Kylo is taken aback at this trust Rey has put into him. He wasn't expecting her to be so open. Their conversations always vacillated wildly between extremes, but the pendulum had never swung this far in exposing her vulnerability before.
He tests the trust, "What were they? What were the coordinates?"
Rey cocks her head sideways, and her eyes narrow, as if unable to believe how brazen his line of questioning is, "Why would I ever tell you that? The last time we were in the same physical space you lacerated my insides."
"I had no intention of ever hurting you," he realizes it is the wrong thing to say as it leaves his mouth, he realizes how wrong everything he is saying is turning out to be.
"You told me you were going to destroy me. You told Luke you were going to destroy me. How can you say you never meant to hurt me?" Rey's voice is strong and edging on outrage.
Something like shame clouds Kylo's face. Something in Rey bursts, and rage bubbles to the surface. She is done playing their games.
"What is that?" her voice jumps with contempt as she gestures towards his face, "What is this? You threaten me and yet you look at me like that when I push back. You've sworn your life to being my enemy, made a conscious choice to go against me more than once, and yet you're here, talking to me as if there isn't this war between us. Is confusing me part of your thirst for power? Is making me totally incapable of reading you, when I can literally hear your thoughts, some sort of sadistic game that you can't stop playing with me?" Her voice reaches a fever pitch until she is almost yelling before she breathes out, pausing in her ire, her head falling listlessly to its side, tired from the tirade. Her voice is soft when she speaks again, her gaze focused on the floor, not Kylo, "I thought for one moment years ago that you were the only thing that made sense in this galaxy. Now you're the one thing that confuses me most." She closes her eyes and hopes that when she opens them he will be gone.
Instead, she hears a demand.
"Look at me."
"No."
"Look at me, please," his desperation catches in her, it always does.
Rey looks up at him through blurry eyes, his figure obscured by her rising tears, her voice betraying her, "You don't understand how hard it is to look at you, to see you. You're covered in these pinpricks of light and they're so bright, so concentrated, trying to escape through the cracks of whatever you've encased yourself in."
Kylo's sudden rage bursts through the room and he shouts back at her, "I have to live this! I have to live every moment feeling as if I am about to be torn apart." The familiar boom of his voice startles Rey for a moment, but she doesn't stir. It had been so long since she heard him scream this way, "I have to endure this constant struggle within me, and then there's you." His voice disarms itself as he says the last word, as he addresses Rey directly, "You, still willing to look at me even if it hurts. You're the only one who has been ever willing to do that. The rest just sent me away. You, still so sure something is in me, that I don't think exists anymore. You're the only person left in the Galaxy who still sees that. I killed the rest of them."
His words should frighten her, coming out like a threat, but Rey takes a step forward, "Kylo…"
He looks away from her, as if looking at her say that name to him is too much, "You, with all your light, who still managed to bleed a kyber crystal. How did you do that? I am not the confusing one. You are the enigma, the outlier. You bewilder me. I am consumed by you."
His words come out like an accusation and Rey breaks her gaze. A tear that had been welling in her, that she had been willing to go away, streams down her face. She lets it fall, focusing on the drop inching down her face instead of the unbearable tension that surrounds them.
He looks to her as her single tear falls, his voice unwavering, "I need you to close the bond again."
"What?" Rey's head jolts back at the sudden turn in the conversation, causing her tear to fall from her chin. No more come.
"I can't, I can't do it. I can't trust myself to do it completely" he fumbles with where to place his hands when he says this.
"What are you talking about?" Rey's mouth gapes in disbelief.
"I know you're going to the coordinates. When you're on the Falcon it's hard to pinpoint your location, but at a fixed coordinate I will know where you are. I will follow you. I need you to close the bond so I can't."
"I haven't decided whether I'm going," Rey lies.
"Yes you have. Stop worrying about convincing the Wookie. He's devoted to you and always willing to break the rules a little. He's good at keeping secrets."
Rey's eyebrows knit together, trying and failing to read him. "Do you really lack that much self control that you can't stop yourself from killing me if you know where I am?"
"I think we both know you would end me first."
Rey shakes her head, scrunching her nose in defiance, "I've never wanted to destroy you."
"Too late. You already have."
With that, Kylo is gone. He leaves his words in the air and Rey with her fists clenched in reflex. Everything seems humid and damp in his wake, and it makes it hard for her to breathe.
She sits down, hard, on the cold ground, and the droids that had been so stilled in his presence start to shift slightly with curiosity at her reaction. She covers her eyes with her palms and presses them deep into the sockets. She can feel her eyes shake under the pressure. The afterimage his light had seared into her retina hangs until she can almost make him out, a full human being comprised entirely of light. When she releases, the room around her is swimming with phosphenes, the very fabric of space around her seems to be swaying.
She gathers herself. Kylo was right, she was going to the coordinates. As soon as Threepio had said them, an invisible string tightened in her, linking her to them. An understanding that this was the next step washed over her, and she knew it was the force that drew her, that gave her the coordinates, that beckoned her. The feeling that the coordinates held something she needed to see nestled deep inside her.
She had spent the years since Luke's passing still asking herself the same question: what was her place in all of this?
She thought she had known a few times. When she sat in that hut on Achc-To, she had been sure her part was to bring Ben back, but she couldn't. After, she thought it was to protect the people she loved with everything she had, but here she sat on the Falcon while they were light years away, fighting without needing her.
All of her sureties had slowly been stripped from her and Luke was right, nothing had gone the way she thought it would. She was still just as unsure what her place in all this was, why she had been fated to save BB-8 as the sun set on her last full day on Jakku.
