The red of Kylo's saber is out immediately, casting a threatening veil over the shifting walls around him, as is his habit when his fear spikes above a certain level. The room expands back to its original size and the hallway Rey's scream came from closes almost mechanically before Kylo reaches it. He grinds his heels into the sand to avoid running into the smooth glass wall as the room around him clinks with the quake, the crystals sounding almost elegant in the tremor.
He circles his saber, not knowing when the shaking of the earth would stop, remembering the way things had collapsed when the rooms moved previously. He looks to R2, still in sleep mode feet from him, and instinctively crouches over the droid to keep debris from falling on him.
R2 awakes to find Kylo over him, weapon ignited, and starts screaming, backing up hard into a wall that was not behind him before. Kylo looks at R2, who looks back, their pasts replaying. This moment serves as a reflection, echoes of Skywalker's Jedi Temple, of the world crumbling around them, play in both their histories. Kylo backs up from the droid, enough to be out of range, trying to mollify the situation, but does not sheath his weapon. Goosebumps gather on his skin as the chasm around them stops shaking.
"REY!" his scream is immediate, deep and savage. He screams her name, as if an accusation to this mountain, to this thing that took her.
"Kylo!" the voice is muffled, but loud.
"Rey?!"
He doesn't wait for a response, instead his saber burrows deep into the wall where her voice was, trying to get to her, trying to burn through to her. The black barrier in front of him begins to glow orange, then red, then magma starts to pool, running so close to his knuckles down to the sand below. The pain from the heat starts to burn, but he keeps his saber buried in the wall. His face contorts, beads sweat. He lets out a curdling scream as the top layer of his skin singes off. He can feel the heat working further and further down through his hands, but he can't stop, he has to get to her. When it hits his connective tissue, his body betrays him and he retracts his weapon before grasping his hand.
He drops to his knees, the residual heat from his saber reconstructing the sand below him into tiny pieces of glass.
"Rey," it is almost silent, an almost prayer, hoping she could hear him despite everything. He begins to think the voice was a phantom, a trick, as he cradles his burnt hand in the other. His throat grows raw, holding back tears.
R2 rolls up cautiously to Kylo, understanding now his intent for looming over him. R2 drags the supplies bag in front of him noticing Kylo's hand is badly burnt. An offer of kindness in exchange for the protection Kylo had tried to give him.
Kylo doesn't notice. Instead, he leans his forehead into the wall, the cooling lava pooled beside him. He had her. He had her and now she was gone. He starts to ram his head into the wall before him, the chamber echoing with the dull pain of it all. R2 comes closer, closer than he has been since the caves, and prods Kylo with the supplies, trying to break him from his thought.
Feeling the droid's care, Kylo whispers to himself, "You're in an ocean…" He would never know Rey's forehead was pressed into the opposite wall, whispering the same.
His head stops its movement and instead rests on the wall. He turns his head to the side to look at R2, who coos a pacifying tone.
As he turns around to grab the knapsack with his strong hand, the room around him alights in a blue haze. He tries to call his saber to him, but realizes he can't do that here. Before he has time to twist his body around to reach the saber, two figures appear sitting in the middle of the room. He pauses.
He had never seen an adult Anakin Skywalker, unencumbered by the mask and breathing apparatus. Pictures of Vader permeated his youth, plastered the halls of the Senate when his mother was outed as his daughter. When he was outed as his grandson. No, not outed, when he was graced with the knowledge of his lineage.
But Anakin, he didn't know if any pictures of Anakin existed in the Galaxy. But here he was, sitting in front of Kylo. There was no doubt this was Anakin, there were traces of Luke, the Luke Kylo knew in his youth, all over him. The light eyes and hair, the smile. His Uncle and his Grandfather blended together in front of him.
Anakin wore the Padawan braid still, so he was young, but there was rebellion in his eyes as he looked at her.
