AN: Hi, hello, what's goin on, how are you all? I'm good. Like, I mean, I'm struggling to work on my Marauders-era story child, and I just started my first retail job last week, and I have to move back to college in literally a week and a half, so my whole life is a ball of stress rn, but other than all of THAT, I'm good. Here, have this lovely angsty thing I've been working on on-and-off to try and get myself back in the flow of writing all summer (it didn't work but now i have an update for this story at least!). This is stretching out way farther than I thought it was going to tbh but I'm happy with where it's going so far, and I hope you're all happy with it too. I know it doesn't SEEM like Reylo, but I promise you, Aketaa and Kylo will NOT be reconnecting as anything other than friends. So don't worry about that. I like Reylo too much to wreck it in my own story.
Echara was gorgeous. Everywhere she looked, at least where she landed, blue-green trees grew thick with needle-like leaves and tall trunks, the forest floor carpeted with blue grass and decaying needle leaves. Even in bare feet, the ground was soft, and it took no effort to move soundlessly. A crisp breeze moved the trees and froze the inside of her nose, smelling sharp and sweet. During her descent, Aketaa saw mountains nearby, and she hoped to find them while exploring the place. Small fuzzy creatures with eight webbed legs and long tails moved through the trees, jumping and gliding from branch to branch, tree to tree. They chittered to each other, unafraid of Aketaa and her ship. They must have few predators here, which was good news for her. Just as Ryla had promised, no signs of civilization were to be found anywhere, at least not without looking closer than she wanted to right then.
At the moment, her easiest living solution was to power her ship completely down with the entrance ramp down. She had established a sort of fire pit near the entrance within the first day on Echara, and she had enough food rations to figure out what here she could eat and what she couldn't. So far the fuzzy, leaping creatures were a no; they moved too fast for Aketaa to catch unless she found a different method, and they seemed like they had very little meat on their bones anyway. She hoped she would find some sort of ground-dwelling animal with more substance than the leapers. Interestingly, the only avian life she could hear sang at night, but she hadn't seen any of the birds yet—or at least she thought they were birds.
On her second night on Echara, Aketaa reached out to feel Kylo in meditation, and seized the opportunity. Now that she needed to stretch even farther to contact him, all of her energy went into simply sustaining her presence in his mind. She couldn't appear with an illusion of youth anymore, and she couldn't even consider creating some sort of space to house their meeting in, not if she wanted to stay as long as she did. Despite that, Aketaa found him surprisingly receptive to her. He never tried to force her out, and he was quite willing to discuss Rey, the student Master Skywalker mentioned. Perhaps she was already a common subject of his consideration, and so she was easy to talk about in his head.
While the encounter gave her hope that he would refrain from being overly aggressive to her, Aketaa held no expectation that reasoning with him would be simple. Additionally, she would have to avoid making him too curious about her own whereabouts; even though her shields were tight and his sensing her had failed before, if she kept initiating contact frequently he might be able to trace the direction of her probing. Having established that he could at least be spoken with like a person, Aketaa decided to dedicate important time to establishing herself on this planet, laying low in the Force for the time being.
Water was a priority. The morning after her conversation with Kylo Ren, Aketaa clipped her long-dormant lightsaber to her belt, threw on another layer against the chill of the breeze, and set out to find a lake or river or something. The land sloped downward to the west—she'd made note of the direction of the sunset in relation to her ship the past two nights—and instinct told her water would be downhill if anywhere. It wasn't long before she picked up the sound of moving fluid, and corrected her course to follow it. Before she reached what she assumed was a mountain spring, she reached a wide lake reflecting the sun up at her eyes through the trees.
It was beautiful, clear and calm. She brought the chemical safety testing equipment out of her pack, hoping it wasn't old enough to be unreliable. Crouching down at the lake's edge, Aketaa dipped the long probe into the water, keeping her eyes on the screen as readout graphs slowly loaded. The lake seemed to be made of mostly pure water. There were low concentrations of some common minerals, all at safe levels, and about the usual biotic life one would expect in a natural lake, but no toxins. She would need to treat the water to avoid ingesting parasites or harmful bacteria, but otherwise her first priority was fulfilled.
As Aketaa was packing up the testing equipment, she felt the tiniest little tap against her mental shields. It was next to nothing, but it was enough to worry her. Her protections were strong, and she knew she was still undetected, but someone was looking for her, someone who knew her well enough that they had reached out to where she would have been in their network many years ago. Kylo had started looking for her.
