Rey pushes him back, and they circle one another, mirroring each other's movements precisely. Kylo can't take his eyes off the ruby beam which slices the air in front of him. Rey notices the hypnotic effect it is having on Kylo and swirls the saberstaff idly around her, lulling him in. With his attention elsewhere, she lunges in, and Kylo jolts back, deflecting her dual strikes instantly. She steps back and waits for him, her saberstaff humming out from her grasp in the exhilaration of meeting another actual saber for the first time.
After what seems like an eternity, he finally steps forward and brings his saber up to engage her fully, and they start their dance.
Whenever the blood red of her saber collides with his, which is rare, as she leads mostly with the blue, an excitement swells inside him, instantly deadened when he splinters back to the reality that this is not training, that he is not her master, and that they are actively trying to kill one another.
The spite of those facts swells in him, as he spits, "I am not going to ask you to yield, if it comes to it. I will strike you down."
"Good, I'm glad you won't have to hear me say no again." Rey's confidence swells with each deflected strike.
At her words, Kylo's attacks grow more frenzied and less choreographed. She ducks a swing and then has to instantly jump as he brings the blade under her legs. He advances on her deftly as she brings one side of her saber, then the other up to meet his beam. His saber bounces back and forth off her own, ricocheting from one to the other as she spins her blades.
He jumps up and over her, breaking the tempo of this ballet. She uses her saber as leverage to spin her entire body parallel to the ground to meet him behind her, but she miscalculates, and he swings his blade down on top of her, her own weapon only narrowly coming between her head and his beam.
The pressure he is wielding down on her becomes too much and her hands cannot slide any lower without the beam bisecting her face, so she collapses her legs beneath her until she is kneeling in front of him. He continues to press down, angling his hands at a steeper incline to compensate for her position beneath him. She remembers the impossible heat his saber emits this close, remembers the searing air between them on Starkiller base the last time they fought like this.
"You need to run. You won't win this" there was a desperation in his voice that was not there before. She tilts her chin up to meet his gaze, curious to see. She follows her scar up his face, it reflecting the purple of their combined sabers like a still river, and is met with the same begging eyes she had seen on the Supremacy years ago.
Feeling some sort of emotion cloud him, she takes her chance, and in a fell motion, sweeps one hand off the saber, using it to call a fallen branch towards his legs. He dips backwards as the branch hits him, breaking the tension just long enough for Rey to flourish up back into an offensive position.
She bends her elbow up, twirling the blades in front of her face, muddling the red and blue until they form a halo of amethyst around her, before settling the blade perpendicular to her body, ready to resume once Kylo's balance returned.
"How? You have no master, no training," his gaze stings her as his words come out like an accusation.
"You thought destroying me would be easy?" the words pant out of her as she catches her breath.
"Not for a second," his lips curl into what might be considered a smile on any other face before he resumes his assault.
This time, however, it is different. He trusts her to parry every blow, block every jab. They are back to their dance, and he almost seems to enjoy it. It reminds her of training, in a way, but not any training she and Finn have done together. Their movements are so fluid, his every move seems to bolster her next one. After a few minutes, anger at how natural this seems starts to froth in Rey's blood. She doesn't want it like this, she wants to fight him, wants to watch him crumble beneath her.
When she has had enough of this, she lunges for his neck, bracing her saber to him, but at that moment he rises his for an aerial attack. His emotions bristle at how close she gets to decapitating him. Anger rises in him and he presses down with real force. Their hands press against each other, the leather of his gloves cold against her skin. He ensures they stay touching by compressing the back of his hands into hers violently. His robes dislodge, sliding down his arms slightly and exposing his wrists to the cold air. Her hands slip down and the skin of her wrists flushes against the skin of his wrists, but she doesn't notice as she desperately tries to keep the strain on their blades. Kylo notices, starkly contrasting this touch to the first time they touched, palms outstretched and willing.
Again, they are locked together, the tension between them making it hard for either to move without betraying their position entirely. Hard grunts clear both their throats and sharp intakes of air reveal how much effort this is taking on both their parts. In the red-purple glow something small moves into Rey's peripheral vision behind Kylo. She tries to keep her eyes on him, but it is so demanding, so dense. She betrays her self-taught training and darts her eyes to it briefly before looking back at Ren. Her heart stops.
A child.
Kylo can't hear her, can't register her thoughts now through his blind confusion, rage, and heat. All he sees is her eyes widen and her grip loosen, jerking him slightly forward towards her. At this he smirks. She must be weakening.
He steps back at the same time she does, and swings his saber in the empty space between them.
He doesn't notice she isn't looking at him until the arch of his saber is too far gone.
His saber makes contact with her lower abdomen, slicing her worn brown cloth coverings, and then, the skin and muscle beneath it. His stomach constricts when he feels his blade meet the resistance of her flesh.
NO. Something deep inside him screams as he falls to his knees, throwing the lightsaber far to his right.
Panic sets into all his bones. Their bond ignites again as he screams at her, WHY?!
She stumbles back, but her eyes don't close in pain or meet his, they stand stark wide and open looking past him at something in the near distance. She hadn't heard him.
Slowly, Ren turns in the direction of her gaze and sees it.
A tiny girl stands curiously swaying between two giant tree trunks, dressed in light grey robes. Her eyes dart between Rey and Ren, both silented in her presence.
His brain starts scanning for an explanation. There were no settlements on this planet, there couldn't be. It was inhospitable for anything but war.
