Kylo leaned back in the chair and glanced at Rey beside him. Her face was set in concentration, and she flicked a few switches to her left before her grip relaxed on the steering controls of the shuttle. She smiled at him and took his hand, allowing their weak connection to strengthen at the contact. "We should reach Tatooine in about twelve hours."

He tightened his hand around his wife's and let out a slow sigh. "Maybe I'll get impatient enough to go to the Dark Side."

Rey snorted softly and touched a button in the center of the control console. A soft beep told them that the ship flew on autopilot. "We could just relax until you need to focus on the Dark." She stood, and Kylo followed her back to the small table and comfortable cushioned bench next to it.

"Relaxing isn't very Dark Side." Kylo let go of Rey's hand to push up his sleeve and ran his fingertips over the metal around his wrist. Almost a week with the ridiculous cuff, and it had not budged at all. "I'd rather get this thing off sooner rather than later."

Rey took his hand again and frowned at the cuff. "You really can't sense that thing?" She pressed her free hand to the metal, and Kylo felt a faint buzzing of energy through their restricted bond. "It feels like how you were before you left the Dark."

Kylo sighed softly and closed his eyes for a moment. "You know, as a child I would've killed for something to stop the Force, to make me normal like everyone else. Like my father."

He heard Rey's soft intake of air, but she said nothing and let her thumb run over the top of his hand. Kylo opened his eyes again and let out a slow sigh. The Force swirled within him widely, eager for an escape into the galaxy around him, but it felt balanced as usual. "It was so easy to use the Dark Side before. But now that I have you…"

"And the Padawans. And little Arian." Rey smiled and pressed her lips to the side of his face for a moment. She curled up her legs and leaned on his shoulder. "If a few days away from them on Tatooine doesn't help, we'll think of something else."

Kylo nodded and wrapped an arm around Rey's shoulders, ignoring the worry that gnawed at the back of his mind. "Once we get this off, we could finally have our honeymoon."

Rey grinned up at him, and Kylo could not help the tug of his own lips at the sight. "I haven't forgotten your promise to take me to Naboo."

Kylo pressed a kiss to the top of his wife's head. "I know. I saw the pictures and lists of things you want to see there on your datapad."

Her hand swatted his chest. "Why were you looking through my datapad?"

"I couldn't find mine, and I couldn't exactly use the Force to get it." Kylo wrapped his free arm over his chest to protect himself from Rey's harmless hits.

She smacked his arm and rolled her eyes. "It fell on the floor – "

They both fell against the table as the shuttle shuddered and turned sharply. Kylo pushed the table out of the way, and Rey scrambled to her feet. She stumbled on the way to the pilot's chair as the shuttle dipped again and pushed her hand out to use the Force to stabilize herself. Kylo's hands scrabbled for purchase as he went flying across the space, and he tried for a futile moment to stop himself with the Force. He slammed against the opposite wall and felt the air rush out of his lungs.

The shuttle righted, and Kylo slowly stood as he sucked in air greedily, hearing Rey cursing over the sound of the control panel's beeps. "What in the stars was that?"

Rey shook her head and gripped the controls as they vibrated in her hands. "Take the controls."

Kylo reached around her and held the shaking controls. Rey ducked under his arms and pulled off a piece of the wall paneling. "The wiring's frayed."

The controls shuddered in Kylo's hands, and he clenched his left hand as tight as possible as he reached to pull the lever to take the shuttle out of hyperspace. "Can you fix it?"

"I doubt there are spare wires hanging around." He heard her rummaging in the back of the shuttle followed by a clatter of what was probably tools. "I could tie the sides together. I just need something to support them."

Kylo tried to glance at the navigational screen to identify a white planet nearby, but the controls jerked, and he struggled to keep the shuttle from tipping again. He heard Rey pull off another panel behind him followed by a string of curses in the language of Jakku.

He spared a quick glance over his shoulder to see Rey kneeling on the floor. "What?"

"There's… I don't know what it is. It looks like it's causing too much pressure on the wires. Maybe I can just pull…"

Kylo heard a loud bump, and the controls jerked wildly out of his hands. The shuttle tipped to the side again. Kylo fell against the wall and caught a glimpse of the planet coming rapidly into view. The shuttle trembled as it plummeted into the planet's atmosphere.

Kylo brought his leg up to kick against the control panel and propelled himself across the space to Rey. He wrapped himself around her small frame, and he vaguely sensed her use of the Force through their bond.

The shuttle convulsed underneath them, and everything went dark.

