"You never leave," Rey says one day, curled high in a tree on a miserable ice planet, lost in the woods. She's accidentally ingested enough snow to match three portions—or at least it had looked that way, with how dense the stuff seemed, but when she'd taken a chunk and melted it down in a fire the other night, the residual water had hardly made it to the brim of the little cup she carries with her in her knapsack. All the while, she had felt him in the back of her mind, watching. Waiting.
You still need a teacher, he says, and doesn't bother to block the sensation of being warm and comfy in his own bed from her.
Rey grits her teeth as the wind blows right through her. It may be the height of summer here on Sholon, but she is desert-made, if not desert-born, and heat had been everything she endured up until she left. If he thinks comfort will sway her— "I said no."
We'll see.
She imagines punching his face in. Amusement radiates from his end.
You are wasted on the Jedi.
"Not a Jedi," she sighs, well used to his seeming inability to hear her when she tells him that Luke is helping her control her powers, not use them as a Jedi would. Luke had told her that as far as his limited experience had allowed him to know, he'd only ever met one man around whom the Light danced like it does around her—Obi-Wan Kenobi, a Jedi Knight, a general in the Clone Wars, and the teacher of Anakin Skywalker.
Anakin Skywalker. Luke's father. (Darth Vader—)
The legacy they all inherited. Almost just to hurt herself, she wonders again who her parents are, who they might've been, whether they left her a legacy to live up to or bear the mantle of. (She thinks, sometimes, when she is sure her thoughts are hers and there is no one around to look at her, of the voice in the vision that had said these are your first steps and wonders where she has heard that voice before.)
What you do looks rather like Jedi training to me, Kylo says, a gentle note in his voice that she does not need, and Rey starts ignoring him. This is the same argument: an offer, a refusal, a parry, imagined violence, and totally unlooked-for admiration from Kylo Ren. She's tired of it. She's tired of a lot of things.
Instead, Rey scrambles down the tree as best she can—trees are not worn-out husks of battleships—and lands lightly in the fallen snow. There is nothing out here, nothing worth salvaging, only dead trees and the snowy wastelands.
She is here for—something. She isn't entirely sure what. She never is.
Luke hadn't been sure either, not really, but he'd let her go regardless. "When I was your age," he'd said, "I was running off to duel my father to save my friends. Best that you have some time to reflect before anything like that happens." He'd wiggled his cybernetic arm. That had been that. (They were both quiet for a long while afterward, terrifyingly cognizant of the past they had inherited, until Luke broke the silence by stretching and then wincing when both his knees popped.)
Kylo murmurs something she categorically refuses to hear. Rey moves, stretches, lets her blood sing alongside her staff; she calls to the Force and it answers, birdsong high and clear and free of the death that had come with the steelpeckers on Jakku. In rote repetition she finds balance, mind blissfully numb, the effects of Kylo's corrosive rage and despair muted like the songs Poe likes to play in the background on an old holorecorder she had dug up in the unused corners of the base. There is clemency in motion without urgency, an economy of movement entirely different from the desperation that had quickly killed any elegance in her a long time ago, and she finds that she likes what almost feels like a rediscovery of an ancient thing, long forgotten.
Soresu with a staff, Kylo observes, sounding almost miffed. What will you cobble together next, scavenger?
Rey comes to an abrupt, screeching halt; the music vanishes, the Force's high aria cutting off in the middle, Rey's staff held out in a blocking motion against an imaginary opponent's downward swing. Don't you have anything better to be doing with your time?
You want to know what Soresu is. Smug certainty.
Rey grits her teeth. I don't, actually.
Did you forget? I feel it too, you know. You can't lie to me.
To that, Rey draws on a (facsimile of a) childhood of suspicious glances and scrappy self-defense and calls him something very unpleasant in Huttese. He only laughs.
There is nothing you can call me that would be worse than what I am, he informs her, dark and rich and laced with a despair so acrid she tastes it on her tongue.
Silently, Rey figures that most of the galaxy would agree. To them, there is nothing worse than a kinslayer.
They do not know hunger. Not like she does. Not like Jakku does.
R'iia's children may leave, the Teedos had told her, but R'iia never leaves them. They carry her anger with them under their breastbones, never fading, always aching. You can tell a child of R'iia from the rest. There is a despair in their eyes that seeps up from their hearts, gnaws at them as much as the hunger does, and though they may walk, they are dead already.
A waste of resources. Sacrilege to the only truth she has ever known: efficiency is the only way to survive.
In that respect, at least, Kylo Ren would fit right in with Jakku's dead-eyed scavengers, R'iia's forsaken children.
Should I be offended? Kylo wonders, too idly. His shields lurch like a thirst-starved luggabeast, make a hop and a skip and a jump to the left, and that's when Rey realizes that he is smashingly drunk. Not only that, but an unpractised drunk, too.
