They stand wide eyed across the room for too long, neither of them sure of how to proceed after the rapid succession of life altering events that had just taken place between them.
R2's breaks their staring contest by whimpering softly behind Rey. She closes her eyes and thanks every molecule in that little droid for giving her something to do besides bore holes into Kylo Ren. She turns around and finds him hiding behind her, leaning out inquisitively to look at Kylo, trembling at the sight of him. Rey is momentarily confused, and looks to Kylo, who averts his eyes. It rushes back; they know each other. They knew each other. The memory of her vision of R2 before she met R2, standing in front of the burning temple, the burning children, floods her.
Rey kneels beside R2, her back to Kylo, and puts her hand on top of his metal body, trying to calm him. His shivering stops after a moment of her touch.
"I'm not going to let anything happen to you," she whispers to R2. Kylo hears.
From behind Rey, sand crunches as Kylo breaks and takes a step towards them. Rey's back straightens, but she doesn't turn. Instead, R2 whips around her, positioning himself between the two humans. He pops his chest plate open, wielding a small mechanical saw, which he hostilely points at Kylo. Rey stands up and turns around, unable to be surprised after what had transpired over the last twenty minutes.
Kylo looks to R2, then back to Rey, "Your savior." His voice is dripping in sarcasm, but he stays where he is.
"Does he need to be?" Rey's voice is even, but armed.
"I think I'm the one in need of protection," he motions to the burn still singeing at his clothes, right above his heart.
Rey exhales loudly and puts her hand quietly on R2. He whines before returning his saw into his toolkit.
"I see he's still well trained," Kylo looks menacingly down at the droid who backs up slightly into Rey.
"Stop, just stop, he has every right to be cautious around you." She stares daggers into Kylo, "I need you to cut the act for a few minutes so I can think."
Kylo looks as if he is about to talk again, but decides better of it at the last second, instead choosing to lean against the wall behind him, where he is framed by the cooling orange slashes Rey had made with her saber minutes before.
Rey rubs her eyes before running her hands through her disheveled hair. There are a thousand ways the next few minutes can go. She looks up at him, and he stares back at her coolly, but she can tell there are a thousand things happening in his mind as well.
"Let's just...let's just start from the beginning and work our way through it," Rey says, trying to be as diplomatic as possible.
As she utters her last word, the ground beneath them begins to rumble.
"Are you kidding me?! What now?!" Rey yells indignantly into the ether.
"Not again," Kylo says at the same time, but Rey still catches his words under her shouting. Her head whips immediately in his direction but he has already closed the short distance between them. He puts his large hands on her back and stomach and and pushes her powerfully forward with him. Rey instinctively whips her head back to call for R2, but he is on their heels already.
"Wait! The way out..."
As she says it, she looks back to the hole she and R2 had crawled through to get into this chamber, and sees that it has disappeared. In fact, the whole room around them was shifting into something else, the geometrical shapes folding in on themselves, forming new configurations.
"We have to go!" he tightens his grip around her, but causing a spike of anger in her at not being able to freely move. She spins out of his grasp and lunges back into the collapsing room.
"Rey!"
She slides to grab her bag. As she does, a stalactite falls inches from her thigh. Before it can teeter from its upright position, Kylo has her. He grabs her one handed by her waist and carries her like that back to the hallway, where R2 stands shaking his head back in forth in disbelief as he watches the destruction of the room they had all just been in.
The three of them squeeze through the hall into a different chamber, this one just as glittering in black as the last. If she were more aware, in less shock, she would have been kicking and screaming out of his grasp. But she allows him to carry her. He sets her down on the ground in the new room once the quaking stops and sits down next to her.
"You knew that was going to happen?" her words come out between deep gasps of air.
"It's been happening randomly over the last two days," he replies, looking around their new room like he would look at a traitor.
"You've been trapped down here for two days?"
Kylo catches his breath and nods. Rey examines him more closely, seeing the signs of it all over him. His hair is drenched in sweat and it hangs down in strands. His eyes are sunken, the dark circles around his eyes more apparent from the early stages of dehydration. She had missed all of it in her rage, had been so clouded in so many emotions she hadn't truly seen him yet.
"You were here when I saw you on the Falcon then, you could have told me you were trapped," her voice is soft.
"And what would that have done? Trapped you too?"
"Wasn't that your plan all along?"
Kylo's eyes narrow, angry at the direction she is taking. He cocks his head, and Rey can feel his temper rising. She tests it to get the answers she needs.
"Your mother sent that transmission a year ago. Why are you only here now?" Kylo winces a bit as Rey says your mother, but pacifies himself for a moment longer.
"I came as soon as I got the message, but, there was nothing here. I could feel nothing. I've come back a few more times since, just for a few days each time. Nothing ever happened, until this trip, until two days ago, when it connected me to you."