It felt good, for a moment, to know that she might be missed, but that moment passed in an instant. Whatever they had had as children was long gone; Kylo had seen to that when he cut her out of his life just as he cut off her lek, without a thought for what they had experienced together and without any regrets. Aketaa never expected for a minute that reconnecting with Kylo would lead to rekindling their old relationship, though she couldn't say she hadn't hoped once or twice that he would still find her desirable. Perhaps it was vanity more than a true yearning for lost love. No, she was glad to be beyond the prospects of romance with that man and all his jealousy, insecurity, and angry violence. Even when they were teenagers, the deeper he fell into the Dark, the worse he became in his demeanor to the point where she had begun to fear being alone with him. In some ways, it was a blessing that he had razed their lives to the ground.
She waited for weeks, counting the days with tick marks on the walls of her ship. After almost a month, she had only felt him reaching for her one more time, and she believed her shields were as strong as ever. Resisting the urge to hold her breath, she reached out.
—
He was treading water, or trying to tread water. The waves and rain came down on his head without mercy, and the thick fabric of his clothing was waterlogged and heavy, dragging him down. His fingers and toes were numb, and his limbs started to feel weak. His head sank below the water.
"Ben," he heard, as he tried to fight his way back up to air. "Ben, stop struggling."
Lungs burning, he looked around for her. She was standing on the sandy bottom, algae floating serenely around her legs, swaying in synchrony with her long headtails, one blunt-ended and shorter than the other. Looking into her eyes, he forgot the storm above the water.
Her gray lips pulled into a gentle smile. "Isn't it peaceful down here?" she asked. "Come, talk with me." She extended her arm, offering her hand.
He kicked his legs, reaching for her. The edges of his vision started to darken, his head beginning to fill with static. She bent her legs to push off the seabed—was it the sea? or a lake? he didn't know—and closed the distance between them, gripping his wrist and sinking with him slowly back down. When he felt his feet hit the bottom through his boots, she smiled again at him. A cloud of sand rose up through the algae, most settling again, some getting swept up and away by the current.
The waves on the surface scattered light in quick patterns across her face, illuminating the concerned tilt of her white brow markings. "Stop holding your breath," she commanded. "You'll make yourself pass out."
He shook his head, terrified of feeling the water fill his mouth, nose, and lungs, taking over his defenses because he was too weak to hold out against it.
"This is your dream," she reminded him. "You can breathe underwater if you want to." Kicking up small clouds of sand as she walked, she came closer to him, close enough to skate her hand from his wrist up to his shoulder. "Relax. You're so tense."
Before he realized she was moving again, he felt her hand on his scarred cheek, blessing him with the softest of caresses. In his shock at the sensation of her skin on his, he gasped, and it was over. His last breath bubbled out of his mouth as water rushed in, stinging his throat and settling heavy in his lungs. Panic washed over him, speeding his heart to a rapid rate pounding in his ears, but there was no pain as his body lost its precious air, and her thumb smoothed over his cheekbone, soothing him, prompting him to take a calming breath.
"Good," she said. "Well done." She waited as he breathed, his heart slowing, the adrenaline ebbing. Then she shifted her hands down to his upper arms and said, "Let's talk."
They settled on the sand, sitting across from each other, like they had the last time she appeared. This time, he didn't bother asking her to join him; he had already exhausted that argument, and he knew he would never win her over to the Dark side. This time, he wanted to get a straight answer out of her, without letting her beat around the bush. This time, he asked, "Why are you reaching out to me?"
"Have you had any more Force connections with Rey?"
He had, actually. There was that time when she escaped the salt planet with her precious shambles of a Resistance, when she slammed the button to close the entrance ramp of the Falcom as if she were slamming a door in his face. Then there was the time when she had clearly been in the middle of something important, strategic discussions, he assumed, and she had pretended she couldn't see or hear him. One time he had been in the middle of a meal, and he embarrassingly spilled soup all over himself.
"Yes, on multiple occasions," he answered. The downside of meeting Aketaa in his mind was that he could not seem to lie to her.
"You've wondered, I assume, why these connections still occur after Snoke's death?"
"Of course I have," he snapped.
She nodded, headtails drifting around her shoulders. "You're being defensive. You're connecting the dots."
"And you're avoiding my original question." He stood, impatience reaching critical levels. "Why are you here?"
For a beat, she just looked up at him, yellow eyes flashing irregularly as they reflected the surface light filtering in through the waves. "I never finished my Jedi training; you saw to that. For seven, almost eight years, I've lived my life apart from what teachings I had learned, hiding that part of me so completely that no one would ever suspect it was there. It gave me perspective, like Snoke gave you perspective, but instead of switching sides I don't think I'll ever take a side again. This isn't about the Resistance, and this isn't about the First Order, Ben; this is about the Force, and I don't think it was ever right to take one side to begin with.
