As Rey lets the bay door of the Falcon down, sulfur from the planet below accosts her. The heat from the lava fields instantly dries out her eyes, and the sting brings her back to Jakku for a moment, before she realizes that this planet feels more antagonistic than Jakku ever did. Even though Jakku had effectively imprisoned her, Mustafar still feels darker and more spiteful.
Her backwards nostalgia is broken with Chewie's whining protest.
"Really? It's hot?" Rey playfully chides at the Wookie's complaint.
Chewie muffles something about that being easy to say when she has such fine fur, but continues on with her anyway.
They stand on the platform, transfixed for a moment at the lava juxtaposing itself against the permeating blackness. A sense of certainty overtakes her. The cool light still streaming out from the Falcon 's bay door is dimmed by the appearance of the two droids. Rey looks to them briefly, not wanting to see any perceived disapproval from them, because she knows she has to go, has to venture out into this place.
Rey adjusts her bag and reaches out to give Chewie a hug.
"Take care of them. I should only take a few days," she nods her heads towards the droids standing quietly above them.
Chewie breaks the hug and takes her hand. When they separate, she has a small comlink tucked into her palm, discreetly handed to her by the Wookie.
She smiles weakly, knowing that R2's meltdown must have scared him. She gives him a final pat on the shoulder before turning to the dark landforms that are raised up out of the lava behind her.
"Wait, Master Rey!" Threepio moves down the ramp as quickly as his rigid body allows. He gets to the end of the ramp before realizing R2 has not followed him, like he usually does. Threepio looks back. For once, he says nothing, just bows his head slightly at the little droid and continues on his way.
Threepio turns his attention back towards Rey, "Oh, Master Rey, do you have to go? Can't you wait for the others to get back?"
Rey smiles at Threepio and wonders if he will ever know he was the catalyst, the reason, for all of this.
"I appreciate your concern, Threepio, but I will be fine. I will be back before you know it." She wraps her arms around his stiff body and he lets out a small, "oh" before bending his elbows to try to embrace her back.
She looks briefly to R2 from over Threepio's shoulder, but as she does he turns away from her. Her lips curl into a small frown.
She waves back to them as she begins her trek towards the blackened landforms to the east.
Threepio and Chewie wave back, watching her struggling slightly, only slightly, with the weight of her bag.
When she is almost disappeared into the ether, Threepio and Chewie start to reboard the Falcon, passing R2's still body as they do.
"Well, are you coming then?" Threepio motions to R2.
R2 looks to Threepio, then back to the spot in the distance that is Rey, then back to Threepio. In an instant R2 speeds down the Falcon 's ramp towards Rey, not able to leave her alone on this harsh planet.
"R2!" Threepio screams and lunges for him, but Chewie holds him back, "Oh! He's going to get himself melted!"
R2 darts through the landscape at top speed until he catches up to Rey, almost running into her when he does. The fear and anxiety she had shoved down when she said her goodbyes is now clearly showing on her face, but when she sees R2, her face lights up. She kneels down and embraces him, tightly.
When she stands back up, she readjusts herself and looks down at the brave little droid.
"Ready?"
R2 beeps in affirmation.
They walk for what seems like hours, Rey lost in the newness of it all, R2 resolutely scanning for impending doom. Every once in a while, Rey stops to marvel at the surroundings, at the smooth terraces of igneous rock impossibly cool beneath her feet. R2 runs smack into her a few times, not paying attention when she stops, and Rey always giggles at his stout, protective focus.
Rey has never seen anything like Mustafar. Even though she is much more well traveled than she once was, Mustafar is still an anomaly. They climb upwards for a long time, traversing the hundreds of thousands of years of accumulated layers of lava flow. Once they get high enough, a large clearing spreads out in front of them. It is almost like they can see the entirety of the planet on this one flat plain. Rey is transfixed by the ground, covered in nothing but thick, cooled magma, the ripples of which fold themselves over every surface. The swirls are entrancing to her, drawing her in with their fluidity. She walks with her head down, studying them, enjoying their curves. Without her noticing, the air around her grows cooler, and when she looks up, a wall of blackness stands in front of her.
