanding the fact that she just attacked me with her freakish powers—”
“Understandable,” Kylo says, taking another step towards Hux. Rey can feel her skin prickle and pulse race with irritation that isn’t her own. “Because I, too, often have the urge to forcibly stop your prattle.”
Hux’s face flushes almost as red as his hair, but he wisely remains silent.
“She is my scavenger, and I will do with her what I please.” The emphasis that Kylo laces his words with carries both threat and promise, and Rey is certain that he is directing the words at Hux but speaking to her.
Her body grows cold. It is only a matter of time, then.
“She has been implanted with a tracking device,” he continues, “I am aware of her movements. I will hear no further complaints about this.”
Hux shifts his gaze to her, eyes narrowed and lips pursed, visibly holding back the retort he so obviously wishes to make. Rey feels smaller than a sand mite under his stare.
The annoyance spikes within her again, so at odds with her own apprehension. “Leave us,” Kylo orders. “I will join you at the bridge in a moment.”
With a salute so stiff that it falls just short of mocking, Hux turns on his heel and disappears around the corner. Rey is not sorry to see him go, but she keeps her eyes on his retreating form and hangs onto the clip of his boots like a lifeline until they fade from even her keen ears.
The silence stretches for a heartbeat too long. The very air between them swells in a messy tangle of energy and emotion and half-formed intentions. For a terrifying moment, she feels adrift, a second from being swept away in a tide of anxiety and despair and rage wherein she cannot discern her end and the beginning of the man standing with her in this hall.
Kylo cuts through it first, his voice inadvertently a grounding anchor.
“Return to your quarters now. Stay there. I will not always be available to run interference on behalf of your idiocy.” It is the first time that he has addressed her directly throughout the entire interaction.
Since he left her on the Echelon.
Rey finally turns to him and fortifies herself by pulling on the red threads of anger within the jumble of their energy. “Good, because I don’t need nor want you to. Stay away from me. I could have handled that piece of Bantha shit.”
And she can handle Kylo Ren too, she tells herself, although her heart quivers at the thought of his earlier words and their thinly veiled foreshadowing.
None of the frustration that roils off him and eddies around her is visible on his face, smooth but for the groove of her scar and faint creases at the corners of his eyes. “You could have,” he agrees, and she is jarred by his sudden quiet tone. She’d be a fool to view it as hint of quarter. “But at what cost?”
He tears his inscrutable eyes from hers and stalks in the direction of the bridge, black cape billowing behind him.
As she is left alone in the corridor, willing her feet to move her towards the lift he just vacated, she feels the ghost of a thought float back to her—a memory, surely, for it is not packaged in words. But if she were to assign it syllables, Rey instantly knows which.
Don’t be afraid. I feel it too.
She swallows once and makes her escape in the turbolift.
The Supreme Leader’s directive to stay sequestered in her rooms serves as a powerful motivator to do just the opposite. He alluded to knowing her exact location through the tracker, but Rey is uncertain of its specificity and wonders how much was posturing to deflect Hux. She has been left alone to poke and prod (unsuccessfully) at various parts of the ship up to this point—and if she stays clear of First Order officials with chips the size of the Supremacy on their shoulder, Rey has no reason to believe that her explorations cannot continue unhindered.
When Kate wakes her at 0800 standard hours, she continues her aquatic protest with a sponge bath, dons her usual garb, and eats in the sitting room with the droid in what has become her strange morning routine. But as she sits cross-legged on the wide chair, awareness cast into the Force around her, waiting for a break in the stream of personnel that pass her doors that may be long in coming, she begins to think that an alternate approach may be warranted.
Rey spends her day replicating what she can of Leia’s lessons instead and retires to bed immediately after her evening meal. She asks Kate to stand guard as usual—and wake her at the turn of the standard day cycle.
Blinking away remnants of grogginess in the morning’s early hours, she dresses quickly and thanks Kate. She grabs her metal staff, still marveling that it was not confiscated from her—practical of them, really, she would have just made another—and begins to retrace the path she mentally drew back towards the central bridge. Kate’s blueprints showed a cluster of rooms past the bridge that were labelled as meeting rooms and other areas integral to the more non-technical operations of the First Order’s last leader.