"Kylo?"

His eyelids felt too heavy to open, and he wondered how much sleep he had gotten. He would need some caf to get him through the Padawans' training. An odd, dull pain ached at his left side, and he felt a strange throbbing in his head. Had he been drinking the night before? He usually avoided alcohol for it inhibited his connection to the Force.

"Kylo, wake up."

The urgency in Rey's voice alarmed him, and he dragged open his eyes against their will. Dim red emergency lights shadowed the worry on his wife's face. It took several long moments before he recalled clutching Rey as they crashed. "Rey? You all right?"

A dark stain was spreading along the knee of her grey trousers, and Kylo carefully pulled himself into a sitting position. He reached a hand to the growing stain, but Rey shook her head with wide eyes. "The shuttle's sinking into snow, and I don't have the strength to stop it." Her gaze flicked to the cuff around Kylo's wrist, and his heart sank in his chest at the unspoken words between them. "We need to get out before we're buried."

Rey had told him of the sinking sands on Jakku and how she had nearly been pulled under one as a scavenger. She was terrified of being buried alive, and her fear echoed through their weak bond as he took her hand to stand. The shuttle gave an eerie groan as he felt it lower into the snow. "See if Poe put any emergency kits on board. I'll find our bags."

Glass from a broken viewport crunched underneath his boots as he picked his way over the dented and broken wall they had been laying upon. The small table was overturned nearby, and his side throbbed as he pushed it out of the way to reveal Rey's brown bag and his small black one. He pulled out a blaster pistol from his own bag and attached it to his belt next to his lightsaber hilt. For all he knew, the First Order could have planned for them to crash on a planet they inhabited.

As he turned back to Rey, the shuttle lurched, and snow piled in through the cracks in the main viewport. His wife pushed up with her hand, and the escape hatch on the ceiling – now the wall – of the shuttle popped open. Kylo breathed a small sigh of relief that the hatch was still barely above the snow line. Rey threw the two emergency kits up and jumped to grab the ledge. Her fingers missed by centimeters, and she fell to her left knee with a soft gasp of pain. Kylo flinched as he expected to feel the pain of her reopened wound and felt the familiar frustration build up again as he realized he could not.

"Let me help." Kylo tossed their bags out of the hatch, and Rey began to protest before snow began to fall in from the opening. A look of panic crossed her face, and she allowed him to grip her waist and lift her a small distance from the floor to climb out. The ache in his side turned into a sharp fire as he hoisted himself out of the shuttle. His ankle clipped the top of the hatch and felt Rey jerk him away from the rapidly submerging shuttle with the Force.

Kylo looked back at the barely visible side of the shuttle and let out a slow breath that condensed in a heavy cloud in front of him. "Lucky you woke when you did."

"Uh-huh." Rey's voice trembled, and Kylo pulled himself to his feet to see her shivering in her thin clothes. He gathered their strewn bags and emergency kits and took his cloak from his bag before handing it to his wife. She shrugged it around her shoulders and frowned at him. "Why did you pack a cloak to take to Tatooine?"

"It has a hood, and I didn't really want to be recognized by any First Order spies that might be there." He glanced at the communicator on his wrist and cursed his luck that glass had lodged into the circuitry. "Your comm working?"

Kylo eyed the growing stain around Rey's knee as she tapped her own communicator. "Power's low, but I'll send as strong of a signal as I can. Hopefully BB-8 will catch it."

Wind whipped at Kylo's face as he scanned their very white surroundings. A wall of clouds hid the sun from view, and he guessed they only had two or three hours before they lost what little warmth it provided. Small lumps dotted the horizon, but they looked to be small hills rather than houses. He tried for a futile moment to feel out with the Force for lifeforms. "We need shelter. Can you sense anyone nearby?"

Rey huddled against him to shield herself from the wind and shook her head. "No one, although I feel like the Force is pulling me to go that way."

Kylo trusted her and the Force enough to nod as she pointed to his left. "Let's walk for an hour. If we don't find anything, we can try to make at least a wind barrier out of the snow."

He shouldered the two bags, and Rey held onto the two emergency kits with one hand. They walked with their arms around each other for warmth as they ventured into the snowy landscape. The wind whipped the snow around their face, and frustration flared in Kylo's chest that he still could not sense anything around them. He felt blind without the Force.

The cloudy sky quickly grew darker, and Kylo could feel Rey's body tremble against his. Her teeth chattered audibly through her blue-tinged lips.

