They hike deeper into the seemingly endless chasm. Or, what they assume is deeper. The force seems to grow thicker the more they walk, just like the air, and this is what they use to gauge their path. Rey tries a few times to reach out, to communicate with the force, but it is gelatinous, almost, and resists her. Kylo tries, too, getting only slightly farther than Rey, before being pressed out. It feels purposefully withholding, teasing, even, in its presence.
As they continue to walk, her curiosity grows where his frustration does. She is lost deep in a thought experiment about wicking the air moisture for water when she hears his breathing grow more labored. Afraid her homegrown medical techniques hadn't been enough to stop the infection, she whips around and steps towards him, but stops when she sees him.
He stands clenching and unclenching his fists, his body in a braced position ready for battle. His jaw shifts tightly under his slight stubble and his face grows red. She looks around for immediate threats but sees none. He begins shaking under the tension of his rigid muscles.
"Kylo?" her voice is cautious, unsure.
"If it would just yield!" he screams out, each word growing louder than the last.
"Calm down," she says back unsympathetically.
"You don't understand!"
"Really?" her voice raises to meet his, "I don't understand? I'm the only other fucking person who could understand," they're yelling at each other again. R2 backs up away from them, almost familiar with this by now.
"No, you're different," he shouts, pointing at her, "You have a different relationship with it. You don't know what this feels like, to be shut out. It's tormenting me on purpose!"
She runs her hands over her face in frustration, before clenching her fingers into fists in the air in front of her, "What are you going to do? Choke it with itself?" She pauses for maximum effect, "I know you're used to making things bend to your will, but you don't have a lot of options here," she punctuates her last words by her lightly padding her palm with her opposite fist.
"I've just...it's just...It's always been there, even before I was born, I knew it, and now…" his words eke out past his clench teeth.
"It's still there," she emphasizes every word, but she's softer now, "It's all around us, we're swimming in it."
"But I can't wield it. It's mocking me. It's so accessible and yet so far away," as he says it his hands dig into his thighs, grasping deep into the flesh under his pants. It looks like he is reaching through his thick muscle tissue to the bone below and Rey winces, thinking of the pain it must be causing. She advances towards him without hesitation and grabs his wrists, pulling them upwards. Her touch surprises him, but his outburst doesn't dissipate.
"That's enough," she demands, and looks at his reddening face, "You need to breathe."
He continues to hold his breath like a tantruming child.
"Breathe you stubborn ass!"
He lets out his breath in a huff.
"Listen to me," she still holds his hands up between them, her tiny fingers not even close to closing the distance on his wrists, "breathe."
He obeys, but the veins in his neck and head throb out towards her.
"Close your eyes," he stares straight into her in defiance, tiny red lines growing throughout the whites of his straining eyes. "Now!" Her voice is so commanding he instantly shuts them.
She tries to think of what to do next. She's gotten him this far but his hands are still clenched above her grasp, the skin of them completely white under the pressure.
"You're in an ocean," the words come out of her before she fully formulates them.
"What are you doing?" he says, but his eyes remain closed.
"Just listen," she gathers herself and closes her eyes too, "You're in an ocean, and it's dark. It's so incredibly dark outside, but you can feel the water all around you, covering you, and you know you're safe. On the shore there are starbursts of light, hazy in the mist, but you let the waves take you out, away from them. You're floating on the surface, and you feel the waves rise and fall under you, the water lapping at your neck and chest. When you look up again, all the light is gone, and there is only endless darkness, but it swathes you, it's close and protecting and you're not afraid," she breathes in, and a sense of reminiscence bleeds into this dream she is sharing with him. "You feel the water between your wading fingers as you break through it, you feel it glide against your skin. When you look down, you notice soft blue light growing from your movements in the water, lighting up the sea around you," she swallows, hoping this is working, "Do you see it?"
"I see it," his voice is soft now, disbelieving.
She loosens her grip on him and sets his hands down. When she looks at him again, his eyes are wide open, looking at her with something like complete awe. He is the only person who has ever looked at her like that, not counting BB-8.
She turns away and rubs her hands which had grown sore from the exertion of stopping him, before speaking again, "It's okay to be angry. This is an awful situation we're in..."
"I wouldn't say awful," he counters.
She ignores him, "But don't let it destroy you. Don't let it take your power from you."