"So you tricked me to come here so you could get your answers?"
"I'm not the reason you are here! I didn't trick you. I didn't plant those coordinates, that was something else."
Rey knows. Her fear had clouded her before, but she knows he is telling the truth. She sits silently and lets it sink into her.
"I thought the coordinates would lead you somewhere else. I thought you would be far away from this," he looks again at the room as he says it.
"Where did you think they would take me?"
"Naboo."
"Naboo?" her eyebrow shoots up, unable to process where she had heard that planet's name before.
"The year you mentioned, 22 ABY."
"What about it?"
The room grumbles again, and the sand underneath them begins to vibrate. Kylo reaches for her again, but she knows this time, she has adjusted. She averts his grasp and instead shoots up to push a reeling R2 forward into the next hall. The shift seems to move more slowly this time and they are less panicked as they move into the next chamber.
"What IS this place?" Rey looks around after they safely settle in the next room, running her hands along the smooth, mirrored walls.
"I don't know, but I think it's funneling us deeper into it. It wasn't this active before you came."
Rey has a chance to think again, and she looks at Kylo. He notices and looks back.
"You don't have any supplies," she states matter-of-factly.
"No, I've been in this cave system before. It's never acted like this. I didn't think I needed any."
Rey takes her bag off and grabs her canteen, uncapping the lid and handing it out to him, "Drink."
"No, I'm not going to take what's yours."
"Okay. So the plan is to dehydrate yourself until you're too weak to move, after which I will be forced to carry you room to room?" She pauses to let it sink in before stretching the canteen out further, "Drink."
He stares at her, knowing she is right. He reaches out to take the bottle. As his grip tightens around it, hers slips off, careful not to touch his fingers. He notices how meticulous Rey is in the hand off.
"When did you last eat?"
Kylo stays silent, wiping the water from his chin, knowing that if he tells the truth, she will just offer more of the supplies she needs to him.
Rey rolls her eyes before taking out rations, stacked neatly on top of each other. Kylo is taken a back at her bag of tricks and reaches for it, causing Rey to shoot back a bit. He grabs the bag from her and rifles through it.
"Jakku made you paranoid," he says as he pushes through rations and medicine and rope on the surface of her bag.
"Jakku made me smart enough to know you don't venture out unprepared," she hands him a ration packet as he takes her tiny dig.
Kylo sits, exhausted, with food in one fist, water in the other, ravenously eating as Rey examines the room, looking for all the possible exit points. She circles the whole room, before returning to Kylo's side, sitting next to him. When she returns, his feast is already over and he tries to hand the canteen back to Rey.
"Finish it. You're already showing signs of dehydration," she waves him off.
"Rey…"
"Finish it, there's more."
The caves groan and both their legs tighten in anticipation, but the walls around them don't shift again.
"We should keep moving. If you're right, if it is trying to force us in deeper, we should do it on our own to avoid getting crushed by it," Rey reaches for her bag and repacks what Kylo had rifled through.
Rey's language is not lost on Kylo. Everytime she says we his chest tightens a little, as if the string that links him to her grows tighter and more taut, bringing them a little closer each time.
Rey stands up and dusts the black sand off of her before loading her bag back on her back. She thinks briefly about extending her hand to help Kylo up, but decides against it, and instead stares at him awkwardly as he struggles through to stand in the sand.
Rey leads, followed by R2, still trying to act as a barrier between the two force wielders, with Kylo bringing up the back.
There is still so much Rey wants to know, and the longer they walk in silence, the more awkward the air between them grows. Her hand grazes her saber and she tries to keep her mind off what happened when she last used it. She tries to focus on anything but the way he had felt and tasted. She focuses on the heat, and all the questions swirling in her instead. She moves on to the next pressing subject, humored by the fact that a literal ghost boy-Vader was so far down on her list of priorities.
"Who was the girl?" Rey calls back from the front of the pack. Kylo would know. If that really was Vader, Kylo would know.
"Padme Amidala."
Rey stops in her tracks. "Oh," it comes out almost pained, as if someone had punched her in the stomach right before she said it, "She was so young."
"She was probably already Queen."
"She seemed it." Rey starts moving again, but stops almost immediately again, causing R2 to bunch up behind her, "She knew Darth...Anakin?" Rey corrects herself halfway through her question.
Kylo can't contain a stifled chortle, "Yes." It comes out almost in a fit.
Rey swivels around to look at Kylo, catching his eyes.
"What's funny about that?" her voice is honestly confused, with a hint of betrayal, as if she knows he is in on a secret she isn't.
Kylo remains silent.
Rey continues walking, this time talking to herself more than Kylo, "She knew Vader as a child." She says it like she has pieces of a puzzle but can't quite figure out how to fit them together. Saying it reminds her of something else, something she had never thought of before, "Vader was a child."