Her. Padme. Kylo tries to avoid her. She is older than she was in the last vision and her beauty had only grown. Kylo exhales and settles when he finally looks at her, relaxing a bit in her presence. Something like moonlight bounces off her exposed skin and she looks at Anakin uncomfortably. Kylo feels the tension in the air between them, having grown well accustomed to that same tension over the past day in the caves with Rey. Really, having grown accustomed to it over the course of his entire connection with Rey.
It is Anakin who speaks first, breaking Kylo's mind of Rey for a moment.
"From the moment I met you, all those years ago, not a day has gone by when I haven't thought of you," Anakin's voice is soft, sweet. Kylo bristles as the juxtaposition between this man and Vader. He remembers the little boy he and Rey had seen a day earlier, so clearly enamored with Padme immediately. He remembers his younger self, seeing Rey for the first time, and all the confusion she had wrought in him immediately.
"Now that I'm with you again," Anakin continues, "I'm in agony. The closer I get to you, the worse it gets. The thought of not being with you, I can't breathe. I'm haunted by the kiss that you should never have given to me." Kylo leans forward, seeing the reverberation of his own life in this. "My heart is beating, hoping that that kiss will not become a scar. You are in my very soul, tormenting me. What can I do? I will do anything that you ask."
Kylo closes his eyes. He was watching his thoughts come out of his grandfather's mouth. His stomach lurches, hoping, and he can't tell who that hope is for. A silence descends and he can't take it. Kylo looks to Padme, who seems to be looking directly at him now. His heart skips as he looks back.
Anakin breaks in, "If you are suffering as much as I am, please, tell me."
"I can't," her voice is small, almost a whisper, "We can't, it's...just not possible."
"Anything is possible Padme, listen to me," Anakin closes in on her. Kylo recognizes the tactic, recognizes the thirst for power just there, under the skin. He recognizes Vader.
"No, you listen," Padme moves, walking across the room, pushing away from Anakin, "We live in a real world. Come back to it. You're studying to become a Jedi, I'm...I'm a senator."
He imagines the chasm between Rey and him playing out, instead of the one between his grandparents. You destroy, I save. You hate, I love. You're dark, I'm light.
"If you follow your thoughts through to conclusion, it will take us to a place we cannot go, regardless of the way we feel about each other," Padme's voice is strong, resolute. He has heard the same tone out of Rey and out of his mother. He shuts his eyes when his mind flashes to Leia, Padme's after image sticking in his eyelids. He imagines Leia, young. His earliest memory of her, leaning over him, kissing his forehead before bed. Her memory overlays with Padme's. Mother and daughter.
When he opens his eyes, they're gone. The room is back to blackness, the only light coming from the refracting glass.
His mind starts cycling through what this place has shown him, trying to make sense of it, but all he can see is Rey. Her hand on his in the dark, guiding him to her. Her breath on his neck as she dressed his wound. Her tears falling in the hut on Achc-To. Her face looking up at his through the escape pod. Everything is out of order, is jumbled.
If you follow your thoughts out to conclusion, it will take us to a place we cannot go. His grandmother's words are a cacophony inside of him, blotting out those memories, confirming his suspicions of what he would do to Rey if she let him.
In his mind's eye, an image appears, of Rey, of Rey but not Rey, of Rey but older, standing in front of him. Someone unseen holds a blaster to her temple and tears run down her dusty cheeks. Traitor! The words are unspoken, but reverberate in his head, and her body falls next to his, executed together.
Another image, another timeline, plays, of Rey, flanked by the bodies of her dismembered friends. Her face sees him, looks at him, and her saber is through his throat before he can speak.
Kylo, the real Kylo, cradles his neck in the caves, his burnt hand cracking in the movement.
Another timeline, Rey stands outside a prison cell. Outside his prison cell, the glass keeping him from her. Pity overtakes her eyes as she looks down at him. Dameron appears, wrapping his arm around her waist, kissing her shoulder before leading her away for the last time.
He follows every image out to conclusion, playing all of their possible timelines in his head. Her body is ripped from a ship by an explosion, her heart pierced by a stormtrooper's blast, her skin flayed by Hux.