"My anger is my power," he says, so endlessly sure. His genuine belief causes her to turn back to him.
"I know he told you that. I know that's what you've believed for so long. But your anger is not all you are," she is almost pleading for him to believe her.
"I suppose I should just 'learn to control it' right? Maybe Luke did teach you something in your days together."
She flashes, briefly, when he mentions Luke. "You could learn to work with it, instead of letting it take over."
His head tilts slightly, "Is that what you were doing when you almost killed me a few hours ago? Working with your anger?"
"No," she looks directly into his eyes, "And I almost lost you because of it." It comes out all at once, but it is a small thing, and it hangs between them.
He should have kissed her then. He would come to regret not kissing her right then for the rest of his life. Instead, he continues to fight.
"And what would be so wrong with that Rey?"
Rey's head shoots back away from Kylo, her neck muscles protruding out, as if his words were a blow, but her feet remain planted firmly in front of him. She lets out a small, pained sigh and turns from him, letting his question go unanswered.
She starts moving forward again and his whole body slumps once her eyes are off him. He was so, so stupid. R2 looks back to Kylo briefly and they share a silent moment, before the droid buzzes off after Rey. He breathes in, wanting to lash out at himself for missing his opportunity, but he stops when the image of the ocean around him pops into his head once more.
He follows them both in silence, his skin burning from the aftershocks of her hands on him.
"We should stop here," she finally says, after maybe another few hours of identical hallway, identical room, identical hallway, identical room, all walked in silence.
"I can keep going," his hubris shows itself.
"Just because you can doesn't mean you should," she takes her pack off and sets it on the ground in front of her, "Exhaustion can deceive. It's better to stop with some energy left."
He walks to the other side of her chosen room and leans against the glass. It is impossibly cool under his skin. He watches her as she unpacks her bag of tricks, her lips moving silently, inventorying their supplies, calculating their date of demise.
Rey suddenly gasps. She drops everything else and digs deeper into the bag, "Wait."
She takes out the comlink that Chewie had stuffed into her hand earlier. In the haste of everything she forgot, shoving it into her bag. She looks up at Kylo, so hopeful. His expression doesn't change.
She tries it a few times, pressing down the button on the side, calling out for Chewie in this abyss. Only static reverberates back at her.
"Nothing works, I already tried to contact my ships when it trapped me," she ignores him, instead racking her brain for other solutions, before settling her eyes on R2. A slight smile runs through her and she moves quickly past Kylo towards R2. As she does, her saberstaff falls from her hilt to the sand below, right in front of Kylo. She doesn't notice, she is more enveloped in trying to fiddle with R2's controls.
"R2, can you send a message to the Falcon?" His eyes go dim for a second, and he comes back in with two disappointed, low whistles.
"I told you," Kylo says, but his voice sounds far away, detached, like he is concentrating on something else.
She realizes he is right and looks down. The light of her cloaked tracking beacon bracelet catches her eye. It's been only slightly more than a day since her arrival on Mustafar, but it feels like so much longer. We will always come back for you. Poe's voice echoes through her bones and she calms herself. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, shifting the blue eye of the cloaking device downwards towards her inner wrist, closer to her pulse.
When she stands back up, Kylo has her saber in his hand. He doesn't notice her anymore, completely transfixed by her weapon. She looks down to it and back up to him, and her mouth gapes open. She is unarmed. She is unarmed and alone with him. Her hand immediately shoots to her scar and something inside her bursts, like it did when he had tried to touch her in the forest. But the force was too thick here. The shockwave that she emits in her fear is so slight this time it only nudges Kylo.
He snaps out of his trance when he feels her, only to find her in complete terror next to him, her arms outstretched protectively in front of R2. He realizes what this looks like, realizes her horror, and immediately extends her saber back to her. She hesitates for a moment, letting the shock drain from her face, before reaching out and taking it from him gently, her fear being replaced with a deep lethargy.
"Did you think…" he starts, his voice deep and edging on hurt.
"No," she interrupts him abruptly.
They are silent for a moment.
His deep voice breaks the tension, trying to explain, "The stone that was my grandfather's, your blue saber...it still calls out to me. Like it's taunting me."
She exhales and sits slowly down in the sand below next to R2, exhausted from her wasted panic. She holds the saber in her lap, looking down at it.
