I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
- Sylvia Plath
It is only lately that Rey has grown accustomed to mirrors.
This is no mirror.
Rey-not-Rey looms above her, taller than she has a right to be. From chin the hairline, her face is powdered white. A finger-width of black smears down her lips. The lines of kohl that skid along her eyelids are sharp-pointed as daggers.
Her eyes are the color and shape of Rey's own. This is no surprise, though everything else is. Somehow, this is what shocks her: that her own eyes can look so cruel.
You didn't even try to fight it, Luke's voice echoes, as far back as Ahch-To, and almost farther. You didn't even try.
Rey-not-Rey is speaking again, and Rey-not-Rey shows no flicker of fear.
Rey feels enough fear for the both of them. (The both of her? Can such a thing be?)
"Do you think that by some kind of trick you can deceive me? For one who does not want anything from me, every step you take reeks of desperation." Her voice is like frost, and better-trained—better accented—than Rey's is.
But more than that, it seems as if she's speaking to someone who isn't even there.
Rey finds her own voice. Less wisely, perhaps, she also finds her hands, and reaches up to free her hair from the other's taut and steely grasp.
"This is a dream isn't it?" she demands, and she scrambles to her feet because a fight is certainly brewing. Every storm trooper does a half-turn, weapons at elbow height.
And maybe this would be the moment Rey dies, or the moment when she wakes up. Leia was only sending her to Takodana, not here.
This isn't real, she thinks.
Then an explosion shakes the earth like wrung-out cloth.
The dust rises in a fog, but Rey in all worlds is still Rey of Jakku. It is muscle memory that binds her spare sash around her face, and it is a scavenger's eye for when to cut and run that rolls her into a low tumble to the side, into the floundering, coughing crowd. They are milling and screaming and trampling, clawing at their eyes.
Rey's hand all but cracks under the harsh press of a boot, and she stifles her cry, forcing herself to find her feet. People in panic are nothing like a sandstorm, but she fights her way through all the same.
Crowds, unlike sandstorms, can be outrun.
Through the weave of the sash, her eyes sting too. Maybe it was more than dust. Some kind of gas? If this is a dream, why does it hurt so much?
Keeping her shoulders hunched forward, she darts into what she prays is an alley, not a dead-end or a trap. She flattens her back against a wall of stone.
She is not waking up. She is not waking up.
A hand claps on her shoulder. Rey knows the size and shape and weight of that hand. "Sorry about all the sneezing," says a voice, that is one part familiar and one part all wrong. "It'll pass."
And Rey is a fighter. She doesn't have to see to grasp a wrist in her good hand, to hook her ankle behind a knee, and fell to the ground whoever has touched her.
She tears off the sash, barely caring for how her eyes sting sharply.
His face may be concealed behind a mask, and her gaze may be blurred with tears, but too much has happened for her not to know him. It's him.
Rey would swear her life on it.
(Perhaps she will have to.)
Kylo lies stone-still, but only for a second. The next second, he's on his feet again. Not unexpectedly, he crushes her against the wall, her hands gathered too tight in his. Her left hand is bruised already; it smarts. "What are you doing here?" The gas mask he's wearing doesn't distort his voice like the helmet did. She doesn't know what to make of that.
"What am I doing here?" Rey is practically stiff with fury, and with much more difficulty than she dragged her hair from Rey-not-Rey's grip a few moments ago, she twists her way out of his hold. And then it hits her. The fever-dream, the explosion. The gas mask.
"Is this you?" Rey grits out. Her voice will be shrill in a moment, and she doesn't have much left, but she will not look weak. Not any weaker than she looks now, eyes weeping as the fog clears, breath sawing hoarsely in her lungs. "Is this all some trick of yours, to make a mockery of what I wanted for you?" For us, she does not quite say—but only by a breath.
Only by a breath.
This time he does what she does not expect. His hands, trembling—and bare: he is not wearing his gloves and in fact he wears no black at all, which is not at all like him—lift the mask from his face.
Rey muffles a cough in her sleeve and tries to pretend that her heart has not skipped giddily.
There is no scar on Kylo Ren's face.
He stares at her blankly, lips parted. His lips are…well, the same lips. It's not like Rey hasn't thought about them. "What are you talking about?"
No scar. Even though it was you who split him wide open, you who carry that memory wherever you—
She does not know where she is. Or who she is, which seems more to the point at the moment. "Who is she?"
"She?" His eyes are watering too, and he muffles a cough.
"The one," Rey spits, "Who has my face."
Kylo—if it really is him—flicks both eyebrows upwards. "So you're really not her."
"No, I'm not her. And is that what you think of me? That I would lead stormtroopers, and let the people kneel before me, like frightened rats? Is that what you're trying to show me? A fine way to tempt to your side!"