Every emotion boils in him as his brain won't stop playing the timelines of her, won't stop playing the images of her dying, or leaving. The cracks of his burn start bleeding as his fists clench and unclench. From deep inside his belly something thunders and an agonizing cry escapes him, half pure rage and half torment. His cheeks are already wet from tears he hadn't known he shed.
He screams into the blackness for what seems like hours, until his chest throbs. Every part of him is pain now. Something in him wants Rey so badly, wants her here with him, her touch on him, but to what end? To those ends?
He goes on like this until he feels cold metal brush against his arm. R2. He had forgot he had an audience.
He opens his eyes and glances towards the droid pushing up close to him, but he does not look at him. R2 hadn't dared get this close to Kylo since they had met again here, in this place. They had been close once, friends even, until his Uncle betrayed him. R2 had been his first training partner, before Kylo was even taller than the droid. Luke had proved Kylo's emerging abilities using R2, Han's mouth hanging open when faced with his tiny son's dexterity. Leia knew, had known, though, since she first felt him growing inside her.
Kylo had seen R2 the night of his Uncle's betrayal through the fire, shaking at the destruction Kylo and his just born Knights had wrought. He had thought about destroying the droid then, thought about running his saber through his cool metal, about watching R2 split perfectly in half. But he hadn't. Something in him stopped him.
And now he sat, here, in the impossible place, being comforted by the droid he had spared from his own hand years earlier.
R2 nudges him slightly, trying to catch his attention away from his inner turmoil. Kylo bunches up his eyebrows as R2 moves slightly farther away, and then returns to bump into him again. Finally, Kylo turns his head towards R2 and looks at him directly.
"What?!" the words are unduly harsh as they escape him.
R2 backs up, but not in fear. He doesn't beep a reply. Instead, he turns his head towards the center of the room, where Anakin and Padme had just been, and his holoprojector lights up.
It takes a moment for Kylo's eyes to adjust to the light filling the room. When he does, he sees a vista beyond beautiful. He sees Naboo. Specifically, Varykino, home once to Padme's family, the Naberrie's. He recognizes it from his youth. They had only gone once, but his mother had told him to remember this place. She hadn't told him why at the time, but now he understood.
The water rolled in the Lake Country behind them. Them. Padme and Anakin stand together, the sun setting on their wedding clothes. This is where they had married. They were married. He had never known, he had thought theirs had been a relationship of passion only, but they had committed to each other here. Their faces looped in R2's memory, looking so happy, so content. A stark difference from the pent up love he had seen displayed from them before.
It had been possible for them. Against everything, they had married. They were happy. They had each other. This was a timeline for Vader. This could be a timeline for him.
"Padme Amidala is your grandmother," Rey's voice wafts over him, lost in herself.
Kylo turns his body around and sees Rey standing in the newly formed hallway to the left of him, transfixed by the hologram playing in front of him. Her eyes pry themselves away from the image and look at Kylo, pleadingly.
His heart picks up, and he can't help that his lips curl up slightly at the knowledge she is safe, "Took you long enough."
Rey sits down on the sand close to Kylo. Closer than she had ever sat next to him.
Rey shakes her head, looking to the hologram looping in front of her, looking at the sheer love and joy in both their faces. "I just, I never knew...I always assumed Luke and Leia were the product of..."
"Rape?"
"...Of hate. I didn't know that he was capable of love, or that someone loved him back. I never fathomed he could have been married. In all the stories I've ever heard about him, he was always an absolute villain."
"He wasn't always that."
Rey sighs, realizing none of the Skywalker men have ever lived up to her expectations.
"It's…" Kylo begins to explain.
"22 ABY," Rey already knows.
"Yes," his smile widens. She was too smart.
"This is why you thought I was going to Naboo."
"Yes," he confirms.
Rey and Kylo continue to watch silently as R2 plays the scene. It reminds Rey of a music box she had once seen in Unkar Plutt's junk, one he had hit her for touching. They cannot hear the vows, only the soft lapping of water coming from R2's recollection.
