When she finds the crystals, she knows why the Force was pushing her to explore the cave.
There was nothing like this on Jakku.
Rey stands at the edge of the great underground pool that the lake seems to spring from, gazing out across the not-water at the crystals on the other shore, the ones that glow a soft, beautiful blue, sticking out of the ground like icicles in reverse. Like someone put them there, they stand in a semicircle; tall, silent guardians of what almost looks like a small, dusty box in the middle. She wants to make it across there, somehow, touch the box like the Force is leading her to, but she remembers what happened the last time she opened a nondescript box in the bowels of the earth.
This box looks very similar to that box.
Rey shifts, swallows, turns off the flashlight. She doesn't need it in here, with the midday light peeking in through the mouth of the river that flows away from the pool. At her feet, a tiny rock crab makes a high-pitched noise and dances away; the noise reverberates in the stillness of the cavern, but she pays it no mind.
She does still have her cables with her. There are plenty of stalactites dotting the ceiling—she could hook one up, swing herself over and back, easy. Just like scaling a Star Destroyer. And the Force wants her to go to the box; she can feel it swirling around her, gently urging her to go.
So why does she have a bad feeling about this?
"There had better be a good reason for this," Rey grumbles to herself, slinging a cable around the sturdiest-looking stalactite. Swinging across the long inlet is like breathing after a sandstorm: a familiar weightlessness, buoyant and bubbling with the relief of the clear air and the rush of a wind without biting claws on her skin.
There was something about spelunking that she had missed, she realizes when she lands, and why does that make her feel—gutted, almost?
The crystals sing like the desert on a good day, drawing her out of her musings. She picks her way across the rocky ground and finds the box to be, well, very much a box; after a moment of consideration, she kneels by it and undoes the latch.
Sure enough, another lightsaber.
I'm not going to experience—another one of those if I touch this, am I? Rey wonders, oddly stricken. The vision she'd seen beneath Maz's castle has stayed with her, despite herself; it comes back sometimes in her dreams, in fragmented pieces, and the only reason she hasn't spent hours mulling over it is because she has no real way of figuring out the answers. No proof. Nothing tangible.
The lightsaber at her belt jolts. Rey jumps, putting a hand on it, but it tugs itself free and flies across the lake—right into the outstretched hand of Kylo Ren, maskless and dumbfounded, like he didn't expect that to actually work.
Panic surges in her veins when he steps forward. When did he get here, how did I not notice, why is he here, what is going on—
The only reason she doesn't laugh when he trips over a rock crab is because Kylo Ren looks just as panicked as she does.
"Why are you here?" is the first thing out of Rey's mouth; all hesitance forgotten, she grabs the lightsaber from the box and holds it at the ready, fingers resting on the throttle-style switch.
"I—I came to apologize," Kylo says dumbly, staring at her lightsaber. There is a dark, thin strip of what looks to be a bandage covering the scar, and a fresh redness around the edges. It reopened, it looks like. A small part of her hisses in frustration. She'd wanted to see it despite herself, next time they met, wanted to see again what she had done to him. "Did you know that—"
Rey balks. She recognizes that tone—the I have before me a piece of ancient history, let me tell you everything about it tone, a tone she's been subject to during singularly absurd moments like that time on Ord Mantell when they'd had to wait in that corner for the Black Sun guards to pass before they could keep fighting— "I don't care!"
And she doesn't. She doesn't want to know whatever history this lightsaber might carry with it; she's gotten more than enough of that from the lightsaber that's currently in his hands, and if she hasn't experienced another one of those visions with this one, well, that's as good a reason as any to keep it.
"It's a piece of ancient history," he says, stepping forward, and even though the entire inlet full of sulfuric acid is between them, Rey ignites the lightsaber. He stops, dark eyes bouncing between her and her weapon, seemingly transfixed by the sight. "Rey—"
"Why are you here?" she repeats, hoping that he can't see the way her hands are shaking. He's rude and a bully and a murderer and a monster, but if he's telling the truth, he tracked her Force presence down across several star systems to this uninhabited ball of untamed wilderness for no reason other than to offer an apology he knows she won't accept.
I'm not leaving you, he'd said.
Had he meant it?
"That," Kylo says, regret flickering across his face, eyes falling to her feet. He hooks the lightsaber she'd been using into his belt and looks terribly guilty. Of course he'd picked up on the current of her thoughts. "That, it was wrong of me, and I wasn't thinking, and I apologize."
Rey swallows. She extinguishes the lightsaber. The tense set of his shoulders relaxes; relief stares out at her from those eyes of his, deep and annoyingly full of knowledge, and she swallows again. Hello, she thinks, looking down at the ground. When did those cracks get there? "Out of everything you've done, you chose that? You tracked me down by yourself to… to apologize?"
"I… yes."
"I don't believe it," she says breathlessly, feeling hurt well up in the depths of her soul. This is a trick, it has to be—but his mind is open to her, and she knows he's done this of his own volition, up and taken an anonymous ship out in the middle of the night; the First Order hasn't a clue that he's gone. No wonder his belt is missing from the rest of his outfit. If it had been a trap, the tracker on it would be transmitting their location to the Finalizer right about now.
