'Where worlds upon worlds once divided the vast space between them, now it is only a mere distance that separates them. Yet, it still feels like crossing the entire galaxy as their steps bring them forth toward one another, as they always, perpetually do. Always. It is the laws of the Force which pits them at each end. That draws them together across the expanse of the universe itself.'
-A series of encounters and interactions between Rey and Kylo Ren following TLJ.
A/N: Doesn't really contain specific spoilers from The Last Jedi, but it helps to know what's happened in the movie for some back story!
Disclaimer: This is a work of fan fiction inspired by and using characters and elements from the Star Wars films, creative property of Lucasfilm and Disney.
|| Confluence ||
Just as she's settled into the cradle of peace surrounding her, there are footsteps that disturb the silence of the roiling waters coming and going at her feet. She can hear the crunching of sand beneath them as though they were truly there, but she knows they're merely the steps of a shadow. She knows this presence. Her shadow.
"I came here for a moment of quiet. I'd like you to respect that," she speaks softly. Her eyes lower to the receding waters before her. Like a child hiding beneath her covers, perhaps this ghost will leave so long as she doesn't care to look at it.
"Please."
She utters this last word on but a breath.
"So did I."
His follow only after a brief pause.
And so these two wayward phantoms coexist in mutual silence beside each other, separated by impossible planes in between. Even so, it's hard to ignore someone who is there. It's strange. It's awkward. Eventually, the unsettling discomfort of half-presence manages to disturb her enough, making the peace she'd sought in her solitude all but futile. She should know better. There's never any peace when he is around.
"What do you see in front of you right now?"
His sudden offhanded question reels her splintering thoughts back to the solid earth she sits on. Her brows furrow at how audacious it is, for him to even ask this at all. Because, yes, she is so prepared to tell him exactly where she is. But then she reconsiders. Surely, he hears the waves rolling onto shore, too. Just as well as she'd heard the coarse sediment grinding beneath his footsteps.
What a wonder.
She almost smiles at the irony once it dawns on her. That they'd both find themselves in search of solitude in the very same moment in two separate points in the whole of the cosmos. Two points that mirrored one another in all the ways their beings had. The symmetry of the Force was astounding.
There are a million worlds in all of the galaxy with a million more shores and water like this. She knows she is in no danger of being found here.
"The sun is setting," she tells him as she looks again toward the horizon before her. "There's...a bit of a breeze. It's a bit cold, but not really." She turns her eyes far down the length of the shore. "The beach seems to go on as far as the eye can see."
"You're alone?"
The coarse sound of his voice draws her attention, and as tempted as she is, she must remind herself not to look at her shadow.
Just go away.
"Yes," she answers with a sparse nod of the head. She hates it. Hates to acknowledge her own loneliness.
The quiet, tentative breath he takes next goes unnoticed by her. "Of course you are..." he utters, and she swears she hears the hint of resentment beneath his ever-bellicose cynicism. Toward her or himself, she couldn't possibly tell. Maybe both.
"Surrounded by allies. By your...companions. And you still choose solitude over them," he points out spitefully. "You consider them your family, don't you?"
She grows embittered by his incendiary disdain, feeling her being roil and sink all at once. And she hates, too, how easily he does this to her. He knows this vulnerability of hers. Understands it. Because, whether it is something she doesn't realize or something she deliberately ignores, it had once been his very own.
"And yet, here you are. Sitting alone on a beach. Talking to me."
She nods, her hardened gaze fixed against the violet backdrop of the glowing red disc waning in the distance. No clouds to be seen above the rippling waves, but her eyes follow the invisible lines backwards from their vanishing point in the infinite distance—red, to violet, to blue, to grey. All grey from where she sits.
"What does that say about you? You, who thrives in solitude. Who wallows in his loneliness. His gloom. Solitude already surrounds you. You came here for a reason."
His eyes peer toward this slip of a girl seated beside him. His breaths quicken, and life itself seems to awaken within this cold ghost. She's got him there, and he won't accept that.
