"You know I can take whatever I want."
His voice was even, emotionless. Words she had heard before. Only then he was looking for pieces of a map - now she sensed the hidden subtext bubble to the surface. She felt herself stiffen, her muscles clench. He was holding her in place, his face slack and unreadable. She struggled to reach something, anything to use as a weapon, but her body was motionless. Caught in a panic, watching him stride closer to her, Rey's mind was just as static. He was appraising her now, his dark eyes cooly matching her own. The snow settled on his shoulders, downy and white, blanketing the world in a pall of quiet. Their breathing was heavy and ragged in the silence.
Ren's face was close to hers now, close enough that she could see the drops of grey-green in his eyes, the matted black curls by his temples. She fought the urge to squeeze her eyes closed, to shut out the touch she was helpless to resist. Rey had feared this so often on Jakku, living alone in the desert, that she long ago promised herself to fight until the end. Only - only he didn't raise his hand, didn't come closer than half an arm's length, didn't make any movement at all, other than a thin, curious waver of his lips.
"I can take whatever I want," he whispered. The sentence trailed away in the brisk air, hanging incomplete. There seemed to be an unspoken coda to his thought, one that Rey couldn't yet guess, couldn't yet explore. Suddenly she felt her body relax, become her own again. In an instant the saber was back in her hand, coursing and alive, ready to strike. Ren didn't move, merely glanced down placidly at the weapon, then back at her. Now she caught his meaning - he could take what he wanted, but was allowing her to give it willingly.
If she moved fast enough she could kill him. Some kind of awful hesitation rooted her to the spot, stopping her from raising her arm in a final swing. "I know you feel it," he said softly. "You feel drawn to me."
"No," she protested, tears building inexplicably behind her eyes.
"I feel it too." His voice was so flat, so matter-of-fact. The snow whirled around them both, wrapping them in blue-white cold. She was terrified to move, both toward him and away from him. In her confusion she found herself probing his mind, reaching past his defenses to the memories buried beneath. She felt him resist for a moment, then - whether through his own surrender or the power of her own prodding - his thoughts and feelings opened to her in a heady rush. There it was, the desire and the anger, the hatred, the self-loathing, all laid bare. Swirls of rage and terrible uncertainty, the ache of being unwanted, the cloying sting of rejection. More than anything the sad, quizzical emptiness of being alone. And running through it, worst of all, an underlying current of earnest hope that he had found another.
She gazed up at him, shocked. Now the fury in his eyes was colored by hurt. She knew he felt her pity. It was the last thing he wanted, but he couldn't turn away. He, too, was fixed to the ground.
"I'll never be who you want," she said. "I can't." Now she felt him in her head, pouring defiantly through her memories. Her abandonment, the long years in the sand, her own yearning for completeness through a stranger beyond the stars. Knowing what it felt like to want someone you didn't even know. He was almost gloating, satisfied. Rey heard his voice within her. We are more alike than you can admit. "Get out of my head!" It felt like she was screaming but in truth her voice was wavering, and her protest sounded weak even to her.
Somehow he was closer now, too close. He gripped her arm with a gloved hand and she jumped, shaking him off. Her pulse raced, her head dizzy. Conciliatory, as if in apology, his fingers softly grazed her shoulder and up her neck, pushing away her hair from her face. Somehow she didn't stop him.
"Ren." She didn't know if she was pleading for him or pleading for herself to run. A smile curved at the corner of his mouth.
"Is that what you're going to call me?" Now he was cupping her face, looking longingly at her mouth. She could still feel his thoughts, the desire and the disbelief. Something was telling him to ignore her protests, to be rough and hard, but another part, a better part, ignored it.
Slowly, as if in a dream, she reached up to trace her hand across his chest. His warmth was lost in the snow, but she could feel the muscles underneath his black cloak, the staccato pulsing of his heart. The distance between them closed again. Drawn to him - that was the only description of the need she now felt to be close, to fold into him. The sudden, unexpected intimacy of it was overwhelming. Not just her own hesitant touches, or being held by him, but feeling his want, his hope, the rawness of his long-buried affection. All of this as she inexplicably perceived - and he reveled in - the hum of her own confused satisfaction.
Rey felt herself softening as he held her gaze, his eyes heavy lidded. Finally, in a too-quick magnetic moment, his lips met hers. Her arms looped around him and he pulled her against him, the full length of their bodies joined. In his grasp her hand slid down to his hip, where it came back slick and red with blood.
"Ignore it," he said roughly. Now his hand covered hers again, guiding it back to his shoulders, his waist, his chest. Again she sensed an unspoken addition to his words. Please. He felt alien and familiar at once, like her home, the blue-green island of her imagination. In another time she didn't know if she could have stopped. But the blood had shaken her out of her reverie, and horror washed over her as she awakened to herself curled into Kylo Ren, her mouth upturned to his, her hand a reminder of the murder of his own father.
"This isn't you." Rey sensed him feel her revulsion more than hear her, and he staggered back. The resulting cloud of hurt and rage swarmed through her head, furiously pounding with pain at her refusal.
"You can't know who I am." Ren's voice was level, but she knew he was struggling to control himself, fighting not to lunge at her. It was shocking and sobering how quickly she feared him again. He must have sensed it, because she was filled with his remorse. Ren stretched out his arm to her, drops of blood muddying the snow at his feet. "Come back to me." As soon as the words left him she felt how much he hated their weakness, but also how much he hoped they persuaded her. Rey realized he was holding his lightsaber in his other hand, sheathed but ready.
"Why? Because you want me, or because you want to kill me?" He didn't answer, and now his mind was closed to her. Rey felt him try and freeze her again as he followed her glance, but his attempt slipped away, feeble.
Suddenly the earth began to crack, to roil and shake. She reeled backwards, struggling to keep her footing as the ground shifted under her. Above her head a tree shed a pile of snow, and once her eyes had been cleared from the white Rey realized that she was now separated from Kylo Ren by a literal gulf, one too wide for either of them to cross. The convulsing of the planet had torn a long, black chasm between them and thrown Ren to his knees. She could still see him through the flurries, a bent streak of black, his hand clutching the wound in his side.
Rey. She didn't know if it was him in her head or her imagination, but either way it sounded like defeat. She backed away, feeling his gaze on her one last time before she fled into the forest, and back to Finn.