"They're both your grandfather's stone," she says in a sigh.
"What?" his voice is slight, hidden in disbelief.
"When we fought, the crystal broke," her eyes don't leave he saber.
"That's impossible, the force it takes to break a kyber crystal..." the weight of what she said causes him to sit down across from her.
A slight smile edges at her lips, still directed towards her weapon, "That's what your mother said, even when she held both the pieces in her hands. It split, it split perfectly. I went into the kyber caves thinking it was broken, but they showed me how to rebuild it."
"They?" Kylo's eyebrows draw up towards each other.
"It? I don't know how to describe what it was."
"How long ago?"
"It was a year after Crait."
"How did you know? Where to go? What to do?" the questions flow out of him, he had been waiting so long to ask them.
"There are some things I can't tell you," she looks at him, waiting for his expression to grow angry, resentful, but it doesn't. "The place I went to, it was like this," she looks up at the cavern above them, "It played tricks. It showed me things, sometimes horrid things. It tried to keep me from leaving, too."
"Show me?" he reaches his hand out, remembering how she had calmed him with her dreams after his outburst earlier. That part of their connection still worked, despite everything.
"I…" her body tenses and her voice burns as she remembers the last time he had reached his hand out like that, on Starkiller.
He remembers then, too, and immediately puts his hand down. She stops everything and his heart drops, thinking he had ruined her openness.
"I can tell you," she offers, after a pause.
He nods, his eyes full of something she can't immediately place.
"You've been in a kyber cave, before, obviously," she motions to his own weapon.
"More than once," he confirms.
"What did it show you?"
He hesitates, but knows his offering of truth will being hers forward, "The first time, it showed me my father...Han's...death. It showed me killing him."
Rey looks down, her eyes immediately stinging at the memory.
"The second time…" Kylo pauses, he looks up at her and swallows, thinking he should lie. He doesn't, "The second time it showed me you."
Rey's head snaps up, her eyes instantly narrow, disbelieving.
"It was just an outline of a woman then, but now I know it was you. In the throne room. Your hand in mine."
Rey's gaze shifts from him to the sand between them. Her hands move from her knees, and she bring them to cross around her torso, a quiet barrier.
He notices and shifts. He tries to break her out of it with another question, "What did it show you?"
"A lot of things. Luke, my friends, you, briefly."
He perks up, but doesn't press, at the mention of himself showing up in the kyber caves.
"I held Anakin's crystals in my hands and tried to meditate, but it kept throwing these images at me, testing me. There was so much pain, and I tried so hard to turn away from it, to resist it like Luke had told me to. But it showed me such awful things."
Her breath stutters in as tears pool in her eyes. She wants to fight the words, like she had been the last two years. But she can't hold them inside any longer. She had never told anyone, not even Finn, not even her best friend, about what had happened in those caves, knowing they couldn't understand. When she had emerged with a half red saber, her friends had so many questions, there was so much they couldn't understand. And she couldn't explain it to them because she didn't understand it herself. She will always remember the flash of fear in Poe's eyes when she lit her weapon for the first time, his second of recognition of something in her that she didn't want to face herself. Her saber was a physical manifestation of her soul, and half of it was bleeding.
After a while, everything went back to normal, they stopped asking her, and she kept it bottled inside of her. The truth of what had happened. And now here she was, pouring it all out to her mortal enemy.
She continues after some deep breaths, "It felt like hours of looping pain, but then there was a lull, and I thought it was over, I thought I was ready. But then...my parents. I saw their faces, I saw my mother calling for me. I saw her crying, clawing at her heart. And then she saw me," tears stream down Rey's face, "She saw me and she grabbed me to her and she hugged me, so tight, she asked me to forgive her," her voice sputters out, "It was all I wanted, it was all I ever wanted, to feel her again, to know she loved me, and for her to know I loved her back, even after…" she wipes her running nose, "But when I turned to her to tell her, to tell her I loved her and I forgave her, her skin," Rey touches her own face, remembering, "her skin sagged and decayed into her skull. She rotted in front of me, into her pauper's grave on that fucking planet."
Kylo moves quietly, until he is sitting next to her, close to her, mirroring how she sat next to him after his mother's death.