And hopefully unoccupied at this hour.
With little need to avoid personnel, Rey is back on the upper bridge level in less than an hour. She senses troopers in the same position as before outside the bridge and the lifeforms of a skeleton operating crew within but bypasses the former with the aid of a soft telepathic suggestion implanted with the Force.
Mere paces past the bridge lies another set of doors, their grand width and additional detailing hinting importance. But it is not the dense material, straited with gleaming silver and so impenetrable that Rey guesses it may be Quadranium steel, that calls her to them. It is a sense of something beyond, a mix of energies and auras that are at once familiar and not, virile and yet incredibly ancient.
For all its pomp, the portal still yields to her without protest at a wave of her hand.
It reveals a hall, bare and black in typical First Order style save for a replica of the first ornate doors to her right. Yet she is called to a plain set of black doors across from them, to her left. The energy humming from whatever lies beyond is enough to set her teeth on edge and raise the thin hairs on the backs of her arms.
She finds herself in front of the doors without intentionally moving her feet and raises her arm once more.
They don’t budge.
After several more attempts to manipulate the air between the panels and push outwards, Rey more carefully wraps her awareness around the material of the only machination of the Steadfast that has resisted her efforts so far. She finds that similar energy is already present and working actively against hers.
The door isn’t just locked… it’s held together with the Force.
The knowledge only strengthens her resolve to get past it.
Acting on instinct, she begins to press her energy upon that which surrounds the door. The singular essence of raw power and tempestuousness is instantly recognizable—who else could it belong to?—and it calls to Rey, eagerly entwining itself with hers. For a moment she feels home, more so than she ever did ensconced in the Jakkuvian desert, and his Force signature is no longer unbalancing, or fear-provoking, or disquieting.
It feels easy and right entangled with her own.
Two pieces of machinery that fit together perfectly.
As familiar as her own breath.
When Rey opens eyes that she didn’t know she closed, the door is open in front of her.
The room beyond is the most beautiful she has encountered on the Steadfast thus far. It sprawls at her feet, bigger than either of those assigned to her, its edges lined with an array of cabinets and shelving that boast the source of the foreign energy. Her very nerves feel pulled towards the ancient hum, small in source but so incredibly steeped in darkness that Kylo’s presence feels grey in comparison. Yet she resists for a moment, eyes roving quickly over a wide table and chair to find the only source of light in the room—the galaxy itself. For this space clearly occupies the very apex of the ship, and the wide expanse of transparisteel that lines it on one side curves up and over to become the room’s roof.
The refracted and multicoloured light of distant planetary systems dances across the surface of the table, showing that what she previously thought was smooth metal is actually a wide dormant screen. As if in response to her attention, a section at the table’s corner retracts, exposing a distinctly hand-shaped pad.
Inviting her to access the data it surely contains.
But Rey cannot resist the lure of the darkness calling her. Her feet carry her sideways, to a collection of objects that at first glance are nothing of significance to her. A dilapidated cane, an oblong bronze disk the size of both her palms, a metal key with uneven, jagged prongs. The inferno is almost overpowering at this proximity; Rey is drowning in it. The urge to reach out touch the items is an itch just beneath her skin that she would have to cut herself open and bare her very bones to scratch.
Her fingers are mere inches away.
Come and see, child of the Light, a whisper fills her ears, caressing her skull.
See the extent of your power, your true nature, without false limits that false friends placed on you.
You are no Jedi, with the strength of your emotions. With how the Dark tempts you.
“No,” she gasps, “It doesn’t—”
Your Masters have felt it—the great Skywalker died in sacrifice rather than teach such a risk.
Oh, but the heights you could reach, the wonderous feats that you could accomplish, together—
Don’t be afraid of who you are.
Rey rips her hand away, feeling like she is surfacing once again from the pool on Ahch-To. She looks frantically for an anchor, a distraction, and alights on a tiny sliver of familiarity amongst the suffocating Darkness.
The creased light spines of the Jedi texts sit innocently two shelves below the accursed objects.
She snatches the closest of the three books, shoving it in the waistband of her leggings before tearing herself from the shelves and walking to the table in the center of the room. Setting her staff down on the glassy surface with a soft trill, she aligns her hand to the outline revealed minutes prior and slowly presses down. The pad engulfs her hand, the tips of her fingers barely reaching half the length of those who the system is clearly meant for.
