CHAPTER TWO
After that, sleep proves more elusive than ever.
Rey alternates between tossing and turning on the small bunk and lying flat on her back, staring up at the ceiling above. The bitter sting of failure clings to her in the dark. It's a sharp kind of hurt, impossible to ignore, but underneath it is a hollow feeling in her chest that's infinitely worse. Rey blinks back tears for a pain that isn't entirely her won. The loneliness is devastating.
Rey's been lonely for all that she can remember of her life, but this – this is something else. Magnified and reflected back at her, familiar and yet not. She knows she should be concerned, but she just feels sad and exhausted.
Finally, she gives up on the pretense of sleep entirely. The Resistance base is primarily underground so there aren't any windows, but she thinks it must be close enough to morning to count. The longer she lies here, the more certain she becomes of where the bewildering emotions she's suddenly drowning in are coming from. It's a truth she's not quite ready to admit.
She dresses quickly and pointedly ignores the scorch mark she accidentally gauged into the floor when she dropped the lightsaber. She'll have to apologize for that later. After breakfast. She leaves the lightsaber where it fell.
She feels a little better after she's gotten some food in her belly, but she's still not prepared to face the facts head on. She's definitely not ready to admit her suspicions to her new friends when they join her halfway through her second plate of food, all a little hungover but otherwise none the worse for wear. By the time they finish eating and part ways – the others off to attend to whatever duties they've been assigned, Rey to wander the halls aimlessly – she's settled into a quasi-comfortable state of denial.
It lasts all of five minutes before she runs into General Organa.
"Good morning, Rey," the General greets her warmly. She shows no signs of suffering any adverse reaction to the copious amounts of alcohol consumed the evening before. Rey figures that's why she's the General. "Would you join me in my office? I have a rather substantial favor to ask you."
It's a bit more than a favor, Rey thinks afterwards.
It's also a huge honor, and Rey is overwhelmed by the trust this woman is putting in her – a nobody, a desert rat, Jakku trash. This is the sort of mission you entrust to your best and brightest, not the untrained girl you met two days ago. She tells the General as much, but the other woman just waves it away.
"I'm no Jedi, but even I listen to the Force on occasion," Organa tells her dryly. "I don't know what the future holds for you, Rey, but I do know you have an important part to play. With your connection to the Force, you have a better chance of finding Luke than anyone else in the Resistance. I can't leave, not now – we need to relocate soon, before the First Order finishes licking their wounds and comes sniffing around."
And so Rey agrees to go. Of course she does, there's really no other option. She's in way too deep to back out now. She's bled for these people, and they for her. There's nothing left for her on Jakku but dust. She'll take the map and seek out the last Jedi, and maybe she'll find her own answers along the way.
There's one thing she has to do first.
She curls her hand around Finn's, twining her fingers with his immobile ones. She squeezes gently.
"There's something else I have to tell you before I go," she confesses. She's already explained about Luke and the map. "You're not going to like it."
She pauses, considering what an enormous understatement that is. Finn is going to hate this. She squeezes his hand tighter. This is more difficult to get out than she expected.
"I – I think I can see into people's minds," she says, hearing the strangeness of the words as she says them out loud for the first time. "I didn't mean to, I swear I didn't, but it's happened twice now and I can feel what they're feeling, and oh, Finn, they're so angry! I don't think they know I can feel it which is probably a very good thing because…" She hesitates, licking her dry lips. She drops her voice to a near-silent whisper, and leans in to breathe her confession across his tranquil features. "…because I'm 90% sure it's Kylo Ren."
Space is beautiful.
Rey imagined it, as a child growing up planet side. She longingly watched distant ships touch down on the horizon and imagined the day her family would disembark from one of them. She used to stare up at the sky on clear nights and dream about being swept up into loving arms and carried away to the stars.
That dream is dashed, now. No one came to spirit her away, and no one ever will. Rey got herself off of Jakku, and now she's done waiting. She looks out at the vastness of space from the cockpit of the Millenium Falcon and feels like her future is rushing towards her.
They've entered Hyperspace and the ship is flying on autopilot, their haphazard course imputed into the navicomputer. There's no direct route that will take them Ahch-To in a single jump, but if the map is accurate, they'll arrive within two standard days. Chewbacca is off in another part of the ship tinkering with small repairs. They'd cleaned the Falcon up as best they could before lift-off, but after years sitting in Unkar Plutt's junkyard, the freighter needs a lot of love and attention to get it back up to the wookie's impeccable standards. With the base preparing a full-scale relocation and the weight of their mission pressing down on them, there just hadn't been time.