"It was then, I felt the pain of one of the crystals, I felt it bleeding in my grasp and I wanted it to stop, but I also...didn't. I wanted it to bleed inwardly like I did, like I do. It burnt and fought, but it collapsed under my hand. And then it was over."
She looks over at him, looking so intently at her from his new position next to her. Their eyes meet through both their tears.
You're not alone.
Neither are you.
They don't speak it, and with their bond unable to reopen in this place, they don't hear each other think it either. But each one knows that's what the other was saying. She breaks her eyes away first.
"We should try to sleep," she suggests, after wiping her tears away, "The heat is draining and we don't know what lies ahead. We should get rest."
His lips tighten, not wanting to stop being this close, but he agrees and stands.
"Hand me the bag?" she asks, and he does. She digs to the bottom of it and pulls out two blankets.
"Two?" he asks, curiously.
"I always bring two, just in case it gets colder than I thought...I don't think we'll have that problem here." She offers him one, "Use it as your sleeping mat. Sand is...relentless." She narrows her bloodshot eyes at the tiny granules as she says it.
They take to opposite sides of the room, which seems to grow smaller as they do. Rey eyes it suspiciously, but explains it away using her exhaustion as the cause. She just wants to sleep away this day, so she lies down quickly, the moment between them still lingering in the air.
They both face their respective walls, not daring to look at one another. It is the first time they have shared a sleeping space, have shared this part of being close. Rey closes her eyes and tries to calm herself from her admissions, tries not to think about the day. One moment creeps in, under her pain, and tingles at her now chapped lips. She shoots her hands up to her lips, remembering what he felt like pressed up against them. She runs her hands across them but stops abruptly, growing hot with embarrassment, before remembering he can't hear her thoughts. Her heart settles before fatigue overtakes her.
Kylo lays opposite, his fingers on his lips too, but the images of her being so trusting with him, so open, so compassionate, overtake the memory of the kiss, for some reason. He sees her eyes, so calm, so resolute, so full of caring, in front of his stupid sniveling form. She had stilled him, quieted the self-hate in his brain for a moment. No one else had cared enough to even try to do that. She had shared secrets, her life, with him. No one else had ever done that, willingly, with him. He closes his eyes and sees her staring back at him from beneath his lids, and calms into sleep.
R2 looks at the two, shaking his head slightly, understanding better than they did what was going on, before lapsing into sleep mode.
He turns to her in the night. Or whatever this was. Their resting period between walking. It had only been a few short hours since they had fallen asleep, but his eyes had groggily opened to see her next to him and the exhilaration that had spring in him was hard to soothe. She was so much closer than she had been when they originally laid down, and he knows she wouldn't have moved of her own accord. He narrows his eyes and looks side to side at the cave walls, but they don't move. He looks back to Rey, unable to take his eyes off her for more than a moment.
The air is so heavy with heat, he can't tell if that is what's making it hard to breathe or if it's seeing her so close to him. He notices she had undressed slightly in her sleep, the oppressive heat leaving her wearing just her breast band and pants. It looks as if she tried to tent her shirt wrap around her for modesty, but it hadn't worked. She must have sloughed it off in her sleep. He tries to fight his wandering gaze, but he lets in, and traces his eyes around her slight curves as her breath raises her chest up and down next to him. He has never seen this part of her. He knew her mind, but this was the first time he had a chance to take in her body.
His eyes are drawn to the tiny, but dark freckles which haphazardly speckle her skin. He thinks back to the thin beams of sun streaming in from tiny holes in the side of her AT-AT home, the one he saw in her mind in the interrogation room. He imagines the light from the dawn streaming in to touch her body, always in those same places before she awoke, dotting her skin with freckles from exposure.
He wants desperately to reach out and touch each one, to feel her shudder underneath him as he traces and connects each one lightly. He fights it, knowing it would be wrong to touch her as she slept, even if she would never know.
When he finally tears his eyes away from this wish, he looks to her face. Her eyes are open and staring back at him. A sense of panic immediately rises in him. How long had she been awake? Blood rises against the skin of his face and he can feel himself getting red out of embarrassment. Just as he starts to shift backwards and away from her, he feels her hand grab his, so lightly. She is shaking, but she is touching him anyway.
She pulls his hand until it is over her body and lightly places it down on her ribs, right above a dark freckle. She rests her own hands on either side of her body and looks up at him expectantly.
