She does not want to think of it as a dance, but she cannot rightly call it a fight. Their sabers have clashed a dozen times already, lightly, raining sparks. But no one has taken ground. Her thrusts are slow, mild; his swings are long, predictable. (Gentle?) From the start they had lacked fervor, seeming to have both wandered unwillingly into the confrontation. But as the intensity of their blows ebbs further, the tension surges. She can sense it is building toward something, but still, she does not expect this.
The soft crimson glow fades to nothing - the withdrawal of the blade accompanied by a clean, controlled hiss. He doesn't only extinguish his lightsaber - he drops it. The lifeless hilt hits the metal floor with a reverberating clank, and she feels the vibration underneath her feet. It was the same sound, when he dropped his helmet on the catwalk. When he killed his father. She remembers the sound. The way it echoed in the enormous chamber, bouncing off the walls and into her ears.
He dropped his lightsaber, but Rey doesn't even lower hers. She lifts it. She holds it tight in front of her chest - defensive. Ready.
They are both bathing in its blue radiance. Blue light, like the moon.
Like being out in the snow…
She can distinguish the reflection of her saber in his polished obsidian helmet, and her own form hiding behind it. She can almost make out her face, staring back at him the way he is staring at her, the way she knows he is staring at her from behind his visor. (It isn't bloodlust in her eyes.) His helmet is shinier, his weapon crisper. He is…refined. Less…wild.
This isn't the first time she has seen the new Kylo Ren. He came back harder after their first bout. Darker, more focused. Better. The last time they faced off, he bested her. Soundly. She escaped with her life only because the others arrived just in time to distract him…or so she tells herself. She tries not to believe that he spared her. It's an explanation for each breath she breathes that alternately exhilarates and terrifies her. But it's an explanation that tempts her more and more. (Even more so now, in his presence once again, when the idea is far more dangerous than it has ever been.)
Because he'd had her, that day. Pinned. Helpless. Resigned. She had yielded, body and spirit, when he brought the tip of his lightsaber up to her throat as she lay on the muddy earth, supine and disarmed. Disarmed and panting. Panting and utterly exhausted. It was no empty threat - the motion had been pregnant. The lightsaber buzzed in her ears, sent waves of warmth against her skin.
After all the trouble she had caused him, he didn't have a single practical reason not to strike her head from her body, or drive the blade directly into her heart. The Kylo Ren from Starkiller Base who had wanted to teach her, who had given up his chance to end her for the chance that she would follow him, was gone. This was a different man. This man – monster – creature – was bent on death. He had sought her out – crossed a battlefield for her. Ridding himself of her had been his mission.
Rey didn't want to close her eyes; she wanted to stare him down defiantly as he struck the mortal blow. But she did close them, tightly. And she held her breath. And she waited…
And waited…
He hesitated.
One heartbeat. Two. Five heartbeats. Still alive. In surprise she opened her eyes and lifted her head off the ground. Even in the moment that should have been her last she was more curious about him than afraid.
He moved the blade closer, as if to recommit to the action. The warmth became a heat that burned.
But this time she didn't hide her eyes from him. This time she did stare him down.
And then blaster shots. And hands pulling her up and away. And hyperspace. (The resistance had lost their battle as much as Rey had lost hers.)
He had spared her. If only because of his hesitation. Just as she had spared him with hers on Starkiller. And now here they are, together again. Alone again. Hesitant, again.
She doesn't want to consider that she may have fallen to Kylo Ren because Leia and Luke had humanized him for her. They had told her stories of a little boy. Of a little boy they loved. Of a little boy they love still, a little boy they hope will return to them.
But perhaps they weren't responsible for that damage…
Perhaps it had already been done.
In this round she is already in danger of wavering resolve. She has trained. She has improved. In a fair fight against him, she might win. This wouldn't be a fair fight…She tightens her grip on the hilt of her sword.
