He held out his hand to her and the feeling solidified, the feeling of home, centeredness, belonging. Luke Skywalker. The Jedi Master, the Hero of the Republic. She almost expected the lightsaber to fly out of her hand and go to him, they belonged together, it was so right, but of course he would never be so rude. He'd come to take it from her with a thanks, a congratulations, and he'd tell her what she already knew. That this was where she belonged. That this was the last puzzle piece of her family.
She took a halting step forward—her legs felt like they were a million miles long now—but the distance between them didn't close. Instead, it grew. Like the planet had decided she would not be allowed to draw so near to him and was putting up more of itself in between.
She took another step, and another, but in some blasphemous defiance of physics, the distance between them just kept growing. She stopped, but there was no undoing this bizarre curse, no halting it. He was pulled into the horizon, dwindling away from her—Rey wanted to scream, summon him back with everything the Force would give her.
No, it was her. She was being yanked backwards, sucked away—off the ground, off the planet, through space and time as her vision elongated, her senses dulled, she was slogging through some deep sleep into wakefulness, her body creaking and shuddering as she returned to it.
Kylo Ren stood over her. She was bound securely, her clothes still the unwashed fabrics she had been captured in, Starkiller Base all around her, imposing its impossibility on her.
"No!" she said it before fully taking a breath, before she tried her restraints or tried to think of how she could've been recaptured. "This isn't right, I'm not here, I escaped!"
"Did you now?" Kylo Ren said, voice brimming over with impressed sarcasm. His maskless face bore no scar, not a single bead of the sweat he'd shed as she'd fought him off. He was as composed, as cool, as collected as anyone she'd ever dealt with, paying her pennies on the credit because they had all the power.
He took a few stretching steps toward the wall, rotating his right arm—the hand he'd used to try to… what had he been trying to do? What had he done?
Finally working the kink out of it, he stopped at a wall-mounted refreshment station, pressing a single button and being rewarded with a small cup of water. As if he didn't realize how incongruous the sight of him was, he picked it up, took a testing sip, then gulped down the rest and refilled it.
Had he taken his helmet off just to get a drink?
"I used the Force!" Rey argued. She had heard of Jedi having visions, nightmarish hallucinations—that had to be what this was. She was still with Luke Skywalker, he was showing her something, putting her through some test. She wouldn't fail! She knew what was real! "I used a mind trick on the guard! I escaped!"
"With what training?" Kylo asked, now examining his water as if there might be something in it. Old Imperial water filtration technology—not wholly efficient. Even on a station like this, it was the kind of small thing that might be overlooked, tech recycled instead of newly created. The mundane reality of it hit Rey like a punch in the gut. "I've received the same spam on my HoloNet account—'learn the ways of the Force, move objects with your mind, see through women's dresses''—it really doesn't work like that."
"No, I did it, it happened!"
"Yes, yes—and then you picked up a lightsaber and defeated me in combat while your new friends destroyed this place. Pardon." Kylo stopped to drink. "Thirsty work. Would you like some?"
"I did!" Rey insisted, gritting her teeth. "It happened!"
Kylo pursed his lips, musing. "I'll give you this, you certainly have a healthy ego. Tell me—before all that, did I try to use the Dark Side on you? Reach into your mind?"
"I resisted you," Rey said proudly. "You couldn't overcome my will."
"Of course I couldn't," Kylo sounded almost paternally amused—an adult indulging a child in some hilarious fantasy. "Not a trained mind like yours. Would you like that drink now? I'd hate for you to have to use a…" A smile seemed to infect his face, slowly twisting his features into dark glee. "Jedi mind trick to get some water."
Rey could feel the realization rising in her, the facts, the truth, but she fought them as hard as she could. It was a trick. It had to be. She was on the ocean, she was on the island, she was with Luke, he would protect her, she just had to have faith, she just had to push this freakish reality away from herself as hard as she—
Kylo threw the water in her face, bracingly cold, a chill she had never known on Jakku. She was left sputtering, gasping, her nerves trying to process this new, astonishing sensation.
"Well, you weren't going to drink it," Kylo said, horribly amused with himself.