Rey looks up to see jagged rocks jutting far up into the red sky. Her head automatically points up, looking towards the scraggy peaks. There was no way. A moment ago these mountains hadn't been there. A moment ago she was in a cooling lava field. She wondered if she had just lost track of time, but she had never lost time before, not even in her most concentrated moments. She always had to be alert. But here she was with a whole mountain range in front of her that she had not noticed. She looks back to R2, but he is already running the length of the mountains, seemingly surprised too.
Rey knows she should follow R2 as he gets further away, but can't help but look back up a the mountains again. The peaks are so sinister against the angry sky. They are almost impossibly pointy. They almost look intelligently made.
R2's whistle breaks her musing. He's found something.
Rey hikes up her bag and follows R2. He is staring seemingly right into the solid cliff face and Rey wonders what he sees. It is not until she is directly next to him that she sees it too.
"This has to be some sort of optical illusion, all of this. Right?" Rey looks down to R2 and he looks back up at her, but doesn't make a sound.
In front of them, the matte obsidian rock of the cliff gives way to glistening black glass which carves itself into a deep cave, stretching impossibly in front of them. Stalactites hang from the ceiling, mirrored in onyx. Rey steps three paces to her left and it disappears. She tries the same to the right, and it fades as well. The cave is only visible if you are standing directly in front of it.
Unsure, she sits at the mouth of the cave, looking deep into the abyss in front of her. She takes out her water bottle and takes a sip before deciding her next move. She begins calculating. There is no way she can cross over or around these sudden formations.
She tries to interface with the force for guidance, but finds it impossible. The force here has swung too far to one side, and it is too crowded with shadow to allow Rey in.
The caves stand in front of her, like the mirror image of the caves she once ventured into to craft her saber.
The caves stand in front of her, like a dare.
She decides to take it. She stands up and heads in, breaking the precipice of the cliff's face. R2 beeps disbelievingly, hoping to stop her, but she continues in. His beeps turn to annoyance and he rolls in to follow her.
As they advance, the cave starts to dwindle, getting smaller and smaller as they get deeper in. She begins to worry R2 will not fit as she has to squat down and waddle awkwardly on the balls of her feet to clear the narrow ceiling. She is about to turn back when R2's spotlight settles on a small opening just up and to the left of them. Curiosity gets the best of her and she slips through it.
R2 whistles deeply as she disappears, but just as quickly, her head reappears out of the hole.
"R2, you have to see this."
He squeezes in just barely and she helps him down into the room. He is ridiculously heavy, but helps a bit by anchoring himself.
When they climb down to the surface level, they both marvel at the room around them. Everything is smooth and covered in black crystal. The walls expand geometrically, forming an impossibly sided polygon around them. Everything is angles and they can see their reflection in each surface. The ceiling is domed and everything shines in chromed black. Even the sand beneath their feet is sparkling ebony.
Rey moves away and starts to run her hands around everything, except for the sand, she is still adverse to sand, even if it is beautiful and shiny. As she runs her hands against the smooth black glass of the walls, R2's interface scrambles behind her, making her jump. She looks back at him, at all his lights blinking and his beeps coming out jumbled and knows something is wrong. She runs back to him, throws her heavy bag to the floor and puts her hands on either side of his convex face.
"R2! R2 what is wrong?!"
She gasps in, trying to figure out what this could be, maybe the heat of it all was too much? It was oppressive, more oppressive than she had realized in her excitement. She pops his chest plate open to check his exhaust readings and internal core temperature, but everything reads normal.
