chapter summary:

Where Rey finds out that you can run from the past, but you'll never get too far.

"You gave me away like chattel when I was never yours to give."

Rey hugged herself closely as she said it. She was still wearing her husband's shirt, and all of her old Master's attempts to make her take it off for something warmer had been met with her greatest vitriol.

"You speak as if I sold you, Rey. I didn't."

Luke was too calm. Too collected and even-headed for the heated argument they were having. It made Rey acutely aware of her own shortcomings with patience. They'd had this discussion before and not just the once, but that made her no less in the right now.

"Rey," Master Luke continued, seemingly unaffected to the wall of her scorn. "You have no right to be so angry with me. Anger is a weakness. I taught you that."

Rey's eyes finally snapped up from their fixed place on the stone tiled floor. She glared at her old master, her lips pulling back into a sneer that would be better suited to her husband's regal face than her own. Yes, patience was gone, and civility would be next if Luke didn't begin to own his accountability in all this.

"Master." She puts as snide an emphasis on the word as she can muster, and her hackles on raise at Luke's deadpan sigh of dismissal. "If you didn't sell me, you pawned me. That's nearly as bad. You gave me to Kylo with no quarter. You didn't once ask me how I felt about the marriage. My only regret is that I would have said no."

The words spilled out unbidden and Master Luke raised an eyebrow. She hadn't meant to say that. Rey had hardly said her true feelings to herself, let alone to one of the two men she was the most furious with.

She'd just admitted she would have regretted not marrying Kylo. Even a week ago swallowing down that thought would have been impossible.

"Your only regret, Rey?" Luke asked. "Truly? If it is then I made the right choice. I knew you would be a boon for him, and that he would bring out the best of strength in you as well. It was a good match to pair you with my nephew."

Rey's face still blanched at that final word. Master Luke… was Kylo's uncle. His blood. The karking brother of the karking Empress. How was it that she hadn't seen that coming? There hadn't been the slightest hint, or had there? Not that it mattered, though. Rey had said far too much already.

Given the chance, Rey would have married Kylo again. Again and again. Oh there were things she would have changed, but never him.

It must be the stress of these last days. Of waking up in a strange place surrounded by those… those things. She had been put under for too long. Her first waking thoughts were that her husband must surely be dead and she had screamed and clawed her grief into the echoing stone walls of the caves before the wraiths had brought her old Master to her to calm reason back into her mind.

"Take me to him," Rey snapped.

She had been demanding that this whole time. Rey wanted to see her husband and only then would she allow herself another misguided moment of hope. Master Luke had promised that to her- that she wasn't a widow. That Kylo though badly injured and hovering at the edge of death was getting better. He'd assured her that these creatures had found her husband before it was too late, but Rey needed the proof of her own eyes.

"I will take you to him, Rey," Luke promises. "As soon as his condition improves. He's ailing terribly. We weren't sure if- well, we had doubts at first."

Rey flinched at that and studies the tiles underneath her feet again. Her eyes itched like they longed to cry, but she was quite sure she was empty of tears by now.

"What are you hiding from me?"

It's not a question Rey truly expects an answer to. Maybe she doesn't want one, but the need for the truth itches and claws at her mind until it's all she can hear.

Luke shifted his stand from one hip to the other and Rey felt meanly pleased to see how, even after a comparatively short time since she'd last seen him, his psychical health had gone down perceptively. Good. Served him right.

"He looks very poorly right now, Rey. It wouldn't be good for you to see him like this."

That broke a bitter scoff from Rey. She buried her face in her palms, taking a long and deep breath until her lungs ached. Then she dragged her hands through her hair and glared at the door.

"You don't get to tell me things like that, Master," she spat. "I'm a grown woman. Old enough to be given into a marriage she never wanted. And now I'm the wife to a king, no less, not a child who needs to be sheltered from the cruelty she's seen only but a few days before now."

It had been Dala that had calmed her down as she ran through the cave tunnels. Rey had been inconsolable at first. Nearly uncontrollable. She had fled from the wraiths that surrounded her when she woke, and then next from her old master as well.

