As the oxygen from the respirator tank cools the air inside her makeshift vaporator, condensation from the heat outside forms water droplets on the tarp, which drip down into the excess respirator tubing Rey has molded into its edges. She funnels the trace amounts of water into the portable bladders until they are back at capacity, before shutting down the operation.
Kylo stares at her the entire time she works, not believing the endless ingenuity and power packed into her body.
She finally stands up after she repacks the supplies, arching her back, stiff from leaning over for the past hour or so. It hadn't taken long for the condensation to form, it was so much quicker here than on Jakku. On Jakku, her vaporator might run for a full month and only get her a gallon of water. Maybe that's why she hadn't thought of it. Here, however, she had 3 gallons in an hour, the moisture in the air being so dense.
She sees the canteen next to Kylo, who had been sitting on the ground next to her, and picks it up, handing it to him again, "Drink, drink as much as you want. Rest assured, dehydration won't be the thing to kill us down here. It will almost certainly be something else," her voice hardly contains her excitement.
He smiles and lifts the canteen to his lips. He notices the excitement drain from her as he does.
"Your hand," she frowns.
It's only then that he notices he is lifting the canteen with his burnt hand, the hand which he couldn't even move without piercing pain hours before.
As he looks at the bandage in disbelief, Rey is already moving, and is back with the medical supplies in what seems like an instant. She kneels next to his sitting body, leaning back on her heels.
"Let me see your hand, I need to redress both your wounds anyway."
"Rey, you've done enough. You just saved our lives. You should rest," Kylo isn't used to people like Rey, with all her endless compassion.
"Without you, I would've never thought of a vaporator," she takes his hand in hers like it's easy, like she had never feared his touch once, "So, no, I think I have some time to make sure your wounds don't fester and infect your bloodstream and kill you. I need you."
Kylo freezes at her last three words. Rey notices the awkward air she created as she unwraps his hand, but knows if she opens her mouth again she will just make it worse so she lets the awkwardness settle over them.
It's broken as soon as she uncovers his hand fully. The char is all but gone, leaving angry looking, bright red skin underneath it. Her eyebrows knit together and her eyes narrow, skeptical of how much better it looks.
"Do you always heal quickly? Is that part of your power?" Rey asks as she inspects his hand, looking for an explanation. She had read about increased healing times for force-sensitives in the Jedi texts, but had never seen it before.
"Not that I know of," Kylo replies, just as confused as she is as he looks down at his hand.
She sticks her chin out, thinking.
She moves quickly to his upper body, swinging her body over to his side. Her torso presses against him as she reaches over the expanse of his shoulders to untie the silk bandage, and he inhales sharply at the touch. She peels away the covering and looks to the circular saber wound. It had already scarred over perfectly, settling in a shade just slightly lighter than his already pale skin tone. The scar tissue looked years old already.
Her head cocks to the side as she looks between his hand and his chest.
"Are you sure?" her eyes flick up to his.
"Yes," he stares back at her wholeheartedly.
"Is it this place?" her eyes dart around as she moves back in front of him, grabbing the gauze and salve from her kit.
"Maybe," he says, distractedly, his thoughts turning to her, to the way the force had picked up when they touched. It was slight, but it was there. Maybe it wasn't his powers that were responsible for this, maybe it was hers. He keeps it to himself as he watches her bite down on the gauze to rip it.
She holds her hand out, palm up, when the materials are ready, a silent entreaty. He knows what she means, and puts his hand in hers again, and she gets to work.
That night, they both fall asleep listening to the other's breathing coming from separate craters, waiting for something to happen. Nothing does.
When Kylo wakes, Rey's already up, talking in a low voice to R2 so as not to wake him. When she notices him stir, she throws a ration packet his way. It lands on top of him in the crater. His head pops up and she immediately bursts into laughter.
"What?" he means it to come out playfully, but he is unpracticed in levity, so his usual harshness bleeds into it.
Rey lets out a final chuckle, "I guess I've just never seen your hair like that."
His hand comes up to his hair, following it as it veers completely off to one side, sticking straight up into the air sideways. He runs his hand through it a few times until it looks semi-normal again and smiles sleepily up at Rey.
Her face changes shape as he smiles at her, falling and looking away.
"We should get moving quickly," she says, all business.
"Yeah, okay," his smile disintegrates almost instantly, failing to understand what he had done to make her change so suddenly.
She stands up and tries not to look at him. Everything about this seemed easy, where it had once been so incredibly difficult. She was reminded of the mornings she would have with her friends on the Falcon, waking up together, learning each other's routines.