Kylo spreads his hands. The nerves she's been sensing from him fade. He'd expected this from her. "Take it or leave it—that is what I came here to do. But, Rey—"
Rey groans, sensing the direction he's going in. His tenacity would be admirable if it wasn't so irritating. "No."
"You need help," he says, condescending and earnest all at once. "Just look at the ground; if that's what you do when you're upset, it's no wonder Skywalker is so reluctant to teach you anything substantial. I could help you harness your powers."
"And you," she realizes, staring at him, staring into him. "You crashed your fighter trying to avoid the lake."
"There was loose wiring in the left gyroscope. It was a defective model." He nearly spits the words out at her, the tips of his ears turning red, and she wants to run her fingers over them. The thought bleeds over; Kylo's gaze turns fascinated as quickly as he'd gotten angry, and she hastily throws her mental shields up to block him from sensing any more of that.
"Right," she says, face pink, hooking her new lightsaber to her belt and determinedly ignoring the disappointment emanating from his general direction. "Right. I'm your ticket out of here, is that it? And you figured you'd butter me up, first."
"No, I came to apologize," he insists.
"…You figured you'd butter me up, first," she repeats. "I'm the only way you can get off-planet."
Kylo remains silent, a muscle working in his jaw.
Rey holds out her hand. He isn't used to bargaining, and he's curiously unwilling to kill her. She has the high ground here. "Give me the lightsabers, Ren."
"You'll have to come across the inlet first," Kylo points out with a mutinous scowl.
They stare at each other in silence on the floor of the ship, both sitting cross-legged, both having ventured outside their cabins to check if daylight had come yet. Well—she'd ventured out of her cabin. He'd kind of stumbled out of one of the shallow crew beds set into the wall in the hallway and he doesn't look too terribly eager to try and cram his tall, broad frame back into it.
"I'm not leaving until I find what I'm looking for," Rey ventures, resisting the urge to cross her arms, too. The space chill is back, and she can feel her skin prickling with it. Doesn't help that he won't stop looking at her. "It's in this area. I can feel it."
"It's at your belt," Kylo says. Almost like he can't help himself.
She glares. "I wasn't looking for another lightsaber. I already had one."
"But you still use your staff. Traditional lightsabers are uncomfortable for you," he observes, academic, then his lips curl in smug victory when hers remain pressed firmly together. "I have several historical schematics for saberstaffs in my fighter, you know. We could make one."
Trying to understand Kylo Ren is an exercise in absurdity. Rey snorts, getting to her feet. "I don't think so. I'm exploring that cave, and you're coming with me."
"You know a storm is coming?" he asks conversationally, standing with her; the hem of his dark tabard flutters with the motion. "We'll get stuck in there."
"Call it a form of meditation," Rey tells him, just the way Luke does when she's being difficult. His expression flattens.
She smiles as she palms the ship ramp open.
The trip to the cave is a quick one, mostly because she'd wanted to make sure she knew the route back to the cavern with the crystals. Kylo looms at her side like a hulking shadow, lips pursed in displeasure, and she wonders if First Order soldiers feel as downhearted at the sight as Resistance soldiers do at the very same expression on the General's face. It really is funny, how much of him is an echo of Leia Organa—it's in the eyes and the hair, the unconscious mannerisms, the commanding air.
It's just a shame that none of that grace found its way into his verbal communication.
"What?" he asks, tensing, ducking his head. Like he expects a punch. He isn't fully immersed in their connection, then.
Rey shakes her head, switching off her flashlight as they get closer to the entrance. People, she has found, aren't salvage. Dissecting him into parts wouldn't accomplish anything useful. "Nothing."
They emerge from the cave to find that a light snowfall has already begun; Kylo surveys the sky unhappily. "We need to get back to the ship."
"Mm." Rey mostly ignores him. He'd tried to start an argument a few times while they were walking, but she'd found that keeping quiet was more productive than engaging with him while he was arguing for the virtues of the Dark. A part of her isn't entirely sure where she's getting the calm required to not take the bait—it's so unlike her as to be almost Force-sent, and if he didn't like her fire she'd be suspicious about the source of it. Mostly she's just grateful that he's been quiet, comparatively speaking, though it does seem like he's steadily descending into a dark mood. In her limited experience with Kylo Ren, that doesn't tend to end well.
"Are you going to say anything?" he asks, raising a brow at her.
Rey hums, a non-response, and doesn't tell him that she had once scratched a total of thirty-six tally marks into the walls of her AT-AT before realizing that she hadn't spoken a single word in that span. Watching the way his expression contorts is almost funny, anyways.
Rey runs into her first real problem when she realizes that Kylo's presence on the ship, the echo of his internal agony in the Force, makes it nearly impossible to meditate.
And she's stuck in the ship with him. It's a good ship, but it was hardly built for space. With him in it, it feels like she barely has any room to navigate the hallways; wherever she is, he's there, face set into a neutral mask she hates almost as much as the helmet he seems to have left behind. The whole business makes trying to stretch her legs an exercise in barely-restrained frustration.