"I…I don't know…" He covers up his confusion much more quickly than she is used to see him do. And all of this stitches together, like laughter and starlight and darkness—
—if there is another Rey, could there be another Ben?
Is this all some trick of yours…
She watches him warily, searching for reminders of the man who bears his face. Maybe the change is reflected in the scars that divide them. He sounds exasperated when he speaks, but not laden with rage and raw nerve endings. "I'm not trying to show you anything. I could ask you the same question, sweetheart. What next? You're going to say this is some double deception? Should I be looking out for some strange reflection of myself?"
"I hope to Hoth not," Rey returns, perhaps too forcefully. Or perhaps not forcefully enough. "And don't call me sweetheart."
His lips twist in a grin that is too much like his father's. And that's how Rey knows that the man before her is not the man she left behind.
"Sorry, milady. It's a family thing."
A family thing.
…
There are no storybooks on Jakku. No holovids. Barely any legends, and certainly not for a girl with a songbird's frail bones but a hawk's determination.
So it is that fate means very little on Jakku. Destiny, even less. The things Rey kept—the stories she gathered—were brightly colored adventures. The Jedi and their saber-blades. Smuggling pilots. Night fights in the blue-black sky, explosions that showered sparks like rain, only in every direction instead of just down.
If this is a dream, it is not one she would have authored.
If this is greater than a dream, it is hard to tell if the charcoal-dusted earth is any more dependable than the sky.
Luke warned her not to enter the deep. But Rey has never been very good at following, only at waiting, and forging ahead after that.
In the cave that beckoned, she found a thousand reflections of her own self.
Legends have to begin somewhere.
…
"Who are you?"
"I should be asking you the same question."
"I'm not looking to be anyone's enemy," Rey says. "I don't know who—who she was, or why there's someone who looks just like me—"
That ever-present grin is cast, suddenly, with bitterness. "Supreme Leader Rey would insist that you look like her, not the other round."
The chill that passes over her is not confined to prickles on her skin. It goes deeper that that. Rey feels it in her bones. "I came from Takodana." She will not sound desperate, not to any incarnation of him. "Do you know it?"
"Well enough. We're far from there, at the moment—the Hosnian system."
Starkiller Base. The first successful test. Rey hacks in a breath, dread snatched inward. "That doesn't exist anymore." Oh, kriff. She shouldn't go around saying things like that! She nips her own tongue to punish herself.
Ben Solo's eyebrows rocket towards his hairline. "Tell that to the Hosnian system, sweetheart."
Rey grimaces at the reappearance sweetheart, but figures it's time to throw the last roll of dice. "Your mother sent me."
…
She says it stubbornly, nails to palm, as if boldness will save her. They don't have much time to argue when one thinks about it, with stormtroopers and a Supreme Leader wearing her face, but that hasn't stopped either of them yet.
For the first time his eyes look like Kylo's eyes. The expression—if it even is one—disappears almost at once. "That's it. You're coming with me."
She doesn't like the way he says it. Assurance, and decision, neither of which he seems to allow to belong to her.
"That's what I'm trying to tell you," she snaps. "I need to come with you."
He stops, and with a quick spin, he's hovering over her. His shoulders are as broad as she remembers. He jabs a finger at her. "No Force tricks."
Rey hangs back. The fog in the streets has all but settled; she breathes easier again, though her heart is keeping up a rapid pace. "What is the Force?"
He barks a laugh. If it sounds like Kylo's, she would not know—she has never heard him laugh. "You're as bad a liar as she is."
Then Ben Solo, broad shoulders and a smirk that rests too easily on that always sober face, turns and stalks off.
Rey sets teeth to teeth and follows him.
…
The city isn't as wide as she thought it would be. Or at least, the man with Kylo Ren's face but not quite his eyes moves quickly, catlike, through narrow spaces and under low-hanging doorways.
"Where are you taking me?"
"No use telling you until we get there."
"I need to get…" She needs to get home. But she can't tell him that. This is a dream, or an extended vision, and maybe it is all about mirrors, and maybe that damnable Force is trying to tell her something. She squints at the sky. It's still ashy clouds and hollow gray. Luke Skywalker, is this you?
Silence.
She can't feel the bond, still. She can't feel anything. It's like she's been dropped into an empty part of space, dangling between unfriendly stars, only she can't open her eyes and the only answers she gets are the ones she can paint her behind her eyelids.
Oh, some days Rey misses Jakku.
Right now, she isn't even sure if this is a day.
There's little else to do but take in everything she can about Ben Solo, if it is really him. She keeps up with him without much difficulty—his legs are longer, and he knows his way, but Rey is wiry and quick and does not tire easily. He is wearing a leather vest over a simple cotton shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows. Since they began their trek cross-city, he has slipped a half-glove on his right hand, well-tanned. A blaster guard? Or for some kind of crossbow?