Rey always put toothpaste on Rose's toothbrush for her, knowing Rose's proclivity for sleeping in, saving her some time in her rush. When she and Poe would have piloting shifts together, he would always leave Rey a mug of caf, knowing she would be the next one up after him, to wake her up before their long stints. She remembers BB-8 slowing down just for her, allowing her to touch his antenna good morning, as he chased Finn around, trying to keep Finn on time for his own shift.
Where are her friends now? In peril somewhere she can't help them? While she sits smiling at the man who wants to kill them all? Worse, while she sits in something like happiness next to him? She looks down at her bracelet, still glowing blue, and she can almost feel their sense of betrayal. She runs it back up to her forearm and tries to conceal it, more from herself than him.
She moves to the knapsack, but Kylo moves quickly ahead of her, getting to it first. He tries to put it on, but it is awkward, as he forgets to adjust the straps to his much larger frame.
Rey smiles again despite herself.
"Here, let me just…" she reaches her hands out to him to help.
"I can do it," he jerks away, confused by her sudden changes in body language.
He struggles, one arm in a loop, to find the other. The arm not in the loop reaches behind him several times, never reaching the other strap. He huffs out when he looks back to her, totally enraptured by this wrestling match he was having with the knapsack. Her smile widens and she reaches out again. This time, he lets her touch him.
"Have you carried your own stuff before, ever?" she goads him as she easily loosens each straps metal adjusters, widening them to accommodate him, before clasping it the straps together on his chest, which he had finally once again covered with a shirt.
She looks up at him and gives a curt nod when she's done.
She turns around but he grabs her arm, lightly. He feels like he might lose this if he doesn't, this lightness, this moment, like he had before.
She can't look back at him, she can't turn back to him. Instead, she looks down to the ground between them, not giving anything up.
They stand in this tableau for a moment, before he releases her arm, knowing that this wasn't the way, that he couldn't strong arm the moment into staying.
She starts walking forward, still not looking back. She fights the urge to caress the spot where his silent plea had burned into her arm.
Her thirst gets the best of her, and she stops and turns back to him after a few hours of working up the courage to face him again. She walks behind him to the pack and unclasps the canteen, drinking deeply from it and wiping her brow as she does.
She extends the canteen out to him, a show of good faith, but as she does, her beacon lights his face in blue, having slipped down from where she had been keeping it hidden further up on her forearm.
Her stomach clenches as she fights the urge to hide it immediately, knowing if she does, he will suspect something.
Instead, she lets it shine as she brings her hand back down. As she turns away from him, she touches it and shimmies the light back on her wrist, until the glow is hidden against her body.
As she does, Kylo watches her, but she doesn't notice, her thoughts stinging back to her friends, again, hoping they are okay.
"You're thinking of them, aren't you?" he cuts in.
"Who?" she plays dumb.
"Your….friends," he says the word, trying to force down his disdain.
Rey's face jumps to his and cloaks itself in confusion, desperately trying not to give anything away.
"The binary beacon. It belonged to Leia. I used to wear it," Rey breathes in, of course, "It's linking you to them, right?"
Her eyes narrow, hating to hear him talk about them, even if it was indirectly. He had no right, not after what he had done to Finn and Poe. Not after his organization had taken Paige from Rose.
"Are they coming for you?" he cocks his head to the side, trying to hide his fear that they could come and take her from him at any moment.
Rey reddens and looks down. She gives herself away.
"They don't know you're here, do they?" he is almost excited by the prospect.
Rey takes a deep breath and exhales loudly, and she returns her gaze to his, an emerging wrath brimming beneath her pupils.
"You left them? That's interesting," his voice is reminiscent of the one she heard so many years ago on Starkiller. So sure, so arrogant, before he was aware of her and her power.
"They left me," it escapes her, angry at his insinuation that she would ever abandon her friends.
The part of him that delights in pain picks up and he pushes when he knows he shouldn't. He lowers his head, slightly, to look into her eyes more deeply as she stares daggers into him.
"They left you," he repeats, "Why did they leave you?" his voice drops as he continues searching her eyes.
She looks back at him defiantly, thankful for the interlude this place caused in their force bond, thankful she isn't linked to him now. This is the Kylo she is used to, so shrewd and scheming.
She shakes her head, no, a silent appeal to get him to stop, to drop it. They were off limits to him.
He thinks he knows though, thinks they left her for the same reason he had been discarded by all those he once loved, "What we are, the power we wield, it scares people." He pauses, "Were they scared of you?"
She blinks, and in an instant, her gaze softens towards him. An understanding washes over her. This isn't the Kylo she knew on Starkiller. Or maybe it was, and she just didn't see past his self-imposed facade before, see deeper to the pain and fear that hid behind it.