Rey sinks further into the captain's chair and draws her knees up to her chest. She should take a nap, or find something to fix like Chewbacca is doing, or even clean something (his impeccable standards regarding the functional aspects of the ship do not necessarily extend to its sanitation, from what Rey has seen) but she can't quite pull herself away from the view. What's worse: now that she has time to sit still and think, her mind feels uncomfortably crowded with the chaotic memory of shared emotions.
Rey sit upright, an idea popping suddenly into her head. She bites her lip. It's a terrible idea, but now that she's thought it, she can't stop thinking about it. She half-rises in her seat and listens carefully for the distant clanking of Chewbacca's tools. She takes a steadying breath.
"You can do this," she tells herself firmly.
Resolutely pushing all of the reasons why she shouldn't out of her head, Rey closes her eyes and reaches out for the Force. She finds it quickly; its omnipresence seems to grow exponentially more familiar to her each time she connects to it. She inspects it curiously, cautiously. It swirls around her like sand caught up in the desert wind and as she thinks it, the image forms in her mind. She's standing in the desert, the sun hot on her shoulders. The wind tugs at her hair and clothes. Rey lets herself slip further into the vision, sifting through it until she finds what she's looking for.
How she even knows what to look for is a mystery, but the moment Rey finds the sparkling thread amidst the eddying sands, she stops questioning it. It catches the sunlight in her mind like half-buried metal salvage. She brushes it off and examines it carefully. It's jewel-bright, this thread she has discovered within herself, and it's alive with the same power that surrounds her. She plucks at it, watching the small tremors ripple down the line. She feels the residual tugging in her chest, and before she can second guess what she's about to do, Rey grasps the shining thread with both hands and pulls.
The thread flares to life with an intensity that takes her breath away as her consciousness spirals out across the galaxy and collides with another's. She feels his surprise like it's her own, and she probably could have gone about this more delicately, but it's too late now because suddenly they are slip-sliding into one another, slotting into place like they were made that way.
In her mind, he unfurls tall and dark and burning against the sun-bright sand around her.
What is this? Kylo Ren says, the words reverberating with shock and confusion. His lips move like he's speaking out loud, but Rey hears the words in her head rather than her ears. What have you done?
Nothing, Rey denies, drawing herself up straighter. Her fingers are still wrapped around the glowing connection that runs between them, and she doesn't let it go. I don't know what is happening to us. Do you?
Kylo Ren's face goes through a rapid series of emotions, and she follows them all with disconcerting ease as the corresponding emotions bloom in her chest. This is not my doing! he yells at her, settling finally on anger.
I know, Rey tells him, because she can feel the sincerity beneath the rage he wraps himself in like a shadow. There is no hiding here, in their shared mindspace. She knows he must be able to feel everything she is feeling, too, but she finds that she doesn't care. She isn't ashamed of who she is, even if she's still figuring out who that is. I don't know how this happened, but we're connected somehow; you can't ignore that.
He stares down at her from his ridiculous height. You rejected my offer to teach you, he says after a beat, and there's an accusation there beyond the obvious, all raw edges and enflamed like the fresh burn scar that discolors his face. There can be no connection between us. That's not how the Force works. Which you would know if you had a proper master.
Rey narrows her eyes and gives the thread a sharp tug. The manifestation of Kylo Ren stumbles forward comically, clutching at his chest in spite of himself.
Nope, she agrees sarcastically. You're right, this is all just my imagination. Sorry to bother you. Go back to feeling sorry for yourself.
He's glaring outright at her now, and crosses the space between them in two long-legged strides. He grabs her by the shoulders and Rey is so shocked by the sudden physical contact that she doesn't pull back. The weight of his hands is strangely real.
You foolish girl! he snarls, shaking her bodily. You know nothing of how dangerous the game you are playing is!
Rey laughs in his face.
This isn't a game, Ben Solo, she says. You kidnapped me, and you killed your father in some misguided effort to erase your humanity, but you're in my head and now I know your secret – that it didn't work.
It's incredibly stupid, taunting him like this. She has no weapon, no training, no real understanding of what she's doing. She doesn't even know if they can hurt each other here, lightyears part in physical reality but tethered so closely together in their minds that they can feel the sensation of touch. She's operating on base instinct, and right now her only clear objective is to get a reaction out of him.
It didn't work, she repeats. So what are you going to do now?
His hands flex on her shoulders and for a second, Rey thinks he's going to move them to choke her, but then something shutters across his face like a wall slamming down and he pushes.
Rey falls back into the sand, and when she blinks away the sunspots, Kylo Ren is gone, and she's back in the cockpit of the Millenium Falcon, alone.
