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Chapter 11: Eggshell
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Hey everyone. Thank you, thank you, thank you for all your continued support. Just a warning, this one is a bit short and not a ton happens. I'm just setting the stage for a big turn of events and new direction the story will take from here. It's coming :)
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Legend Fanatic - Thanks for sticking with me, my very first reviewer. \^.^/
Cat Beats - I can understand that bitter association, but I do love the character, too. Layers like tiramisu. I'm really interested to see how you take this one.
River Fox - Thank you so, so much- You have excellent intuition ;) and I really, really do appreciate all of your positive feedback- you're amazing. I wish I could give you a present or a hug or something.
T - Definitely, I just wish I knew more about human psychology.
jedi-pixie - I would say your review for chapter 10 definitely compensates for the whole story :) Thank you so much. I'm really glad what I've done is working for you so far; I'm definitely shooting into the dark with precious ammunition. And yes, the Force ghosts! It's so much fun to be playing with them. Especially my darling Qui-Gon. I'm really missing them but they'll be back soon ;)
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Rey rose to waking like a fish, languidly floating through the remnants of swaying anemone dreams. The ghost memory of gentle fingers embracing her jaw, stroking at the soft line connecting to her throat, gradually pulled her to wakefulness. The coldness of space was something she still hadn't gotten used to; goose bumps had littered the plains of her skin ever since that first flight with Finn. Although much of it, she was sure, was due to more than temperature. Now, however, she was warm. Reaching out with a blind, groggy hand she felt a woven garment slung over her shoulders. It was heavy and calming.
It smelled like charcoal and forest. Like Kylo.
Her eyes still closed, she tapped into the energy surrounding her and felt for him. His increasingly familiar signature waves were lapping sleekly out from somewhere back in the cabin.
Blinking into the darkness lined by the fine, pulsating lights of flight instruments, humming away like the soft burr of insects, she realized the ship had left hyperspace.
Now, looming in front of them were the still butterfly wings of a nebula. A face filling her view of the infinite sea of the universe. Its creamy gas clouds were sea-foam white, tinged with water-colored splatters of the palest bronze, solid as the walls of a limestone cliff and foreboding as a sandstorm.
She rose and the garment, a black wrapping Kylo had worn around his own shoulders since she first met him, rose with her. The weight of the fabric pressed down on her and it should have felt like an invasion- but it didn't. It felt contradictorily calming, like a thick layer of settling of dust over everything after a derecho.
He said he had saved her life.
It was inexplicable, but she believed it. She had always believed he was honest, despite everything. But she still hadn't fully analyzed how she felt about him or his most recent action, abandoning his own security to save her, to circumvent killing her. The bare emotions of her reaction to the fact were buried under a deep coat of sediment and detritus cleaved and spilled from her former perception of him. But she wasn't ready to go excavating. There would be time.
She peered through the doorway of the cockpit and saw Kylo sitting cross-legged in the center of the cabin, his eyes closed in meditation. Leaning against the doorway, she regarded him, knowing he must sense her himself. Not wanting to disturb him she waited silently. He looked so tired; creases crossing his face like fractured adobe.
Minutes passed by like leaves carried downstream. She thought of him, who he was at four, a hopeful, loved child. How at ten he was already darkening from insecurity. By thirteen he was burned and cold. Twenty, something else, something crippled and mutilated, scar tissue contorting him into a unnatural mold. Now, at nearly 30, he was a basalt mountain, carved by slow, steady glaciers, and crumbling.
Kylo opened his eyes and looked at her.
"What happens now?" she asked.
"I'm scanning the nebula for the planet. When it's found we'll go."
"Are there sentients on the planet?"
"Yes. They are reclusive, but they are said to be benign. As long as we don't threaten them, I've heard they will give refuge to travelers."
Rey nodded and Kylo said nothing else. She let her eyes wander over him. The variety of expression carried in his posture was simultaneously smooth, ragged, dark and shining as obsidian. He was watching her as if she were soaring, though she hadn't stepped or shifted from her spot against the doorway.
"What are you going to do now?" She asked quietly. She felt like she was learning braille speaking to him, her fingers tracing over the patterns of bumps, trying to pry miniscule motes of meaning from them.
Nothing about his physical body indicated him registering the question. She waited, holding his steady gaze, wondering. She was asking him to expose himself to her. To strip. He had already removed his helmet, his cloak, and now she noticed, his gloves. He had been wearing them when he had touched her earlier. She wondered whether the skin of his finger pads was coarse or smooth. His hands looked cold, pale with the faintest tinges of lavender around the knuckles. Did he feel as cold as she had, now that he had given her his cloak? No, surely he must generate the heat of an active volcano regardless of what he was wearing.
"I don't know." He finally said, stirring her from her musing.
