Rey lays on the mat in the midwife's hut, ecstatic just watching her baby sleep. "She's smiling," Rey says.
"Babies don't smile. It's only gas," the midwife tells her.
Rey laughs to herself, quietly. Her baby girl is perfect, with chubby cheeks and a shock of black hair and fists balled tight to her chest like a little fighter. And she is definitely smiling in her sleep.
Palaka the midwife peers down at the newborn. "Well, it's just a thing babies do."
"She's so perfect," Rey says.
"Every baby is," Palaka says softly.
Yes, Rey thinks, but this time it's true.
"Can I hold her?" Palaka's little daughter asks. Sarenna is five and she is already helping her mother with deliveries. Sarenna helped Rey fix this birthing hut when Rey was in the middle of nesting, and she rocks and changes the babies in the midwife's care with a chirpy smile. Sarenna loves babies. She is going to make a fine midwife some day.
But this is the first baby Rey has ever seen, let alone touched. This baby is the first person Rey has ever met that she knows for a fact she is related to. She doesn't even know what she's going to name her daughter. She's had months to find the perfect name and now the baby is here and Rey has no idea what to call her. Right now Rey just wants to look at her daughter and listen to her sleep and watch her yawn.
"Not right now, Sarenna," Rey says.
"Okay," Sarenna says, and she skips off to help her mother clean up the towels and bedding.
Rey is tired and sweaty. She is flying on the pain and endorphins of having given birth to the galaxy's first perfect child. Rey knows that how the baby got here wasn't perfect — she doesn't want to think about that, not right now. What happened happened and it happened months and months ago. But the baby is absolutely perfect with those cheeks and those eyelashes and Rey just wants to watch her sleep.
She sweeps the baby's hair to the side. She shouldn't be so surprised that her daughter was born with a full head of black hair. Palaka says often the hair babies are born with falls off within a few days or weeks, but Rey knows better. She knows her daughter's hair is just going to get thicker and bushier from here on out.
§
Almost a year ago she finished a tour of duty working with youngsters on Reikan. Luke had asked her to do some preliminary work with boys and girls of six and seven who had showed some latent talent with the Force. Simple games that really brought out some of the unusual abilities of the kids, as well as snuck in some math and language skills. The ones who were clearly destined to wrestle with either the dark or the light were sent on to Ahch-To. The others had their talents shaped in other directions.
Six and seven year olds, Force-touched or not, were exhausting. After two straight years of being worn down by their constant questions and the manic energy, Rey had asked for a short off-world holiday, and Luke had said yes. Immediately. With a laugh. And his thanks.
She did not tell him the other reason she wanted to get away.
Where are you, scavenger? the voice in her head had whispered.
It had sounded like Kylo Ren had been standing right behind her, whispering in her ear.
I'm going to find you, girl, the voice had said.
She was afraid. She was afraid for herself and she was afraid for the children and so she ran.
She went to a practically deserted planet where some liked to do meditation retreats. There were simple dwellings, where each person could retire in peace from others. Green trees, purple meadows, fresh water, and periodic, silent shipments of food by quiet droids.
The rules of the planet forbade bringing weapons on to its soil. She left her staff and her lightsaber on the ship.
She spent her days meditating in various areas: on the edge of a cliff, in the middle of a meadow, in the shade, in the sunlight, after a hike, in her cabin.
One day, she went to the bank of a small stream and sat on a flat stone, her legs crossed. She faced out toward the water, the light wind blowing through her hair and closed her eyes. She meditated on the nature of what it meant for the Force to be both light and dark, the futility of having these opposing forces always at war with one another.
The moment he entered the sanctuary she knew he was there.
His churning, violent emotions assaulted her like the touch of a gloved hand on the back of her neck.
Shivers went down her back and she opened her eyes.
Rey stood up on her stone and turned around to face him.
Kylo Ren stood on the edge of the forest behind her, all in black, wearing his mask. The first person she'd seen in the weeks since she'd come here had to be him.
And probably the last person she'd ever see. He had the advantage of surprise, he had the will to kill her quickly and without mercy, and he had the odds in his favor. He wasn't wielding his lightsaber — in fact, she couldn't sense it on him — but despite her fighting skills he had the simple advantage of being larger and stronger than she was.
Her bare feet sank into the mud, warm and squishy between her toes.
Take off the mask, she thought as she walked toward him.
Why?
I'd like to look into the eyes of the man who wants to kill me.
