Dedicated to the wonderful ladies of the Reylo Fic Recs group chat.
Without them, I can't imagine this story would have ever been completed.
Thanks for all the encouragement and word sprints, my friends!

Also, while this is not a crossover, the inspiration for this story
comes from the Star Trek: TNG episode of the same name, so I
would be remiss in mentioning that. It may be a greatly maligned
episode, but I was always fascinated by the mythology of it.

Special thanks to the mods of the Reylo Fanfic Anthology for going over
my work with a fine-tooth comb! Your work is much appreciated!

If there's one thing that Rey has come to realize, it's that being Force-bonded to someone who has gone back and forth between being your mortal enemy and the one person in the universe who understands you is one of the most difficult things she's had to endure. It isn't that her life had been easy; far from it, really. She'd been abandoned, left to scavenge in a desert that ultimately had taken the lives of those weaker than her. She'd counted the days, believing her family would come for her, pushing away the thoughts that told her they were gone, dead, never coming back.

But then Kylo Ren came along and ripped into her mind and she pushed right back and here she is. He said she wasn't alone. But she is. In her darker moments, she's pretty sure she always will be alone. She tries to fight those feelings, tries to pretend they're not real. But still they're there, always somewhere flitting through the back of her mind, ghosts she cannot completely chase away.

He's still there, she knows. There are days that she can feel him tentatively poking at the connection that had been forged between them. It almost feels like an apology, but Rey turns away from him each and every time. She doesn't know what to do, what to say. How do you tell someone they tore your heart in two when they turned from the path you hoped they'd set their feet on? That you had such high hopes and then they threw them on the rocks like so much garbage.

Luke Skywalker had been right. It didn't go the way she thought it would. And so she's back with the Resistance, hiding the reality of her life from people she counts as friends. It's not a good place to be. And she's known, ever since she was brought back into the fold, that it had to break sometime.

It's the middle of the night when the bond simply tears through her. She comes awake with a gasp, flinging herself out of bed and stumbling about the dark room blindly. She can't make sense of it, doesn't know what's thrown her into this. She's sure she had cut it off, if not completely, then almost completely. But no, this is different. There's no subtle shift in the world around her, no dampening of the noises of the base; it's more like blazing coals raked along the nerve endings that connect her to Kylo Ren.

"Rey?" comes the quiet voice of Rose from across the room.

Rey lets out a shuddering sigh, hand reaching out for purchase on something, anything, as she feels her knees go out from under her.

"Rey!" Rose sounds frantic now and then there's light and the concerned face of her roommate staring at her as she clings to the side of her bed frame.

Fear.

Panic.

"Rey, what's wrong?"

Disgust.

Hate.

Anger.

It's him. She knows it's him. She can feel the darkness beating at her mind and tries to beat it back, tries to stop the flood of whatever it is from invading her and taking over. She can feel it trying to pull her to him, into his mind, into whatever horrors he's found himself in.

Betrayal.

The sharp hiss of a lightsaber.

A shout.

Death.

"I have to go," she mutters, pushing up from her bed. Nausea hits her almost as soon as she's on her feet and she reaches out to the wall to steady herself. Don't give in.

"Rey I don't understand."

She takes a moment to look at Rose, sees her hair askew, eyes wide. She can't understand. No one can. Rey reaches out and touches her friend lightly on the shoulder.

"I know." What else can she say?

Something was wrong.

Terribly wrong.

And she doesn't know what.

"What are you…" Rose starts to say as Rey turns away, grabbing the pack she always keeps put together, just in case, and he lightsaber. Luke's, still. She's proud of it, the hours of meditation, the reading, the study, that has led her to reassembling it into something that feels like an extension of herself.

She often tries not to think of why the Skywalker legacy lightsaber calls to her, but she knows. It has to do with him, with the bond that she knows goes much further back than the meddling of some sadistic creep.

"I have to go to him."

There's a look about the other woman's face that says she knows more than she lets on. "Him? Kylo Ren?" she ventures.

"How did you…"

"You talk about him." Rose offers up a shrug. "In your sleep sometimes. I don't know what's between you, but…"

Rey rounds on her, gripping her shoulders. "No one can know. Please, Rose. Don't tell anyone where I'm going."

