If I had stayed with Master Luke for a little while longer, he wouldn't have gotten to me, she kept repeating to herself but the words tasted like a lie even before the sentence was finished in her mind. She sat on the wet grass of Ahch-To, completely alone on the planet in her self-imposed exile and stared at the peaceful waters that surrounded the small island.
She closed her eyes, shutting the world out and tried to meditate but as it usually went these days, her mind was failing to concentrate and peace of mind was very hard for her to obtain. Her thoughts always found their way back to him and she clenched her fists as the usual surge of fear gripped her. She desperately tried to calm herself in an effort not to send Master Luke, or him, a vision of herself. If Master Luke caught just a small glimpse of her he would have confirmation that she was alive and probably within a few hours a ship would turn up carrying excited passengers and bring her back in touch with the world.
She smiled, imagining Finn's face as he would run up to her humble abode, probably taking her into his large arms and spinning her around countless times in the ecstasy of relief, and the clanking sounds poor BB-8 would make as he'd try to climb up the stairs by jumping before she would descend to greet him.
That would be no good, though.
And as for him, even if he got the most vivid vision of her, he wouldn't be able to pinpoint her location but he would most likely become aware of what she was desperately hiding from him.
Not yet, she thought. I'm not ready for you to see me yet.
No, she didn't want to see the people she loved, no matter how much she missed them. She instinctively felt that this battle was her own and that her teacher or her friends would have no way to help her.
She had to endure and keep waiting. The fate of the entire galaxy depended on her strength.
Meditation on the small sandy beach of her island was the only part of her Jedi training that she was still able to do in her weakened physical condition. How Master Luke had managed to stay alone on the planet with just the sound of the waves and wind to keep him company for years and do nothing but train his mind she still couldn't understand. She still lacked the patience for it.
But as for the few remaining months of isolation she had left on Ahch-To she wasn't going to allow her mental strength to deteriorate even further than it did when she was trapped in Kylo Ren's quarters.
That is why every couple of days she went down to the beach, closed her eyes and purposely made herself remember the events that disrupted her life seven months ago while trying to replace anger, helplessness and similar emotions with acceptance like a proper Jedi would.
The mess began after a year of training with Master Luke when vanity and nostalgia convinced her that she was strong enough to leave Ahch-To and go for a visit to the base on D'Qar, in spite of her teacher not being too overjoyed with the idea. She missed Finn and Poe, the General, BB-8 and many others with whom she became friends before permanently settling with Master Luke as his Padawan on the far away planet.
After only a week of her vacation she had to face the unpleasant fact that she had been mistaken about her strength and progress and found out why her teacher was reluctant to let her go, when Kylo Ren found her and snatched her away from the Resistance.
Looking back on it she realised that he must have made an enormous mental effort to conceal from Master Luke how hungrily he was searching for her throughout the galaxy, since her teacher only felt a small tremor through the Force telling him that it might not be the best idea to let her go, but it was weak enough for him to dismiss it and tell her goodbye, expecting her back in two weeks.
When she went with Finn and Poe to a planet not far from D'Qar which they promised existed solely for entertainment, laughing all the way and without a care in the world, they weren't aware that a small part of the First Order's fleet was passing relatively close to it. Close enough for Kylo, who had been aboard, to sense her presence and descend on the planet with his presence concealed and the intention of capturing her.
He had undoubtedly been training intensely over the past year, just the same as her, but progress comes much more quickly for users of the Dark side of the Force than to those of the Light. That is why when he walked into the small dimly-lit bar where she was having a few drinks with the boys, maskless but radiating power, it only took a wave of the hand to make Finn and Poe, along with all the other customers and staff, to fall to the ground unconscious.
Only Rey was left standing, intoxicated as she was.
He fought her with brute physical strength and unyielding determination in his dark eyes until her clothes were drenched with sweat and all the furnishings of the bar were destroyed to pieces.
At least two times she left herself open to his blows and if he had taken the chances she had accidentally given him and swung his lightsaber, some of her limbs would have flown off. He was at full combat strength and she was drunk and very much unprepared for the savage attack. That is why he eventually managed to overpower her without causing her any serious harm and she had fallen to her knees once all of her strength failed her.
He took the blue lightsaber from her limp hand and tucked it into his cloak while she could only watch with barely enough energy in her body to keep her eyes open. He took her lax body gently into his arms and with her head unwillingly cradled in his shoulder carried her away to his ship.
She woke up disoriented and confused in a bed that didn't smell like her own. Black walls surrounded her.
"Where am I?" she asked as soon as she lifted herself up and her eyes fell on the face of her captor.
He was crouching near the bed in the same position as the last time when she woke up as his prisoner, clad in the usual black but without his mask. The sensation of déjà-vu overcame her. They have done all this once before and just like the last time, he waited for her to wake up instead of waking her.