The chill that ran down Rey's spine, stealing her breath, had nothing to do with the physical cold that pervaded her body, coming through the hardened metal, the ice of this frigid world, as real as she was.
"It was all a mind game," she said. Her voice sounded viciously dull, cutting into her own ears. She had never heard herself so defeated. "You made me see those things—"
"I can't take all the credit. You have a very active imagination." Crushing the water cup in his hands, Kylo brought it to the garbage chute, chucking it with mocking sadness down to the nearest trash compactor. "And you had the coordinates to my wayward mentor. To think—if you hadn't bought into such a ridiculous fantasy, I wouldn't be able to pay him a visit. But I guess it's true what they say: Flattery will get you everywhere."
Rey let out a shaky breath. The water dripping off her had left a chill deep in her breast, and she was trembling with it: with rage, with denial, with a desperate wish to erase this nightmare and get back the dream that had been cruelly snatched away from her. She could see now how someone would join the Dark Side. If it had called to her, she would've taken it up gladly. Anything to wipe the smug smirk from Kylo Ren's face.
"What are you going to do to me?" she challenged him. It was a stupid question—she knew he meant to execute her. But she would at least have him look her in the eye and say it, not allow herself to pass through fearful moment after fearful moment, fed and caged like some animal, before finally being marched to some airlock or lined up before a squad of Stormtroopers…
"Are you sure you want to know?" Kylo Ren asked, teasing, before he waved off his own question with a curt gesture. "I think I'll keep you. As I said, you have an active imagination—a healthy ego—it may be you even have some small talent with the Force. Yes… yes, you're a very interesting specimen all around."
When he put his mask back on, it covered up a sickly smile.
"You should kill me now," Rey told him. "Because I will find a way to get free and I will kill you."
Behind his mask, Kylo seemed so oddly implacable—unable to be read, his body language still and unknowable. Then, in a flash, he drew his lightsaber, its ignition not a snap-hiss, but an ill sound, a phlegmatic explosion of energy that only reluctantly solidified into a true plasma blade. Almost immediately after that, the vents on the hilt slammed open and a coruscating discharge flared out on either side with a horrible hiss like some feral rodent.
With a smooth pivot, Kylo delivered the tip to her throat, the energy it held buzzing and dancing about with only the barest regard for coherence—she thought it might break loose at any moment, erupt like a faulty power coupling going off. When the flickering energy drew closer to her bare skin, she cried out, thinking he was thrusting it forward, taking her life with one powerful lunge through her larynx, into her airway, her spine. One tiny motion of his wrist—that was all it would take.
"Not so cocky when the danger is real, are you?" Kylo deactivated the lightsaber, casually returning it to his belt as his mask loomed over her like some moon in the night sky. Distant, cryptic, but with a decided sense of tangibility. She could feel his gaze on her—on her pitched breathing, on her clothes plastered to her skin by the water. She couldn't imagine even the thoughts inside her head were safe from whatever dark concentration that mask contained. "Very interesting indeed."
He jerked his outstretched palm at her and Rey felt a blistering heat—heat but no pain. She thought for a second that he'd burnt her. She knew what a third-degree burn could do to a scavenger, burn right through the nerves before you could feel any pain, you died not knowing what was wrong. But then he lowered his hand and she looked herself over; nothing had happened. But the heat had drawn away the moisture from her, leaving a bone-deep warmth that was actually preferable to the slight chill she had felt before. For whatever reason, he had spared her any further discomfort.
"I'll have someone by later to bathe you and dress you in new clothes," Kylo said, his voice husky and threatening through the mask, even as his cadence was the same conversational tone as before. "I'm sure you'd find me doing it… distasteful."
Kill you, Rey thought as loud as she could. Either he could hear her thoughts or he couldn't; she wasn't sure if this was some sort of defiance or if she was surrendering the spoken word to him and his threats of violence. Either way, she held onto the thought, and it let itself be gripped far more easily than the dream of Luke Skywalker on his distant world. I will kill you, I will, I will.
"Rey," Kylo said, with a slight incline of his head that might almost have been a bow. He turned on his heel and took a satisfied stroll to the door. "Such a pretty name…"