And then she had seen their horse. That sweet, even-tempered animal that Rey had never really known how to interact with. She'd probably scared the poor thing half to death as she'd ran to embrace it. Dala had reared up, disturbed by all the chaos Rey was bringing with her, and Master Luke had pulled her back from getting a proper kicking to the chest like she might have deserved.

He's alive, he'd promised then. And now Rey was done with waiting.

Their eyes were white and their bodies twisted and wrapped in black gauze.

Bile rose up in Rey's throat at the very sight of them. These wraiths were as hideous as they were terrifying, and worse still were how many of them there were. They creeped about the underground tunnels, their shrouded figures seeming to occupy every corner. With every step Rey and Luke took the wraith's turned to follow, their unseeing eyes gazing with a hollowness that sent a shiver along Rey's spine.

"What kind of soulless monsters are these?"

Her voice was hushed but it still against the stone walls surrounding on all sides.

Luke stopped in his lead to shoot her a very unfavorable frown. Around them the wraiths drew back further, and for a long moment there was nothing but absolute silence.

"They are the Xa Fel," he explained. "Fel is their tribal name, and we are guests in their Xa tunnels. They were humans once, just as we are. Likely now though few would recognize them as such."

His tone was thick was disapproval. Rey straightened, her eyes sliding sidelong to glance at the closest wraith. It's whole body was bent at an unnatural angle, and the only exposed area of it was a single white eye. The pale skin around it was marked with a spiderweb of scars that disappeared into the edge of black wrappings.

The eye narrowed and Rey's grip tightened on her staff. Somehow she had the feeling she had omitted some sort of major indecorum just now.

"Why are they?" Rey hushed her voice further. The fingers of her free hand fluttered in the direction of the black shape.

Luke rested his weight against his cane and took an audible breath before answering.

"Generations ago they were slaves to the northern kingdoms. The same place that the caravan you had been traveling with hailed from. There was and still is a great mining industry there, and the Fel were forced to work in the tunnels. As the lore goes, they were kept down there for so long, sometimes years at a time, that an affliction befell them. They became blinded by whatever substance they were exposed to in those tunnels."

Rey risked a look back at the beings, and they seemed to glare right through her. She swallowed, a gnawing sense of guilt at her own harsh words beginning to bloom, and she nodded for Luke to continue.

"Just blinded?" she asked.

Luke shook his head, his expression falling for a moment before he recovered himself.

"Most of them lost much more," he continued. "Whatever they were exposed to in those mines made their bodies too disfigured to be of use to their owners, and those that were lucky were thrown out into the desert wastes. Whatever their affliction is, it remains with them still, passed on from one generation of Fel to the next."

Rey swallowed, a sickly feeling settling deep into her gut.

"If-" her voice wavered, "if they're from the north, how did they come to be here?"

Luke dropped his chin and began to walk again. Rey hesitated, looking back over her shoulder at the lurking shapes, before quickly moving into step with her old master.

"The Fel are guardians of the whole desert, Rey. They have lived here long before the flag of Alderaan flew in the wind overhead. There are only a scant few left now, and these Xa tunnels are as close to a homeland as they have anymore."

Rey hadn't been allowed to know where they are right now, though Luke had lead her to believe they were somewhere within a mountain range that ran close to the coast. The wraith- the Fel- that had brought her here had drugged her, allegedly for both her own good and to keep the exact location of their caves a secret. Aside from that initial drugging Rey had to admit that they had done nothing else against her, and even Dala had seemed to be kept in good care.

"Why are they all watching us?" Rey whispered.

Unseeing eyes had followed their every step as Luke had lead her through a maze of tunnels. There were a network of doorways here and open rooms, and without her master's guidance she would have been well and truly lost.

"They are not used to seeing humans so close. Those of them that go to the surface keep their distance. They watch, but they rarely intervene."

"And the Resistance?"

Another fork in the tunnels and Luke leads them on the right hand path. Rey had been trying to keep a mental account of their route but it had begun to feel hopeless.