The difference would be comical, if not for the ear-piercing scream that emits the moment she touches it. The screens are alive in an instant, crimson text casting bloody shadows over the room. Rey leaps back, staff clattering to the floor, swearing and rubbing a palm she is certain is tingling with some sort of mild electric shock.
“Are you finished your primitive, ridiculous attempts at accessing our data systems yet?”
She doesn’t need to look up to know who has finally interrupted her sleuthing. A dusty and studiously avoided corner of her mind knew it was only a matter of time until some meddlesome aspect of the system alerted him to her presence, if her tracker hadn’t already. Rey reluctantly drags her eyes to where the Supreme Leader, who’s space she is clearly trespassing in, is framed in the doorway.
Kylo is clothed in his full armoured regalia and cloak despite the late hour. The harsh angles of his face and deep plum circles beneath his eyes have only grown more prominent in the last day. She hopes that he is burning himself out with his once-coveted position; that he will soon self-destruct under the weight of his dictatorship without her needing to lift a finger.
It would just be easier, she tells herself.
“It was worth a try—I got past your Force-locked door. Could’ve ended the whole war by pressing a few buttons.” She gestures blithely to the angry crimson screens below her to obscure the sudden spike in her heart rate. Not trusting his fatigue to protect her from yesterday’s promise, Rey calls her metal staff to its home in her hand.
Kylo steps under the transparisteel section of roof, face now painted with the glow of the stars and nebulae far above them. “You’re a fool to think it’s that simple,” he mutters, tracing the outline of her weapon with his eyes. Something in his voice makes her doubt that his words are only meant for her—or about the war.
Silence stretches between them, a deceptively peaceful impasse that Rey feels compelled to break to return them to their familiar ground cracked with fissures of rage.
“So, you got everything you wanted. Power, control, the might of a military at your fingertips. And now me, the weapon that you traded the Resistance for.” Words that have been turning over in her head since she arrived on the Steadfast, through all the insipid days and dread-soaked nights, rise from her chest unbidden.
If she doesn’t utter them, she fears she will scream.
“I was a poor trade, Supreme Leader. I will not be a willing weapon. Not for you, murdering and pillaging your way across the galaxy, leading an army of leeches and cowards who follow you out of fear for their lives.”
Rey feels the first hint of his anger rise at the words she spits like dirt from her mouth.
He stops several feet from her, the compusystem table a reassuring barrier between them. He tilts his head and keeps his voice soft, something in his tone or his presence urging her to pause, to slow in her typical race to comforting rage.
“You’ll be a weapon for the Resistance, though. Why?”
His choice of words pinches a nerve deep within her that remembers the nervous glances and solitary meals of her months on Ajan Kloss. Smothering the pain with the fire that is always in reach when with him, she spits the answer she knows she should give.
“Because they are fighting for something good. Hope. A better galaxy.” So no more children on backwater planets have to go hungry again. A disclosure too personal for a nemesis—one who has used her past to break through her defenses before. “Not godsdamn domination.”
A step closer, and his face is now perfectly divided into light and shadow, the luminescent trail of one string of stars aligning perfectly with the scar she cut into his right cheek.
“And what is the Resistance’s idea of a better galaxy?” he asks, frustration simmering under the fragile calm of his words. “What are they willing to do to obtain it—kill, just as I do?”
“No—yes, but—only when necessary, only with purpose—”
He interrupts, seeming almost affronted. “You think that I do not kill with purpose?”
“Vile, dishonourable purpose,” Rey spits, glad to be back on proverbially solid footing. “We’ve taken fewer lives, and we’ll never take another when we win the war. You killed an entire system.”
Running for her life from him through the forest of Takodana, she hadn’t known what the terrible, aching sense that had washed over her had been at the time. It had sickened her to the point of physical illness when she learned from Chewie aboard the Falcon later.
“I didn’t give that order,” Kylo says dismissively before fixing her with a look that is equal parts callous and contemplative. “And would you cease your violence? What if I was captured, charged with war crimes? Would I not be put to death under whatever sham of a new government they put into place?”