Just her luck.
As she explores Sholon's forest-mountains, venturing to and from her starship in short bursts, she stumbles through a patch of brambles and draws in a sharp breath. There is a vast body of water extending out before her, stretching long and far and wide with long fingers until it reaches the horizon, and Rey, eyes drinking it in with wonder, thinks—how did I not notice this before?
She certainly hadn't seen it when she'd made planetfall, too busy trying to find a safe place to land. If BB-8 were here, he'd be chirping in with something about her observational skills; for now she happily forgets her inadequacies, rushing up to the edge of the water to take in the sights. Framed as it is by the snowy forests to the left and the ancient mountains to the right, she begins to understand: the mists must've been concealing this gem of a lake—can it even be called a lake? It's almost more like an ocean. An ocean! Rey leans forward unconsciously, eyes wide beneath the winter goggles Poe had snuck into her survival kit—
Don't touch that lake! Kylo shouts out of the blue, startling her out of her trance; she falls backward, flat on her bum, and puts her hand to her heart. It beats far more rapidly than she thinks is truly warranted for just a bit of surprise. That isn't water, scavenger, it's sulfuric acid. It'd burn you from the inside out if your skin made contact with it.
Why do you care? Rey shoots back. She stands and turns back into the trees, mood thoroughly spoiled.
Oh, did you want to suffer a horrible death? Be my guest, he snarls after a half-second of hesitation; she gets the distinct impression of him towering over her, crowding her in—
Rey shakes her head and hops over a gnarled tree root. What makes my dying a horrible death different from all the other horrible deaths you've caused, Ren?
She slams the door between them shut and refuses to contemplate the loneliness of being the only audience to her thoughts. Kylo's rage, so reluctant and incoherent these days, flares to life from far away; she turns right and clambers up an ice-covered rock, focusing on the exact route she will take to return to her ship. The benefit to Sholon's ragged, uneven landscape is that she hasn't lost any physical fitness by taking the time out of training to go on this little sabbatical.
"Tell Finn and the General that I'm quite alright," Rey tells the holo in the captain's quarters (so unlike the Falcon, she thinks wistfully, unused to the clean efficiency of pretty much every other ship in existence). "I'm stuck in the ship for today—something tells me going out in this storm isn't wise. But I'm quite alright. I feel I'm… making progress. There's a cave nearby I plan to explore when the storm lets up, and I've got a good feeling about it."
She wishes, for a moment, that they were here instead of there, that she could reach out and touch them and make sure they were real, not illusions drawn out by the desert heat. Abruptly, Rey stands; she gives the holo a smile and turns it off, then marches out to the cockpit to stare out at the viewport.
Nothing but white.
But it's not sand.
"That's right," she tells herself, trying not to shake. She hardly feels the cold in here; the ship retains heat while planetside far better than the Falcon ever did, for one, but she's spent so much time immersed in the Force here that she hasn't felt the dull edge of the discomfiting chill that had erased Jakku's heat from her bones. Usually, that sensation is as much of a constant as Jakku's sun had been. "This isn't a sandstorm. And when I find what I'm looking for, I'll go home."
She'll come back for Finn, like he did for her. Nothing and no one will take that from her.
Would that everything could be so simple. Him again, and electric warmth settles in her veins, makes her head hazy and the press of gravity on her feel nonexistent.
Rey frowns a tad and returns to the captain's quarters, settling on the bed for a lack of anywhere else to sit. She wraps the flight-standard blanket around her and ignores the fact that not all of that thrumming satisfaction at being acknowledged is his. Do you make a habit of drunkenness?
Only around you, scavenger. Darling.
Darling, he's said in that voice, called her his darling, and his thoughts are drifting to the scar on his face. Rey's hair stands on end as the absentminded sensation of his fingers drifts from the base of her jaw to the bridge of her nose, lazily tracing the path she'd torn open with the lightsaber she hadn't known how to use. She stands almost violently, the blanket slithering to the floor, and pays no attention to his distinct pause as she rifles through her bag in short, jerky, jagged motions sharper than the steel beams scraped thin in the gutted bellies of her past.
You marked me, he informs her, clipped, academic, too drunk to know what he's saying. In the Starlit Way, off Scalduron, that means—
Shut up, she tells him, sharply, and doesn't let herself regret it. She doesn't want to know what his scar and her role in it means in the Starlit Way, and it has absolutely nothing to do with how the last time she was back on the base, she'd overheard some of the Resistance pilots gossiping about all her encounters with Kylo Ren. Nothing. At. All. She seizes the thermal blanket and hurls it onto the thin mattress of her bed, gritting her teeth.