"I tried to make you think about the pain the Dark side inflicts on you and everyone around you. I tried to show you the innocence we once had, before we were concerned with Light or Dark. I'm trying to make you think about Rey. She has the knowledge of a youngling when it comes to the Force, and she has no one to indoctrinate her in either dogma, only the politics of the Resistance. What will she become without the old Jedi teachings? What am I becoming? What is the Force? That's what this is about," she finished.
His hands had clenched into fists as she said these things, and now he grit his teeth, scowling down at her. He had suspected she had been trying to manipulate him since the beginning, and he was right, though he wasn't entirely sure what to make of her ideas. She didn't say explicitly that she wanted to turn him from the Dark side, but she heavily implied it, that was certain; what was she trying to convert him to, though? He didn't know. In the absence of a better response, he gave her angry words.
"Snake," he accused through clenched teeth. "I have been honest with you, and you refuse to give me a straight answer. You told me nothing!"
"The tides are turning," she said, a stern force behind her tone. She stood to match his posture, though her eye level was no higher than his chin. "I'm telling you that you need to think. Think about your adolescence and your conflict and your Darkness and your Lightness and the universe itself. The world isn't black and white like they told us it is, and it's time you start understanding that."
With that, her form dissolved, swirling into nothingness in the water. She took all sense of safety with her, and he was drowning once again.
—
After two and a half months, the relief in solitude was beginning to wear off. Aketaa hadn't found any native people with sentience, only a myriad of animals. She had at least figured out that there were plump little ground-dwelling creatures about the length of her forearm with eight little feet and a stubby little tail that could be easily hunted, skinned, and cooked. The meat was sweet and tender, juicy with fat, and one of these animals made a perfect stew that could last her two or three days when she added to it the starchy tubers she discovered by observing the very same animals. Other than the ground-dwellers and the tree-swingers, she had noted a handful of different insects, none of which troubled her, and a much smaller eight-legged critter that was no bigger than her fist and lived in little burrows among the tree roots. Nowhere could Aketaa find any sign that a sentient, civilized population had ever existed on Echara.
She developed a habit of talking to herself and the things around her by the end of her third month. There was no other way to maintain her sanity, isolated as she was. Now and then she'd make casual conversation with the burrowers when they came to poke their curious snouts around her campsite, or she'd ask the trees rhetorical questions. She started thanking the lake when she visited to collect water, and sincerely apologizing to the ground-dwellers she hunted.
"I know if I talked to Kylo often, then I probably wouldn't be talking to you right now," she told the little ball of fluff that was currently climbing up the side of a crate she had brought out of the ship. "It's just risky to contact him so many times. If he grows too familiar with the feeling of my visits, no matter how well I hide my signature, he might be able to feel out the direction I'm coming from. I can't let that happen, obviously. There's no guarantee he won't track me down and kill me just to be rid of me." She sighed and rubber a hand over the juncture between her montrals. "You don't care, of course. Stars, you don't even understand a thing I'm saying."
To help herself and keep her mind sharp, Aketaa decided she would write out all her musings on the Force and its nature. Perhaps it would break the habit of speaking to things that could never speak back in addition to ordering her nebulous thoughts. There was a mobile solar generator unit tucked away in a storage compartment of her ship, so Aketaa brought it outside and charged up a datapad where she could type up document after document. This endeavor of hers took up plenty of time, and it felt as if she was being depressurized as she translated her thoughts into concrete words.
The singing still happened every night, and Aketaa still couldn't tell what it was. Being a Togruta, her eyes were well-suited for seeing in the dark, but there were no birds she could find in the trees whenever she tried to look. Anyway, the singing sounded far-away, so maybe she couldn't find its origins because they simply weren't there around her. At least, that's how it was for a long while, until one evening just days after Aketaa began to notice a seasonal change taking place around her. She woke up to frost two mornings in a row, and the foliage had begun to look a few shades darker blue than the aqua color she had grown used to.
That evening, just after a beautiful purple sunset, the singing started up as it always did, melodious and smooth and distant, until suddenly it became shrill and sharp for a few moments before it stopped altogether. When it started again hours later, the sound seemed to come from a different direction. Aketaa hadn't even realized the sound had a direction until she knew the source must have moved to a new place. Something had attacked the singers, Aketaa thought, and made them move to a new singing ground. This was the first evidence she had of a predator-prey dynamic on the peaceful planet. She hoped that whatever hunted the singers was too small or too afraid to hunt her, too. After listening to the singers for a while longer, Aketaa went into her ship to go to sleep for the night.