"They are in another section of these caves," Luke says. "They know of the Fel, but are expressly forbidden from coming into this part of their tunnels."

Luke came to a stop then at a door. He rested a heavy hand against it and gave Rey a very serious glare.

"Rey, the Resistance does not know that you and Ben are here. Not yet. I don't know how they would react if they did, and it's essential that we keep it that way until the time is right."

It wasn't a threat, Rey knew that with a certainty. It was a warning. Master Luke was telling her without having to say it that she must stay put and keep quiet.

Still though, there's a question that had been burning in her mind ever since she'd woken up and had seen Luke.

"Did they try to kill him?" she asks. "Shortly after Kylo and I had left the palace, we were attacked in my old home in the desert by… two assassins. Were they sent by the Resistance?"

Luke looked away for a moment for a moment, and Rey noticed how his brow was pulling together. He shook his head and her shoulders relaxed incrementally.

"No, Rey," he said. "That was not our doing, though it hardly seems surprising that the Alderaan throne is being threatened now. The assassins could as likely be sent from an rival kingdom as they could from someone within the palace itself."

Oh yes, Rey and Kylo both had thought about that. Her husband had no shortage of enemies. At one point he had even suspected someone in his own harem. One of his wives, no less. It was yet another reason why they should simply disappear as soon as they are able. Let the Empress worry about who sits on the Alderaan throne. She'd been gone for so long she might well ave forgotten about it just as she'd forgotten about her own son.

"I would like to see him now," she said quietly.

Luke nodded and pulled his hand away from the door he'd been leaning against.

"Rey, I must warn you again, he will likely be a terrible sight for-"

"I saw him when he was only a few breaths away from taking his last," Rey snapped. "Anything above that can only be an improvement for my memory."

Luke looked like he wanted to say something more on the matter, but he finally relented. He gestured at an open doorway further down the tunnel where a flickering light peeped out.

"I will give you a few minutes alone with Ben," he said. "Come and get me if you need me, or I will join you both shortly. There are still many things we need to discuss."

"Hello."

It was a simple and wholly insufficient greeting. Rey still smiled softly as she said it though. Her heart ached. Literally ached. There was a stabbing, throbbing pain in her chest that bloomed with every breath in and only barely subsided with each breath out.

It mirrored in tandem to Kylo's own.

There had never been a sweeter sight than her husband's chest rising and falling steadily under the thick woolen blanket that they'd draped him in.

Oh for sure he looked a sight. Paler than a piece of parchment. Lips blue like the shadow Nevan had smudged herself with. He was thinner, too. Even after just a few days. But he was alive.

Her husband, Kylo Ren, heir to the crown of Alderaan and quite possibly the single most irresistibly infuriating man Rey had ever met in all her days was alive.

And he probably didn't even know she was here. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered, because Rey had won. She had succeeded in her goal. She'd found someone out in that desert full of nothing, and they had rescued her husband when she couldn't help him herself.

Rey lightly stroked his face. His skin was cool and there was a sheen to it that she could see even under the dim candlelight. Oh so carefully she lifted the sheet up from his torso to see the extent of the real damage.

His wound was swollen and an angry red. It was puffed up around the stitches, but there was a distinctly herbal scent that filled her nostrils. It didn't looked infected, just miserable.

When she'd first woken up herself and Luke had calmed her- Rey might have been trying to assault or at least scream like a banshee at the wraith she found touching Dala- but that first day Master Luke had promised that Ben was in good hands. It had seemed to true. The room itself was clean though sparse. It smelled of herbs but not sickness. There was an odd sort of metal brazier which was emanating a steady heat. Rey frowned at it, having never seen anything like the faintly glowing crystals that were enclosed inside.

Kylo's form stirred and Rey immediately moved back to him. There was no other furniture in the room so she sat on the edge of the bed, positioning herself carefully so as not to dip the mattress or disturb him in any way.

He made a soft sound and Rey leaned in closer. For a moment his eyes opened just a crack but it was fleeting.

"Do you need anything?" she asked, hoping that the sound of her voice but rouse him.

