Chapter 7
Blinking her eyes open slowly, Rey's vision was filled with bright light. Squeezing her eyes shut again and trying to correct her earlier mistake by looking from under her eyelids only barely, she let herself adjust to the brightness of the room. As the seconds ticked by, the brightness seemed to diminish as her pupils shrunk and she thought she could open her eyes fully without the risk of going blind, she slid them further open and faced a halogen white TL light overhead. Blinking once more, she turned her gaze to the side ever so slowly, the movement causing her neck muscles to pull and her to wonder how she had hurt herself.
She tried to come up with the reason why, but her mind couldn't come up with anything. As she tried to connect the pieces, the thought seemed to slide down in a dark tunnel and never appear again, scattering somewhere she couldn't see. The room consisted of only four blank walls, like a cell, and trying to lift her head and looking down upon herself, she noticed she was tied to an old metal bed frame, no mattress, by her ankles and chest, thighs and wrists. She tried to twist her wrists for some form of movement, but no go.
She had an idea who was responsible for this, her mind told her as the memories of what had happened to get her there came back to her. She remembered the other spaceship crashing down after attack of the First Order's, having hit the enemy just in time to ensure their downfall as well. She remembered the face of her mother beside her as they crashed, significantly more softly than the others, but still too hard for them to have stayed conscious apparently.
"Hello?" Rey called. Her own voiced bounced off of the cold walls and echoed back at her, but nothing else happened. Of course they had been smart enough to put her in a completely empty room, where she couldn't use the force to help her. "Fuck," she mouthed, letting her head fall back against the harsh iron springs, wondering where the rest of her 'crew' was and if they were okay, like her mother. She felt the way her head pounded still, a throbbing headache reminding her of the hefty fall she had made in the Millennium Falcon. It felt as if someone had tried to put hundreds of elastic bands around her head, nearly forcing it to split in two. The pounding headache and her loneliness brought her back to unconsciousness soon.
It was only when she heard the sound of the door to her cell open and close and heavy but slow footfalls resound, much louder than they would have in a remotely dressed room, that she gained her consciousness back. She didn't know how long it was since she first woke up and fell asleep again. It could have been minutes or days. Ever having been a light sleeper, headache or not, Rey's eyes shot open to the sound and fell, unconsciously remembering not to look right up from earlier, upon a dark masked figure she had seen before. She had known.
"You," she spat, the hoarseness and weakness of her voice taking away from the anger within it.
Kylo Ren did not respond. Instead, he remained halted but two feet from where she was tied to the bed and reached up without still saying another word with both of his black gloved hands, taking away the mask that hid his true self from her. "Hello, little sister," he spoke.
Rey felt her breath catch in her throat as she took in the youthful face of her brother from so up close, the anger and mocking in his eyes and the smirk upon his lips that seemed more comfortable squeezing together in a tight line as he scowled, and she heard his voice from so close, so unfamiliar. She swallowed the many questions she wanted to fire at him and the anger and fire she wanted to spew at him since watching him murder their father and discovering they apparently shared a set of parents. "Mind me if I don't greet you as if you're a relation of mine," Rey responded harshly.
Ben sucked in a sharp breath through his nose, didn't seem to release it. "Believe me, the fact that we're siblings couldn't give you any more grief than it does me right now. I know how your General has a way with words and how she make the 'light' as she calls it seem like such a great option, just like that old fool, even now."
Despite the fact that Rey still had to call her mother by her relation to her, still even had to think of her that way, it strangely upset her to hear Ben talk about her as if she was nothing to him. She assumed that the old fool he meant was to be their uncle. Rey wondered where he was, and where Finn and Poe were and if they had been successful or they had been boycotted by the First Order. The plan had been rash and impulsive, but they had all thought that regardless of the quickness with which they had pushed its execution, it had had a chance for success. "Is our mother here as well? She's alive?"
Ben snorted, sitting down on the side of the bed frame upon which she was tied and regarding her as if she was just a stupid little child. Part of her was made angry by his clear pretense, another part of her felt very small in his presence. "Oh, yes, our mother is here, and she is alive⦠for now. The only reason why I am keeping it that way is so that she can watch as I execute my plan with you, as she so desperately seemed to want to be a part of it all."
Anger boiled under the surface of Rey's skin as she sucked in Kylo Ren's words and thought of the words that had been spoken before they set off for this mission: the First Order would try to win her for them, would kill her only if she proved to be impossible to convert, or so they had said.
Seeming to catch on on her train of thought, Ben looked her straight in the eye. "There is no light or dark," he said. "The world is only divided in those who don't possess any power over the Force and the ones who do but are too scared to take control, and those who do possess the Force and have the strength to use it in the way it is meant to be. Our parents raised us to be afraid of something that is an honor to possess, an honor to control. When I broke free from their confines and joined those who taught me to use the force, they saw dumping you as the only way to keep you in their power, by letting you go and taking away your heritance and the knowledge that was to come to you, not even giving you the chance to see the truth for yourself. I believe that they mustn't have been all too convinced of the value of the 'light' if they would rather have no daughter at all than showing her."
Rey shook her head, the words he spoke cutting deep. They had left her behind, had dumped her in a place where she had had a terrible youth, no idea who she was or what she could be. In that moment, it was hard to see him as Kylo Ren, rather than an innocent young man.
Staring at him, she dug up vague recollections of her early childhood, of how she thought he might have been as a young boy, but there was no indication for her that the images she saw running though her mind's eye were truly him. The more she tried to focus on those flashes, tried to run after them in her mind, the faster they flew away, gone seemingly forever again. Had her father been a weak man? She wondered. She had never had a chance to know him or discover what kind of person he was to be able to tell for sure.
"You possess control over the Force that no other female has ever had," Ben spoke, and it seemed as if he was thinking aloud, heaving himself upright and walking around the room. "I think with proper, unlimited training, you would see the goal we are striving towards. You would see that what we're trying to do is the only logical option for the continuance of the Force as it should be ruled."
Rey's eyes connected with her brother's then, and the thought stopped fuzzing around in her head for the first time since she had woken up here. "Will you teach me what I've missed?"