In the morning, she rose and came out of the ship, bare feet banging down the metal ramp for a few steps before a sound made her freeze. A whimpering? Yes, something was hiding under her ship, and she had frightened it. Aketaa proceeded with more caution, using a light step to walk down the rest of the ramp and making slow movements to come around the side of it. She crouched and ducked her head to have a look. Curled up under the ramp, in the most protected place it could find, was a very leggy, long-necked little animal. In the shadow of the ship and in the weak morning light, Aketaa thought it looked very similar in color to the blue Echaran grass. She used a gentle Force suggestion to calm the animal and reached out for it, being careful not to bang her montrals against the edge of the metal ramp. With some coaxing, she brought the creature out into the light. It protested with a clear, melodic sound, and Aketaa realized this was one of the singing animals.
It was nocturnal. She could feel its weariness and see the reflective backing in its silvery eyes. She picked it up, cradled it in her arms, and carried it into her ship to give it a safe and warm place to rest. Not for the first time, Aketaa cursed her remote isolation; she had no idea if this animal was a youngling or an adult, how to tell if it was male or female or neither, or what the dietary and behavioral needs of its species were. As she went back outside, having settled the creature in a nest of blankets and spare clothes, she tried to develop a guess as to how it ended up in her camp. Maybe the singers were pack creatures, and this one was separated from the pack during what Aketaa was pretty sure was an attack last night. It ran in one direction, and its pack ran in another. Maybe the entire pack scattered. Should she be using the word "pack"? This animal didn't seem like a predator—its eyes were positioned on the sides of its head, a common feature of prey animals across many planets, especially when Aketaa compared it to the tree-swingers, whose eyes were front-facing, and the ground-dwellers and burrowers, whose eyes were side-facing. Wasn't "pack" a predator term? Togruta were pack creatures, though the polite term was "a tribal people." Togruta were also without a doubt predators. Perhaps "herd" was a better fit.
She roused the ashes and coals back to smoldering so she could reheat yesterday's stew. A chill blew through the forest, rustling the soft needle-leaved trees. As soon as the pot felt hot, Aketaa brough her breakfast back inside the ship, where it was warmer. Finding the little singer asleep, she settled down next to it with a spoon.
"You and me, huh?" she said quietly so as not to disturb the creature. "Two animals separated from our packs. Or herds. Let's just call them our families." Aketaa chewed a soft piece of meat for a moment, then said, "Of course, your family's at least on this planet, in this forest. They can't be too far off if you made it here in one night. My family, they're scattered throughout the galaxy like shards of a broken plate."
Alright, so maybe she was taking advantage of a captive audience, but it was nice to have something there to talk to that didn't scurry away after five minutes and wasn't a tree. She was feeling sentimental on account of this lost little creature, so Aketaa told it all about her life. Her mother had told her all about her grandmother, who wasn't really her grandmother, and she tried to remember how all the stories went. Then she talked about Shili the way she remembered it, through child's eyes, and about moving away from it to learn from Luke Skywalker, for all the good that did her. She must have spoke too loudly, because the animal raised its pointed head, blinked up at her, and lowered it again, this time extending its long neck to press the tip of its dark purple nose against her thigh. Aketaa's heart practically melted, and if she wasn't sure about the singer before, she now knew that she would die for it without question.
Continuing in a much softer voice, she went on: "You know, Kylo Ren was my first friend at Master Skywalker's academy. He was Ben Solo back then, just a boy as sad as I was to be away from home. I'm only a couple years younger than him, or maybe it's three years? I think it's two years. Anyway, I arrived when I was six, and Ben had been there a year already. I don't know why I gravitated to him instead of one of the other students—there were a handful there around our age. Maybe it's because I could tell he was lonely, more so than anyone else." She found a bone in the stew and picked it up to suck at the marrow. "Master Skywalker tried to enforce that whole Jedi-can't-have-strong-attachments rule, but I'm pretty sure Ben and I were, as the kids say, dating by the time I turned fifteen. That's not a great word for it, though, because we didn't go on dates, not really. We just spent almost all our time together, and..." She trailed off and gnawed absently on the bone. "Anyway," she said, "it was a long time ago, and it didn't go well. Maybe it would have gone better if that voice hadn't been in his head, dragging out his Darkness. I could feel it there with him. By the end, I never knew when it would suddenly take over him. And then, you know, he and Master Skywalker started fighting one night, and next thing you know, he's calling himself Kylo Ren and burning the academy and temple, asking the other students to join him in the Dark side or die." She snorted, but quietly, for the singer. "That was a mess. That's how I ended up with one short lek," Aketaa told it, balancing her stew in her lap to hold up the scarred end of her right front lek.