"We're more alike than you care to know," he tells her. He knows she hates to hear that. And above all, he knows he's right. Her vehement stillness tells him that she knows this, too.
And she is livid. Her jaw sets as her lips quiver at the wordless breaths that are just so close to forming at the edge of her tongue. Her hands fold within themselves, tugging the cloth of her tunic to wrinkles. And for a moment, everything surrounding her within the scope of the cosmos turns to grey.
"You think you know me," she utters in the barest breath. She raises her chin, directing her eyes away as she collects her resolve in his presence. It seems to dwindle every time she finds herself standing before him.
Just a shadow.
It's as though he existed for this sole purpose.
She releases the folds of her tunic and places her hands at her sides flat against the cold, jagged rock beneath her. Her palms linger against its whetted, weathered surface. Such a resilient relic, she thinks for just that moment. How long it had been there. How long it had existed against the wind and tides. She must harden her resolve to be just like it.
She spreads her fingers apart and pushes herself to her feet. Lingers. And at last, she dares to look straight into the eyes of her shadow. She doesn't know why she should've expected anything different, anything more—he's still just a man.
"No more than I know you," she tells him with certainty. "I know what I have. What about you? What do you have?"
She stares him in the eyes as though to reclaim what withering fortitude he has stolen from her. Give and take. Nothing is created nor destroyed. The laws of conservation.
"What is it that matters to you?"
A challenge. A reflection. A foretelling.
"I don't believe you're this...dark...shadow you claim to be." Her words are like a defiance against his very being. "The dark doesn't have you. You're better. You're better than that."
Her brittle voice can hardly carry forth these words, relinquished from the very core of her heart. She tightens her lips again as she feels the need to battle back her tears, because this is something she has had to tell herself so many times before. Before any notion of the Jedi, or Luke, or the Force had ever graced her conscience. She knows it intimately. Understands it better than anybody.
"...I wish you could just see."
There is a merest twitch of a muscle beneath his eye as he watches her. Listens. A tell. (Perhaps it had been foolish to forsake his mask after all.) In this clash of wills where his mastery of the Force and lightsaber mean nothing, the only thing he thinks to do is bury himself beneath his sneering animosity.
"You're no better than Luke." The very name is spoken as though it were Malice itself on his tongue. "Arrogant. To presume to think I need any saving."
"And you believe yourself to be the one to guide me?" she hisses back with fire on hers. "I don't need you. You're poison."
How quickly she comes around again.
"And you're a distraction." He stares down at her, matches the steel of her gaze. "Guess we're both bad influences on each other."
A stalemate, as it always is with them. She is the first between them to turn away, sighing out all her vexations as she traces the imprints of her footsteps back toward her rock.
"I only tried to make you see," his voice calls aloud to her.
The ancient rock's coldness bites through her to the bone as she settles back down onto it. "The blind leading the blind," she utters beneath her breath.
"You're still hanging on—"
"—You've betrayed everything you've ever known."
"To become greater than everything I've left behind."
Once again their eyes meet amidst the hanging silence. The waves sweep over the shore with the whistling breeze. The universe only continues, seemingly untouched by the reverberating dissonance of their irreconcilable coexistence.
"At what cost, Ben?" she finally asks him. Truly asks him. "There is sacrifice. And there is decadence." She searches through his gaze into the being that lies beneath this shadow before her. "It still isn't too late. Don't let yourself fall to ruin."
And it is these last words of hers that are enough to reignite the embers of his defiant ambition. Just like that, Ben is again banished away from sight.
"Stay close as you are…" he warns with a quiet, foreboding whisper, looming over toward where she sits, "I'll destroy you...and drag you down with me."
With his words comes the dread of all his rooted scorn. Yet beneath the smoldering threat lies a deeply underlying bid of caution—to deter her, to keep her away. Because deep down, he knows what he is to her. What he means for her. And in the glimmer of humanity left in his eclipsed heart, he still cares enough to say this much. If it means she must hate him for it, then let it be so. That much, he knows he is willing to sacrifice.
