Chapter One: The Consequences of Battle

The collusion of blades left resounding sparks of blues and reds between the dark lord and the scavenger, and with every slash and deflection came the hissing of heat and energy.

Rey shoved first and Kylo shoved back and this continued with every breath and step of the way. One blade close to skin and one blade too far. One blade had been deflected and the other swayed forward. The two duelists had danced about on the battlefield with their motley of tan and black fabrics swirling amongst one another, and all eyes focused on the striking gleams of their beautiful light that had cracked between.

Their sabers came into a standstill at angled wrists, the humming was amplified as the light of the blades condemn themselves into a single position between the force sensitives. The ground shook around their displays of true power, the harmonizing balance of the grey force outlined in the passion of the dark and the benevolence of the light. As blinding as it may be, it was quite the beautiful sight to both the First Order and the Resistance.

Ren was now refined in every sort, be he an assailant of the mind or a beast on the battlefield. He was not an enemy one might seek to challenge and Rey knew no advantages would bless her a second win. She was afraid to say it, but she knew she'd been lucky and lucky throughout that day. Nothing in her life had ever gone that well for her and now as fate would have it, mother mercy was seeking a price for all she'd been given.

He ground his primal blade against hers and it was a bold attempt to prove that his crafted saber was better than his own grandfathers—the saber he sought for so diligently. Rey blinked in irritation and realized the angle of his own saber grew too focused on the base, as if he were trying to rupture his own grandfathers blade because it had once destroyed his own.

His mask was washed in hues of mostly red and his eyes were hidden behind a seemingly endless void of blackness. The mask was too expressionless and too hard to read for Rey—a chance at claiming victory against this Kylo Ren was slowly dwindling away. Right now, as the young Padawan saw it, fighting against this unemotional droid was considerably more difficult than with the boy she'd confronted years ago.

You're just a boy.

As if he were responding to that thought, her wrist flicked back painfully and unable to bear the weight of his muscle and height. She quickly sidestepped and shaved her saber from his unyielding grip, cinders of heat feathered away from the motion of their blades. She lightly tapped the ground around him which then forced the Dark Sider to turn away from the imprisoned rebels. She wanted it that way. In any case were she to dodge one of his attacks and it were to be directed towards her friends, she wouldn't be able to forgive herself.

No one had uttered a word, not a sound from either side of opposition. They had all held their breath as witnesses to their final solitary battle represented by a lone member of each side. The First Order impatiently waited for their Dark Lord to finish off the Padawan while the Resistance silently pleaded for their heroine to succeed.

You're just a scavenger.

She heard this in the back of her mind and wondered whether it came from him.

Then came another whistling screech of lightsabers, and until that point she that she had almost gained the upper hand. Until she didn't have it anymore. Their bodies grew close, their gravity thrusting each other at the will of the mind. Their faces neared while their forms remained stagnant at a counterbalanced stance. They listened to each other thoroughly and looked for any weaknesses. Their robes wildly whipped against each other's brutal power. Their opposing force clashing and refusing to give in to the other like yin and yang. Her own light saber sounded refined. Cultured. Pure. His sounded raw. Primal. Like a cat purring.

Through the blackness of his mask Rey could tell he'd been staring her down. Kylo Ren stepped forward, his foot crunching against the destroyed and crippled metal of several fighter planes. Rey mimicked and stepped back, this continued until she realized how dangerously close the Stormtroopers were at her back.

"Stop pushing me," Rey fussed through her full teeth, glancing backward and then back at Ren frequently during their heated battle. Although her legs were in a stance meant to stabilize her form, her knees were slowly giving way against his enormity.

Had her years of training not been enough? Had she been too eager to become the heroine? The one who saved the innocent from the evil?

The mechanical grinding of Kylo's arm filled her ears and she felt the slow forced descent of her frame to the ground. He was gaining the upper hand. It was Rey's mistake to fight the brute of a man on open ground, as she excelled primarily in her agility and nimble exploitation of terrain.

"Surrender yourself Scavenger," Ren's husk voice demanded shortly after, and Rey felt him rummage inside her mind.

"Get out of my head," Rey wore on and her own light clashed and sparked against his eerily ominous one, her hand purposefully aiming away from his cross guarded hilt so that she wouldn't be seared through by one of its side handles.

Her catlike eyes seemed more brightly green than hazel as it reflected in the colorful blend of lightsabers. She seemed worn down. Tired and unwilling to let this fight go on for any longer than it should. Her hair looked as though it hadn't worn its three-bun style in months, but rather a long and grown out braid that peeked out from the small of her back.

"It's easy to explore amidst the obstruction of battle. You leave yourself unwound well enough to read you as a scroll," through the mask his voice rumbled.

"My mind is not a scroll for you to r—" Rey stammered in her sentence as she found herself between the heat of a blade and the heat of a blaster bullet. The pain roll into her back, and through her stomach and through her skin, Rey paused at the almost paralyzing sensation and surrendered herself entirely to it. Her body crashed to the ground and her saber hilt roll away, deactivated and painstakingly out of her grasp.