Kylo Ren stood there motionless as she walked toward him, his head slightly tilted to one side.
She felt a constriction in her throat. Not his doing — it was hers. Despite the inevitability of this moment, she was nervous. I don't want to die, she thought.
None of us do, he responded.
His black gloved hands reached up and unlatched the mask. He was such an ordinary-looking bloke underneath the mask. Except for the scar she'd given him down the side of his face, the mark that destroyed any symmetry he had in his long face. She could understand why he wore the mask. It allowed him to be someone else, to do things that maybe he couldn't do as himself.
"The Dark Side seems to need to change its adherents to fit its needs, not theirs," she called out to him. "Also, I prefer your voice without the filter."
One side of his mouth curled up in a rueful smile.
Rey kept walking toward him, and the closer she got to him the calmer she became. There was no reason to fear him — if he'd wanted to kill her, he could have done it already. Maybe my meditation practice is paying off, she thought.
"Calming my thoughts is the hardest part," Kylo Ren answered, looking down at his mask.
"It's the hardest part of what anyone does. It's why so few people do it," she said.
"I don't want to kill you," he said.
"I beg to differ," she said.
Memories from the way he'd entered her mind while torturing her, the fight they'd had in the snow on Starkiller Base, the agony of getting away from him, the fear she'd felt wanting to stay hidden from him.
He blinked, all of those images and sounds and emotions clearly running through his head as well.
She stopped less than two meters away from him, under the shady canopy of the thousand-year-old fifty meter tall trees. The moss-covered ground beneath her feet was cool and dry and the air smelled so sweet. Seemed a shame to bring their issues to this idyllic setting.
"Then why are you here?"
He stared down at her. Rey was tall for a woman but he was so much taller than most humans she'd met in her life. His eyes were dark and sad. His mouth kept moving like he was trying to figure out what to say. He had such a mobile mouth. Made him look younger than she'd expected.
"I thought I wanted to kill you," he said. "I thought I had to. That's what was driving me."
Oh, fantastic, more Force-related mysticism she thought.
"No," he answered. "A realization I had during one of those meditation sessions."
And with that, before she could even respond, he took one step toward her with those ridiculously long legs of his and he landed on the soft ground in front of her, kneeling, his head bowed. All she could see was his head of thick, wavy black hair, falling forward, shading him from her view. Even kneeling, his head came up to her chest.
"You are the only person in the universe who I can feel," he said. "Who maybe understands how…"
His voice trailed off, but she knew exactly what he meant. Living day to day with the Force running through you was like being in a room filled with bright, startling colors and everyone around you could only see black and white. Or hearing a symphony of the planets and everyone only hears the cicadas chirping near them. It was how she knew which children to send on to Ahch-To: the ones who could feel the caress of the Force's touch against their skin reacted differently than the ones who simply felt the wind blowing against their robes.
Kylo Ren tilted his head back and looked up at her. "I understand if you want to take revenge on me," he said. "I accept that. But I can no more hurt you than I can end my own life."
She was using an immense amount of willpower to keep her hands by her sides and not touch him. She knew exactly what he meant. Despite everything he'd done, despite the harm he'd brought to her and those she'd loved and to the galaxy, she knew she would not be the one to end him. They were more entwined with one another's pasts and futures than anyone else. Neither of them had anyone — in his case, that was by his deliberate action, but she suspected there was more to the story of what had happened to shape Kylo Ren than anyone knew. Being alone either made you strong or it made you crazy. If she had been a child and the only others she ever met with Force sensitivity were Luke with his distractions and fears or Supreme Leader Snoke with his focus and praise, would she have ended up like Kylo Ren?
"That's what you came all this way to say to me?" she asked him.
He dropped his head again. "I don't know what I came for," he said.
The words hung in the quiet air of the forest as the lie they were.
Her hands shook as she reached forward and drew her fingers through his thick hair, drawing him forward against her body. She held him there, feeling him shake as he pressed his head against her ribcage.
As they touched, she realized she could feel his hair and his skull and his breathing and the press of his hands on her body. She could also feel her hands digging into her own body, how comforting it was to rest her head against someone else, the way the black mood lifted simply being near her.
She had never experienced the Force bond like that before. Where the boundaries between them simply fell away and she was inside his world as surely as he was inside hers.
After a moment — yearning comforting touching — he pulled away from her. The confusion on his face mirrored what she was feeling inside. Which only made sense. The sensation of blending together with another person, especially one as strange and different as the two of them were to one another, had shocked her deeply. Why should he be any different?