"Where are you going?"

Rey just shakes her head. "I don't know." She can sense him, but just barely. There's…blood. So much blood. And she isn't sure if it's his or someone else's. Something awful has happened. He feels…trapped, she realizes. Trapped, scared, angry. His erratic emotions flood the bond and she has to push hard at them to keep them from bringing her to her knees.

"I just…I have to go."

And then she's off, running from their room, down the corridors. She leaves Rose standing in the doorway to their quarters and she knows that the other woman will come up with some excuse. It isn't that Rose likes to lie. But she's smart. She's creative. And she's always interested in learning more about Rey and her Force sensitivity. She's never told her about the bond, never would have told anyone about it, but Rose seems to have an intuitive understanding that there are things that Rey sees, things she does, that are beyond any rational explanation.

Sometimes Rey wonders if Rose is at least a little Force sensitive. It would certainly explain her almost preternatural empathy. It would explain why she doesn't press her for details when Rey stares off into space or rushes from the room to work off her anger and frustration in training. It would explain her ability to somehow accept when Rey knows that others would not be able to.

The hangar is dark when Rey slides quietly into it and she's thankful for that much at least. Almost everyone is asleep at this hour. The one guard, half asleep against the wall, proves to be no problem as Rey reaches out with the Force and sends him into a restful slumber. "I'm sorry, my friend," she whispers, knowing he'll get in trouble for falling asleep on the job. Especially when it's discovered she's taken one of the shuttles and disappeared. She hates that thought, but some things are necessary.

Take-off is uneventful. She enters in the launch codes and coordinates that would take her some distance away from the base. She doesn't know where she's going from there. She only knows she needs get away.

He's out there.

He's hurting.

And she needs to find out why.

She's altered the system on the shuttle to stop sending her coordinates back to base. It doesn't surprise her at all that such a thing exists on the Resistance's shuttles. A safety measure, to be sure, but it's easy to bypass for someone who has scavenged for parts from these types of machines for much of her nearly twenty years of life. The Resistance will be able to trace the shuttle to where she had first jumped, but no further.

Leaning back in the pilot's chair, she casts her mind into the currents of the Force, riding them out and away from her location. Past planets. Past stars. He's moving. That much she can tell. Alone, she realizes as she follows the traces through the currents to him. The connection is muted and his walls are up. But it's still there.

She can still brush his mind with hers.

Taking a deep breath, she pushes in further. Where are you going?

Another deep breath.

Kylo…

Another.

Ben?

Her eyes are closed and she reaches out a hand. Luke had once smacked her with a reed for doing such a thing, but still that physical motion helps guide her mind, helps push outward to him.

Where are you?

She's drifting among the currents, can feel them like the ocean of Ahch-To, carrying her away from shore, away from her reality and to his.

Her eyes fly open and she rushes to the control panel on the shuttle, fingers flying over it as she inputs coordinates. She's brought back to the reality around her as the bond fizzles. She blinks once, twice, and then glances down at the information she had just entered into the system.

Nowhere.

She's going nowhere.

Some planet in the Unknown Regions. Star System 7624. One sun, three planets, only one of which is inhabitable. There's no information about life forms, just one small notation that there may have once been life on the planet but the world has not been explored. So she's a no one (you're nothing…) going to a nowhere planet.

She's pretty sure this does not bode well at all.

It's a semi-rough descent as she enters the atmosphere, which the shuttle system assures her is indeed breathable. It's thick with clouds that obscure the ground beneath them. Her understanding of the galaxy is really quite limited, having only explored a handful of planets in the past few months. She's certainly never seen one that was entirely engulfed in clouds, the ground obscured entirely even as she enters the first layers of atmosphere.

Please don't be a desert planet.

Not that she can ever remember clouds like this on Jakku; the sky there is a bright and clear blue. She had only seen the occasional cloud over the fourteen years she had spent there, usually right before a dust storm tore through her AT-AT. Clouds were still something that set her on edge, bringing back memories of racing back to her AT-AT to hide and hoping she made it before her life ended as so many did on Jakku. Death in a sandstorm, buried in the shifting sands. Like your parents…

She tries not to think of that, tries not to hear his voice, to remember the years marking her days as she'd hoped they would return. Her memories of Jakku are not good ones. She shudders as she remembers the heat, the hunger, and finally pushes it all from her mind as she comes clear of the clouds on the other side.