The roaring burning sensation made her cry aloud and crinkle in her agony. Rey had never felt something so agonizing in her life and she'd grown quite a thick skin for the entirety of it. The young Padawan's breathing increased exponentially and sweat beads formed at the roots of her hairline.

Kylo Ren towered over her in just as submissive confusion as she and watched with a silence that seemed all too unpredictive. She glared up at him with narrowed hazel eyes and a complexion far too pale for anyone physically hale and hearty. His mask glared down at her several moments and felt visibly or invisibly upset.

Rey soon believed him to be a man of honorable victory, and this was not an honorable victory.

He then geared his attention to someone probably behind her, unclicking his cross guard when he realized what had just transpired. His body curled forward and was ready to devour whomever dared to interrupt. Rey had witnessed this all with her mind processing things far too slowly now, clutching at her abdomen and the blood leaking far too well for her to handle.

Was this how it ends?

Rey watched Kylo Ren step past with thudding boots and toward whomever it was behind her, she felt her life would not be sole in its departure from the world today. The young Padawan followed his movements with her dreary eyes. Her life was slowly beating itself out of her body with every drop of blood.

Was this kind of life worth it?

The fabric against her wound soon became heavily mudded with blood, pooling around her palm and licking its way to the stony ground. Her breathing became ragged. Her eyelids became heavy and her body became a useless puppet without an inkling of self-drive to move on its own.

Is this what happens when I try to bring peace to the world?

Rey's shoulders veered over and the rest of her came with them. The sky turned to its side and she could see the army of white situated from behind. She could see her lightsaber hilt that had rolled several feet away from her finger tips. Kylo Ren was moving toward one of them, she could see all now fading away in her blurred vision.

Is this what I deserve?

Rey woke with dreadful sensations in her stomach, a roaring migraine in her head, and numbness in her limbs. She hadn't felt this out of touch with herself since she'd been ambushed by thieves on Jakku one mistaken night. But this was worse. She had people to look up to and people to lose.

Rey glanced around. It didn't look like the Resistance, she assumed herself to be captured and held as a hostage in the First Order. It was a medical bay none too large as it'd been occupied by the only bed she lay in. It was more of a patient's private room filled with stale air and a sole operator. Right beside her was a droid bustling around equipment on a tray. Scuffling her eyebrows, Rey wondered why she was still alive and what chain of events had led her to this place.

The young Padawan craned her neck down at her abdomen to see gauze neatly wrapped around her wound; blood already soaked through and left an imprint. It needed to be changed.

"I need more gauze," Rey murmured timidly and her voice croaked more than she wanted it to. One droid coined in place to examine its human patient. Apparently, it wasn't sure if it was to take commands from anyone unless they were an officer of the First Order.

"Do not speak to her, droid," commanded a mask-muffled voice at the doorway. Strangely, Kylo Ren stood like the giant he was, peaceably and intent on dealing no harm. Anytime soon for that matter.

"It was going to change my bandages. What's wrong with that?" Rey twisted her head away from the voice as best she could, knowing full well her hair was a tangled and an unpleasant mess. She didn't want to face the enemy because he was mostly the reason she was here. "Couldn't you have used bacta to heal me more quickly? I know full well you wanted a rematch."

"I'm surprised you know what bacta is." The rumbling voice inquired, seemingly avoiding most of what she had said.

"Right, because I'm just a scavenger." Rey found herself muttering the words less viciously than she'd wanted to sound. What was she to do now that he'd captured her a second time, familiar with the scope of her capabilities? Is it the fact that the resistance could be dead at this very moment? Was the reality of her own death creeping upon her so gradually she'd come to accept it? She didn't know exactly what to think but feel momentously weak in her own defeat.

"And yes, you're right. I did want a rematch," she could feel the pressure in the room change and that Kylo Ren had entered it, disregarding any form of permission. "If you'd like to know what happened, I'd be happy to enlighten you."

"I never thought of you to be happy," the young Padawan retorted with another crack to her voice. She didn't see herself sounding so weak, ever in her life. Pain continued to swell in her abdomen but she clenched her fists away at it. "About anything."

"A Stormtrooper struck from behind, as a coward would have," Ren continued with distaste swimming in his tone. It felt extremely strange to have an enemy like him at her backside. The young Padawan wondered why she hadn't bothered to watch his every move despite her existing conditions, "you should realize I never meant to kill you."

She wondered why his tone felt so empathetic.

"Right, you because were also trying to get inside my head," Rey bit back. There was a hint of resentment that'd been building up over the years, "because you'd either slice someone's body or their mind to smithereens. You're just angry you haven't fully gotten ahold of me yet."

She could sense irritation bubbling up and she'd been right to assume he'd harbored a temper.

Rey began with another venomous question, "do you want to know what happened after you killed your own father?"

Rey could tell his face was contorting with anger and even with that blank slate of a mask it wasn't hard to decipher how he felt. For some inexplicable reason, she didn't expect him to do anything to her while she lay like this. He was erratically quiet and she could sense his body remain painfully still. She knew he wanted to do something.