The static and crumbling do not stop. It is as if someone is interfering with his communications systems. She finds his major comms system and detaches it slightly, just to allow herself some time to think about how to fix him. R2 goes quiet, before his holoprojector starts playing, the blue light piercing Rey's chest. She doesn't realize what is happening at first and looks down to the image as it splays across her body. She snaps out of it and moves, quickly, allowing the image to form on the ground about 3 feet in front of them.
"Leia," she breathes when her eyes adjust to the lighted form.
She recognizes this form of Leia, it was the last form Rey ever saw of her, tucked into her bed in the makeshift infirmary on the Falcon . She had not laid eyes on her General in a full year, and her lungs immediately burn with the memories.
When the image of Leia speaks, her voice is so sad, more sad than Rey had ever heard it when Leia lived.
"This is probably a fool's errand, but I need to try. I never got to tell you the truth about where you come from. Snoke got to you before I could. And now, I'm out of time. There is still so much you don't know about your family, about the Skywalkers, about Vader. The answers to everything lie on Mustafar. Please, for you sake, and hers , go there. Figure out who you are."
The holovid scratches and jumps, but not before Rey can make out Leia's last words, "I love you Ben. I never stopped loving you."
Rey's body stiffens and she starts to shake, trying to process all the information she has just been given. The message loops as she turns back to R2, in a state of shocked disbelief.
Her head swims with too many thoughts at once: there was no way this was real, this was the past she was looking at, that was Leia almost a year ago on her deathbed on the Falcon, Leia had sent this message to him when the droids said their goodbyes to her. Everything starts to spin as she pieces it all together. Her brain files quickly through everything, and she puts her hand on R2's face to steady herself.
Mustafar, had she said Mustafar ? She shakes her head, no, and R2's head moves slightly in her direction as her eyes well. He cuts the transmission.
Just as suddenly as the transmission is cut, a deep booming sound erupts from all around her, " Are you actually here?" The voice echoes off every surface.
Everything in Rey stops for a moment of pure terror. Goosebumps prickle her skin and the hair on her arms stands straight up, bracing with some long extinct instinct to scare off predators. Rey spins around, the blades of her saberstaff already ignited, ready to face what she already knew was standing behind her.
A dozen Kylo Ren's stare back at her from every angle of the room, his reflection shattering into the glass walls of the cave, unfolding as a veritable fun house before her. Her mind registers it as a trick, like the ones the force played on her when she forged her saber. She skims the mirror images, waiting for the joke to play itself out. Instead, her eyes meet his, his real ones, and her heart stops.
She holds her saberstaff up defensively, creating a barrier between them. Neither of them move, for a moment, then another.
Recognition of something snaps in her head and she bares her teeth. This wasn't a trick; this was a trap.
"How did you do this? How did you infect Threepio with those coordinates?" Rey's words come out like bullets from behind her clenched teeth.
"I didn't do this," Kylo shakes his head slightly, looking deeply at Rey.
"You're lying." Rey doesn't yell, her anger is past yelling, but her voice pierces anyways.
He takes a deep breath before talking again, "Search your feelings. You know what the truth is..."
"Stop talking."
"...something wanted us here together."
Rey screams and lunges for him. She reaches him, but he ducks, and her saber sinks into the obsidian wall, melting it slightly, rebirthing it into lava.
She grunts as she pulls it from the wall.
"FIGHT ME!" She screams at him and he continues to flee, bouncing off the corners of the room away from her wailing saber.
He says nothing back, instead focusing on deflecting and dodging, his cowl blending in perfectly with the walls behind him. There is no time for the theatrics of her saber, for twirling or cycling through forms, she is all forward motion. Her eyes are all rage, and Kylo knows this isn't like before. She is aiming to kill.
He instinctively tries to reach out to her through the bond to calm her, but remembers that he had asked her to close it. She feels the failed tug and grows even more incensed. He dodges another blow. Growing more panicked, he tries another tactic, reaching out to gently force stun her, but her body cuts through his powers. He cycles quickly through his arsenal, his hand outstretched towards her charging body, but finds that nothing works here, nothing is stopping her in her frenzy.