"Use the Force to raise your body temperature a bit." The frigid air hurt his lungs as he spoke, and he watched Rey's flushed face as it shifted into a look of concentration. Her teeth stopped clicking, and he nodded in satisfaction. She was still unused to the cold, but the Force could keep her going for a while longer.

He nodded to the emergency kits to take her mind away from the cold. "I'm a little surprised Poe stocked not one but two of those on his shuttle."

"He said he learned on Jakku that having emergency kits on board was the only thing the First Order did right." The end of Rey's sentence was interrupted by her laugh, and Kylo grinned at the sound.

He pulled his wife closer as a strong gust of wind slashed against them. Her feet slipped through some ice, and Kylo's side burned as he caught his wife. He finally pressed his hand against it to feel for what he assumed was cut made worse by the face he did not have the Force to help him ignore it. His fingers felt something sticky on his clothes, and his hand met something that was definitely not his own body. Sharp pain rippled up to his shoulder as he felt a hard shard of metal embedded in his body.

"Are you all right?" Rey looked up at him with concern, and he knew she had sensed the burn of the injury.

"I'll be fine." He met her worried eyes, and the memory of their first duel on the snowy Starkiller Base flitted through his mind. How desperate he had been to resist Rey's Light. His side had been damaged then, too, by something worse than a piece of metal.

Taking a deep breath, he brought his hand up the injury and pressed his hand against it slowly. A spasm of pain shot through him, and he let the Force trapped within him pull on the self-inflicted torture.

"What in the stars are you doing?" Rey moved in front of him and stopped walking, her eyes narrowed in a glare.

Kylo crossed his arms over his chest and could not help the shiver that ran through him. He pulled on the small irritation the movement caused in his new wound. "The point of this trip was to try to awaken the Dark Side of my powers. That's what I'm doing."

"Not by hurting yourself! Isn't that what Snoke made you do?" Rey darted to his side before he could stop her and examined his sticky clothes. "There's a better way than causing yourself more damage."

Kylo turned to shield his side and shifted their bags to cover the wound. "The Dark Side is about using pain and anger to fuel its power. I can't really use anger since you always calm me down. So pain it is."

Rey wrapped the dark cloak further around her body and scowled. "I won't let you hurt yours – "

A yell escaped Kylo's lips as something large and hairy smashed him into the snow. The attacking animal snarled down at him, and he distantly heard Rey scream his name before its weight flew off him. Kylo blinked several times as a daze clouded his sight, and he rolled onto his side. Deep red stained the snow, and he pressed his hand over the wound. His breaths came in shallow gasps through the stabbing pain his side, and he remained on his knees as he heard Rey's quick footsteps approach.

He looked up through the blowing snow, and it took him longer than usual to register the dark shape coming behind Rey. His cold fingers fumbled fruitlessly for the blaster at his belt. "Rey!"

She turned in time to avoid the brunt of the sharp claws, but blood blossomed through newly formed holes in the cloak. Her bleeding knee buckled, sending her sprawling into the snow. Her uninjured arm lifted slowly to grab the lightsaber from her back.

Panic and terror flooded through Kylo as the beast of an animal reared back for another swipe at his wife. Her lightsaber activated, and she swung it wildly from where she lay on the group. The animal yelped and backed away as her blue blade seared through its fur. Rey struggled to her feet and brandished her saber threateningly.

Kylo finally pulled his blaster from his belt and aimed at the animal. The bolt hit the animal – which he recognized as a wampa – in the leg, and it swept out a paw wildly into Rey. She flew to the side and crashed into a hill of ice. She fell to motionless to the snow.

Kylo's heart nearly stopped. He could not sense Rey, could not sense her heartbeat or her electrifying presence through the Force. She could be dead because of him in the bitter cold, and the kriffing cuff kept him from the right of even knowing.

He shuffled through the snow and yanked hard on the frozen cuff, desperate for it burn in every depths of hell that may exist for him to be able to sense Rey once again. His cloak covered her still body in the snow, and Kylo locked his eyes on it as he broke into a run toward her. His side screamed at the motion, but he refused to allow it to keep him from his wife.

The soft growl of the wampa broke his thoughts, and Kylo watched in horror as it raced toward Rey's form. He threw his hands out instinctively.

Agony tore through his side and mixed with his fear for Rey. The wampa flipped backward in the snow, and Kylo closed his right hand into a fist as he raised it into the air. The animal rose by its throat, letting out pitiful whimpers as it thrashed against the force holding it captive.

