A/N: I am overwhelmed by the positive feedback and ongoing support. It is encouraging and truly humbling. Thanks everyone.
BB9-E reports thirty minutes to go, when the first alarm goes off. It is too early for the shift change or the periodic lifeform scans, so she knows it must be the ground assault force.
"Rey," she hears his unmistakable tone through her commlink.
His voice is chilling and hypnotic and very, very angry.
"What sort of time do you call this?" she jokes lightly. "I've been waiting for hours."
"Where are you?"
"Coruscant, where are you?"
"Do not push me, Rey," he is seething, and she can hear it in his voice as much as she can feel it in her mind.
"I'm in the data vault," she replies, forgoing banter in favour of getting down to business. "My droid is downloading the data as we speak, but it's going to take another thirty minutes."
A few heartbeats of silence, then, "I'm coming to you."
His efforts to get to the data vault will be in vain. He will lead the security forces directly to her, and he won't be able to access her position from that side anyway, not unless he has the codes to activate the bridge across the way. Regardless, she has already pushed him parsecs beyond his limit of patience and won't try to stop him.
"He'll learn the hard way," she muses, and gets up from her seated position on the cold, hard floor. She begins to stretch out her limbs and run on the spot, trying to warm herself up for the inevitable conflict Kylo is bringing her direction.
Long before Kylo closes in on her position, she spots the first security officer, no doubt investigating the vaults after the scans have detected a breach. Perhaps he is expecting to see vermin chewing on wires, but for sure he doesn't see a blur of red and black as she leaps from one catwalk to another, cutting him down with her crimson saberstaff. His body falls in pieces to the depths below, and she vaguely registers the distant noise it makes as it finds the unseen bottom of the shaft.
"Hurry, BB," she calls back to the droid, whose response sounds suspiciously like a blown raspberry. "Don't give me that tone!"
Kylo Ren is close now, only a few levels above her position, and that's when the entire security team floods the data vault, dressed in tac-gear and sporting massive blasters. There are some thirty men surrounding her, some on the upper level, some below, but thankfully, none on her own level, so they haven't noticed her droid downloading their precious data files.
"The Corusca Imperial Pride is taking back the home of Emperor Palpatine, the Imperial Palace will me ours once more!" she shouts to throw them off her purpose. It seems to work, because the most senior-looking security officer, noticeable for his big gun and emblazoned jacket, sneers at her.
"I didn't order filth for dinner, what about you boys?" he goads, and the other men chuckle. "Kill her."
Blaster bolts come flying from all above and below. She deflects most of them with her saber-staff, taking a few near misses, enduring little carbon burns on her arms and legs, and she leaps onto the platform above. Cutting through the first four soldiers with ease, having caught them off guard with her Force-jump, and she uses one of their bodies to absorb the blaster shots coming at her from below.
In deflecting a barrage of blaster fire from an awkward angle, she leaves herself open for attack as one of the soldiers runs and catches her off balance, and she drops her saber-staff. It falls onto the below platform out of reach. She has no time to call it back to her grasp, because then he's on top of her, hands around her throat, and she gives him a well-deserved knee to the groin. Although he is in pain, groaning through gritted teeth, he is not dissuaded from his cause. So instead of trying in vain to pry his meaty fingers from around her throat, she retrieves a knife from her thigh and plunges it into his temple with all her might.
His body goes limp, and she tries to extract the knife, but no – it's firmly lodged in the man's skull and doesn't want to come out. So she abandons it and pushes his body off her with the help of the Force, just in time to catch the rest of the security forces converge on her position with their blaster barrels all pointed at her.
Angry, she pulls all their weapons away with the Force and brings the guards to their knees. The first she throws over the edge and he falls with a scream. The second is given enough time to get to his feet, but by this point, Rey is so incensed that she sends an almighty push, knocking him and his two compatriots off the catwalk to their deaths below.
That was a mistake, she thinks, and along with her bruised throat, the carbon scoring dotting her body, she feels weakened from the efforts and her legs give out beneath her. She eyes her saberstaff laying on the platform below, and she can still hear shouting as blaster fire comes up at her from the level below that.
She summons the strength to jump back down one level to retrieve her saberstaff, taking another immediate forward leap and flip through the air to meet the remaining assailants on the next level down.
There are twelve of them and she cuts down the first two, deflecting more fire, and once they realise their guns are ineffective, they come at her with electrified batons. They successfully fight her off, pushing her back off the main platform and onto the skinny catwalk, and as the fight goes on, two more fall down, one of them taking the catwalk handrails with them.
Distracted for a few precious seconds, they now outflank her. She is surrounded and that's when she feels Kylo very close by. Afraid, she reaches out for him, and he lends his strength. Unaware such a feat could be possible, she pulls at his gnarled soul and drinks in the darkness, unleashing her power with a visceral scream. She defends attacks from four sides, and with each parry, she also strikes out, knocking one guard back far enough to attack the one behind. She cartwheels one-handed, giving two of them a butterfly-kick, while cutting another's legs off, moving with incredible speed and ferocity.
Is this what Kylo feels, all the time? Always with one toe in that dark, bottomless pool of raw power? Drawing his strength from the abyss, while she is afraid to drown in it?