He rolls away from another attack and sees her face is nothing but a scowl. He manages to get across the room from her as she again dislodges her saber from deep inside the wall that had just been behind him.
"I'm not going to fight you," his words come out between deep breaths, the damp air in the cave making it hard to catch his breath.
She turns, her buns loosened around her face and looks into his eyes.
"Then die," every bit of compassion is drained from her voice. Rey was sure he had lied, had tricked her, had made her believe this was the answer, all to get her here. Anger courses through her, the darkness of the planet infects her, extinguishing her light.
She runs full speed at him as he is pinned against the corner of the hard glass behind him. She sees the perfect reflection of her twin sabers in the glint behind and all around him. The scream that leaves her is deep and guttural and savage. All her clouded emotions pour out of this one sound as she angles her saber above her like a javelin. She charges him, the red of her saber lined up perfectly with his heart. She expects his saber to rise up to meet hers at any second but it doesn't. She is too close to stop now and he still isn't defending himself.
He sees the saber but doesn't move, knowing that being killed this way, by her, is infinitely better than any other divergent realities he may face. He can't fight her anymore, he can't risk raising his blade to her even in pure defense. His mind strays back to the drops of her blood in the snow, the smell of her burning flesh in the night's air. He can't risk hurting her like that again.
Seeing her running towards him like this fills him with a sense of morbid wonder. It had always been her. As her blade careens closer to him, he doesn't flinch, doesn't take his eyes off hers. If she needs this, to kill him to feel whole, he would be a willing sacrifice. He realizes he would do anything for her, even this. In what may be his final moments, his mind skitters back to this father, briefly, recognizing that Han had given him this same gift.
And then, it's over. He never raises his weapon and it's over. She buries her blade into him, her hilt digs deep into his chest. Her eyes are wide, so wide, as she stands inches from him, the smell of his burnt flesh rising. His eyes too, bear into her, with surprise, with the end of something. The blue end of her saber sticks out from Kylo's chest, but the red is disappeared against his body.
Her breath picks up in stuttering inhales and a tear rolls down her cheek as she realizes what she has done, what she had almost done. At the last second, she had flipped her red saber off before it plunged into his chest. The residual heat from it had scorched Kylo's skin, leaving a perfect circle right above his heart. She flicks the switch which retracts her blue saber into its handle and drops the weapon to the ground, its contact with the glass below reverberating loudly, but all she can hear is the sound of Kylo's breathing. The beautiful sound of his life, his continued life despite her impulsive recklessness with him, fills her with something indescribable.
Kylo looks down and realizes what she had done, realizes she hadn't pierced him, and breathes in sharply. In the second of this realization, her lips are on his. This surprises him even more than when he thought she had killed him the moment before. His eyes widen and he looks at her face centimeters away from his, her eyes shut tightly, tears still streaming through the cracks. He is dumbfounded, not kissing back, but at the touch of her hands on his chin, he breaks, and pushes off the wall, grabbing the back of her head and her lower back and pulling her deeply into his body.
He knows exactly how he wants to touch her, he had been playing this over and over in his guilty mind for the last three years. He had shoved this exact moment down in himself, minimized it into near nothingness inside him, knowing Rey, knowing she would never allow it to be real. He had tried not look at it for the last three years, but it had seeped into his being, bled into his dreams. The thought that he may wake up from this soon shoots through him and he presses even further into her.
Her chest wells with surprise at Kylo's fervor, causing her breasts to press themselves tightly against his body. Their breathing hardens as they feel each other this close for the first time, as the desperation of this moment, their lips on each other, rises. He lifts her body flush with his so he doesn't have to keep slouching to find her, and she is off the ground, off the sand. Her hands find his hair and run through it, tugging the back of it lightly as his tongue runs across hers. She wraps her legs around his waist and his hands find her backside, not wanting her to slip away ever again.