"Not everyone is like that, Kylo," her voice is soft.
"You're wrong," he retorts, noticing something like pity rising in her eyes. He preferred the anger.
She wants to reach up to him, to run her fingers the length of his scar. But she doesn't.
"What's been done to you…by the people you trusted..."
"Stop," his voice is blunt, almost emotionless, "I don't need to hear your melancholy theory of how I got this way, or you trying to justify and explain away my decision to turn to the darkside to make yourself feel better about whatever this is."
He moves past her, breaking their closeness, and into the room in front of them.
Rey's shoulders raise instinctively, like a defense mechanism. She follows him out of the hallway, but waits until he gets to the other side of the room to speak again.
"Was it your decision?"
Kylo's breath hitches as if her words physically accosted him. He can't look at her and instead, turns to the wall behind him, inspecting it closely.
Rey exhales into the air above her, looking at the ceiling above. Her head tilts at what she sees.
Exposed erratically across the ceiling, peeking out from under the cooled globule lava, pieces of metal beams jut out. They seem to funnel into the next hallway.
Rey, totally entranced by these sudden structures, forgets she is in the middle of a discussion and starts to follow them.
When Kylo finally turns around from the wall, she is gone. He looks to R2 who beeps a small invitation to Kylo before disappearing after Rey.
When he catches up to her, her movements are turbulent, changing direction slightly every few steps. He studies her for a moment, before following her unwavering gaze above her.
He stops.
The caves around them seem to be slowly disintegrating away, being erased slowly by chiseled hallways of metal. He looks behind him, from where they just came from for confirmation, and he gets it.
As she looks up at a rectangular light exposed above them, still glowing red, he rushes past her, dropping the pack. His body slightly brushes her as he does, lifting her fugue state.
"This is…" Rey begins.
"Not possible," Kylo finishes.
"What could have made this?"
Kylo remains silent, the answer formulating in his head, fearing what saying it outloud would do to her.
They continue to look up, admiring the angular curves of their stumbled upon surroundings, not noticing how close they are getting to one another.
He backs into her, softly, without realizing, but she doesn't move. Instead, they stand there back to back, both looking up, silently relishing in being this close.
"Should we keep going?" Rey asks, totally in disbelief at the transformation around her.
"I don't think there are a lot of other options," Kylo responds, his voice just as astonished.
Her can feel her slight nod against his back.
They stand there for another moment, neither of them wanting to fracture this instance of vague intimacy.
But they do, eventually. They have to. Kylo picks the pack backup and restraps it to him, this time without her help.
She helps clasps the canteen back to it and starts out in front of him.
"Wait," he stops her, "I think it's my turn to lead."
She blinks and squints at him, blurring his edges slightly in her vision. She wants to launch in to him, to remind him of who gave him his scar, to remind him that she is just as capable, but she is tired of fighting with Kylo. She gives and imperceptible nod and steps back, allowing him to step in front.
They start walking again, a weight of anticipation settling in both their stomachs as they do.
They make camp that night in a room totally man made. No more traces of the natural cave formations exist. It reminds her, slightly, of the rooms she once saw in the wreckage of The Inflictor, an Imperial Star Destroyer she only dared to venture into a few times on Jakku, dodging its feral inhabitants to look desperately for parts. The dark walls are stark against the rectangular lights that glow red above them, lining the top of the room, still glowing impossibly in this deserted place.
Or, at least, she hoped it was deserted.
She helps him to take the pack off, eager to restart her vaporator operation before bed, but also eager to have a chance to redress his wounds. She tells herself the tight feeling of excitement in her stomach is just for the vaporator, trying to ignore the feeling of his hand in hers.
She starts to tent the tarp as he grabs the blankets. She notices from the corner of her eye his struggle to decide how to place their temporary sleeping mats. At first, he places them far apart, before deciding to move them closer, then very close, then farther away. After his fifth movement, she can't contain her tiny laugh anymore.
"Is something funny?" he still holds a bit of contempt for their discussion earlier, but there is some lightness behind his voice now.
"No, not at all," she responds, focused on her work, "The way you have it is fine."
He looks down to the blankets and is almost surprised at how close they are, how close she has just given her permission to be to him. He thinks maybe she can't see, that she's too distracted by her work to know what she has just agreed to.
"Are you sure?" he immediately regrets the question. He should just let it be.
"Are you not?" she shoots back, glancing at him as she wraps the plastic tube around the tarp.