For a moment, she fingered the puckered scar, remembering back to that night. He had burst into her room, kicking the door open with more force than was necessary. Aketaa had already been awake, feeling the pain of the deaths in the Force and watching the flames grow and spread from her window. She should have run earlier. He tried to appeal to her first, asked her to join him, but she could feel that Dark presence so strongly that she was too afraid to speak—Snoke, she realized years later, right there in his head, poisoning his mind. Then he demanded, then he threatened, and then he ignited his lightsaber with a growl of frustration and anger. That's when she finally reacted, and her jade green blade met his emerald one in a clash of bright light. He was stronger in this fight than he was when they sparred for practice, and it was all she could do to worm her way around him and dash out the door and towards the hangar. He followed her, tried to hold her with the Force, but he was more of a mess inside than the academy was outside, so he couldn't pin her down for more than a minute. A second battle, and her guard slipped, and in a blink of an eye the end of her lek was hitting the floor with a fleshy slap, leaving a sizzling stump behind. She knows she screamed, because she felt it buzzing in her montrals so loudly that it made them ache, and the pain must have fueled her last desperate attempt to get away. She gave one mighty Force push, and Kylo Ren was thrown back into the hangar wall, hard. It bought her enough time to escape in the ship.
Aketaa sighed and finished her breakfast stew. The past was the past. What was important now was that she didn't get herself killed while trying to talk Kylo Ren out of tyrannical power through the Dark side. Rey seemed to be a workable angle. The more she thought about it over the past months, the better she liked the idea of appealing to Kylo through discussions of Rey. Their Force connection was very interesting, especially because the bond persisted after Snoke, the perceived cause, was dead. Balance, Master Skywalker had stressed to her. Find balance, seek balance, restore balance. Was this the Force manifesting its own balance in joining Kylo Ren to Rey? Aketaa wished she could meet Rey; perhaps if she did, she could confirm or discard this idea. But no, Rey was lightyears across the galaxy from Echara—just like everything else.
—
He became aware of her presence as if she had just stepped into the room where he sat meditating.
"It's been a while," he said, seeing her wrapped in a heavy cloak in his mind's eye. "It must be cold where you're hiding."
She nodded, to his surprise. "Colder than I'd like, yes. There's no climate quite as perfect as those warm Shili grasslands." Casually, she looked around and adjusted the fabric of the cloak, pulling it tighter around her. "You keep your spaces nice and chilled, too, I see. Thank you," she added, "for supplying a setting this time."
He didn't even realize he was producing a mimicry of his quarters for this mental meeting until she pointed this out, and he rushed to clear the place of anything too personal—not that he had many personal affects to begin with. As if she was idly curious, she stepped further into the colorless room to drag her vibrant fingertips across the glass tabletop, then the back of his desk chair. With a sigh, she came to a stop only a few steps from where he was seated on the thin rug, looking out the floor-to-ceiling viewport at the stars. He looked up at her as she admired the view. The cloak, a warm tan color, made of a rough-knit fabric, obstructed the shape of her body and length of her headtails, but he could still appreciate her strong nose and prominent cheekbones.
"There's nothing quite like the view of stars from among the stars to make you feel totally insignificant, is there?" she asked softly.
He didn't answer. After a moment, she stepped around him, brushing his knees with the cloak, and walked over to his bed. She sat on the mattress and made a face, wrinkling up her nose and furrowing her white brow markings. Settling cross-legged in a mound of heavy fabric at the foot of his large bed, she looked very small. Even the horns, which he noticed had grown into a more pronounced and graceful curve since he had last seen her in person, only added to the dwarfing effect. It was all an illusion, of course, and maybe she was even projecting herself like that on purpose to look non-threatening or something.
"Such a hard mattress," she said. "How do you sleep on this thing without feeling sore?"
"It's supportive," he snapped. "Anything softer and my back hurts."
She winced in a dramatic way. "Are you getting old, Ben? You're, what, 30 now, aren't you?"
He rolled his eyes and turned back to face the viewport. "Are you here to talk about your philosophy again?"
"I'd like to talk about Rey, actually. I wish I could meet her myself, but for now I have to settle for knowing her through you."
"That's a ridiculous notion," he scoffed. "I'm anything but an unbiased source of information."
"Well, yes, I know, but I like to think your perception of her adds flavor to the whole situation. It'll be interesting to see in which direction your bias leans." She paused, and then asked, "Does it bother you when I call you 'Ben'? It felt right when I appeared as my younger self, but..." She trailed off.