The force ignites in this dark place and runs through them, wanting them closer, impossibly close. It is too much, and they break the kiss for air. Her face is slightly above his as they rest their foreheads together and stare into each other's eyes, breathing heavy. Her eyes are hooded, almost tired, but his are full of surprise and latent longing. His eyes dart back and forth between hers, not believing this moment is real, still thinking he will wake up again like he always does after seeing her like this.
Just as quickly as this had started, it ends. A menacing sound from across the room causes them both to break instantly. She uses his body as leverage to flip backwards away from him towards her saber on the ground. Kylo straightens from their embrace, his saber hissing immediately at the intrusion. When she lands, she is crouched, one leg out, bracing the ground as she grabs and reignites her own weapon, still warm from her one sided battle. Neither of their breathing steadies. They stand next to each other, ready to fight on the same side again.
Around them, the funhouse of mirrors ignites in unearthly blue static. Two figures blip into existence in the center of the room. Children. Rey lets out a faint, pained "no", remembering the vision from the forest. But this felt different than their visions. This was something else. She slowly wills herself to look at the children's faces and realizes that neither of them is the child she saw in the forest. When Kylo makes the same realization, his stomach drops a bit in disappointment. Children, but not theirs. They both recall their blades at the same time.
No, these children are different, Rey thought. In front of them sat a young boy, sitting on something unseen, with a slightly older girl standing in front of him. Her dark hair was braided like a halo around her head. She is familiar to Rey, but Rey knows she has never seen her before. If you live long enough, you see the same eyes in different people, Maz's voice rings in her head as she examines the girl further. She is young, perhaps 13 or 14, but she feels older, more worldly, endlessly mature.
As Rey focuses on the girl, Kylo looks to the small boy with sandy hair. Confusion sets in. Why are they being shown these children? He has never seen either of them before.
The children both move awkwardly, as if waiting for someone to say something. Rey begins to circle them, but the gaze of the children never acknowledges the presence of Rey or Kylo. Slowly, the realization that these children cannot see them back seeps into their collective consciousness.
"Are you an angel?" the small boy's sudden voice breaks their concentration.
"What?" the girl scratches in, opposite the boy. A smile spreads across the girl's face and both Rey and Kylo feel as if they have seen that smile before.
"An angel," the boy continues, "I heard the deep space pilots talk about them. They're the most beautiful creatures in the Universe. They live on the moons of Iego, I think."
Rey continues circling, her head tilted in deep puzzlement , but Kylo stands still, unmoving from his original spot.
"You're a funny little boy. How do you know so much?" the girl steps in closer.
"I listen to all the traders and star pilots who come around here. I'm a pilot, you know. And someday, I'm gonna fly away from this place."
"You're a pilot?"
"Mhm. All my life."
Rey starts to cycle through the possible reasons for this scene unfolding in front of her, the possible identities of these two children. She doesn't understand how this is possible, this scene playing out like a memory in front of her. She comes up blank.
Across from her, Kylo figures it out. At his exact moment of realization he takes in a sharp breath and holds it.
"How long have you been here?" the young girl's face is so soft, so curious, as she looks to the little boy in front of her.
"Since I was very little. Three, I think. My mom and I were sold to Gardulla the Hutt, but she lost us betting on the pod races."
"You're a slave?" the girl's face contorts. Rey's face mirrors hers.
"I'm a person, and my name is Anakin," the young boy defiantly responds, and the room seems changed in the instant the sound waves hit the air.
Rey's hand shoots to her mouth and her eyes dart immediately to Kylo. He is already looking at her. Her shock is broken with the voice of the young girl.
"I'm sorry, I don't fully understand, this is a strange place to me."
Suddenly a phantom crash emits from the far corner of the room and all four of them turn towards it.
When Rey and Kylo turn back, the children are gone from between them. They stand looking at each other from opposite ends of the room.