The satchel over his shoulder is sharply lumpy in spots. When he pauses at the mouth of a street which opens onto the slum-tents that skirt around them, she reaches out to touch it. Once a scavenger, and all that.
"What's this?"
Flash-quick, he smacks her hand away. Rey smacks back, because that is what she always does, and then he catches her wrist in his and spins her around so that they're chest to chest. Thankfully it's her good hand this time.
"Careful," he says. "Thieving's no way to start a friendship."
"I'm just someone with questions," Rey seethes. She can't match that teasing grin, and she doesn't like what it's doing to her insides. A tug of something, yes, but it's a something that lands a little the right of her heart, at the center of her ribs. It is therefore not quite what she needs. "I said nothing about being friends."
"Hard to trust you when you're angry like this." Still that loose curve of his lips, maddening, irreparable. "What's your name?"
"You already know it. It's Rey."
"Hmm."
"The real Rey." She tugs free from him and folds her arms over her chest, glaring. At least he hasn't yet noticed the lightsaber tied to her belt. Is this version of him even Force-sensitive?
(Is she?)
"See!"—and his eyes are sparking again, instead of deep with darkness. "See, that's something she would say. Probably with her boot on my throat."
"So you know her." Rey blinks hard again, trying to clear the last of the sting from her eyes. "You know the crazy dark-side version of me?"
His face hardens a little. She hates that that's what so familiar. "I'm not telling you anything. Still not convinced this isn't that damned Jatoori gas, messing with my mind…" he breaks off into a mutter and shakes his head, picking up his swift pace again.
Rey keeps abreast of him, not wanting to tag along like a child. Children are all too easily left behind. "It was your idea, wasn't it? The gas?"
"Needed a distraction." He can shrug with his grin and his shoulders at the same time. "Now, Rey-not-Rey, time to explain yourself."
They've reached one of the slum tents. Unlike the gray and black of the city, it is a patchwork of faded earth-tones. Rey is vaguely comforted by this.
Ben pauses, stoops, and says, "I don't know why I'm trusting you."
You never do. Rey imagines hands outstretched. Imagines pressing at the corner of an invisible room that traps her mind and is her mind all at once, imagines that someone presses back. "Then don't."
He mumbles some retort and thrusts the expanse of his shoulders through the door-flap of the tent.
Rey follows. Inside, it's reasonably large, shaped like a shanty. There's the crackle of a fire, a smoke-way cut like a ship's porthole.
Rey sees none of this.
Rey sees a leather jacket, a blaster cocked at knee-height, another face she'd know in any world.
Han Solo.
…
"Han!" It bursts out of Rey's throat like a sob. Always, at the worst moments, she forgets herself. Forgets everything that has happened around and to her, in the past few star-spanning hours. "You're alive!"
Han's on his feet, blaster pointed. "'Course I'm alive. Hutt's breath, Ben, what are you doing bringing her here? Worked out so well last time, didn't it?"
"Pop, it's not—" Ben is, for the first time, truly flustered. "It's not her. Just—looks like her."
There's no quantifiable time to explore this further, because the tent shakes and Chewbacca bursts in, roaring in furious Wookiee.
Rey has never been frightened of him.
She remembers, this time, that he doesn't know her.
"Chewie, I'm—I'm not here to hurt any of you," she says, palms outward. She's tempted to glare at Ben, who is being manifestly unhelpful, but that won't aid her case for pacifism. "My name is Rey, but I'm not whoever…whoever that is. I know who all of you are. Han Solo, smuggler, and Chewbacca, and this is your son, B-Ben."
"Keep talking," Han growls. She can't read him. This isn't Han, softened by time, hardened by grief, and offering her a job on his ship. This isn't the Han she knows. Rey only hopes that he still can be.
"I passed out, or—I don't know, went into a trance on Takodana. I woke up here, and I saw…the one you all of think as Rey, and then I ran into Ben, and here we are."
"That's not all." Ben clears his throat. "Tell him what you told me."
Rey forces herself to remember that this isn't Kylo Ren, and she doesn't have to fight everything he says. But the prospect is tempting. "Leia sent me." She almost whispers it. "Leia sent me to Takodana, and I think she might understand…"
Han's face twists. Rey's only seen that expression once before, and it wasn't on Han's face. It was on Leia, after Starkiller Base.
Han turns away. He sets the blaster down and doesn't answer Chewie's rumble. He looks old, and Rey knows that he is old, but that is the kind of thing nobody ever remembers about Han Solo.
"I'm sure she would, if she were here," Han says. He waits a long, long time before he finishes. "Leia's dead."