"R2 was there," Rey realizes in a breath. The droid lets out a distracted whistle in response. "I knew you had secrets," her voice is playful as she addresses him. As she looks over to R2 on the other side of Kylo, she notices the blackness of Kylo's hand, and the dark liquid pouring out through its cracks onto his pants beneath it.
She lets out an audible gasp before reaching for it. She thinks better of grabbing an injury, though, and pulls away at the last second.
"What happened?!" she is almost yelling, but not quite. R2 cuts the transmission, startled by her voice, and they are broken of the beautiful memory.
He motions to the wall behind him. A deep gash, now cooled back to its original obsidian, runs deep into it and she follows it down to his saber laying dormant on the floor beneath it, surrounded by glittering glass.
"Why would you…" she begins to ask before she realizes that was the spot she must have disappeared behind.
"I needed to get to you," he responds to her unasked question, looking straight ahead and not at her.
She extends her body over him and his stomach seizes in anticipation for a moment, feeling her muscles stretch over his legs. When he sees that she is only reaching for the knapsack across him, he settles. She drags it over to her side before digging through it and taking out supplies.
"Give me your hand," she asks, distractedly, as she unfurls gauze.
He doesn't move.
"Give me your hand, Kylo," she is more direct this time and he obliges.
She holds his palm in her own, careful not to touch the top. She dips her finger in salve and begins to rub it over the burn. His fingers tighten around hers as she does, recoiling from the sting. This was the third time she had taken care of him in a day, and he didn't deserve any of it, he realizes, as he holds her hand in his.
He looks up at her face, lit dimly, as it works. She is focused on her task. Her hair, wet from sweat, runs down in pieces from her face as she wraps his hand. He admires every soft curve, every slight movement of her lips, which silently run through the stages of dressing a wound.
Suddenly, she speaks, and he has to pretend he wasn't just staring at her, "Who's Obi-Wan?"
A surge of shock at hearing that name from her lips runs through him. His grip tightens even more around her.
"Where did you hear that name?" his gaze is unapologetically on her now.
She looks up from his hand, confused, "It didn't show you him?"
"What?" he reverberates her confusion back to her.
"The caves, they didn't show you Obi-Wan?" Rey's mind is in disarray, she had just assumed the caves would show them the same images.
"No...they showed me...something else," Kylo responds, feeling guilt at the apparitions he had seen and what they had stirred in him.
"Something else?" her voice is half questioning, half trying to comprehend. She takes a breath, as her mind begins to form new explanations. "What is this place?" she repeats her same question from the day before.
"I don't know," Kylo shakes his head, freeing himself from looking at her.
"I think it's...I think it's intelligent," she says, not quite wanting to say it outloud just yet.
He looks back to her, wondering if she's gone insane. She shakes her head sensing his apprehension.
"I think it's more than just trapped memories. I think it's that too, but...it showed us Padme and Anakin meeting for a reason. And then it separated us and showed us two different things. It's doing this on purpose. It brought us here to show us these things."
He pauses, letting a contemplative silence dawn over them. He knew what she was saying was right, but he wasn't sure how. He thought the force had brought them together before, but he was wrong, it had only been Snoke. Was this another game that someone was playing on them?
After a while, he says the only thing he can think to say, knowing she wouldn't have an answer, "Why?"
"I don't know, but I don't think it is done with us yet."
She finishes wrapping his hand and packs up in silence. They're both still tired, but Rey's survival instincts are too far buried in her own thoughts to force them to rest. She needs to think, they both do. They begin walking in a haze, both lost in their own heads.
After an hour or so, Kylo picks up his pace, until he is walking next to her, instead of behind her, edging R2 out.
They walk in unison for a while, Kylo focusing on how many steps it takes her to match his own, trying to think of what to say to bring them out of silence. Finally, he speaks, "Obi-Wan was Anakin's master."
Rey nods, still focusing forward, Kylo only confirming what she had already seen in the cave's memory. She knew that much about Obi-Wan.