The veil of detachment hiding his face had opened, just a sliver, but through it she could see relief, not just that, but furor. Not hope or anything so fully optimistic, but the inspiration of an animal that had slipped from its collar. It was growing like an emerald and peridot bud from a charred, splintered stem.
Abruptly, the ship shuddered violently, an animal shaking water from its pelt. She looked behind her but where the gleaming nebula had faced them there was only a starless darkness. Not the emptiness of space, but the fullness of something else.
Walls.
Reaching instinctively into the Force, nothing now felt different than when she had been in the cockpit looking at the nebula.
But there has to be something.
Suddenly, it dawned on her that when she had woken up in the copilot's chair there had been something. A thickness to the air, like heavy humidity. And the warmth.
She looked to Kylo, whose lips were slightly parted and his eyes up, scanning. But he did not look concerned. He looked aflame; like hearing pack predators howl at their catch.
If it had been Snoke, Kylo would have said something. It was someone else.
She flew back to her seat, examining the control panel; it was completely and inexplicably dark. Looking through the windshield she couldn't see anything through the glass. They were bound, blindfolded and gagged in this nothingness.
Kylo slipped into the chair beside her, rumbling with apprehension like the storm he was when she first saw him on Mannassar.
"Do you know what's happening?" Rey breathed, expecting alarm in response.
But his voice was only crisp and alert. "It looks like the Aing-Tii have found us."
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The darkness lifted away like the opening jaw of a mouth, stuffing the cockpit with light. And the Force; it soaked the air with the same intensity of the overwhelming sunlight, sweet and warm.
As her light-blindness slowly dissolved she could see the walls of the cargo hold their ship laid dormant in. It was massive and curved organically. Beyond the hold's exit there was a landscape— a shore pierced with jutting ochre rock masses caped with ferns and lichen, resting in the sand like sprouts. The mossy rock formations continued past the wave-line into the calm mirror-like sea reflecting a pale sky.
Like a physical breeze, a sudden wave of almost tangible benevolence swept through her, mild and calming. It was not her own, but it felt intentional, like someone had put it there. Automatically, she knew it was from whoever had brought them here. And somehow it felt reliable, urging her to feel safe.
She looked to Kylo, who was already watching her. She raised her eyebrows, her body quivering in uncertain anticipation and coursing adrenaline, "Did you feel that?"
He nodded simply, his expression murky but glowing from some internal source of curiosity that she realized she also felt within herself. She scrutinized him. He was tense, but not dangerous, his hackles lowered. She realized that his behavior now was the same it had been when she would walk through the white grasses on Mannassar with him, tame and composed.
"What do you know about this world?" She finally asked, letting the need of the question break through the study of her captor. Or, somehow, impossibly, her guardian. The idea felt like smoke, clogging her thoughts and tingeing the taste of her breath. Instinctually, she cleared her throat.
Kylo didn't indicate notice, just responded, "I only know a little; mentions in the Jedi Archives that I recovered from the Empire's records. Jedi came here to be healed and to learn from the Aing-Tii—the sentients here. They're supposedly very Force sensitive."
She nodded, suddenly moved by an eagerness tugging at her like gravity to see the world outside the ship. She rose and he stood with her. They went, Rey moving in front and striding purposefully through the shadowy interior of Kylo's ship, past the ravaged crew quarters and down the descending hatch into the musky half-light of the cargo hold.
Kylo's ship lay flat on the clay-like floor. She crossed over it towards the outside; peering as she walked at the seamless, empty walls. There was nothing to see but dim hollow space.
Stepping down out of the hull into thick, temperate air she felt the sand sift beneath her feet, coiling her stomach in a bitter familiarity. She pushed her mind past it and looked back to observe the ship that had swallowed Kylo's, raising a hand over her eyes against the blaring light.
Then a glimmer in the periphery caught her eye.
A tall, graceful being was walking towards her on long, limber legs from around the end of the huge ship. Entrancingly arranged ivory plates entirely covered its bipedal body, reaching from its gently curving snout to its long, elegant tail. Delicately drawn motifs covered these plates in an intricate design, especially around its eyes. They were black sapphire orbs that shined like tide pools emulating starlight. Most remarkably, from its mouth extended six thread-thin jade colored tongues, which swayed in the air before it like sea grass, tasting and sensing the world in a purpose that was somehow obvious.
The same wave of benevolence pressed into her and she instinctually knew this alien was its source.
"This is an Aing-Tii monk." Kylo whispered from her side, his voice smooth as water.
Rey considered the Aing-Tii as he or she stopped in front of her, a froth of wonder rising from her churning apprehension of the last several days.