Meditation is one way to let go of the things that keep trying to drag you in the direction of the Dark Side, Luke had told her one evening after training, absently patting a nervous-looking Porg that kept glancing at its fellow sniffing the fire a little too closely. Frustration and Kylo Ren are two things that definitely attempt to do that to her. It only takes two hours of Kylo hovering before she retreats to her cabin and tries to focus.
"Can you try making your thoughts quieter?" Rey half-asks, half-commands thirty minutes later, poking her head out of her cabin and glaring at where he's stretched out against the bulkhead opposite her door. He's sitting there just to spite her—she knows it. And—damn him—it's working. The calm from before is gone, vanished into the blinding white that blocks any view outside the ship's windows.
Kylo waves his hand with a distinctly piqued scowl. Unwillingly, she catches fragments of so light and can't concentrate and blast it from his stream of thought; she feels better knowing that he's having trouble, too, and she refuses to think about how that's not very Light of her. A scavenger can't afford to waste time pretending to have moral compunctions. Eat or be eaten, she hears, and grits her teeth. "That's not how the Force works."
"Well, do something about it. I'm trying to meditate."
"I could help you sharpen your focus. Make things easier for you. You're too restless to get much out of the way Skywalker wants you to meditate. We could do it together." His voice is low, intent, cajoling. His eyes, dark as ever, say join me. Rey refuses to allow herself to question why she flushes.
"No," she tells him. "Be quiet."
Sliding doors don't slam shut, but she hurls her pillow into the wall and gets about the same measure of satisfaction.
With Kylo around, Rey doesn't bother trying to record another holo for Finn and the General. Apology or not, lack of a desire to do mortal harm or not, he still technically classifies as her enemy; he calls to the Dark just as she does to the Light, and the Force swirls in tumult around the ship, a microcosm of a galactic clash of will and nature. Sholon is big enough that the vastness of the untamed wilderness presses in on their thoughts, dampens the intensity of the fight between the two sides of the Force, and it's getting in the way of a good and proper showdown.
That's the way he sees it, at any rate. For her part, Rey is trying very hard not to give in to her desire to start a fight herself. The lack of space claws at some animal part of her that runs solely on instinct, and that instinct keeps bleating run or die, run or die, like the alarm klaxons in the Resistance base—at least, if those alarms had any voice recordings to go along with them. She's kept mostly to her cabin, darting to and from the fresher, ignoring Kylo's increasing frustration as she avoids having to look at him.
Rey groans to herself when she realizes that duty calls once again. She sheds the thermal blanket with a great deal of reluctance and stands from her meditative pose. Her knee pops as she does, drawing a wince out of her. She'd been trying to meditate for longer than she had thought, if the way her legs are protesting is any indication. Still, necessity is a compelling force; she palms the door open and is met with the sight of Kylo Ren glaring at her from his place on the floor, fingers flattening on his arm like he'd been tapping them against it.
"Rey," he drawls—actually drawls, the surest sign of his ire if she's ever heard it. "You could at least pretend to not be afraid of me."
The way he says it is infuriating. Rey forgets about her bladder; she takes two, three steps forward, and she's standing over him, fists clenched, trying not to seethe and failing utterly. "I'm not afraid of you."
"Really? Could've fooled me." Kylo stands, and she's hardly a short woman, but he dwarfs her. "We've been in here for two days, now. I'm bored."
"So sorry," she says, gritting her teeth. "Forgive me for not wanting to have a conversation with you of all people."
Kylo's eyes flash at that; he tries to back her up against her door, but she gives as good as she gets, arms flashing out to catch his wrists, and they're stuck like that in the middle, just like the first time they'd fought, straining against each other—
"I let you win," he informs her. She glares, but before she can say anything, he stops pushing his weight against her. The back of his head collides with the bulkhead; Rey tumbles forward with him, pinning his arms as far up as she can realistically reach and finding herself pressed up against his chest for her troubles. Kylo looks down the line of his nose at her, something flickering in his eyes that she doesn't know how to read, and then he ruins it all by smirking. "See?"
"Allowing something in one case does not make it true in the other," Rey snaps, ripping herself away from him. She stomps into the 'fresher, feeling further away from yesterday's calm than ever.
Jakku hadn't been like this. Jakku had been sun and sand and grit everywhere, but very few people. Traders and smugglers at Niima Outpost hadn't truly counted; before Finn, no one was permanent except Unkar Plutt, and the blobfish was an unctuous coward of a sentient being. Now she has Finn and the General, true, knows some other people in the Resistance on a friendly basis, but there has been nobody like whatever this is with Kylo Ren, where the bond sings in the backs of both their minds and feeds off of their proximity.
Rey is not accustomed to wondering why. There had been no time for philosophy when she had been eking out an existence on polystarch and pieces of junk—she had to know that her family was coming back for her, that it would all be worth it in the end, or else all her sacrifices would have been for nothing at all.
But ever since Maz had told her that belonging wasn't behind her, she's found herself wondering more and more.
Why me? What is my place in all of this?