It was selfish of her. He needed to rest in peace, but Rey so desperately wanted to hear him again.

He moved again, this time a little more than before. Rey lightly pressed against his shoulder, not wanting him to risk any movement to tear his stitches.

"I'm sorry."

The words were such a faint, barely discernible murmur. Rey stilled her breathing, pressing her head close to his lips and waiting for him to continue.

"It's okay, Kylo," she whispered. "I'm not angry."

Rey didn't feel any anger anymore. She felt hardly anything right now, besides relief and a soul-deep sense of hurt. These last few days had been all she had. Part of her feared for their future and whatever plans Master Luke was no doubt laying, but if they have survived going through all this they could survive anything as long as they were together.

"Mom."

Another soft murmur and Rey leaned closer and stroked his hair. He thought she was his mother? He was no doubt delirious, and the room was very dark.

Rey remembered what he had said about the Empress. Something about how he and his mother had parted on poor terms before the Empress left overseas. Rey had thought little of it at the time, and Kylo had hardly mentioned it himself since then. The fact that he had been willing to drag them both all across the desert to the ocean just to be there to greet his estranged mother when her ship arrived spoke volumes though.

"You're not a selfish man, Kylo," she whispered, her fingering twining in his damp hair. "Self-centered, often, but not selfish. Whatever transpired between you and your mother will be forgiven."

Rey pulled back to take his hand in her own. Perhaps she was imagining things, but it almost felt like he squeezed her palm back. His grip was weak, but he was there, he were here with her, and it gave her an idea.

"Ben?" she whispered, the name sounding exceptionally foreign to her ears.

Master Luke had said that was her husband's original name, but he had changed it himself to Kylo apparently after some great falling out within the family. This had been shortly before the Empress had left overseas. Luke hadn't wanted to speak on the incident any further, nor had he been receptive to answering her questions about the nature of his involvement with the Resistance at that time either.

"Ben?" she tried again.

This time his fingers squeezed lightly. Kylo's eyes opened just a little and Rey leaned forward so he could see her better. The very edges of his lips curled up in a faint smile, before he face fell slack again and sleep claimed him once more.

A knock came from the door. Master Luke entered a moment later, and his eyes immediately fell to Rey and Kylo's clasped hands resting on her lap.

She blushed, feeling oddly like a child caught doing something they weren't supposed to. Ridiculous since they were married for kark's sake, but it still felt strange to be showing any sort of intimacy in front of her old teacher.

She let go and stood up, her hands fidgeting at the edges of the tie to her robe. Luke nodded.

"We will find something more suitable for you to wear," he said. "The Fel wouldn't have anything that you would like, but I can smuggle something out of the Resistance's storerooms when I get the chance."

Rey cleared her throat, her mind fumbling with forming her next words.

"Can you- er… Can you apologize to them for me? To the… Fel? When I said that about them I didn't realize that they-"

Her voice trailed off. Luke watched her neutrally before assenting.

"That they weren't soulless monsters? I will tell them, Rey, but be assured that they're used to be called far worse. How is he?"

Luke gestures at Kylo, but Rey notes he seemed reluctant to go any further into the room than the doorway.

"Better than I last saw him," she answered honestly. "He woke very briefly and he tried to speak, but I don't- I don't think he knew who I was. He seemed very confused."

"It's the herbs. The Fel are skilled healers. My nephew's injuries were extensive, and earlier when he'd first woke he would hurt himself trying to get up. I understand that the Fel are keeping him in an induced state of comfort and peace for his own sake. Depending on how his wound heals, we might be able to begin bringing him back in another day or two."

No part of Rey liked that. Of having to put her complete trust and faith in the hands of these dark cave dwellers. However there was little other choice at this moment.

"Tell them thank you for me," she said quietly.

Luke finally took a step further inside, but only the one. Each time he looked at Kylo is was partnered with the oddest expression that Rey couldn't quite place.

"What did he say?" Luke asked. "When he woke up? Was he angry?"

Rey shook her head.

