AN: To set the tone for this story, I decided to start by filling in the gaps between the dialogue during the cannon interrogation scene. There was a lot of room to work with, since anything could have been going on in their heads, so I took some creative license. After this prologue, the story will diverge into an AU, and I already have 8 chapters written, so I have a pretty solid idea of where it's going. Hope you enjoy it!
Disclaimer: Star Wars does not belong to me, and I make no profit from the publication of this work.
Her dreams, strangely grey and far away, were lingering far longer than dreams were meant to. She felt a deep sense of unease, and sometimes, felt close to remembering why, before the answer slipped out of her mind again.
Time passed, warping strangely. It felt as if it had been minutes, or months. But she could feel that she had been waiting.
Finally, she awoke with a gasp, and the immediate knowledge that she was in danger. She could sense his presence, and remembered how he had seized every muscle in her body, and bent her form to obey his will.
"Where am I?" she asked, an instinctive, grasping question, one she knew was futile, but could not contain.
"You're my guest," he replied, his voice distorted, inhuman.
"Where are the others?" she said as she blinked rapidly, in an attempt to clear her clouded vision.
"You mean the murderers, traitors, and thieves you call friends?" he said, "You'll be relieved to hear I have no idea."
She felt a hot wave of anger rise into her throat at his words. She couldn't believe that he could say something so completely false as if it were the truth. As if her friends were somehow less than him, when people like Finn were worth a thousand of his arrogant ass.
She felt the first brush of his mental gaze then, like a ghost passing over the back of her neck. She knew what it was immediately, instinctively, and her rage only increased.
"You still want to kill me," he observed, his voice devoid of tone, stating fact.
"That's what happens when you're being hunted by a creep with a mask," she spat back through clenched teeth, wanting him to react to her anger.
He did react, but not how she had expected. He turned around, and with almost dramatic ceremony, removed his helmet.
As he slammed it down into a hexagonal dish full of grey powder, she felt a strange energy crawl down her spine, as if she had just walked over a grave. He turned around, and she forgot the strange dish.
He looked nothing like she had imagined. She had expected the look of a ruthless soldier, the trained killer that he was.
Instead, he looked like an extension of his traditional black robes, long-faced, awkward, and slightly sad, his large lips making him look almost boyish.
He stepped closer, taking up most of her field of vision. His combined proximity and silence increased her anxiety, which made her hate him all the more. Her heartbeat intensified, filling her ears with rhythmic thrumming.
"Tell me about the droid."
She was relieved. She could do this, she could redirect him. It would be just like redirecting nosy scavengers on Jakku, whenever they grilled her for information.
"He was a BB unit with a selenium drive and a thermal hyper scan indicator…"
His face flashed with sudden impatience, and she knew that her evasion had been pointless. He already knew what she was trying to hide.
He interrupted, "Carrying a section of a navigational chart. And we have the rest. Recovered from the archives of the empire. But we needed the last piece, and somehow, you convinced the droid to show it to you." He paused ominously before continuing, spitting the words, "You. A scavenger."
He intoned then, almost carelessly, "You know I can take whatever I want."
She felt him, prowling just outside the edge of her mind. He was radiating calm confidence, the sense of total security that came with the knowledge of practiced superiority.
Meanwhile, she was frantically clamping down, tensing up, encircling her memories of the map with a feverish will, burying them deep within herself. She would not let him have them.
He lifted his hand then and drew himself close to her, entering without further warning. Immediately Rey was smashed by a headache that seemed to cleave into her forehead. He began to search, tearing through masses of her memories, and she was forced to watch them as they flew by, thrown into disorder. In flashes, she felt the emotions of each memory as it fluttered past in the wake of his probing.
Quickly, she realized that she could slow him by forcefully recalling memories in detail. So as he moved deeper, she began to throw out streams of these obfuscating memories, sending him down into her encyclopedic knowledge of engine parts, down into her memories of every good find she'd ever made.
She felt the first hint of his doubt then. It was only a whisper, but she latched onto it, and devoured it like a staving woman. She fed her will with it, and it grew even more frenzied.
But he could adapt as well. He seemed to focus, to gain a degree of seriousness that he had previously lacked. And he began to look for her fear.
He pulled the nearest fearful memory into view, and then reached out for others that shared the same emotion. He began to use the chain of fear memories like a rope in a sandstorm, pulling himself down, deeper into her subconscious. Now when she tried to distract him, he had his chain to cling to, and he was not swept away.
The memories became increasingly upsetting to recall.