She gripped at the sheet spread below her body, as if it were going to help her from this monster in any way. She eventually found her ears moving to a source of purring, a crimson saber had woken with liveliness and it certainly meant to expel a certain rage on the nearest object; this happened to be the poor medical droid standing beside Rey. The sound of electrical discharge and the sizzling of metal reached her ears and she turned to the source of it.

Rey watched him raise his cross guard in a subsequent attempt to dismember the surgical droid. He stopped midway he calmed himself while taking a deep breath. He deactivated his light blade once again and quickly stormed out of the room with not a shred of desire to look back at the force sensitive scavenger.

She churned her head down to the mutilated droid as best she could and thought that maybe, maybe this was her fault. No, this wasn't her fault at all. He was spoiled child who never learned how to deal with consequences of his actions. He was a too irresponsible for the powers that be blessed upon him.

While this had come to pass, Rey found her breath in motion again and her heartbeat had been slamming her chest as if it wanted to escape and never come back. She let her mind become tranquil as Luke had always enquired her to, when she let her mind wander too far into the fear that hid in her own heart. She lay back down, her wispy hazelnut hair twisting around the back of her head and her lips feeling dryer now that she had nothing left to say.

Rey basked in her own silence that night, apart from a few mechanical buzzes and formalities of the next medical droid that had taken care of her. Before here, the last memory she could recall was the vague sight of Kylo Ren and his mask looming over hers, a dark silhouette against a background of stark luminescence. His firm shoulders shifting back and forth as he paced along and clawed tightly in her outer leg, as if she were slipping out of his hands. This was nothing more than a snippet to her. It was a drifting blur of waxing and waning vision.

Air licked at her exposed hands and she felt her cloak billowing behind Kylo Ren as he briskly carried her through the halls. She heard the scattered voices of various men, women, beast, animal, and technology and anything she could comprehend. The sweet, sweet state of unconsciousness was calling to her. Yet she could feel Ren at the back of her mind and he was constantly probing hers in such an incessant curiosity that she could not drift fully asleep even if she wanted to. The pain was there. It wasn't just a memory. An event so authentic that it left its mark on her body and it was a reminder to Rey that she was living a truth.

She remembered the irritating brightness as it cascaded down from a row of rafter lights, a building or vehicle that seemed too large to have such a high ceiling. It existed nonetheless. Despite the sudden epiphany, Rey couldn't have combatted Ren while he held her so tightly in his arms and she'd been so close to kissing death on the lips. And then she recalled how often her mind grappled with his while being in a daze and she felt Kylo Ren subtly steer her into a regenerative coma.

Did he carry her here?

The strange sensation is something she'd experienced maybe once before; a faint feeling of déjà vu rose in the back of her thoughts.

Rey grew tired of lying there and wallowing in her own muse. She moved suddenly and ripped away at her gauze and it relit a fire of pain in her stomach and then her spine. She felt creeping numbness overtake her lower body.

Oh no…

She regretted moving at all.

"Droid…"Rey whispered as best she could, "Droid…please. I need assist…ance."

Another surgical droid that Ren had called for later that day, veered its way toward its human patient. Soon it began working on her, using a cloth to staunch the wound while it injected an analgesic drug into her body. She felt the pain washing away from her cavity despite feeling nothing at all in her legs.

The droid replaced the soaked cloth with a clean replacement. It soon addressed its human, "be careful not to move. You'll risk extreme paralysis."

"Is that what's going on?" Rey fought back the tears, craning her chin toward the procedure on her body. "Please, please," it was the combination of drugs and the thought of losing feeling in half of her body that made her frantic. "No… this…this can't happen. Please help me—"

"You must stay calm." The droid monotonously reminded her, "I must successfully perform this procedure."

When Rey said she'd never felt so sullen with her life earlier and well… this was it. This was a new low. Her eyelids drifted to rest. Why was she closing her eyes? She couldn't fall asleep yet. She felt angry and almost pitied herself for the way her life had taken its course.

Was this the doing of a higher being? Or had she come to an end from her own fault? Her thoughts soon became hysterical and she felt her breathing heighten and it was loud enough where it was the only thing she could focus on.

Rey opened her eyes and noticed a massive black creature standing at her bedside. His mask was nowhere in near sight and he'd been glaring down at her like she'd been departing from the world already.

"Here to personally witness me in my own death bed?" Rey asked, with sweat coating her cream skin and tears ready to roll down her cheeks. She whispered to him with rarely any spite in her voice, "Go on. Watch. I know how often you wanted to see me like this."

His dark eyebrows crinkled inward as if there was a constant battle in that expressive mind of his. His eyes reflected sorrow and Rey thought that maybe she'd been hallucinating things.

"Place her in a bacta tank," Ren commanded and there was something deeply conflictive in the way he said it, "do it now!"

Rey felt herself slipping away, lost in the world of unconsciousness.