Rey is uncertain what stokes her anger more—her inability to counter his argument, or that the image of him chained and lifeless does not give her half the triumph and satisfaction that she knows it should.
“Right and wrong are not objective concepts, scavenger,” he continues, now standing at the far end of her side of the table, one hand resting beside the pad that clearly fits it perfectly. “What benefits one person will not benefit all. The New Republic didn’t care about a child, abandoned and starving on Jakku—did they?”
The incredible similarity of his words to her thoughts just minutes prior makes her cold. She scrambles to deflect. “Why do people follow you, then? What does the First Order have to offer the nobodies of the galaxy?”
“Order. Efficiency. A purpose, just like your beloved Resistance.” He parries her words as adeptly as he has her lightsaber. “And some follow because they believe in these things, as do your compatriots.”
Kylo takes another step, then halts, the stillness of his body a foil for the tumultuous emotions that she senses increasing in intensity, pushing at the walls of the room. But when he speaks again, his voice has lost most of its certainty, and it is the first time that Rey can describe it as being anything remotely close to tentative in nature.
“Is it so hard for you to believe that people would follow me for a reason other than fear?”
She is skilled at sensing any hint of weakness, and that rush of triumph finally comes at this small chink she feels in his armour.
“Yes,” Rey says, with as much strength as a killing blow.
The barely noticeable jump of the muscles under one eye could be a flinch, or a twitch of anger. She hopes that she has returned a mere sliver of the hurt he inflicted on her months prior.
His eyes flick up to meet hers again. The cold impassivity of his expression does not match the depth of feeling—wanting, buried but Rey knows it well—contained within.
“What would it take to make you follow me?”
“Ben Solo, back from the dead.” Rey is surprised by how quickly the honesty tumbles from her mouth.
Likely because she knows it is a fool’s wish, an impossible demand.
Every hint of raw humanity leeches from his face and posture at the name. “You know that man is dead, then?”
“And a monster has taken his place,” she continues, echoing their previous verbal sparring. No other word has been as effective at eliciting the fire she now sees in his eyes. “One that keeps people caged like possessions to taunt and play with as he pleases.”
A ripple of genuine confusion in the Force supports the veracity of that in his voice. “I have not laid a hand on you since you stepped onto this ship. If someone else—” he cuts off, the next words catching in his throat, and Rey must grip the table with her free hand to avoid being swallowed by the storm of fury that surrounds her.
“No,” she admits. “But I was injected with a fertility suppressant alongside the tracking implant, and with what you said to Hux—”
The tidal wave crests and falls as quickly as it rose, leaving behind surges and eddies of more insidious, bitter ire. “Standard First Order practice. And I do not give any information of consequence to that imbecile.” The hand laid on the table curls into a fist.
The quality of the air between them shifts, mirroring the acerbity she senses through their bond. He walks towards her, parallel to the table, as slowly as a predator stalking trapped prey. Rey has spent too much time running and hiding. She refuses to let her muscles yield now and stays perfectly still as Kylo leaves mere inches between their chests.
And then he renders his statement of a moment prior false as he lays a gloved hand on the side of her cheek.
The breath stutters in her lungs as the cool leather kisses her skin. Her awareness narrows to the raised seam that separates his fingers and palm.
“Did you not hear me when I said you were only a weapon?” he asks softly, starlight straited across his austere face and dancing cruelly in his blown pupils. “If I wanted to claim you, you’d know. With my status, do you not think I could have any woman in the galaxy?”
The heat and tightness that laced her skin before returns tenfold at his touch, equal parts revulsion and burning shame. A disgusting sand rat, worried that the Supreme Leader of the galaxy would take his pleasure forcibly from her dirty body when dozens of more respectable women would prostrate themselves at his feet. And before she can stop it, her mind dares to wonder how many of these women he has had, in a way that she knows the vague mechanics of but does not fully understand, nor has any experience with.
It is the coalescence of these feelings and the urge to hide like a wounded animal that makes her hurl her next words up at him with as much venom as she can muster.
“And not a single one of them would stay with you.”
Rey turns on her heel and strides around the other end of the table, then out of the room, relishing the single thread of agony that runs raw through the bond, pulling on it without quarter until she hears the satisfying shattering of permaglass and metal behind her.