"That's typically how it works," Kylo's voice is gruff, but he allows her time, he wants to see how far she can get on her own.
Something else pops into her head before she can put it all together, "What was that even? How could we see them?"
"I don't know. It felt different than our bond, or our visions, it was like…
"A memory. But not ours." She looks around at the glittering halls enveloping them. "Can places have memories?"
"I think this place can do whatever it wants," Kylo sounds a bit further away when he says it.
"But why Anakin and Padme? Why show us that?" Rey turns back to look at Kylo, but immediately averts her eyes when she sees him. Kylo had stopped a ways back and was taking off his cloak and shirt behind her, tucking them into his waistband. Once again, she was confronted with his bare torso.
"What..what are you doing?!" Rey stays not looking at him, but holds up her hands, palms facing out, willing him to stop.
"It's too hot down here," he says simply.
"So?"
"I have to find a way to cool down, I feel like I'm going to pass out. You don't want me to be incapacitated? This helps."
Rey was not used to taking clothes off in the heat. On Jakku, the hotter it was, the more clothes she would have on, to avoid being burnt to death by the sun. But the heat in these caves was so much different than Jakku's. She feels her clothes sticking to her body in ways they haven't before. She feels weighed down by the damp air around her. But still, she wouldn't think of taking off any article here.
She dares to look at him, carefully trying to meet him dead in the eye, to not look anywhere else, but the fresh mark on his chest draws her eyes like a stain. A stain she caused.
"Kylo…" it escapes her as she looks at how quickly infection was spreading in his wound.
He had been waiting for her to say his name since she kissed him. It already seemed like a lifetime ago but it was only a few hours. He misunderstands her breathy voice. He misunderstands her intent, mistaking her worried eyes for hungry ones. He closes the distance between them, squeezing out a confused R2.
"Rey..." his voice surrounds her and makes her spine shiver.
Rey looks up at him, his face now directly above hers, their bodies almost touching, and a look of utter confusion wraps her.
"What are you doing? Your wound, it needs to be dressed," her voice, cold and detached, almost pushes him away.
"Right," he takes a step back.
She eyes him cautiously as she moves into an intervening room. She takes off her bag as he follows, finding a rock nearby to partially sit on. His ears redden at his mistake, and his internal dialogue is brutal.
Rey begins to sort her supplies in the sand and Kylo works up his wounded courage.
"You skipped something," his voice breaks her concentration.
"What?" Rey looks down at her medical supplies, thinking that is what Kylo is referring to.
"In our conversation. You started from the beginning, with why I'm here, but then you skipped to the end with Lord Vader. Something happened between the two," he pauses, before adding, "A few things happened between the two."
It hits the air and stings Rey, her body freezes looking at a bottle of antiseptic.
Her body starts moving again once she takes a breath, but in slow motion. She slowly puts the bottle down and turns her crouched body so her knees face him.
"Kylo," her voice is calm and firm, "A mountain just ate us, showed us your ghost child grandfather, which we haven't even fully addressed yet, then tried to kill us twice. We are now trapped inside of that mountain with a finite number of supplies and the wound I gave you is starting to blister and drain yellow pus. There is a hierarchy of priorities here," Rey is precise in her takedown, "Tell me you understand that."
"I understand," he almost sounds chastened, but breaks that when he adds, "I just think it should be higher on our list."
"Well you're wrong. Now throw me your cloak."
He does, willingly. If anyone else in the Galaxy talked to him the way she just did, they would be, best case, in an infirmary for at least a few weeks. With Rey though, her fiery backtalk causes a smile to grow across his face. He angles his face downward so she can't see it.
Rey is too distracted to notice anyways, with the lush velour of Kylo's cloak in her grasp. She runs her hands along it, almost luxuriating in it. She had never felt something so soft. She skims her fingers over the golden fringe, the fringe that represented Snoke, testing for weak spots. She finds one, and uses all her force to rip it apart.
Kylo breaks out of his thought process when he hears the tear. He almost jumps out of his sitting position before reaching one hand out and yelling, "That's Onderon silk!"
She smirks at his outburst and rips it again, the fabric now structurally compromised.
"It was. Now it's just a very fancy bandage."
She continues to rip it into smaller and smaller pieces, relishing in the shocked look on his face as she obliterates his costume. As she makes one of the final tears, something small and metallic falls out, having been hidden in the lining. The glint of it catches her eye before it disappears almost immediately into the black sand below.
She instinctively reaches down, digging her hands deep into the granules, and clasps around the cool, slight metal, before bringing it back up into the cavern.
"Rey, wait…" Kylo begs, but she can't hear him.