He wants this and she is giving it to him, this small, huge thing, so he begins. He takes his fingerprints and grazes them lightly over the freckle, circling it as he does. Now he is shaking too.
He doesn't let that stop him. He moves his body closer to her, until he is laying on his side almost pressed up against her, to see more as his graze tickles across her belly and to her sides. He never lifts his finger as it moves from dot to dot. His touch is so light he is almost not touching her, and it makes her shiver slightly in this unduly hot room. At each new freckle, he stops, briefly circling it, then moves onto the next. When he gets to her scar, all four of his fingers run the length of it, before returning to one single roving digit. His touch feels electric, and they both feel the force, so lost to them here, ignite where they touch.
He runs his finger through the middle of her breast band, careful not to take too much without permission. She holds her breath as his fingers travel between her breasts. He is on her chest now, then her neck, then their faces are so close to one another again, she can feel his breath on her cheeks.
He wants so badly to kiss her, to pay her back for the kiss she had initiated when they had first met in this place, but he knows he won't stop with a kiss. She looks up to his eyes and sees the impossible want. Everything feels tight around them as he inches closer to her.
She turns her head away before grabbing his hand slowly, breaking the taut air. She guides his hand off her skin, not knowing how far she wants this to go. With his hand in hers, she curls her body away from his, until her back is exposed to him. His stomach drops as she turns from him, thinking she is breaking this off.
Instead, she twists their hands down together to rest on her lower back. It is damp with sweat and she flushes hot for a moment, embarrassed, but he doesn't notice. He takes the hint she is giving and continues tracing the new constellations of freckles that he finds on her back. Her body shivers as his fingers skim her spine, barely touching her. Her growing lust clouds her thoughts. The muscles in her thighs twitch and tighten and the movement reverberates into her core. She feels something pool between her legs.
She closes her eyes tight and tenses up her shoulders, realizing her body was preparing for something she didn't know if she was ready for yet.
He immediately withdraws his hand from her, noticing her body change. She had only moved like that once under his touch before, when they had seen the vision in the forest. Those two little children, their two little children, with Rey seeing a son, and him a daughter. His head immediately pops up to look around the now tiny room, hoping to see that little girl again.
Before he thinks, he speaks, "Do you see something? Do you see him?" the last word stings Rey, she knows exactly who he is talking about when he says him.
She rolls back over, back to facing the obsidian ceiling above. She doesn't look at Kylo. The heat that had been coursing through her body grows cold.
"No. I don't think those versions of our visions exist anymore," she replies as her hand instinctively runs its way across her scar.
A guilt bounces off every part of him, replacing the euphoria he had felt when he was touching her body, as he remembers what he had done, how he had shredded her and how she just forgave him for it. Forgave him for stealing that version of her happy ending. Of their happy ending.
Something in him breaks as he remembers and he moves away from her. "You can't let me do this Rey. I've taken so much from you. I will take so much more if you let me. I will devour you. I will snuff you out. Don't let me."
Rey props herself up on her elbows, sweat running down her stomach and pooling near her navel, and she finds him, "No you won't." Her voice is sure.
"How do you know?"
"I've seen you, remember? All of you."
"And when you did, you called me what I am, a monster."
Her eyebrows knit together and her eyes narrow, causing tiny lines to form on her temples, "That's not all that's in you. I didn't kiss a monster. I kissed you, Kylo."
"Why did you kiss me? Why are you doing any of this? It's cruel, and painful, more painful than anything you've ever done to me, to give me this, this dream, with no intention of reciprocating what I feel outside these walls."
"And what do you feel, Kylo? Not everything is a power play, not everything is something to be won. I'm not a playing a game here."
"Everything is about power, everything," he raises his voice and sounds like a record, repeating what had been poured into him on autopilot.
Rey's breath hitches at his harshness and she looks away. She sits fully up and pulls herself up until she is standing. She starts to walk away.
"Where are you going?" the edge of anger still holds in his tone.
"Away."
"Wait, Rey, don't, if this place shifts I will lose you," he softens, full of instant regret.
"You seem to be doing that all on your own."
She walks deeper into an adjoining hallway, disappearing from his view. It is at this moment, almost on cue, that the ground starts to rumble again.
He hears her voice echo, "Kylo!" but he can't see her.
"REY!"
Everything shifts.