The difference this time, though, was the fact that her limbs weren't bound and she was laying on a soft bed in a spacious room instead on a cold metal table in an interrogation cell.
He didn't answer her question, choosing instead to keep staring at her with a look of satisfaction. The memory of the words 'you're my guest' echoed in her mind as a reminder of a similar situation from over a year ago.
She was momentarily glad for the silence since she had to adjust to the strange nausea that was starting to overcome her after she sat herself up.
Only the faint buzz of the ships engine was to be heard along with an almost undistinguishable sound of far away footsteps.
She looked around the room without speaking again, instinctively looking for the exit. There was very little light and all of the furniture was as black as the walls. There were windows with closed drapes on the wall to her right, a heavy looking exit door to her left and another one opposite to the bed on the far off side of the room that she presumed could only lead to a bathroom. The floor was surprisingly carpeted and the sight of a barefoot Kylo Ren on the cream fabric made such a ridiculous picture that, for a moment, it made her feel like she woke up in a Force influenced nightmare.
To add to the strangeness of her surroundings, there was a soothing and somewhat familiar flowery scent in the air even though no plants were in sight.
As her eyes fell back on the face of her still crouching captor, anger flooded her mind as if a dam broke at the very sight of him, in spite of all her training with Master Luke and preparing for the time their paths would cross again.
Instead of speaking he still kept staring at her intensely, since he was still adjusting his thoughts on the fact that he finally had her and that this time she would not be able to leave him unless he chose to let her go.
She noticed a faint scar over his face, the mark she left upon him a year ago on Starkiller base and felt glad at the thought that he must be reminded of his defeat every time he looks in a mirror.
She frowned, realising that she would have to speak again since he seemed to be in no hurry to answer her previous question.
"Why have you taken me instead of killing me?" she asked, very much glad to still be alive but also genuinely confused about it since she knew that this time there was no map or anything else of vital importance in her mind that he would need or be able to extract. He didn't need her alive, so why did he let her live?
"You ask a question to which you already know the answer to," he replied, finally rising to his feet. His voice was placid even though his eyes were burning with fervour.
"My master wants you," he continued and she recognised the truth of his words, but she also realised that there was something else to it.
I want you, is what the gleam in his eyes revealed to her. On his face was visible the same longing he felt on the night when their lightsabers clashed for the first time, when he waited for her answer after he offered to become her teacher.
It was in that moment that she felt a chill in her body that didn't have anything to do with the temperature of the room and realised that he hadn't found her by chance, but instead had been searching for her. She was looking at a man not pleased with a great, although accidental success, but at a man who was finally rewarded for months of hard work – and she was the reward.
"You are strong," he started again, taking his first step toward her, "you know this."
"It would be a shame to let your potential go to waste with the inadequate teachings of Luke Skywalker," he said as he walked over to the bed. With his tall and broad frame now looming over her, she scampered over the other side, ready to leap to her feet should he try to sit down on it.
She stared at him incredulously, thinking how big of a fool can one man be?
She watched him murder his own father.
She felt nothing but hate for him as his kind, no matter how hard Master Luke tried to purge such feelings from her. She felt that he should be aware this, so why was there still hope in him?
"There are higher odds of you shifting back to the Light than those of me being turned the Dark side," she finally spoke in a contemptuous voice, "surely, you must know that," she added with a look of genuine disbelief.
"Supreme Leader and I find the odds to be high enough for the effort to be worth the risk. There is a chance of success," he said with leisurely confidence as he unfastened his cloak.
"And even if I fail and you don't let yourself be turned, your power will at least be nullified which is more than good enough for us," he said, walking away from the bed, and she watched as he proceeded to fold the cloak and put it on a small table near the door.
The statement caught her attention more than his tidiness did, though. Nullified?
"How exactly are you planning to achieve that?" she asked, now obviously alarmed, though having no idea if it was even possible for him to fulfil such a threat.
"Hasn't your beloved teacher," he started, saying the words with jealous venom, "told you about the process of how one slips into the Darkness?"
He watched her, waiting for the answer to his question but she didn't even need to answer him verbally. The fact that Luke kept her in the dark on that subject was written all over her face.
She noticed one corner of his mouth creep slightly into the malicious echo of a smile.
"No, instead he chose to leave you ignorant and vulnerable to it. He is an even bigger fool than I previously thought."
A bit of his emotions started to bleed out and in that moment she could feel just how firmly he believed that if she had lowered the blue lightsaber of the Skywalker's on the snowy night when a planet was breaking under their feet and chose him as his Master instead of running away with a Wookie, she would have spared them both a lot of pain and trouble.
"Either way you won't have a choice. You don't understand that yet because you are accustomed to the teachings of the Jedi. You believe that your consent is necessary and that there is a set of rules for using the Dark side just as there is for the Light, but that is where you are mistaken."