Kylo, wanting more from her than a nod, gives her more information, hoping it will bring her out of her own mind and get her talking to him, "After Anakin became Vader, Obi-Wan blamed himself. He disappeared to Tatooine. He watched Skywalker grow up from a far. He eventually become Luke's first master, but they all knew him as Ben Kenobi."
Rey stops and looks up at Kylo. Ben.
"Ben Solo was named for him, yes," Kylo knew what she was thinking, and answered the question he knew was coming before she could ask it.
She sighs and looks at the ground. He had offered so much. She pauses, thinking, before she speaks again, searching for what to say in response.
"I've heard his voice before," she gives him a truth back for his.
"What?"
"Obi-Wan. I'd heard him in my head before today. Only a few times, but, I'd heard him."
"How?" Kylo leans on the wall of the hallway behind him, hoping what she would say would help him to make sense out of this powerful woman who came from nothing.
"When I was ten, I tried to climb The Spike in the Imperial Graveyard."
Kylo's eyebrows raise, and she realizes she needs to explain more, that the jargon she grew up with on Jakku doesn't translate here.
"It was a Star Destroyer, once, but it had crashed so hard that it burrowed into the sand. All that remained was its tail end sticking straight into the air. It was the tallest thing on Jakku."
"And you tried to climb it?" Kylo's voice is full of disbelief, but the question was an honest one, searching for a motive.
Rey nods, "It was the highest vantage point. Most of the ships had been so picked over by that time, and I needed parts for food. I thought if I could see everything, I could see something someone else hadn't."
Kylo stares at her, remembering how much she had to go through before he met her, imagining her ten year old body, a body that should have been playing and reading and laughing, pulling itself up to fight for food, something so basic to him.
"I'd tried to climb it when I was younger, but my arms were too short. When I was ten, I was big enough, barely, but I was. So, I started climbing. I made it maybe, 15 meters, before my grip gave out. I learned later how to use belays and ropes to climb, but I was young and I didn't know," she chuckles, more to herself, more at her ignorance, than anything. "And so I fell."
"15 meters?" Kylo marvels at the distance, knowing Rey wouldn't exaggerate.
Rey continues to nod as she speaks, "I woke up in the sand, and I couldn't move. I couldn't feel anything. But there was this voice, and it said, 'Get up Rey', and I knew I could. And I did. And I walked back to my AT-AT. I had cracked five ribs, but I survived." She pauses as something like pride swells in her, "I made it to the top of The Spike when I was fourteen."
Kylo smiles at that.
"The voice, it was his. It was Obi-Wan's. I heard it a handful of times since, always willing me to keep going. I heard it for the last time in Maz Kanata's cellar. He called my name, he said, 'These are your first steps.' And that was it, until this place showed me him."
"He was one of the only Jedi to survive the Great Purge that was Order 66," Snoke's words escape Kylo. Rey winces at the rhetoric.
Kylo notices, and instead, switches to the words his mother used to tell him about Kenobi, "He was a friend of Leia's father, Bail Organa, during the Clone Wars. He was the reason they all came together, Leia, Han, Luke, the Wookie. He saved their lives from Lord Vader by sacrificing himself. That's all they told me about him."
"He's dead?" Rey knows this, knows he wouldn't still be alive, but the question still ekes out of her like a hope being extinguished.
"He's very dead. He died the day my parents met," Kylo breaks from her and starts walking again, tired of talking about the past.
Rey stays behind, processing.
"Wait." He turns to her, "What did you see?"
"Padme and Anakin again," he replies, looking at the room he had just stepped into.
"Why would it show you them again?" Rey face scrunches.
Kylo ignores the question, instead, he forms a command, "Come look at this."
She obeys, walking into the room he stands in, expecting to find more of the same identical rooms they had walked through over the course of the last day and a half. Instead, she is confronted with something new.