He rose to his feet and stepped back from her. Staring at her like he had never seen her before.
"I have to go," he said.
"Stop," Rey said to him. "You don't need to go back to the First Order. You don't need to return to any of it."
"I can't stop being me any more than you can stop being you," Kylo Ren said.
"You aren't alone."
The side of his mouth curled again. "You are the only one of your compatriots that feels that way."
It was true. If she took Ren back to the Resistance's headquarters officers might shoot him on sight before General Organa could ever weigh in on the fate of her son.
She took his hand in hers. "You could come back and call yourself Ben Solo. No one would know."
He squeezed her hand. Then dropped it. "He doesn't exist any more."
"We both know that's not true," she said. She had felt every single strand of energy — light, dark, happiness, rage, sadness, loneliness, pain, excitement — that was flowing through Kylo Ren during their embrace. She knew exactly who was in there now. As he knew her.
He turned his back on her and walked back to the area where he'd dropped his mask.
"This doesn't end here," he said.
"This will never stop," she said. "Not until we make it stop."
Her words made him stop in the act of putting the mask on. Instead, he raised his head to stare off toward the sunlight beyond the edge of the forest, toward the burbling stream, his eyes squinting as he looked at something that wasn't there and his mouth made sounds she couldn't hear. Then he looked at her.
"Yes," she said. Or she thought. Both. Neither. It didn't matter.
They each took a step toward the other — his was a lot longer than hers — and then his arms were around her, pulling her up to him, his hand cradling the back of her head. Their lips met and the first romantic kiss Rey ever received was wet and desperate and brutal and the most wonderful feeling in the universe.
She assumed that probably not all kisses were like this, since most people couldn't feel their partner's emotions and sensations as strongly and as starkly as their own. Their kiss deepened and she felt like they were melding into one person, unable to tell who was touching whom and who was feeling what.
He pulled away from her, panting, wanting, needy. She quickly pulled him back down to her, unwilling to lose those sensations, that feeling of belonging. His hands gripped her arms and she held on to him as tightly, her fingers splayed across his back.
"Rey," he whispered.
Her fingers felt for the clasps on his cloak, unhooking it from around his neck. She felt the heavy material slide away from her (down his back) and pool around his feet on the forest floor.
He let go of her again, only long enough to pull the folded-over edge of material out. Then he drew her over to him (she walked into his arms) and lay the both of them down on the cloak. Within seconds (years) he was raised over her and her fingers deftly removed his shirt and he shoved his hands under her tunic to spread across her skin.
Rey did not know if this was the best thing that had ever happened to her or the worst and she didn't much care. She only knew he was here and they were together.
§
Kylo Ren stayed with her for a month. They learned a different sort of meditation, trying to experience one another as themselves, instead of a single unit. She learned what it meant to be a part of the Force.
Luke sent a message to the droids that serviced the individual dwellings and Rey propped the note up on the altar in her room. Where are you? Luke asked. Come home.
She looked back at Kylo Ren and thought, I am home. Which meant she was lost, didn't it. The only place she could be and the worst place she could stay. There was no good way to respond to Luke, so she didn't.
"What are you going to say to him?" Kylo was leaning back on the bed.
Rey shook her head as she gazed at her lover. Her enemy. What was he now, anyhow? Her other half. His hair even shaggier since he'd arrived on the planet. He looked so soft, practically baby-faced. Well, if babies had three day old stubble. Personal grooming hadn't been much of a priority for either of them in the past few weeks. Mostly they had been lost in the feel of one another's bodies and minds and emotions.
He was the only one she would ever feel this with.
She sat next to him on the bed and as always happened their hands immediately joined. The smooth coolness of his skin, the soft warmth of hers.
"Come with me," she said.
He laughed. "Where? Where could we go?"
"There are millions of planets. We can find one where we can —"
"Where could we go that he won't find me?" Kylo asked simply. Rey wondered if "he" referred to Luke or to Snoke. They each had their own overlords, it seemed. Kylo rubbed his eyes. "Where he won't find us?"
"What can we do?" she whispered.
By way of an answer, he put his arms around her.
Less than a day passed before Rey felt the echo of a scream zap through her head. She ran back to the cabin, where she found Kylo bent over on the ground, the palms of his hands pressing in to the side of his skull as though trying to squeeze the agony out.
Rey didn't feel Snoke's intrusion herself, but she knew Kylo felt it as deeply as anything he'd felt with her over the past month.