He doesn't need his lightsaber to hurt her, to be lethal. But she knows he hasn't relinquished it in order to use the Force against her - she can sense it. Rey doesn't know whether she is reading his movements, the language of his body; or whether she is perceiving his emotions and motives in the Force (the way she can perceive his unique signature - the heady, overwhelming beacon of his presence).
Or whether she has deluded herself into thinking that he won't kill her - the dangerous fantasy that he did spare her, and didn't want to (or couldn't) kill her. Or the even more dangerous fantasy that this strange mercy is light in his soul…
She's no fool - this man killed his own father in front of her. Her life is nothing to him, meaningless. And yet her belief that she knows him – quintessentially – persists. And as long as it persists, she is frozen.
Rey closes her eyes and centers herself within the Force. She lets it in, she tries to listen. But all she can feel is him. Her eyelids fly open – she expects to find him inches in front of her but he has not moved.
"Let's stop pretending," he says. His first words to her. The deep mechanical pitch of the voice changer in his mask does nothing to hide his inflections. She hears clarity, resignation. Worst of all, she hears confidence.
He has such a penetrating perception of her.
She shudders to remember his invasion of her mind – the pain, the sense of violation, the threat to Luke and the Resistance. But Rey had been so lonely, so private, so silent all her life. And then there was this person who suddenly knew her, knew everything about her, knew her under her skin and down to her bones. He knew what she feared and what she dreamed of. A connection had been forged. It thrives.
"You don't know how to stop pretending," she replies bitterly. She thinks of Han. And she thinks of Leia.
He ignores the insult. Tilting his head, he observes, "You cannot conceal your fear with anger."
"I'm not afraid of you!" she declares fiercely. "The dark side rules with fear. It won't rule me."
"Fear rules us all, and you are afraid. That is not something that you can hide from me." She wants to be provoked, but his tone is pleading. His voice is soft.
Rey feels her vulnerability more keenly now than she did in the interrogation chair or pinned in the mud under his blade. But she has a ready reply: "I am afraid…but so are you," she counters. She intended it to be a taunt, but as it passes her lips it's quiet and empathetic and distressed, much like his words were.
He takes a tentative step forward.
She immediately takes a step back, her breath catching.
As he reaches up to unlatch his helmet, she swallows. The helmet is intended to terrify, but for her, it's his face she fears. She would give anything to be saved from those eyes.
Or is that more pretending?
He removes it, and it falls carelessly from his hands. The same metallic clank. The same dark memory. The same reminder of the atrocities he has committed.
He is just as she remembers, except for the severe scar traversing his face - the scar she gave him. It hardens his appearance, and yet the same sensitivity, the almost menacing tenderness, is still there. She doesn't want his face to feel familiar to her, but it does. (And more from thinking about it than from having seen it. What do you know better than that which has haunted you?)
She expects him to be embarrassed about the scar, but he isn't. There's no resentment in his expression, or hate. Just indecision, and that tiny gleam of confidence she heard earlier in his voice. And…admiration?
Her lightsaber grows heavy in her hand. Without noticing she had already let it slip down to her waist. She switches it off and holsters it, against her better judgment. But she can't fight him, not after he has looked at her like that. Whatever is happening here, the weapon is useless.
They fall into near-darkness, and it feels…intimate.
And then he says her name. Whispers it. So softly she almost doesn't hear. He had never spoken her name before - not to her. And she had never heard it spoken that way before by anyone...
Grim determination seems to be the one expression she can't manage as she struggles to master the emotions on her face. She doesn't want him to see that it has affected her but she can't hide that it has.
Again he takes a step forward (more purposefully, staring at her), and again she retreats.
Rey knows what she's afraid of. And it's not the dark side, and it's not him – it's what he might do, and what she might let him do.
So she turns and does the one thing she never does: she runs.
/
NOTES: Without formulating too much context, I imagine this taking place towards the end of Episode VIII. Rey still doesn't know who her family is or where she came from.