He looked bitter in that moment since, after all, nobody asked for his consent either. Regret was absent from him, though, as she noticed.
He looked away from her then, choosing instead to stare blankly at the wall for a few moments, waiting for her response and allowing the weight of his words to sink in.
Confused as she was, she wanted to ask him a hundred questions about the teachings of the Force that she knew Luke deliberately withheld from her, but she knew instinctively that he wouldn't answer even one of them out of fear that she might use the information against him in order to escape.
What he was telling her now was only taunting, not teaching.
"Where am I?" she asked again quietly, feeling beaten and knowing it to be the only question that she actually might get an answer to.
He turned to her once more before answering.
"For some time you will be living with me. We are aboard my ship. These are my quarters, as you may have already realised," he said in the same tone of voice that he might have used if she had asked him what time it was.
At that her mouth fell open and she looked around the room in a panic as if to double check it was the same room she woke up in minutes ago. The big black dresser was still there. The sofa hasn't moved either. The lights were still as dim as if they were in a candle-lit cave.
Looking around she realised just how his the black room was.
She finally realised that the flowery scent of the room faintly reminded her of the General's perfume.
"I will do no such thing," she almost shouted once she finally found the words. She looked down to her hands to see what she was clenching and saw that in her hand was the black silk of his comforter.
He wants me to share his bed with him, was her first frantic thought and suddenly she found that to be ten times worse than the threat of somehow being pushed to cross the line to the Dark side.
"Throw me in a cell," she said urgently and walked around the bed to stand in front of him in an effort to make her defiance seem even stronger.
"If you think that this is the best way of punishing me," she said as she pointed to the bed, "believe me, it will be worse for you than for me, I'll make sure of it."
"What a dirty mind you've got," he said, tipping his head to the side and she could feel herself blush because of how uninteresting the idea that came first into her mind actually seemed to him.
"I won't touch you. Though, in the situation you are in, should you really be worrying yourself with such silly things?" he asked with a mocking half-smile.
"I'm not worried about anything," she said stubbornly, not actually caring about the fact that they both knew it to be a lie.
"You are," he answered nevertheless.
There was a brief moment of silence in which they only stared each other in the eye.
She looked visibly distressed, knowing it to be useless to hide her fear and worry from him seeing it. He would feel it radiate off her no matter how hard she tried to keep a straight face or hide the tremor in her hands.
He, one the other hand, seemed pleased with the reaction he got out of her. He needed her to be afraid of him. A year ago she defeated him and humiliated him, causing him to doubt his own strength more than ever before. His fear of not becoming strong enough only continued to grow as his days went on and it was all because of her.
The murder of his father was supposed to be an act that would sever all ties with the weaknesses of his past self but instead of clarity, the image of her as she stood over him in the bloodied red snow latched itself onto his mind, refusing to leave.
"What are you going to do to me?" she asked, breathing in deeply, bracing herself for the answer.
Only then did she realise they were standing chest to chest and that she could feel his breath on her skin.
He remained silent and lifted his hand as if to touch her face, but stopped his fingers when they were just a few inches away from it. He looked at her with what could almost be described as pity and the sight froze her in spot, which is why she didn't flinch when his hand was so close to her cheek.
"I will use your own nature against you. I will make you feel again," he said quietly, lowering his hand and taking a step away from her, "I won't have to do anything to you. I will just keep you by my side and you will do the rest for me."
She closed her eyes, exasperated, not understanding what he meant by that. She shook her head, thinking it best to get along to the most important thing that was bothering her.
"I won't tell you where Master Luke is," she said firmly, causing his face to attain the expression of faint annoyance.
"Nor will I tell you the location of our base. And if you try to force the information out of me I will defend it with my life," she finished. She meant what she said with every part of her being. She would die that very moment for her cause if she had to.
"I know that. That is why I won't even bother trying," he answered her and her brow immediately furrowed in confusion.
"Why am I here then?" she asked, sounding even more annoyed than he looked, feeling that there must the some other, more practical and more imminent reason for his actions, other than 'nullifying her power by making her feel'.
"Haven't I told you about that just now?" he asked irritably.
She could tell that in that moment he thought her to be quite daft, so it came as no surprise to her when he suddenly moved away from her and walked over to the table by the door and cloaked himself once more, grabbing his hideous helmet.
"You didn't make any sense!" she shouted after him, watching as his black locks disappeared under the mask of the master of the Knights of Ren and the silence of the room became filled with the sound of his heavy breathing, enhanced by the vocaliser in the helmet.
"Those doors lead to the bathroom," he said, pointing to the doors, in a robotic voice that at the same time sounded familiar and made her cringe.
"The left side of the closet has been prepared for your convenience. Dinner will be sent to you in half an hour. Don't wait up for me," he said and with his long cloak billowing behind him left the room, leaving her alone in her newfound misery.