She looks at the gold, shimmering dice in her hands, thumbing the sand off of them. It takes her a moment to realize, but when she does, the edges of her vision blur and the air around them bends. She blinks, and when her eyes reopen, a toddler with an incredible amount of dark hair sits in front of her in the sand, smiling up at the dice. But Rey isn't holding them anymore. Han is.
Rey isn't in control of this. She's totally paralyzed. If she could move, she would have gasped loudly, but her whole body has ceased working. Tears start to well, but she can't blink again to dispel them. She sees Han, so much younger than she knew him, but still with the same underlying warmth covered by roguishness.
Han kneels in front of the young boy, his son, alternating between teasing the baby with the dice and tickling him with his free hand. The baby finally grasps the dice and pulls them down to his mouth. Han grabs the boy and pulls him in for a tight embrace. The tiny boy laughs and claps as Han lifts him up and spins him around.
Then, the vision is gone, and where Rey had just been staring at Ben, Kylo Ren now stands like a wall in front of her. Her eyes struggle to adjust back with the sudden change in perspective.
Rey's body allows her to start breathing again. Kylo is right in front of her and she angles her chin up briefly to his face.
He looks like a child who had been caught with something he shouldn't have.
She can't look at him right now. She's not sure who she is looking at. She instead stares straight into his body in front of her, her eyes moving quickly back and forth, trying to process what had just happened.
"I...they're…" Kylo stumbles, trying to explain why Han's dice were sewn into the robes of the Supreme Leader.
"You went to Achc-To," she interrupts. The words come out and crash against his chest inches in front of her.
"Yes," he says it almost in a trance, none of his usual obfuscation tingeing his reply.
"Just to get these," she lifts up her palm with the dice in them, showing them to him.
"Yes," he answers, even though it is not a question. Rey knows.
She finally is brave enough to look him in the face again. Someone else is there, in Kylo's face with him. She saw him earlier, when she had almost ran her saber through his heart. She saw him before on Achc-To, in the hut as rain poured down.
She reaches her hand up towards his face, pausing at the last moment, seeing the eyes of two men staring down at her, both so wanting. She cusps the side of his face so gently, so slightly, that his own hand immediately comes up to meet hers on his face, pressing her into him more. She feels the weight of his head as it leans into her hand, so needy for her touch.
Her other hand still grasps the dice. She lifts them up and finds Kylo's waistband. When her fingers touch his bare torso he stops breathing, not wanting to risk losing her touch with the slightest of movements. She tucks the dice into his waistband, returning them to his possession, returning them to their rightful inheritor.
His eyes close as she touches him, and it's too much for her. She slides her hand out from under his, causing his eyes to immediately snap open to look at her again. She is looking at the ground now, not at Kylo. He fights something in him telling him to grab her and force her little neck up to look at him again. He takes a step back from her to quiet the voice.
"Sit," she motions towards the rock he had been on before, still not looking at him.
"Rey…"
She shakes her head, "We really have to treat your wound."
He gives a short nod and walks backwards to the rock. She gathers her supplies and walks towards him.
She dips her cloth in water and cleans the burn first, being careful not to disturb the blistering circle. As she does, her other hand settles on his shoulder and her light touch sends shivers through him. He can't remember the last time he had been touched like this by another person. All his skin had known was violence and pain, and here she was, igniting his synapses with something totally foreign.
She cleans with antiseptic next, an ancient method used before the invention of bacta. She had left the few pads not taken by the Resistance with Chewie, just in case. It meant this process would be longer, but deep inside of her something appreciates that. As she presses the disinfectant up to his skin, he sucks his breath in through his teeth.
"Fuck, that's worse than bacta," he gasps.
"I'm sorry," she pauses before talking again, her voice full of regret and sadness, "I'm sorry for all of it Kylo."
"Don't be," his eyes pierce hers and she nods.
She wraps his tattered cloak around him like a sash, tying it off to keep the damp air off the wound. Her body working around his causes the force to hum between them and she steps back when she notices it. She tries to catch it, to see if it will let her in, but it vanishes when they stop touching. Kylo's face shows that he felt it leave too.
Rey sighs before leaning down to repack the bag.
"It's done," she loads the bag onto her back, jumping slightly to push it up, "You ready?"
Kylo nods and stands next to her as they look forward into the endless labyrinth of halls and rooms in front of them.
Thank you for sticking with it this far! These chapters are long, I know, I just wanted you guys to get a little more Reylo in this chapter after waiting ten chapters for them to finally do anything, only to get cock-blocked by Kylo's ghost child-grandparents.
There are some loose ends in this chapter that I promise will be resolved soon. Also, more angst, because who would I be if I didn't just totally obliterate these two before giving them some happiness? Maybe. SOME.
Anyways, thank you to everybody reading. I've never done this before and I am having so much fun writing and reading your reviews. It's amazing. Thank you, thank you, thank you.