"Light. Dark. Jedi. Sith. None of it matters. I don't care about any of it. And you shouldn't either."
He makes his sentiments clear for her. There is nothing to come back from. There is nothing to return to.
"Whatever serves me. Whatever gets me what I want."
And I take what I want.
She looks to him with those same unchanged eyes. Full of intention. Full of sympathy.
For who—me? Why, Rey? Of all people, why me?
"What do you want?"
"...Everything."
For all the certainty he commits to this answer, she isn't at all convinced of it.
"My blood-right. Everything. And no one is going to stand in my way."
He crouches down to one knee to meet her face at eye-level. Turns all of her unwelcome condolence back unto her.
"Least of all, you."
It is for this that she finally allows her tears to shed. Bitter, spiteful tears. How hurtful he could be. She knows to expect no less of him, but it's still like a knife plunging into the heart of her very being. After all, she'd done the very same to him before. The symmetry of the Force is astounding.
A breath escapes from her lips. She purses them tightly and swallows back her tears as she turns away from this terrible shadow. (Perhaps it'd been a mistake to confront him after all.)
Good. Turn away. Turn away, and keep going. Don't bother looking back.
She wipes her eyes clear with the back of her sleeve. Her eyes are scraped raw by the homespun coarseness of its fabric, but she stubbornly turns her gaze back to the softly illuminated world before her. She came here to be alone, she reminds herself.
"I have nothing left to say to you."
And as though the Force itself had responded to her wishes, she is once again left to nothing but the company of her own solitude.
A/N: (I'm going to be mentioning stuff from the TLJ a bit here, so I think a mild spoiler alert might be appropriate here, just in case...)
Hello! So...I'm probably one among way too many who've been utterly sucker-punched onto the Reylo ship...train...ship(?)...'cause of TLJ. I know there's already been a thriving community for them forever now, and I don't know that I'm going to be going head first into that fandom, but damn this movie rekt my feelings about them, lol. I never rabidly shipped them before, but I was never against it either. I have to admit I really liked the dynamics developed between them in the film, and omg, using the concept of Force bonds, too? Squeee-hee-hee-hee goes my inner closet teenage gurl!
But outside of SW, I've also always been fascinated by the concept of two people interacting "remotely" (conversations through correspondences/non-physical contact/etc.) and building some sort of relationship or dynamic from that. So, wtf, the movie pretty much did that, how could I not play around with this? And it's been a looong time since I've last felt inspired enough to make this many story notes (enough that I should probably do something with it), so I think the not stupid thing to do is to ride this high for as long as I can before it craps out (as it always eventually does...ugh, fuck you, lazy-ass, unmotivated brain.)
That said, I pretty much have this short-ish story mapped out. There's bits and pieces in between stuff that needs to be filled, but it's otherwise kind of planned out. It's...gonna be loosely formatted. I dunno. Snippets and interactions. Sort of follows some kind of trajectory. (If that sounds super vague, that's just about right with the usual crap I write, I guess.) I don't write stuff too often, but omg this ship just won't leave my brain right now, and I'd be an idiot not to get some kind of writing in. :| I'm not even sure how many readers will even actually notice what with the already stupid amount of Reylo anything already in existence, lol, but I do hope you guys enjoy! :D
Historically, I'm not speedy with updates, but it all really boils down to what available time I have and how many kinks need to get ironed out. I'll try my best not to take too long (and hopefully actually *finish* this whole thing before Ep. IX comes out...'cause...knowing dis bitch's busy (lazy) ass...) Anyway, please enjoy the rest! And if you so feel compelled to, please do leave a review! :) Just a small word of support or whatever floats your mind will be greatly and wholeheartedly appreciated! And if anyone has questions or just wants to drop a message, please feel free to PM me! I love to talk and share enthusiasm!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! ^_^
12/22/17