Actually, no one had asked him that question before. People either knew him as Kylo Ren, the Supreme Leader and dread Knight of the Order of Ren, or they wanted him to be Ben Solo again. He had chosen the name 'Kylo' all those years ago, but in truth both names caused him pain. Of course he was bothered by being Ben: all that meant was another person desperate for things to go back to the way they were, unable to see that he could never go back now even if he wanted to. And yet, maybe it would sting even more to hear the name 'Kylo' in her mouth. But wasn't that what he deserved after everything? Aketaa, whom he had betrayed more than any of them, precisely because she had never betrayed him, now returned to him the pain he had caused her, as was her right.
He realized he had been sitting silent for too long. "I'm not Ben Solo anymore," he told her, "and I won't ever be Ben Solo again. I would ask that you respect my new name and title, but—" he shrugged, "—I know you'll do as you please."
"Alright. You chose to be Kylo Ren, after all; as I don't wish to make an enemy of you, it's only right I respect the name you chose. Just don't expect me to hail you as anything but a very large man-child." He heard her shifting on the bed behind him. "So, Ky—can I use a diminutive?—tell me about what Rey is like in person."
Ky was a plucky teenager who could take trick shots with a blaster, not an adult ruler of the galaxy, but he found he didn't hate it. He let it slide and answered her request. "She's...intense." Yes, that was the best word to describe her. "Nothing she does is done half-hearted, like she concentrates all of her willpower into each moment she lives. And the raw Force is strong in her; before she understood what it was, she was fighting against me and winning."
"That's quite the admission," she said.
"There's no point in lying, not to you," he replied. "There's nothing you can do to me but talk."
She hummed, a noncommittal noise. "If there's no point in lying, then what do you think of her, truly? You told me you felt you understood each other, and obviously you think highly enough of her to offer her a place of power with you. How did you understand each other? What is it about her that appealed to you?"
It ached to think about it all: those first moments of connection, exposing their vulnerabilities to each other, growing comfortable just talking, until that outpouring of acceptance from her as she told him he wasn't alone and reached out her hand to him; the strange and unexpected joy he felt when he sensed that she was coming to him, his anticipation so great that he even combed his hair; that glorious and triumphant battle, during which they had trusted each other so effortlessly and completely, culminating in his clumsy and tactless offer and their terrible struggle that rent Skywalker's lightsaber in two. To top it all off, he had watched her shut the door, cutting him off from her deep well of empathy. He clenched his jaw for a moment and took in a deep breath.
"She was a mystery, at first, this scavenger rat who was more powerful than I expected. It must have been the first time in her life she had encountered the Force, and she was pushing against my probe and reaching into my head during what should have been my interrogation of her. Then of course she escaped, I'm sure with the help of the new power she discovered. We fought, and it was like the Force was fighting through her; it must have been, because this was her first time in a lightsaber duel and she bested me. Not long after, the Force bond connected us."
"And that was when you felt something for her, after the bond gave you time with her?"
"Neither of us knew what was going on, at first, but she used the opportunity to lash out at me. That's very like her, by the way. It's her impulse to feel very strongly one way or the other and make up her mind very resolutely. She doesn't stop and think until she must."
"Hm. Then conflict does not sit well with her?"
"No, I don't think it does. She told me I was a monster, and I agreed with her. That seemed to stun her, to have her own assumptions about my villainy confronted like that. I don't think it took very long for her to convince herself I could be persuaded to the Light after that."
There was a rustling of fabric, and then Aketaa appeared at his side, sitting down a respectful distance away and stretching her legs out in front of her. Her red-orange feet with their white-striped toes were bare. "But what happened next? Something must have happened that appealed to your heart. You still have a heart, I know."
He knew exactly what did it. It was a mistake, a moment of weakness—it was foolish. "She trusted me," he sighed, looking out at the infinite dazzle of stars, each distant and as coldly beautiful as crystals of ice, snowflakes caught on his black gloves and frost forming on his black cloak. "She confided in me because I wasn't a monster anymore. And she was so lost and so sad after her encounter with the Dark side—not important now," he said quickly, waving away Aketaa's sudden curiosity. "I tried to offer her some comfort, tell her she wasn't alone, and she immediately turned it around to share it with me."
For an immeasurable amount of time, perhaps seconds or hours, they were silent, sitting on the floor next to each other. And then: "Oh, sweet man," she whispered, "I wish I had loved you more."
She turned and leaned over to kiss his cheek, and then, like mist evaporating in the sunlight, she was gone.