"Hello." She tried softly, hoping the Basic would be a shared lingua franca, but the Aing-Tii did not respond. It simply appraised her with its large, gleaming eyes for a silent moment. Then, it drooped smoothly into what could only have been a bow and a swell of calm ease rushed into her, extending from the monk to her through the Force as the monk's means of communication.
She smiled and tilting her head down, returned the gesture.
A note of contentment sent by the monk plucked at her heart. She waited for the monk to make the next move, but after a brief moment, it simply turned and retreated. Already? She looked to Kylo, impossibly tall beside her and harshly dark in this too bright world, but he only watched the monk walk away with his mouth held in a firm line and his eyes impenetrable.
The monk stopped at the entrance to its ship's cargo bay, and with a gentle motion of one of its three-fingered hands, Kylo's shuttle obediently rose and sailed out of the cavernous hull to settle placidly like a tranquil moth on the sand outside. It was effortless.
The monk looked back at them once more and Rey felt a last injected aura of amity, then the monk turned again and continued nimbly around the curve of the massive ship. Rey swallowed the acrid incredulity begot by the abruptness with which she and Kylo were brought and then abandoned to the expansive emptiness of this shoreline. Soon after, the whale of machinery lifted into the sky and departed, fading quickly into the thick cloud of humidity.
Watching it blend into the distant air she recognized the growing fuzziness in her limbs and the bleary veil that had fallen over her eyes.
She turned to Kylo, "Do you have an atmospheric scanner?" Striking irritation prickled at the skin lining her collar bone for asking the question. She shouldn't need him. She shouldn't need anyone.
His eyes softened at the question, as if calmed by its neutrality and the necessary dependence. He nodded and silently turned back to his ship, relieving her of any more attention to the implications of the question.
She followed him, noticing the length of his powerful strides and the lines of his athletic body. He had never changed the thick tunic that covered his torso. What did his body look like underneath? The humans in Niima and the areas surrounding it had been frail, with sharp protruding bones and gossamer muscle straining tight against dark, thin skin. Finn had been such a stark contrast to the human flesh she had known, so robust and vibrant. But Kylo was different altogether physically; lean but authoritatively powerful with his height and his broad, muscular torso. How would Kylo's chest compare to the concave stacks of ribs with precious little meat she remembered from home?
He glanced back at her as he ascended the ramp into the hatch. She held his gaze for the brief moment, trying to pull meaning out of it, but only feeling in the dark and finding nothing.
He went to the cockpit, which was now purring gently, all systems back to normal. Navigating through and inspecting the ship's general user interface, he said plainly, "It's a Type II Atmosphere, but the only concern is that atmospheric oxygen is at 14%. It will take us some time to adjust, but we won't need masks long-term."
"How long are you planning on staying?" Rey asked quickly, suddenly feeling trapped at the idea of adjusting to the atmosphere.
Kylo turned and looked at her, the muscles of his jaw clenching. "I'm not sure. But we should be safe here. The location of the planet isn't on any charts I've been able to find, and trust me, I've looked. And, this nebula really should be impassable because of its size and the dense accretion of nebulaic material, which somehow is supposed to produce a barrier of hallucinations among Force sensitives. I was honestly just hoping the monks would come to us, because I truly didn't know if we would find them. But I've also heard that the Aing-Tii can be very protective of their privacy and… defensive."
"Defensive against what? They brought us here."
"They brought you here. I have no idea if they would have actually brought me here without you."
"And why would they want me?"
Kylo didn't respond, he just regarded her, his mouth open in question with the spirit of a smile playing across his lips, then he shook his head gently. "You must know, Rey. Really."
She ignored him, "You said defensive. Who are they defensive against if not us?"
"Snoke, the other Knights, anyone from the Order. The monks have a reputation for attacking slavers, and the Order is certainly that."
Rey's breath hitched. The Order is certainly that… a slaver.
Yes. But what are you?
Kylo held her gaze; stiffening like stone, as she was sure her own expression had itself hardened in abundance. But she had prodded him enough recently. She did not know him or his tolerance. The rage she had known in him since Starkiller, and the leaden turmoil she had discovered in him recently were too volatile to test. He was not going to attempt to harm her for the moment; she needed to keep it that way until she found a route of escape.
But that was the real question. Where would she escape to? And even if she knew, this sleek predator in front of her was more than impressive. What would it take to slip away from him?
His words slashed through her thoughts. "We have enough rations for months, and there's enough humidity in the air to condense forever. We'll be fine." His face was still hard, and he had internally retreated to somewhere far away again. But still, he was tame, controlled.
She lowered her eyes, inhaling deeply, retreating herself back to the soft lines of the dunes at night.
"I'm going to look around," she said quietly, and turned to stride softly back out to the sand.
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She spent the night that arrived soon after tucked into the warm, soft sand, sheltered from the unknown starfall.
Kylo remained in the darkness of the ship that carried them there.
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