He settles as she finishes up the vaporator and turns the oxygen tank on. She scratches the bridge of her nose, tickled by sweat, before returning to the knapsack to grab the medical kit.
"Sit," Rey commands. He obliges immediately, knowing she would get her way eventually if he were to try to talk back to her demand.
She comes and sits opposite to him, and his hand is already out for her to take. She smiles at the routine they've quickly established. She unwraps the old bandage to find silvery new skin underneath. The burn was only slightly less than two days old, and it was completely devoid of the nasty blistering and leaking her own burns would have at that stage of healing.
She thinks back to the hot metal littering Jakku, to her youthful carelessness which would forget, and touch, and burn. The memories of her enraged skin, welting, bursting, scarring appear in her mind, and his. He slowly tightens his grip around her hand and pulls it closer to his body, extending her arm as he does. He twists it, slightly, to see the underside of her arm, to see the healed scar of the burn he had just seen mark her in her memory.
She realizes that what she had just remembered had been transferred to him, somehow, and tries, hollowly, to get her arm back. He tightens and she stops her false retreat.
Slowly, he brings his face down to her scar, which runs the length of her inner arm. He runs his full lips against it, brushing the length of it. He doesn't press his lips to it, like a kiss. Instead, he skims it, running from just below her wrist to her elbow, his eyes locked onto hers as he does.
Rey's eyes widen, but she doesn't move. The only distance between their two faces now is the expanse of her upper arm. She fights her urge to look away, strangling down her timidness at his touch.
She braces for him to smother her, but instead, he moves away, slowly, and places her arm back down on her sitting thigh.
She starts breathing again, but doesn't move as he gets up.
He walks to the blankets, and once again repositions them. This time, he lays them together, side by side, before walking back to her.
He extends his hand out to her sitting body. She looks between his outstretched hand and his face. This time, she takes it.
He leads her over to their makeshift bed and she lies herself down on her back. He settles next to her, mirroring her position. They both look up to the ceiling above. Her hand extends down between them and finds his, holding his hand in hers once more. They fall asleep like this, just holding hands, but it's enough for both of them.
Rey wakes before he does, another new tradition, new routine, starting. They had shifted in the night to face each other, but they hadn't unclasped their hands from one another. When her vision clears from sleep and she sees his sleeping form in front of her, her muscles tense for a split second before she remembers this Kylo, not the one from her nightmares. She reaches up with her other hand and brushes his hair, weighed down by sweat, out of his face, tucking it behind his ear.
The moisture of his sweat on her hand reminds her of something, and she carefully slides out of his grip and heads to her vaporator, which had been running throughout the night. Water overflows from the portable bladder to the floor below and she curses herself for not being more mindful.
As she deconstructs the vaporator, shutting off the oxygen and repacking the bag, the ground around them starts to shake.
A small "no" escapes Rey and she starts shoving everything indiscriminately into the bag.
Kylo wakes at the tremors to find the space next to him where Rey had been empty. His heart lurches. He turns around to yell for her, but before he can form the words, she has his hand, pulling him up from his slumber.
He grabs the blankets as she leads him forward, into the hall ahead. R2 lights the way already, peeved at their sluggishness.
Behind them, they hear a crash, but don't look back, knowing the beams they had been admiring the day before were coming down.
R2 speeds up, and so do they, Rey's hand still dragging Kylo's half sleeping body.
They darts through hallways and rooms, each one growing larger, but they can't notice, can't stop for fear of collapse.
Suddenly, they run out of a hallway, expecting to find just another room, but instead, a large expansive chamber spreads out before them. R2 stops, causing a pile up behind him. The room seems to go on forever, it is huge and black but elegantly designed, with vaulted ceilings that ascended up and over them. The trembling stops as soon as they step foot in this new discovery, and Rey's grip loosens on Kylo's, shocked.
She walks out, basking in the excess space after being so cooped up in the endless cave system for days. After a few paces, she realizes the floor in the middle of the room ends abruptly and gives way, with a walkway extending up and above the cistern. She edges up closer to it and looks down into the chiseled pit. Fifty or so meters below a vast pool of magma, angry and malevolent, churns, running as a lake beneath the room.
She looks back at Kylo, expecting him to be inspecting the room as curiously as she was, but he stands in the same place she left him, tousled blankets still balled in his hand. He looks directly at her.
She knows he's figured it out.
"What is this place?" she asks again, for the third time. This time, though, she knows he will have the answer.
"Lord Vader's Lair."
"Lair?!" she repeats, dubiously, before looking to R2. "He was a Super Villian," she talks to the droid, joking as if the lair was the thing that really pushed him over the edge, and not the mass murders.