—
Aketaa killed with her teeth. That's what they were designed to do, after all, and becoming a primal hunter for a short while suited her just fine. The ground-dwellers were active enough at dusk, and she was still able to find an abundance of them in the forest. She made quick work of one to roast and feast on that night, then decided to catch a second to make a stew for the coming days. There had been no lunch for her that day, not after sitting so long next to the singer, hesitant to disturb it in any way, so she was hungry enough to devour a whole ground-dweller in minutes. While she was there, she searched for patches of the plants that would yield her their bulbous and starchy roots. There was an herb, too, that reminded her of sweet mint, and another that had a pungent bite raw but boiled down to a delicious smoky flavor. These she gathered to flavor the stew.
During the hours upon hours she spent at the little creature's side, Aketaa had meditated. She grounded herself to peaceful Echara, feeling the wind whistling through the blue grasses and darkening needle trees. Around her campsite, the Echaran wildlife went about their busy lives. She thought she could even feel the faint breath of the singer herd as they slept, far away and safe. Nothing stuck out to her as an identifiable predator, but she didn't linger on that for long. The victims of time decomposed in the dirt, things reaching the ends of their lives, leaf litter and small bodies broken down by fungi and insects she had not yet seen for herself, becoming food for the new growth of the planet. Death linked cosmically to life, as it always has been and always will be. Dark and Light, eternal.
Then, when she rose from the details of her immediate surroundings and observed the web of all interconnected sentient life, she picked up Kylo Ren's meditative energy without even needing to think about it. Hadn't she just been telling the singer that she couldn't let her visits to him become frequent again? Yes, but in her deepest needs, she was lonely, and he was the only one she could talk to who could give her that satisfaction of companionship. It wasn't so difficult to hide out on Raydonia, where she was surrounded by her friends and students, and even on Tatooine she had spent her time surrounded by an almost crushing population and been honored with the attention of Ryla. On Echara, she was withering, just a bit, and she wanted so badly to have a conversation.
She debated with herself for a short while before finally reaching out to cling to his consciousness for a little while. It felt a little desperate to her, but hopefully it had been long enough since the last visit that Kylo wouldn't pick up on her incredible isolation. It seemed to her that he didn't. He was more composed than usual, and he was more open than usual. It was a nice little change of pace, she thought, to not be shouted at or witnessing his suffering. His calm demeanor reminded her of the Ben Solo she used to know, as a matter of fact, though she could never admit such a thing to him. Oh, he used to be calm, alright. There was a time when he didn't have the violent temper Kylo Ren was so famous for, and he was instead just a thoughtful and reserved boy, perhaps more prone to frustration than others, but so driven to figure it all out in the end, focusing with a quiet determination until he understood and succeeded. He was still that same person in there, somewhere hidden under the layers of damage done to him by his upbringing and Snoke's particular influence.
Initially, Aketaa wanted to add his years steeped in the Dark side to his horrible influences, but she hesitated. What was the Dark side, really? She'd been over this before. It was half of the universe, it was death and decay, it was violence and anger, grief and passion. It was in everyone in some measure, some more than others, that was certain. It was as natural as the Light side. Aketaa was sure Kylo Ren was Dark, but that was perhaps not such a bad thing in and of itself. And anyway, there was Light in him to temper the rash impulses of the Darkness; he had just been suppressing it over the last decade. So, no, he was not damaged by the Dark side of the Force. The only damage done by Darkness was done by individuals enforcing a dogma of complete Darkness.
The Dark side was present in Rey, too, she would wager. From what Kylo told her, she was no paragon of saint-like Light. She believed him when he said she was passionate and unrestrained. Surely Kylo knew there was some measure of Darkness in her that he had wanted to draw out of her, just as Rey must have thought she could draw out the Light in him. Without doubt, she was his equal and opposite match. Maybe she was so powerful without training because she was free of any extremist ideology and was instead fully herself, and maybe Kylo was limited even with all his training because it was exactly his Dark side training that taught him to suppress those parts of him that would make him strong.
When she returned to her camp, the sun had sunk down behind the trees. The little singer was emerging from the ship.
"Hello, little one," Aketaa said, speaking softly to avoid startling it. It offered her a little trill as it stepped into the grass at the foot of the ramp. "So, what do you eat? You must be hungry."
As she built up her fire, Aketaa observed the creature as it walked around, methodically inspecting everything in her little campsite of a clearing. It nosed at her as she sat to skin the first ground-dweller before wandering away again, making Aketaa smile for a moment before returning her attention to the dead animal in her lap. She sliced here and cut there before skillfully ripping the main body of the hide from the meat. Another glance up to the singer, and she found it was grazing peacefully only a yard or two from where she sat.
"You're a forager species, then?" She sat and watched the creature step with its eight thin legs, long neck reaching to nibble the stalks of blue grass. "I wonder if you're an herbivore or an omnivore."