It's not a desert planet and she sends her thanks out into the Force for that. It reminds her more of Takodana than anything else, heavily forested, mountains in the distance. She's almost sure she sees a lake or two hidden within the trees. She throws out her senses into the Force and can feel Ben there, somewhere on the surface of the planet. She turns the shuttle and scans the ground as she floats along over the forests. It feels like ages before she finally finds his shuttle tucked away in a small clearing on the far side of the planet. It's small, much smaller than what she expected, and easily overlooked. But it's still the black of the First Order ships, ominous and terrible, sitting there in the middle of what seems to be an uninhabited planet.

Something terrible has happened.

She lands her own shuttle easily enough. Piloting comes naturally to her, almost frighteningly so. And she wonders, not for the first time, how much of her abilities are due to her connection to Ben and how much are just her own. She's heard he's a first-rate pilot and even Poe has grudgingly admitted that he might be better than him. And so were her abilities hers?

Shaking her head, she lets the ramp down, grabbing her lightsaber and clipping it to her belt as she descends into the humidity of the unnamed planet.

Her senses are tingling with something before she even finishes her descent. Voices, distant and muffled. Words she can't understand skitter around her, trying to wrap around her mind. A feeling of discontent, a feeling of need and want and…

Her eyes turn toward the other shuttle, taking in what she already knows she's going to find. It's tilted precariously on the side of a hill, the front smashed in, the window shattered. The ramp to it is open but she's sure she's not going to go that way. It's a hair's breadth away from collapsing down the side of the hill and even as she contemplates going near it, it gives a groan and shifts slightly.

Leaping back, she shouts for Ben. He's here. Somewhere. He's not on the shuttle, she realizes; his Force signature is not that close. He's…She stops, presses her mind out toward him for a moment. Force.

She can see the tracks leading into the woods, heavy booted feet that moved in an uneven pattern toward the edge of the words, disappearing down a path she isn't sure she should follow but knows she will at the same time. With one more glance at his shuttle, abandoned like some child's discarded toy, she strides off into the forest, head held high, one hand on her lightsaber. Just in case.

She doesn't fear Ben, not exactly, though a small part of her worries what a severely injured Ben might be like. His wandering into the forest doesn't bode well. Abandoning his ship, abandoning medical supplies and food rations and shelter to go wandering off into a forest on a planet that she at least doesn't know anything about…None of it makes sense. Every answer she can come up is worse than the last.

Severely injured…

Delirious…

On the verge of death…

She takes a deep breath and reaches down inside herself. Yes. She can feel him out there and so after gathering some meager supplies, she follows the same path he had walked. She has to follow where he's led.

She has no choice.

She's been wandering for what feels like days. It was nearly dark when she set off into the thick forest after Ben. There are no footsteps here, but she can sense him. He's moving away from her at a much more rapid pace than she can keep up with through the dense undergrowth.

It's turned dank and cool in the shadows of the forest as the sun goes down and she shivers as she continues her trek. She has her poncho at least, something to keep her warm. She long ago learned her lesson when she stood on the surface of Starkiller Base, the bitter wind leaving her skin numb, while she fought Kylo Ren. Only adrenaline and the swings of her lightsaber had kept her from noticing the bitter cold of the place. Once all that had drained out of her she had certainly begun to become aware of it, but by then Chewbacca was there and they had rushed back to the safety of the Falcon.

Now she is all too aware of the cold and pulls the poncho tighter around herself as she trudges on. No rain falls and she's thankful for that much at least. She's still not quite used that. Rain. Water just falling from the sky. It feels like a waste but oh, what a glorious waste it is. Sometimes, in the dark of night on Ahch-to, she would step outside her hut, lift her face to the sky and let it soak into her hair, drip down the sides of her face. Such a precious commodity on Jakku. But on these other planets, it's plentiful. Rain storms and rivers and waterfalls. She'd like to see one...someday maybe.