Where there used to be sharp, geometric angles, now there were smooth curves. The glass had all but disappeared, still glinting in certain areas, but it only sparsely. Rey was thankful for that, she had never liked mirrors. Rey was thankful for something else, too. Beneath them, the sand had been replaced by cooled matte obsidian rock, curving and dipping. She almost falls to her knees in glee.
"No more sand," she says, quietly but triumphantly.
Kylo chuckles, "Of course that is what you would notice first."
"We must be getting closer," she surmises, as she looks up and admires their new surrounding.
"To what?"
"To whatever it wants us to see."
As they walk, the rooms continue to change, slowly. The ripples in the walls start to smooth out, the floor beneath them loses it's uneven waves, until they are once again able to look up from their steps, unconcerned about tripping into a divot.
They go on for hours, bolstered by the knowledge they may be getting closer, but it seems never ending. They talk intermittently, about the supplies, about the cave's memories, trying to make sense out of it, but mostly they are silent.
It's Kylo that stops them this time.
"We should rest here," he announces when they get to a room with smooth craters large enough for lying down in.
Rey drops the pack immediately, as if she had been waiting for him to say it. She stretches up towards the ceiling above, inadvertently exposing her stomach to him slightly as she does. She reaches up and cracks her neck before settling down, claiming a crater and hauling the knapsack between her legs.
"You should let me carry that tomorrow," he poses, mentally kicking himself for not offering until now.
"Yeah, I'll let the infirmed one who can't stop getting hurt carry the supplies, great idea. Then you can throw out your back and make it a trifecta of injuries," Rey teases and begins to unpack.
Kylo rolls his eyes as he watches Rey dig through the bag. He knows the futility of arguing with strong-headed people, so he lets it go. Rey finally gets to the bottom and takes out the two blankets and a new satchel of water. She carefully transfers the water from the portable bladder into their canteen.
"There's enough for two more canteens full," she says to herself.
"How long will that last?" he asks, looking down at his bandaged hand.
"A day, really. We can probably make it two," she had packed enough for a week, but with the heat and the fact that there were two of them, the supply had dried up quickly.
"Then?"
"I don't think dehydration will take that long in this heat," she offers up a ration packet and the newly refilled canteen to him.
"Right," he takes them, but doesn't eat or drink. Instead, he holds them like the precious resources they are.
"So we're on a timeline," she opines.
"Too bad we're not moisture farmers," he says mindlessly, wiping the humidity from his brow.
Rey, who had been opening her own ration packet, perks up, "What did you say?"
"Nevermind," Kylo says, looking around trying to pick a crater that seems satisfactory.
"No, what did you say?" she presses.
"I said 'too bad we're not moisture farmers.' It was stupid, laugh at me some more," his usual self-pity comes back to the surface.
Rey pops up out of the crater and rushes Kylo. He can't make sense out of the blur she has become, but braces. She is to him in an instant, placing her hands on either side of his face. His hands instinctively settle on the slight curve of her hips, but in her excitement, she doesn't notice his touch.
"You beautiful bastard," she declares, and wants to kiss him on his cheeks, like she does with Finn and Poe and Rose when she's celebrating, but she stops herself. Instead she breaks her grasp, and his, and rushes back into her crater, pulling out a tarp, a respirator, and a water filter.
"What are you doing?" Kylo asks after his heart calms from touching her for the briefest of moments.
She ignores him. Instead, he sees her kneel to R2. He can't tell what they are talking about, but the droid is animated, and pops open his chest plate to hand her something. Rey touches the top of R2's body, and a slight pang of jealousy hits Kylo, seeing the droid receive what he wanted so badly again, what he had lost just a moment ago: her touch.
Rey runs back to her crater and begins to tent the tarp, running part of the respirator tube into it.
Kylo figures it out, and rushes to crouch near the crater, "You're building a vaporator." His voice is full of awe and his mouth gapes open. Rey is smiling when she looks up at him. She reaches out and touches his jaw, slowly closing his open mouth until they are looking at each other, her hand still on his face.
"Took you long enough," she beams in this dark place. Kylo would never forget her face in this moment, not for the rest of his life.