Rey is winning, and her body count is getting higher, and her assailants lesser. But when it seems as though the worst is over; the sound of many running footsteps indicates the arrival of reinforcements and her situation goes from manageable to fatal.
In desperation, she reaches to that dark place, deep inside where she has been too afraid to tread since Uquine. She raises her hands, palms outward to her advancing enemy, letting that cold ocean chill to the bone, and she lets it rip.
Force lightning forks from her palms with a brilliant blue light, snaking from one guard to the next. Some are dead, smouldering corpses. Others are groaning and struggling to their feet. Rey is spent. She falls to her knees again. Cold, so cold.
Sudden blaster fire kills the last of them, raining down from above. She gratefully looks up to the next platform to see the advancing stormtroopers as they destroy the remnants of the security team. Sees Kylo watching her, head slightly cocked to the side. With captivation or contempt – she doesn't know for sure, only wonders how long he might have been standing there, watching her fight for her life.
With a limp, she makes her way back along the catwalk to the far platform and climbs the maintenance ladder to the next level up. A trooper offers a hand to pull her up, when BB9-E disconnects from the terminal with a satisfied series of beeps.
"He's done," she tells Kylo, "He got the whole thing."
"Pull the company out," he orders, and the stormtroopers retreat, with Rey and BB9-E in the centre of the formation, leaving bodies in their wake as they make way to the landing platform to where their transports await.
Halfway there, the troops need to slow their pace as they flank Lady Snoke and her precious droid, because she's too physically drained to move at the necessary speed. It gets worse when the adrenaline wears off, and her jarred knee freezes up. When she stops altogether, an impatient Kylo Ren picks her up and tosses her over his shoulder, and she's too fatigued to argue, in fact, she's almost grateful. He gingerly sets her back down once they're inside the troop carrier, and she makes way to the cockpit to give the pilot directions to her ship. They take off and disappear into the cloud of pollution that covers the underworld, just as more security forces arrive. The shuttle hovers over the rooftop where her TIE is parked, and Rey goes to exit the shuttle, when a firm hand stops her. "You've done enough today," is all he says, and he jumps down to the roof and signals the shuttle to depart. She's slipping in and out of consciousness, looking out the side viewport where she sees Kylo's TIE flying alongside as they exit the upper atmosphere and make the jump to lightspeed.
There is a medic on board that tends to her scratches and scrapes, then with a body scanner declares that she's fine, just fatigued, which she knows already, but her knee will need further scans and a few bacta injections. "Thanks for that," is her curt reply, before she curls up over three seats and closes her eyes. The last thing she sees is BB9-E chirruping happily and a few troopers clapping each other's back celebrating another successful mission.
The shuttle is stifling with comradery, mateship, and elation, and it's so wonderfully human. It's the last thing she thinks about before slipping into a deep, dreamless sleep. At one point, she feels a stinging sensation in her leg, but it isn't enough for her to gain full consciousness.
She wakens several hours later in her quarters aboard the Finalizer, and finds herself asleep in her combat clothes, with her boots lain on the floor next to her and her gloves placed delicately on her bed-side table. She reaches out to touch them and feels a familiar feint energy, catching broken images of Kylo carrying her unconscious form to bed, and kissing her forehead before leaving the room, with an emotive "Thank you."
They're straying into dangerous territory, and she needs to leave. Now.
She comms the bridge from her terminal and asks them to prepare her a ship so she can return to the Supremacy. An hour later, she's showered, in fresh clothes with her weapons and belongings in her satchel as she makes her way to the hangar, with BB9-E in tow, having downloaded the contents of the data vault into the ship's memory banks. The droid tells her that General Hux is most pleased to have the entire contents of the data vault, not just the navigational charts.
Rey stops dead in her tracks. "The entire data cache?"
The droid beeps lightly in response, relaying that her instructions were, 'all of it'.
"I meant all of the navigational charts, not the entire contents of the vault. Are you telling me I had to fight off a hundred highly skilled security guards, almost get myself killed, unnecessarily?"
The droid lets out a single high-pitched blip that sounds almost like a 'yep'.
She growls, and the lights above her flicker and shake with the trembling force. "I should send you to the scrapheap, you… worthless ball of junk!"
Kylo Ren blocks the corridor ahead, and the droid curiously looks from its Master to Ren, several times before rolling off towards the hangar without her. A group of officers enter the hallway between both powerful force users, and revaluate their course, turning around and heading another direction.
"You're leaving," he states flatly.
"My work is done, I have other things to attend to."
"Such as?"
"None of your business, that's what."
"The trans-galactic navigational chart we were looking for is incomplete," he says. "We're not done yet."
"As I'm sure you heard, my droid retrieved the entire info-cache. If the map you sought is incomplete, that's no fault of mine."
"You did good today. We could use you."
"The Supreme Leader doesn't share your opinion. My presence is required elsewhere," she says simply, without malice or discontent, and continues walking, past him, his masked eyes following her retreating form.
"Travel safe," he calls after her.
"Sentiment, Kylo," she warns before turning towards the corridor out of sight.
On her way to the hangar, she crosses the path of several stormtroopers and maintenance techs frantically repairing an all but destroyed console, slashed, burned and melted beyond recognition.