You would be marvelous, he's saying wistfully, something soft and bleeding at the edges peeking through the both of them for a whisper of a second, marvelous with me, scavenger, all that anger—
Are you still on about that? Let it go, Rey demands, flinging the other blanket back onto the bed and dropping onto the floor to engage in a furious series of core exercises. She can't go outside, can't run endlessly like Luke seems to believe is best for any Force-sensitive in training ("I'd make the Porgs do it too, if I could bear it," he'd said with a grin and an amused glint in his eyes that comes far too rarely—), and she's trapped, almost, in this box of a starship. Kriff if it doesn't drive her mad. Inaction means stillness means death is coming for you, and Rey hasn't come this far just to die.
Kylo sits up at that—she feels it, like he's right beside her, connected to her, his heartbeat matching hers; she stares at the harsh, unchanging, cold light of the ship and sees him leaning over her, eyebrows raised in disbelief that radiates with the same majesty Leia exudes in nearly every situation. Stars help her, she wants to reach out and trace the same path along his scar that he had. Scavenger, are you telling me to let go of the past?
You admit it's the past? Rey glares and does not concede. Slowly, deliberately, she does another sit-up and lets him feel the burning sensation.
He glares right back, something in his gaze yawning and ponderous and dark, as easy to get lost in as the older, floundering wreck of a Star Destroyer to the east of the ship she'd found Dosmit Raeh's helmet in, and he leans in, leans close. Close enough that all she can see is him. You will never be my past.
She recoils. There is promise in those words, words that cannot be taken back, words that he will not take back. Not even if she'd wanted him to.
But when has he ever listened to what she wanted?
Now and forever and always, no matter how much we hate it, he's saying, whispering, we are inextricably intertwined, until one of us dies, and maybe not even then. I'm not leaving you, scavenger. How about you let it go?
It is a horrible, horrible mockery of everything that should be gratifying. If he weren't here, weren't watching, she'd almost want to cry. Instead, she forces herself to unclench her jaw and stare at him evenly. Leave me alone right now, and come back when you aren't drunk.
He leans in even further. No, he murmurs, the ghost of his breath almost warming her lips.
Rey turns away from him and chips away at her exercises, something of her soul burning with her body. There is no sense in not finishing what she has started.
Thankfully, after she threatens to venture out into the raging snowstorm in her privvies if he doesn't leave, he pulls back, puts the barriers back up. If he drinks his past into oblivion again at any point in the two days it takes the storm to die down, she doesn't feel it. Rey occupies herself with feeling out the pathways she's got in mind for her trip into the cave; two are untenable, the fresh snowfall making them impassable or dangerous to navigate, but fortune—or perhaps the Force—smiles upon her, and the third is both open and relatively flat.
Enough so that a bit of work (and practice levitating things with the Force) makes for a clearing large enough to set her rather small spacecraft down nearer to her intended destination. When the job is done, she braces herself for the blast of frigid air and decides to run the rest of the way to the cave; it's roughly ten, fifteen standard minutes away, if she had to judge, and she could do with getting the blood in her veins moving. She hums as she stretches and feels a little grin overtake her when she starts on her path.
This feels good. This feels like freedom.
Eventually, she makes it to the tall spire of a mountain that houses her cave. She comes to a stop in front of the entrance, focusing on evening her breathing out, and when her chest rises and falls at a relatively normal rate, she peers into the darkness. There isn't much to see—just the outlines of rock formations, all spires like their larger brethren, rising up from the rocky earth in triumph.
"Well," she says, for a moment forgetting that BB-8 isn't with her, and freezes. The absurd feeling of being deprived hits her, and she swallows. "Oh… right."
Then she shakes herself and marches into the cave. Something tells her that there's worth in exploring this place, and Luke had suggested that she could try practicing extending her senses with the Force—something about nature, with its strong connection to the Living Force, helping her to tap into its energies. It's not the first time Rey has felt like it's all a bunch of bunk, like everything Luke has told her about the Force has a missing piece in it somewhere, but there'd been an ardent belief shining in his eyes that she hadn't had the heart to question. Luke Skywalker is a very sad, solemn man, and his hope looks like the ashes of something that never should've been extinguished.
Sins of our forefathers, Rey thinks, remembering what the Basic reading primer the Resistance gave her had said about what Force-adherents believed. Then she thinks about the reason for Luke's solemnity. Sins of our sons.
Oh, we were wrong, whispers a cultured, conflicted voice, one she does not recognize. Rey glances to the side, then the other side. Nothing. The voice continues on, heedless of her confusion. But perhaps he was not entirely right.
"Who are you?" Rey asks, but the darkness does not answer her.
It never has. Not really.
Still, as she forges deeper into the cave, she can't shake the feeling that there is a presence there with her—sad and solemn, given to silence, but there.