Kylo watched it struggle to breathe for several moments, and his eyes flicked to his wife's immobile form. He dropped the beast unceremoniously into the snow and stalked toward it, his lightsaber igniting comfortably in his hand. His purple blade reflected in the fear of the animal's large, dark eye. The wampa shifted weakly in the snow, but Kylo willed it to remain motionless like it had done to Rey. He ended its life with a long cut through its chest and throat.

The humming of the lightsaber cut through the sudden silence of the snowy landscape, and Kylo looked down at the blade. He had not used it in well over a week since he had nearly lost control of it, but now it blazed in his hand as an extension of himself. He felt the Dark Side pulse through him, stronger than it had been in years. He half expected the lightsaber to turn red in his hand.

"Kylo?"

Rey's head lifted from the snow, her brown eyes wide as she watched him. Snow clung to her brunette hair in clumps. Her hand covered her bleeding arm, and she studied him carefully. "The Force…"

Kylo deactivated his lightsaber and clipped it back to his belt as relief flooded through him. His hand brushed against the blaster, and he wondered why he would carry such a weapon before he remembered the cuff around his wrist. With a brusque gesture of his fingers, the metal opened and fell into the snow as he dropped to his knees next to his wife.

Rey wrapped her arms around his middle, and Kylo let out a hiss as she squeezed his wound. The Dark flared hotter within him. His wife pressed her lips to his, and he felt the full strength of their bond connect. The Dark recoiled at Rey's Light in his mind and screamed to get rid of her. Kylo forced himself to latch on to his wife's presence. She had not been physically gone, but dear stars, he had missed her.

Bright light shone through Kylo's closed eyelids, and he lifted a hand to watch a shuttle emblazoned with the New Republic's seal descend nearby. Two figures ran out into the blowing snow, and Kylo sensed the vibrant energy of Jessika and Poe before their faces came into view. They each clutched thick blankets, and the Padawan quickly wrapped hers around Rey's shivering form.

Poe pressed his blanket into Kylo's arms and stole a glance at the dead wampa. Kylo pulled on the blanket, which radiated welcome heat, around himself with numb fingers and scooped up the open cuff, feeling its cold weight in his hands as he followed the Damerons back to the shuttle.

"BB-8 caught the last bit of your signal and altered Jessika. I was meeting with the Senate's military council when she found me." Poe scowled at the shuttle. "Unfortunately, someone insisted on accompanying us, and I didn't really have time to argue when I saw you were on Imei."

Kylo exchanged a glance with Rey, and they climbed the shuttle's ramp. Kilnetel's green form nearly negated the inviting warmth. Kylo briefly debated about returning to the freezing planet rather than share a shuttle ride with the Twi'lek.

Poe slipped into the pilot's seat as the ramp clicked shut, and Jessika pressed a medical kit into Kylo's hands. He sensed her sympathy through the Force as she took the co-pilot's chair. The shuttle lifted smoothly away from the snow under Poe's guidance.

Kilnetel smiled prettily up at Kylo, and the Dark roared inside of him as he acutely sensed her sensitivity to the Force. "I'm so glad you and Master Solo are safe."

The Dark whispered to silence her, but Kylo only flashed a bitter smile back at her. "I'm sure the First Order will not be." He dropped the open cuff on the floor in front of Kilnetel and moved to join his wife.

Rey sank into some seats as far from the Senator as possible and took the medical kit from Kylo's hands. "Should get that metal out of you."

Kylo's eyes flicked to the Twi'lek, who watched them intently. "Med droids can do that."

He felt Rey's worry through their bond, and the Dark welcomed it greedily. It whispered that he did not want more Senators poking their noses into his business. Besides, the medical droids would likely make him stay in the hospital overnight and away from Rey. He did not want to be away from her now that he could fully sense her again.

He shrugged off the warm blanket and clipped off his thick belt. He then pulled up his two layers of clothes and flinched as his wound throbbed angrily. He did not want to pull off his shirt entirely with Kilnetel nearby, but the back of his mind whispered to taunt the Twi'lek with something she could not have. He met the Senator's eyes challengingly for a moment before he slipped out of his shirt and looked down at the jagged injury.

Kylo felt Kilnetel's eyes on his bare chest, and he pulled the thick blanket over his right shoulder to keep warm as the hairs on the back of his neck rose under her stare. Rey slipped her own blanket off, and with a flick of her fingers, it flew across the small space and on top of Kilnetel. The thick material muffled the Twi'lek's yell of alarm. "Do keep your eyes to yourself, Senator."