Luke made Rey huddle under his blanket and cloak as he poured a large glass of water before her. Rey's mouth felt like a desert from the salt water, and she drank the whole thing without stopping, but she ended up coughing again, and Luke patted her back until she waved him off.
He would have been a great father.
"You stopped breathing and I thought…" Luke said, "I thought you were dead, Rey."
Rey's lungs were sore and pained, and every breath felt like torture, and her sobbing certainly hadn't made them any better. Tears were still running down her face, and she kept coughing up seawater.
"I can't swim," she rasped before breaking down coughing again. Luke nodded.
"I couldn't either," Luke said. "Desert planets don't have too many places to learn, so Leia taught me. I jumped in right after I saw you fall, but I couldn't find you and I thought I lost you. I'm so sorry, Rey. I should have been faster." Rey shook her head, still struggling to take deep breaths.
"You saved me," Rey said. Her voice was at a whisper, sounding like she went through packs of deathsticks every day. Luke refilled her glass of water and poured another one of warm tea.
"I saw him down there," Rey said, and Luke sighed. It wasn't a sigh of pity or disappointment, but more like a confirmation.
"I thought you would," Luke said. "Sometimes, when someone is in great pain or distress, they hallucinate their soulmate helping them. Leia and Han told me that. Han once said that he saw Leia more on his adventures through the galaxy than he did at home.
"So," Luke said, sitting across his table form Rey, "I'm assuming you know what a soulmate is. Which is odd, seeing that you didn't know what colors meant."
"I don't know when I learned what a soulmate was, but I just know. The colors, though, I never knew about," Rey said. Her voice was still raspy, but the tea was helping.
"Colors are the Force's way of letting you know that you've found the person you're destined to love for the rest of your life," Luke said. "Those who spent their whole lives doing nothing but good meet their soulmate and see color very early, but people who walk somewhere in between Light or Dark side of the Force wait for most of their lives to see color."
"In between?"
"Warriors, smugglers, scum. Han Solo was well into his thirties before he met Leia and saw color," Luke said, shrugging. "He didn't think he would ever see them. You'll have to forgive me, but because I was born seeing color, the only firsthand accounts of the soulmate process are from my sister and…."
"I understand," Rey said, not needing Luke to finish his sentence. She was surprised that he had even said Han's name twice that day, as in Rey's close to two months training with Luke, he rarely mentioned Han Solo. The wound was too fresh, she supposed.
"I know it's hard that your soulmate is my nephew," Luke said. "And I'm sorry. But I really do believe that there is still good in him. And perhaps the Force bonding you to him is a way of saying that he can be redeemed. You could be the one to bring him back to the Light side."
"I don't want to redeem him," Rey said, but the feeling in her chest—her bond, she was realizing—seemed to recoil at these words, and Rey knew she was lying. She still hated him after everything he did, but she agreed with Luke that there was Light still in him. The Force wanted her to save Kylo Ren, and she wanted him saved, but she didn't know if she wanted to be the one to save him.
She was busy with her own life. Rey never considered romance an option back on Jakku, and she certainly wouldn't consider it now, as she trained to become a Jedi and stop the very Order that her soulmate belonged to. She had a war to fight, to win, and she didn't want this soulmate junk to ruin anything.
Not happening.
Luke was silent for a moment, mulling over what to say next. Rey drank some tea and felt heat bloom through her body.
"Tell me what you're feeling right now," Luke said. Rey thought this over for a second.
"I'm confused. And angry, really angry. I hate him, Luke. I know you still think there's good in him, but I don't. But at the same time, I feel the connection between us. It's like this warm feeling in my chest that tells me he's alive. And it's not… unpleasant. But just the thought of being connected to Kylo Ren really makes me angry. He's not a good person, he's evil, and we hate each other. There's no reason for me to be connected to him like this, and I don't want to be. I don't want any of this," Rey said, hardly pausing to cough. Luke didn't say anything, only looked to the roof of his cave.
Rey felt something odd happen to her bond when she said she hated Kylo. I seemed to shake a little, like it was on the verge of collapsing. She brought a hand up to her chest.
She remembered her vision, where she heard his screams echo off stone walls, where she watched him break down. She thought of every dream of him, from the memory of seeing his face in color to glimpses of his face, his voice. Her bond flourished thinking on this, and she recoiled in disgust.
Something wasn't right. He was always coated in cuts and bruises in her dreams, always screaming or in agony. Rey never saw him in the setting she imagined for him—in the center of command or the First Order, ruthless and cruel, striking down every opponent in his way. But instead she saw nothing but suffering and pain on his part.
She had a bad feeling about all of this.