"How long have you known?" she looks back to Kylo, but her voice has no hint of resentment or anger, just curiosity.
"I suspected since the walls started changing. I'd heard about a castle on Mustafar, I'd even looked for it a few times with my Knights after…" he looks to R2, "After the Temple, but I couldn't find anything. I figured it lapsed into the lava pits in disrepair after Lord Vader's death."
She steps away from the lava lake and back towards Kylo.
"This is what it wanted us to see. The memories, they were Vader's, trapped here. Why here?" she looks around as she talks, trying to figure it out.
"This is where he become Lord Vader. This is where he and Kenobi dueled."
Rey's face scrunches up, trying to piece together the history of Vader from the fragments she had been afforded. She knew of him only as a fearful nightmare before all of this, as the prototype for Kylo Ren, for the monster in a mask. But now, there was so much more to grapple with. She tries to piece things together as quickly as she can, struggling to decode what the caves were throwing at them.
Kylo starts to put it together before she does.
"You never told me exactly what the caves showed you when you saw you Obi-Wan," he says, needing just a little more information before drawing his conclusions.
Rey shakes her head, unable to describe it fully, but answers the best she can, "His mistakes."
Kylo takes a step towards her, his curiosity fully piqued.
She notices and continues, "Luke, in his first lesson, his only lesson, he told me that it was a Jedi who was responsible for the training and creation of Darth Vader. Now I know, he was talking about Obi-Wan."
Kylo shakes his head, "Obi-Wan didn't create Darth Vader, Sidious did."
"Like Snoke created you? Or was it your blood turning against you that created Kylo Ren?"
Kylo turns his head away from her, unable to stomach what she said.
Rey continues, trying to justify her words, "Obi-Wan knew Anakin was different, knew he felt the pull of the darkside, but he kept pushing the light only, ignoring everything else. He couldn't see past the code, see past the Jedi, to help him. If that's what made Vader, if sticking so closely to an ancient order was enough to throw the Galaxy into this never ending struggle, maybe Luke was right."
"Maybe he was right how?" Kylo still looks away.
"He told me the Jedi Order needed to end."
At her words, Kylo's head snaps up, looking back to Rey, challenging her, "Seems...uncharacteristic."
"You changed him. What he did to you, because he thought he was protecting the light...it broke him."
Rey moves closer to Kylo, closing the distance between them slowly.
"You told me once to let old things die. Maybe we should. Maybe that's what it's trying to tell us. Snoke used your two warring sides to get to you. He used the complete rejection of the dark by the Jedi to infiltrate your mind, and make you scared to ask for help when you needed it. And in retaliation, you grew to hate the light instead, to try to snuff all of it out of you," she moves closer, until she is right in front of him. She reaches out and skims his lower torso with her hand. His abs contract under her touch until she finds them. The dice. She settles her hand above them while she talks.
"I used to think that you hated Han, you hated your father. But now I know you didn't. You loved him more than anything in this whole Galaxy. He was everything to you. And you thought by killing him, you would kill Ben. But you didn't. He only grew more."
She feels his breathing stop as he holds his breath.
"What if we didn't run from either side? What if we didn't torture ourselves with the absolution of these two factions we didn't create? That the force didn't even create? That some people long ago decided on? What if we got comfortable in the tension that lies between the two?"
A tear runs down his cheek and she brings her other hand up to catch it. She doesn't know how he will react, doesn't know what he will do with everything she's just thrown at him. She waits.
"I don't think this place will let us kill the past," he backs up and out of her grasp, before walking around her. Her mind races at this sudden role reversal.
She waits a moment, letting the questions slow down in her mind, before talking again, "What do you mean? What do you think this place is telling you?" She turns around to look at him as she pries for answers.
He doesn't respond, instead, he stays looking away from her into the length of the room in front of them.
She remembers, then, that they hadn't seen the same things in the caves. Maybe the force wasn't trying to tell them the same thing. Maybe they had different things to learn.
"You never told me what it showed you, exactly, when you saw Padme and Anakin again."
As he turns to look at her, something in front of him hisses like water at its boiling point, masking something like running footsteps, but neither of them are moving.
The room in front of them flashes into blue. Kylo backs up, finding Rey and taking her hand, but neither of them stop looking at the blue mist ahead. A mass materializes, before manifesting into a clearly defined body.
And for the second time, Rey sees Vader without his mask.
DUN DUN DUN. I'm so excited for the next chapter. It is actually the scene I built the whole story around and I'm just so excited to finally show you guys!
And again, a huge thank you to every one who has stuck by this slow burn this long. Y'all are the real MVPs. We're almost there!