She's pulled out of her reverie by the snap of a stick and she stops, her eyes trying to see into the darkness around her. There are sounds there in the forest. Not the voices. Those had drifted away soon after she set food within the trees, though she can still feel them out there, trying to press through any mental defenses she erects. These sounds are something animals that scurry through the brush at her feet, fly from treetop to treetop. She stares upward for a moment, watches the sway of the trees in the moonlight, almost transfixed by the motions, dark and ethereal.

Masaka…

She has her lightsaber up and lit before she can even think about what she's doing, turning to try to find the source of the voice she keeps hearing. Someone is there, watching, waiting. Her lightsaber illuminates the path she's taken, highlighting the purple narrow-trunked trees with a slight blue glow. Whirling to her left and right, she sees…nothing.

"Hello?" She hates the way her voice sounds, hesitant and tinged with worry. "I know you're there. Come out." There. Demanding. Confident. She hopes the slight tremor in her voice, the shiver that passes down her spine isn't obvious to whatever is out there.

Masaka…

No one steps out of the shadows.

There's nothing there.

Just that one word, the only one that's distinct in any way, the syllables slightly drawn out on a hiss. She can feel them trying to draw her closer. She wants to follow those murmurs, trace them to where they're coming from. She's sure they're telling her something if only she can stop to listen properly.

With a shudder, she pushes it all from her mind. It's nothing. It can't be anything. It's just the noises of the birds far above her, like the cries of the porgs on Ahch-To or the vultures that stalked the scavengers of Jakku, just waiting to pick their bones clean. But still, she turns and runs from it, the sound of the beasts, the birds, the voices following her.

Where are you Ben?

What am I doing here?

What has happened to you?

Something is close on her heels. She's sure of it. She can feel it closing in on her. Predator and prey. And still the only thing she can make out from the sounds around her is that one word. It isn't Ben's voice repeating it. It's someone – something – else.

Leaning forward, she races through the brush, weaves down a path that is nothing more than broken sticks and trampled plants that tell her something recently came this way. She's sure there hasn't been sentient life on the planet in years, though she can still feel the Force here. Just a faint trace, as if it's encased within the bark of the trees, hidden in the thick undergrowth that she's trampling.

She's flying now, or it seems, feet barely hitting the ground, racing in a near-panic through the still-dark woods. She sees just a sliver of sun, somewhere high above the trees, but it doesn't trickle down to where she runs, deep in the oppressively humid forest. Another animal, running from something, running to something.

There's nothing there.

No.

There's something there.

Run…

Flee, my child…

She plunges into the thick canopy, hacking at it with her lightsaber in frantic swings. Then she's clear, pushing through to the other side.

Ben is there.

He stands shadowed in the middle of the clearing, backlit by the sun as it rises behind him. She can't make out anything in his face, but he takes a step toward her. Halting, almost lurching along. He's never been a graceful man, always moving with purpose, steps just a little too heavy with purpose. But now he almost looks robotic. One foot in front of the other, knees not quite moving as smoothly as they should, as he makes his way across the clearing.

"Ben?"

He doesn't respond to his name. Not the first time she says it, nor the second.

There's an intensity as his steps get faster, more frantic. She wants to pull back, hide.

This is a mistake.

There's a klaxon going off in her head.

Run.

Hide.

Leave him to his fate.

The cacophony of voices in her head hits an almost fever pitch and she wants to cover her ears. She backs up a step, then another. Hits the bushes behind her. She's almost driven to her knees as the sound nearly overwhelms her. Hate, rage, the darkness of roiling emotions gone wrong.

Escape.

While you still can.

And then he is nearly on her. One of his hands comes up to touch her shoulder.

The voices stop.

She can hear the rush of blood in her ears, the harshness of the breaths she sucks in. He leans in close, too close, and she is frozen to the spot, wondering for a moment if he's about to kiss her. No…

He touches her face almost reverently and sinks to his knees before her. "Masaka…is waking…"

The sun rises above the treetops, bathing them in golden light. And then his eyes roll back in his head and he collapses at her feet.