"Hate is the path to the Dark side, Rey. I personally don't follow the Jedi Code verbatim, but that part is incredibly important. You can feel however you want about my nephew, I won't tell you how to feel. But I want you to not to feel hatred. Disgust, dislike, disregard, yes. But not hate," Luke said.
"What am I supposed to do the next time I see him? Tell him that he's my soulmate and decide not to fight? Luke, we're on opposite sides of an ancient war," Rey said. "He's on the Dark side. He killed Han Solo. He's not going to come back to the Light. There's not a chance."
"My father was born to be on the Dark side. No matter how much he tried and fought it, he ended up in darkness. But his final act, the act that defined his life, was saving me. Ben might be in the Dark side now, Rey, but that doesn't mean he can change. Everyone can change. And with this bond you have, you could be the one to change him," Luke said. Rey set her jaw and stood up, dropping Luke's cloak to the ground.
"Kylo Ren is my soulmate, and I truly do not think that he can change, and it is not my responsibility to change him," Rey said, and she left the cave.
Rey dreamt again of Kylo Ren suffering. She saw him cry and scream, fight and lose, destroy and be destroyed. She saw his entire body riddled with bruises, so many that it was hard to tell what the actual color of his skin was. The scar on his face stood out to her, and when he shifted his eyes, she noticed that half of his face wasn't able to move normally. She did that to him.
Oddly, Rey felt a little sick thinking about it.
Lightning, bright as day, cackled and jumped around Kylo, but he was untouched. Rey heard the heavy sound of breathing, though it seemed robotic and pained. As the sound of breathing grew louder, the lighting and Kylo faded into blackness.
Rey.
She knew it was Obi Wan.
The truth isn't always pleasant, Obi Wan said. And I'm sorry that you learned it this way.
I'm sorry that I had to learn it at all. The Force made a mistake, Rey said.
The Force doesn't make mistakes. It might make terrible and painful choices, but it never makes mistakes, Obi Wan said, sadness seeping through his voice. Rey wondered what he wasn't saying, what those terrible and painful choices were.
Then what do I do? Fight my soulmate? Forgive him for murder? I'm lost, and I haven't even processed all of this. We're in the middle of a war, I don't have time to figure this all out, Rey replied.
You must train for now, and then when you see him next, you will know what to do. I cannot tell you which choice you should make, but I do know that you will make the right one. There are more than two choices, Rey, and you will see which path you should take, Obi Wan said. The war of good versus evil could very well depend on what you do.
That's comforting, Rey said. As if she already didn't have enough weight on her shoulders.
The same duty once fell to me, with another Skywalker. To this day I still don't know if I made the right choice for the galaxy, Obi Wan sighed, but I know that I made the choice that I felt was right. And I know that when the time comes, you will make the choice that you feel is right, and that will be enough. It will be enough, Rey.
Breakfast was silent the next morning. Luke cooked again, and Rey ate every bit of food he put on her plate. She always did. Luke refilled her plate before she asked for another serving. He always did. Frankly, the amount of food Luke gave Rey still stunned her. She couldn't remember a single day in her life where she had eaten as much.
"The color of the sky is blue," Luke said suddenly, and Rey's chest seemed to open. Her favorite color, the one she always hoped to one day put a name to, was blue. Like 'red', it didn't seem to be a real word, but something about it clicked when she let her eyes meet Luke's, and she knew that Luke Skywalker had blue eyes. The sky above her head shone blue. The ocean that nearly swallowed her was blue.
"Thank you," Rey said, and Luke stood up, walked around the fire, and sat directly across from Rey.
"I'm sorry about yesterday. I could have been much nicer, much calmer, more sensitive. I have never been in the situation you're in, so I don't know how stressful or frightening this could be, but that's not an excuse," Luke said. "It is not your responsibility to redeem my nephew, and I'm sorry that I ever implied that. Forgive me, please. I didn't mean to upset you, and I'm incredibly sorry that I did."
Rey stared at Luke for a long moment, her eyes not leaving his. And then she lunged forward and hugged Luke. She wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his shoulder, and he held her back, not saying anything.
Rey hardly hugged people back in Jakku. She only hugged the small children who were learning to scavenge, and she would only do that when she found one in the carcass of a ship, crying and lost. But hugging, which she learned with Finn, was nice. She liked hugging.
"I have no idea what to do," Rey admitted, thinking about the cryptic advice Obi Wan had given her, the pull in her chest, and the image of Kylo Ren's bruised and broken body. Something was wrong. Something horribly wrong was happening to her soulmate, but she didn't know what to do. She didn't know what to do about anything.
"Honestly, I don't know either. But we will figure this all out together. I promise," Luke said, squeezing Rey tighter.
Luke would have been a perfect father.