When he came out of the blackness, he stared at her. She was losing him, she knew that.
"I have to go," he said.
"You have a choice," she screamed. "You have always had a choice. We have a choice."
He still had the uniform. Where had he been keeping it all this time? It was black and pristine and unmarred by dust or stains or the floor of the forest where she'd last seen him in it.
"Come with me," he said, holding his hand out.
His hand. Back in the black leather glove.
"Choose me over him," Rey begged. "Please."
"Together we are stronger than he is," Kylo said. "Come with me and we can break this together."
"Or I will lose you and then myself."
He walked out of her cabin and Rey saw his ship had come to get him on the landing pad.
His mask was in his hand.
He did not turn around as he walked up the ramp.
A day after he left she woke up from a fitful sleep, put her hand over the soft skin below her belly button, and realized she would be tied to him forever. She restarted her meditation practice, concentrating on one thing: keeping Kylo blocked from her thoughts.
She had gone to see Luke and told him she was done with the order. He knew immediately why, of course, and wished her luck in the future.
"Can I give you some advice?" he said mildly. "This won't change who he is truly is. It might…make him worse."
§
Whatever the wisdom of those days she'd spent with Kylo Ren — and Rey did not lie to herself, he was only Kylo Ren, not Ben Solo — she looks at her perfect baby girl and decides it is all worthwhile.
She is so lost in the wonder at the miracle that somehow two humans can somehow make a third that she doesn't immediately register the wave of darkness, rage, and determination that rolls over her. When she does feel it, it's mixed in with her own growing terror. She struggles to sit up, ignoring the pain that causes her, and she picks up the baby, wrapped in her soft blanket, and thinks about where she can go.
She had kept Kylo Ren out of her thoughts. But of course he would feel his daughter's first breaths.
Two rooms away Sarenna screams and Rey feels Palaka's life threads neatly severed in two by a slender, elegant bolt of pure rage, wielded by its creator. Rey knows Sarenna is next.
"No!" she screams. "Please! Please don't hurt her!"
The sound of Rey's voice wakes the baby up. The tiny infant screws her face out and bellows a sound of unhappiness.
The red glow of his lightsaber fills the doorway before he does. The blackness of his mask and his uniform and cape cast a pall over the room. The midwife's villa is filling with stormtroopers, but the only weapon that has been used is Kylo Ren's.
For a moment Rey is sure he is going to cut her down like he just did Palaka. He will slice her and the baby in two.
Then, in a blink, the red beam retracts.
Rey holds the screaming infant in her arms as she backs away from him.
"How could you do this?" he yells at her, his voice altered by the filter in the mask. If there were anything familiar or caring in that voice, the mask has erased it.
Despite the barriers she has erected to the bond they share, she can feel the rage and fear that are coursing through him. At discovering the baby's existence. How betrayed he feels. How frightened he is about what his next course of action is.
He will take the baby to Snoke.
What he does after that…Kylo Ren isn't even sure yet. Raise his daughter as the most powerful user of the Dark Side of the Force ever? Or slay Snoke when the Supreme Leader is distracted by the monumental opportunity this child of two Force users represents?
But one thing is for absolute certain: Kylo Ren is taking the baby with him.
"You can't," Rey says. "Please. Please don't take her from me."
Family isn't exactly Kylo Ren's strong suit. He has no understanding of what the baby represents to Rey. To him she is merely a means to an end.
Rey knows that was not true all those months ago. For a brief shining moment they were together and it was not like this.
"You may come with me," Kylo Ren says. "Or you can die where you cower. Hand over the child."
The large black gloves reach for the baby, who is howling. Rey, whose body is still racked with pain from the delivery, is shaking. She can't stand up straight.
Kylo Ren takes her daughter from her hands and cradles her in his arms. The baby is still screaming.
"Please don't hurt her. Please," Rey begs him.
"I have no intention of hurting my child," he says, subtly emphasizing the last words. "She is the most important person in the galaxy." He moves the baby into a hold by one arm. And with the other he lights his lightsaber, the electronic hiss filling the room more powerfully than the child's wails. "You will come with me. Or you will die."
Rey stares at the man standing behind the red beam, a man who meant almost everything to her for a short while, the one who will destroy her no matter what she does in this moment. If she goes with him, it's almost certain she will go to the Dark Side — she will have to, to protect her daughter. And if she manages to stave that off, he will kill her for not submitting.
"All right," she says.