Surrender
Chapter One:
Rey was but a tiny speck amongst the sea of metal ruins. Her astonishingly clean, pure white apparel flowed airilly around her lean figure as she clung to one of the thousands of irregularly shaped structures. She was inching her way around the edge of said structure, before swinging herself forwards and placing her foot on a length of steel jutting out. Her sudden weight caused the piece to snap off, spiraling into the seemingly bottomless pit looming below. Rey fell at the unexpected lack of ground surface, just barely catching her hand in a groove of the metal column before she met the fate her now dangling body foreshadowed. She grunted, dragging herself upwards, back onto the small footing area she had resided upon before. Rey then latched onto the random, jagged outcroppings of the stature, climbing upwards a few paces before turning her head to look over her shoulder. There stood another outstretched, large piece of steel that was curled into an almost candy-cane shape. Bracing herself, Rey kicked off the column, launching and twisting herself in the air as she flew towards the next. Her heart hammered with fear- and time seemed to slow down as she approached the decaying scrap of the Death Star. She lunged forward, reaching out, and hooked her fingers around the edges of the cold material tightly as the impact drove the wind from her body. Rey inhaled sharply, her breath coming in heavy gasps as she heaved her entire body's weight onto the structured piece that extended to the side, over the large fall that could've been her doom. It was a strange feeling, whatever it was. A mixture of exhilaration intertwined with the fear, and the somber notability of the task she had forced upon herself.
Rey continued on, climbing and leaping through the air until she reached a solid- albeit tilted at an angle- level of ground. She peered around the hall cautiously, unsure of what to expect. Dirty water dripped in through cracks in the ceiling and walls, flooding corners of the long hall. Old, decaying stormtrooper helmets were gathered in groups on the floor, but she brushed this off. Rey turned, noticing that this hall had a short wall before it opened up above her in the large, spherical top half of the Death Star. She quickly climbed this wall, staring around at the rusted, mostly destroyed walls and the steel junk that littered the floor. Curiosity overcame her fear as she continued her search for the Sith Wayfinder…
Rey's footsteps were light on the scratched floor before she froze, hearing the shafts of a somehow-still-functional door opening. She turned slowly, and walked through the door. The Wayfinder has to be around here somewhere… She thought silently, trying to reassure herself more than anything that the dark pull of the Force here was nothing more than residual evil from past-times. A strange prickling feeling crept it's way up her body, leaving a tingling sensation in her fingertips. As soon as she had entered the doorway, it closed steadily behind her, leaving her in the almost pitch black room. It was eerily silent. Something inside her had called her here, and it was more than just a feeling. It was almost as if a part of her knew this is where she should be. The part that was always calling to her, night and day. The part she fought persistently, and the part she never wanted to admit to having. Rey walked forward warily, observing that the room was full of tall, reflective prisms similar to the reflective wall she had seen in the pit below the island on Ahch-To. Looking around at all of these crystals, her gaze landed on the Sith Wayfinder- suspended mid-air between two pillars, held in place by a high concentration of the dark forces flooding the room around her. As she began reaching forward, something in the back of her mind caused her to hesitate. Her fingertips, mere centimeters from the device, pushed past this instinctive hesitancy, and her calloused hand wrapped around the defined pyramid shape. She immediately felt something stirring in her mind. It was a dark, low hull in the back of her head. It whispered to her, a low tone of incoherent words. She was neither disturbed nor comforted by this incessant undertone of voices. Rather, they appeared to be warning her. Pulling the mapping device from it's suspended position, she turned from the column, inspecting the apparatus with gentle hands. Upon further inquiry of the voices produced by the Sith material, she snapped her head up only to see a mirrored image of herself- only this reflection was pale, cloaked in dark robes, with her face illuminated by the glow of her blood-red lightsaber. Rey let out a surprised, breathless gasp, backing up into yet another of the glass prisms. The second image of herself lifted her lightsaber, unlocking the second half of its metal shaft, letting it swing downwards, ignite, and form an exact replica of Darth Maul's saber. Panic spiked through Rey's mind, and she was momentarily paralyzed by the strong feeling. She stared at this version of herself, the version she had seen sitting beside Kylo Ren on the sith throne. All of the terrible memories rushed to her mind, the feelings of abandonment and sheer loneliness, the resentment she tried to keep pushed down to prevent this side of herself from becoming a possibility- so how was she here now? How was she real?