That moment had changed the entirety of her future and it all happened so quickly. Since then, her life had been full, there was no doubt, but with that fullness came an almost unbearable weight. She didn't know how much longer she could carry the burden of it all. On Jakku, she knew where her life would lead her. It was sad and it was small, but she knew.
Now she wasn't sure of anything.
And the one person who could maybe understand, who could maybe help her carry the weight, had just asked her to wall up their connection.
But maybe, maybe these coordinates would have some answers.
She acts quickly, not wanting to seem as if she wanted to keep something he had asked her to throw away. She pushes herself off the ground and walks in a trance to her bunk. She opens the drawer underneath the beds and takes out the Jedi texts. The page she needs is easy to find, earmarked from years prior. It takes her longer than she wants to admit to calm herself after that encounter, but eventually, the pulse of the force syncs with her own and she slips into the plane.
Kylo stands right next to her, but she can only see his broad back. He's facing resolutely away from her. Static swirls around them, but he is as clear as he had been in the storage room dozens of minutes before. She looks at his still figure for a moment too long before concentrating on shutting him out. As she rebuilds the bond, his silhouette starts to wave at the edges of her peripheral vision, morphing from a crisp outline to something more amorphous. The fibers which hold them together start to stretch unnaturally, pushing what was Kylo further and further from Rey. The force stutters and jerks, fighting Rey back, but she persists. She thinks she sees the figure turn and reach out at the very last moment, but it could also be nothing, everything is undulating so madly. Eventually, it was like it had been before the forest, before he had marked her. He is a mass in the distance that barely registers. She slowly comes out of it and finds herself back on her bunk, looking at the wall in front of her. Her eyes shift in and out of focus, and she can only feel numbness rising in her.
Kylo was right about another thing, too; Chewie was easy to convince. Almost before she was done explaining it to him, he was up and taking his long strides to the holomap.
Chewie pulled up the map in the common room, igniting a microcosm around them. He walked through it, almost to the edge, before finding the speck of her coordinates. A small, excited roar escaped him as he pointed to it.
It was deep in the Outer Rim Territories, and there was not a safe route set into the ship's paralight system yet, so Rey and Chewie had to manually chart and punch in variants to the system. They spent a few hours mulling over which path might be the safest route. At any time she could have changed her mind, could have told Chewie she wanted to stay instead, but she didn't.
Before they leave, Rey discharges a small radio message into space for Finn, Rose, and Poe, in the highly unlikely event that they make it back before she does. In it, she only says, "I'm safe. I will be back soon," and she hopes this will be enough to stop them from wasting their fuel reserves on her.
Chewie enters in the route as Rey straps herself in. The familiar streak of stars extends in front of them and their bodies lean back into their seats.
A minute passes before the ship moans and their bodies heave towards the window of the Falcon, which is now filled almost completely by perfect red orb.
As the planet grows closer, Rey's gut grows heavier, and darkness rises like a tide in her. When they enter the atmosphere, she is swimming in it. There is no fear in her. Instead, she is reminded of dreams she would have of the ocean as a child, before she even knew what an ocean was. In the dream, she would swim too far out in the dark sea, and all the light from the shore would fade to almost nothingness, but she would still keep going, propelled by something unknown. She would keep going until she was enveloped in utter darkness, until everything around her was black. It was then that the water beneath her would begin to glow with her movements, bioluminesce rising from her wading hands and legs.
Luke's voice from Achc-To ripples through her head You went straight for it. You didn't even try to resist. It had been the same in the caves that had called to her when she needed to rebuild her saber. But she dove head first, because she knew that even in the darkest of places, she could make light.
The Falcon creaks as it lands, its metal expanding in retaliation to the heat outside. Large swaths of bubbling lava surround the landing platform, crashing like waves against the rocks.
As she powers down the Falcon, the familiar blue lights of its interior are devoured by the red glow of the planet. Rey feels her skin and eyes darken against the dim outside. Chewie's voice surges with reluctance against this hellish scene. Rey looks at him with complete confidence in her decision, and he quiets.
Rey pushes herself up, not quite sure where the force needs her to be yet. She walks back to the storage room, her maintenance shop, and turns to the droids in the corner. She had left them off for long enough. She switches C-3PO back on first.
"Oh, Master Rey, how good to see you again."
Rey smiles at him, glad to hear he recognizes her again and is not calling her Senator Amidala any longer.
She turns to R2 next and reaches behind him to find his power switch. He powers on with a few beeps and she puts her hands on either side of his body to steady herself to stand. Before she can engage her legs to lift herself up, R2's beeps turn into panicked mechanical screams and Rey's body reactively tightens as he runs through her, pushing her to the ground.
"R2!" Rey and Threepio scream at the same time, as the tiny droid careens towards the cockpit.
Threepio helps Rey to her feet before waddling behind her as she runs after the errant droid. R2 and Chewie have already begun a yelling match when Rey catches up.
Rey only can make out a few beeps between the Wookie's yelling and R2's panic, "What do you mean we have to leave?"
R2 starts moving wildly, turning his body back and forth between Rey and Chewie while showering them with endless cascading beeps.
Rey kneels down to R2's level, trying to calm the frantic droid, "R2, it's okay. I feel the danger too. I won't let anything happen to you, to any of you."
He calms, but continues beeping, trying to get her to understand this is different.
Rey straightens. She remembers her initial impression of R2 as secretive. She wonders what he is not saying.
"R2, I promise, we've made it through so much more than Mustafar."
R2's defeated whistle rings out at the name again, Mustafar.