"I think he thought that I was his mother. He called out to her and… apologized. He really didn't seem to have any idea what was going on."

Luke's face fell at that and a shadow crossed his expression.

"His mother. Of course."

He left it at that and Rey watched him, trying to work out the connection in her head. How strange to think that her old teacher was the brother of the Empress. She'd only seen paintings of the Empress, and those were from many years ago/ Did they look similar? Were they close with other? Did she know of his role within the Resistance that was trying to overthrow the crown?

"What is she like?" Rey asked.

She'd heard tales of the Empress of course, but the woman herself had been gone for so long. Now that their upcoming meeting seemed like a real, tangible possibility all the questions she couldn't ask her husband began to brew in Rey's mind.

Luke didn't answer that, however, and Rey frowned. She took a step forward, willing to press the issue even if it meant opening up old wounds between her Master and his sister.

"Do you think she will like me? Is she severe? Does she- well, does she know how Kylo has been conducting himself in her absence?"

Luke straightened, his expression pulling tight as he watched her.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"W-well-" Rey began to stammer, her nervousness growing the longer Master Luke delayed answering her. "She's my mother in law. That's classically a difficult situation. I've never had a mother figure. I don't know what she will expect of…"

Rey's voice trailed off as she took in the sharp look Luke was giving her. It wasn't an expression of anger, however, but rather one of acute sadness.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" she asked.

Luke sighed deeply, his eyes closing shut. Rey looked behind herself at Kylo then back at her old teacher again.

"He didn't tell you."

Rey blinked. Then she shook her head.

"Tell me what?"

Luke opened his eyes and squared his jaw. It was a gesture she could have sworn she'd seen Kylo himself do whenever he was bracing himself for something very bad.

"What is it?" she pressed. "What didn't my husband tell me?"

Her old master took a long moment before answering, and when he spoke his voice was deliberately hushed.

"Ben's mother is dead, Rey. She passed on two months ago."

Silence and nothing more.

Seconds ticked by. The words fought to register.

Dead.

The Empress was...dead.

It didn't make sense.

Rey's mind couldn't wrap around the concept. If… if the Empress was dead… then Kylo was…

Oh.

Oh.

Rey wasn't sure if that changed nothing or absolutely everything.

Author's note:

Oh okay, so I actually had a very different setup for this chapter in mind at first, but I was having some problems with it. Thevagabondthoughts whom this whole story is a gift to helped me come up with the idea for this whole network of caves and tunnels that the Resistance has been hanging out in.

And the Xa Fel are a real Star Wars species. You can read about them on wookiepedia, and I deliberately wanted to pick something that wasn't that well known.

Here in this story they're a little changed. We're not going quite as full fantasy as would be closer to canon but there are different species and all kinds of mystical things going on. You'll find out more about the Xa caves in the upcoming chapters.

As always, you're all welcome to chat with me anytime! I'm lost-inthesunlight on tumblr or you can find me ava_avdal on twitter!

comment replies:

Paul Lenzen – Yeah, that was the stable boy from TLJ! He didn't show up at all in the 3rd movie so I wanted to give him a cameo in the very least. Thanks for commenting! :)

ldsrsc – You'll find out more about the "wraiths" soon, because Rey and Kylo are going to be down in these caves for at least one more chapter. Thanks for commenting! :)

probrediabla – Yeah, this last chapter was pretty dark, but now at least things are looking up for our duo! Not by a lot, they're still really in the thick of it, but the very worst is hopefully behind them now. The next chapter of In My Veins is coming out today (possibly already posted by the time you read this) so I hope you check it out as well! Thanks so much for commenting!

ToughSpirit – Don't worry, I promise this story will have a happy ending. We're in the final act now , so it's time for our duo to really come together. Thanks so much for commenting!

.Feathers – I managed to update not too TOO long, so that's pretty good for me! Sure, if you'd like to talk I'd love to chat with you if you're interested! FFN is very clunky for messaging, so it might be easier if you message me on twitter at Ava_Avdal or on tumblr at lost-inthesunlight :) Thanks for commenting!