…Wes, ten years her senior, his comforting smile, that feeling of security she felt when she was with him, when he teased her. Until he had called her a pest and left her alone, in a dark wreckage…
…waking to the noise of ship engines, feeling a deep compulsion to make sure it was not her family, having to go out and check…
…the spacers, they had passed through on the way to the outer rim, and she would watch them. With a secret, aching longing, as mothers kissed the foreheads of sweaty, dirty children, even in their rags they had more than she ever would…
She was crying. She heard him talking, inside and outside her mind, two voices in unison, "You're so lonely. So afraid to leave." His words twisted with surprise, and a shriveled pity. She hated him for the pity most of all.
"At night, desperate to sleep, you imagine an ocean. I see it. I see an island."
Her island, her ocean, flashed before her. Her secret place, her escape. She could not remember ever having seen an ocean in her waking life. It had been a mystery that she could conceive of such a thing, but it had been her mystery. And now, he knew it too.
She twisted violently against her bonds, her teeth bared in anguished rebellion.
"And Han Solo. You feel like he's the father you never had. He would have disappointed you."
"GET OUT OF MY HEAD!" she screamed, thrashing.
"I know you've seen the map. It's in there. And now you'll give it to me," he said, as if his words would will his desired reality into existence. Perhaps they could. He closed his eyes, sharpened his concentration, and redoubled his efforts.
His presumption, his invasion, filled her with revulsion. She shook with anger. And finally, in desperation, she reached deeper, past what she had believed to be the limits of her will. Beyond her will, she found something new.
It was a connection to something so vast, so deep, it took her breath away. In the silence she found there, she felt afraid.
Recklessly, she gave herself to it entirely. She let it fill her mind, clear and pure, like the peal of a silver bell. Her eyes remained closed, but she saw him then, standing before her, his silhouette wrapped up in stunning display of living light, his energy intertwining with hers.
She experienced a feeling of leaving her body, as if she had never had a body at all. She could sense the troopers asleep in the quarters above her, the thoughts of the guards on patrol outside her cells, the tortured mind of another prisoner, even the alien mind of a tiny beetle scurrying down a nearby corridor. She was no longer Rey, and furthermore, she realized there had never been a Rey, only an illusion of separateness.
Between herself and Kylo Ren, she saw golden lines of fate, thrumming and shifting, blindingly bright. She reached out to touch them, and an incomprehensible weight of knowledge fell onto her, the weight of years of lived experience yet to come.
She could not understand it. It was too much, and beyond comprehension. She felt herself begin to panic, and then, she heard his voice,
"Don't be afraid. I feel it too."
Her eyes shot open, and she found herself in her body again, staring into his cold eyes, ice blue. He was looking at her expectantly, more softly, as if he believed that she, now enlightened, would give into him, and submit to his will.
Her anger reawakened at his presumption, and began to swirl into the lingering energy, forming something ice cold and ruthless. She let it take over her thinking mind again, knowing somehow that it would help her.
Easily, she slipped into his mind, which was so close to hers, and so unguarded. He was taken completely by surprise, thrown into a panic, and she felt the momentum turn, as fate began to rewrite itself.
By the time he had realized what had happened, she was already ripping through his memories with devastating precision. She caught on to a thread of fear and pulled, dredging up an overwhelming amount of information, flooding her own mind with foreign memories. He frantically tried to collect them again, but the damage was done. She could see his fears, flashing through her mind on waves of emotion.
…a fear of himself when we first learned about his grandfather, and he looked into his mother's eyes and saw that she did not trust him…
…when Snoke first asked him to kill, and he could no longer deny what he was, what he wanted him for…
…filling the hole in himself, the loneliness, with imaginings of his grandfather, with how proud he would be, with how terrible it would be, if he did not approve…
…from his earliest memories, the fear of the shadow, of the legacy of their family, of the duty, the burden, the task of making his family proud, and then, the task being worthy of the legacy of the legendary Darth Vader…
"You. You're afraid." she spoke, her voice floating just above a whisper, echoing with the knowledge of her victory, "That you'll never be as strong as Darth Vader."
She drew back, and the connection severed. He flinched away from her as if he had been slapped.
As she laid back, breathing heavily, she knew she had won. She could see it in his face, in his fear and shame. But the euphoria she had been expecting never came. Instead she felt nothing but exhaustion, pity, and perhaps… disappointment. Because he was no longer the agent of pure evil he had once seemed to be, because everything had just become far more complicated. He was a shade of grey now, and she was no longer entirely sure that she wanted to kill him.
He turned and left the room. There was nothing else to be said.
AN: If you have a moment, please leave a review and let me know what you thought. Thanks :)