"Don't be afraid of who you are," Sith Rey spoke in an icy voice that was slightly distorted, as if filtered through a mask like Darth Vader's or Kylo Ren's. Rey ignited her own lightsaber just as Sith Rey launched forward, swinging her red plasmic light beam in a circular motion. Rey swung her saber downwards, deflecting the hit before her dark-side self twisted her hilt, raising the send half of her lightsaber towards Rey's chest. Rey swung once again to shield the attack. The impact sent Sith Rey and her saber stumbling backwards a few steps. They continuously fought, switching between offensive and defensive just as quickly as the other did. As the battle continued, it became more and more clear that every move they made was matched, stride for stride, breath for breath by the other. Their movements were so synchronized that it was less of a battle, and more of a choreographed dance. A dance between the light and the dark. Their coordination terrified Rey, and caused her to realize that she wasn't in fact, so different from the thing she feared most- herself.
With a sudden surge of power, Rey thrust her lightsaber forward in a stabbing motion, only for Sith Rey to rotate one of the blades of her saber so that they were parallel; catching and locking Rey's lightsaber in between the two fiery columns. Sith Rey abruptly raised both halves of her weapon, forcing Rey's along with them so that the two were face to face. Rey's eyes widened and her breath came in heavy gasps from the exertion it took to fight herself. The flames of the three blades crackled around their hilts, the heat licking dangerously close to their white-knuckled, tightly gripping hands. They remained like this for a moment, neither able to do much at this point but catch their breath. Rey stared at herself, her heart hammering with growing fear when she couldn't easily pull her saber free from between her counterpart's grasp. Sith Rey had sickeningly pale skin, yellow eyes which are that of the Sith, and a lust for death and destruction. Rey's mind was racing, fighting against the still growing whispers of the Sith, the dark constantly threatening to overwhelm and consume her, and the longing she felt to give in to it all. It appeared as though her doppelganger sensed this, for she released Rey's saber and roughly shoved her backwards before disappearing. Rey fell onto her back, lightsaber submissively turning off. As she hit the ground, her eyes began to flutter between a state of opened and closed. As a sudden overbearing drowsiness smacked her in the face, she scraped her fingernails against the smooth floor in an attempt to wake herself up. She could no longer resist the overwhelming cacophony of Sith voices bombarding her every thought and blurring her senses. Her body felt like it was being pressed into the ground by the physical weight of the extreme surge of dark Force in this place.
"Surrender…" the voices screamed into her mind, their words finally clear enough to understand. Rey didn't want to listen, but she knew she couldn't keep fighting herself. Her eyelids drooped heavily as she was ultimately forced to give in. At this surrender of her mind and body, thin trails of smoke began spilling from any crevice in the room, creating a fog-like cover over the floor around her figure laying on the ground. The black smoke slowly crept towards her, forming a large resemblance of a snake before arching and locking its jaws open, snake slithering in and out of its mouth. Blood-red eyes burned into her eyelids before the snake lunged forward in a striking motion aimed for her face. Millimeters from her closed and resting face, the snake imploded- turning into hundreds of thousands of tiny particles- all of which shone with a brightness invisible to any human or even Jedi eyes. The room glowed as the tiny, yet inexplicably blinding speckles twirled through the air, falling slowly and landing on Rey's body. The tension in her body dissipated instantly as her body began absorbing the pure particles of power. The voices, pestering and persistent, had finally silenced. Rey felt merged with the part of herself she had always feared- the Dark. A weight was lifted off of the woman's shoulders and her eyes held a component they had never contained before, although the glittering speckles had left tiny burn marks that covered her body. She wondered why she hadn't surrendered to it before! I…I feel free. She let out a soft, small chuckle as the truth hit her finally, as clear as anything she'd ever seen. Brushing the few released strands of hair behind her ears, she slowly sat up as the weight of the room suddenly evaporated. She remembered her mission once more and stood to leave the room- whose door was now slowly opening. To find the Sith Wayfinder, and use it to find, and stop, Emperor Palpatine. But now she was rethinking that. Why fight for the Jedi? She now knew what she truly wanted, so why not work towards that instead? Rey felt like a different person, seeing everything through a new pair of eyes. She looked at her reflection in one of the mirrored prisms, and her soft, calloused hand brushed against her face as she inspected herself. Yellow tinted eyes, same as the version of herself she had just met. Tiny welts that covered her body, but were insignificantly painless. Why had she ever been afraid of this? Her growing smile quickly turned into a smirk spreading across her dainty, yet dangerously dark features when she sensed the presence of who had arrived. She finally faced the sunlight-filtered arena beyond the tiny room in which she had discovered herself, abandoning the Wayfinder on the ground. She let out a soft hiss as the sunbeams hit her skin, but began making steady pace towards the broad-framed figure approaching from the other side of the hemispherical ruins. As the dyad neared each other, it became even more appallingly clear to the both of them that something had changed in Rey. She could feel Kylo Ren's guarded surprise, and-
displeasure?