And then he notices. She looks exactly like Rey, the little Rey he saw in the interrogation room as he took what he wanted from her head. The little Rey crying out against the harsh desert. The little Rey lying in the shadows of an AT-AT, willing her small body to survive just one more day.
It hits him: he had touched Rey just now. He had bore his hands into hers. This was a vision. He had seen her future in the hut on Ahch-To the last time they touched and this was her past, her ghost come to haunt them.
Before his theory can play fully out, he looks at the girl's eyes. His muscles seize in stupor. They weren't Rey's eyes. He sees his eyes peering back at him under the girl's two bushy dark brows. The only parts that aren't carbon copies of Rey.
The smell of her burnt flesh permeates the air and he remembers what he had done. He breaks away from the small girl. As he shifts his kneeling body to back to Rey, his eyes meet the sparse drops of blood on the snow below her, what had escaped before the heat cauterized her wound. Past the bright red drops, her saber lay dormant beside her. He was so afraid then, so afraid to look further. He had not felt fear since the last time he had seen Rey, as she closed the door to the Falcon on him on Crait. Here, like then, his fear was the same. That he would never see her again after this moment.
He willed his gaze forward and found her standing still, both her hands grasping her wound, pressing hard into her side. Her breath hitched and her face gnarled in torture.
She wants so badly to fall but she knows if she does it would be over. She knows Finn and Poe and Rose are somewhere on this planet counting on her not to give in.
Instinctively, he reaches out for her, not wanting her to be alone in her pain. As soon as she processes his movement through her searing misery, a fear in her that dwarfs any she had felt before, even the powerful fear of a child on Jakku realizing no one would ever come for her, surfaces. Every fiber of her being feels as if it were bursting, knowing what came with Kylo Ren's touches. Always the visions of what she realizes will now never, ever be. She never wants to feel him ever again. A blast of solid energy surges from her center outward, forcing Kylo violently back into the tree behind him, the tree where her now vanished vision had stood just seconds earlier.
His skull makes a hollow sound against the trunk, a sound skulls should not make. He slumps down in a pool of his own black robes, stunned, his pupils blown wide open in a concussion, staring straight at her.
Rey blinks, the shockwave temporarily easing her agony. Questions fall like a flurry in her head, wondering what had just happened, what had she just done, before a tiny voice inside of her says, "Run."
She isn't truly sure whose voice it is, but she obeys, as best she can, by turning and slowly limping towards the rendezvous spot. About ten paces out, she calls her lightsaber to her hand from the snow. Kylo's gaze, set clearly on Rey until this moment, slowly fades to black.
He blinks back into existence, not knowing if it had been a few minutes or hours. It was still dark, the fighters above had moved farther away, but were still engaged in battle. He sits up, searching. The steady sleeting snow had not filled the footprints that littered the ground from their duel yet. Maybe he still had time.
He shoots up quickly, too quickly, and his spinal fluid rushes to keep up. His head pounds and he feels wetness trickling down the side of his face from his ear. He is knocked off balance once again by the dizzying nausea that hits, but catches himself before barreling forward, following her tracks.
She hadn't made it far. In a clearing up ahead, he sees the small outline of her body placed delicately in the snow. Tunnel vision, the same he experienced at the beginning of this night towards her, once again descends, and everything else in the world fades except her.
He charges towards her, the snow growing denser in the open field. It was free to fall here unimpeded by the forest trees. A hundred yards turned into to eighty turned into seventy.
A sharp pain flashes across his chest followed by the familiar growl of Shyriiiwook.
It is more than a warning, more than the stern reprimands about being careful Chew...the Wookie had given him as a child. It is a threat with every intention of becoming more.
Kylo stops immediately, his vision blowing out from just Rey take in everything around. The Wookie stands much closer to Rey than he does, his Bowcaster pointed now directly at Ren's heart. Kylo runs the calculations in his head of every possible permutation laid out before him. The Wookie holds a range weapon, he does not. Even at full speed, the Wookie's long strides against his would have Rey in the Falcon before he was halfway there. He knows from his teenage years the Wookie is not susceptible to mind tricks. They stand across the field, Kylo's dark eyes boring into the Wookie's, hooded in fur. In their standoff, Kylo can feel Rey's body temperature dropping in the snow between them.
His concern for her shoots another variant into his head: why a warning shot? The Wookie handled a Bowcaster with skill, had laid people to waste with it far before his birth. He rarely missed. And yet, this was the second time the Wookie had failed to pierce his heart.
The truth of it froze him where he stood.
Chewbacca, noticing the complete apprehension on Ren's part, in one motion lunges for Rey, scooping her up with the Bowcaster's aim at Ren never wavering.
Chewbacca wants to hold Rey to warm her, but he needs one hand free to keep his threat on Ren real. He slumps Rey over his shoulder, causing her to scream out as the wound Chewie hadn't seen makes contact with his shoulder.
Kylo unfreezes as he hears Rey's suffering.
It is all frenzy. Chewbacca runs for the door of the Falcon as her screams suddenly evaporate into the night air, the pain knocking out her conscious mind for the second time. Kylo knows it is futile but he runs anyway, his cloak whipping behind him.
By the time he gets to where Rey's impression landed, the Falcon's blue engines are already melting away the snow in front of him. He slowly clenches and unclenches his gloves as he watches the Falcon fade, before running his fingers over the skin of the wrist that had touched Rey.