Once the ground-dweller was impaled on the spit and set to roast over the flames, Aketaa relaxed and licked at her bloody hunting knife, wet from the skinning. She'd skin the second one later when she was ready to boil a stew. For now, it was sitting to the side with her gathered herbs and tubers. It would be a late night, but that was fine. Her eyes were designed for seeing easily in the dark. Anyway, her new friend was nocturnal, so she might as well spend some time observing its habits.
So passed the evening, and many after it. She was growing comfortable on Echara, even though the winter was setting in. The frost began to last longer and longer in the mornings, and then one night Aketaa could see it begin to form over the landscape. The singer didn't seem to mind it, but Aketaa did. It was cold inside her ship, though it was out of the wind, and she decided to build a small fire inside where it could keep her warm while she slept.
—
He felt it: just a hint, an indication, like the faintest curl of smoke from a stick of incense. It was Aketaa. Whatever shields she had been using to block him out had been strong, very strong, but now they started to weaken. It was her own fault. She wasn't disciplined enough to sustain her excursions into his mind while guarding her presence. Before it slipped away, he grabbed it, pulling it and twisting it around until it was a solid thread, real and concrete in his mind. This, finally, was her connection to the Force, made accessible and traceable to him. He decided to reach out along the line and follow it to its source. It wouldn't tell him her physical location, but maybe he could get a read on her.
It occurred to him that he didn't know what he expected or what he wanted out of finding her Force signature, other than confirming once and for all that she was truly real and not just some trick sent to invade his psyche. By whom, he had no idea, but it was always a possibility. As Supreme Leader, there was now a larger target on his head that he must acknowledge.
But no, she was there, yes, just the slightest pulse from very far away. He concentrated his energy on it until he had amplified it for himself, tuning his senses to its existence. He had to make sure he could find her in the Force again. Rey was lost to him; though they still saw each other through the bond, she knew how to shut him out very effectively. If he could feel Aketaa's signature, he could perhaps use it as a comfort the way he had grown to use Rey's signature. At least one person in the whole kriffing galaxy cared about him, and that was all he needed to reassure himself of now and then.
He wondered…the flicker of her life was weak to him, but maybe it would be enough. He shifted, took a deep breath, and focused. Grab the thread that lead to her consciousness, follow it, grip her signature—was there a way in? He envisioned the walls keeping the world out and saw were they were starting to fall apart. Tap, pick, scratch, break them open.
—
It was time to brave the cold to take a bath. She'd been avoiding it because of the cold, but she could smell the smoke of burning wood and meat on her skin, mixed with the sweat from wearing so many layers. In honesty, she felt grimy and gross, and so a wash was necessary. She gathered soap and towels and started the walk to the lake. The singer—whose name, she'd decided, was Krishden, after one of her muscially-inclined Raydonian students—walked along with her, moving much more deftly over the terrain with its many legs than Aketaa did with her two legs.
At the lake, Krishden happily stopped to drink, pleased with such an adventure so early in its evening. Aketaa dipped her foot in the crystal-clear water. Cold. Very cold. Very, very cold. She cursed the fact that she didn't have a tub big enough to fill with heated water for a proper bath. With an annoyed huff, she undressed, dropping her clothes on the shore. The air was already so cold. She waded into the lake, and stars, it was freezing. Before she started really shivering, Aketaa used the Force to retrieve the soap from the shore. Her lekku and toes were beginning to tingle, but she lathered the soap over her arms anyway.
And then, a mental pulse, so strong it made her vision go white for a split second. It was followed by searing pain jolting through her skull. She dropped the soap into the water and cried out, hands pressing against her head. The pulse, the lightning bold of pain, a second time, a third, a fourth. Her feet slipped on the lakebed, and though she was only standing in water as deep as her waist, she went under. Her mouth filled with icy lake water as she screamed. She wasn't submerged long. She surfaced and coughed, gagging on the water she had choked down, and still the pain continued. It felt like her brain was shattering.
Clumsily, she stumbled out of the lake, splashing her way onto the shore, and she collapsed on the smooth stones. Curling into a ball now, kicking her legs out the next second, writhing and thrashing, she cried. She gasped as something like a hot poker impaled her spine, ramming from the base of her skull down to her tailbone. Then, it all stopped, leaving her aching and panting.
Someone there. A presence in the Force. Speaking in her head.
"I did not intend to cause so much pain," it said.
"Well," she wheezed aloud, "you did."
Gone now. Alone. Kriff. Stars. Kriffing stars. Aketaa raised herself up on shaking arms and legs, snatching up the towels to wrap around her freezing body. Krishden was gone. She probably scared her little friend away with her screaming. She was now isolated all over again. Who the hell was that?
—
Well. That had not gone as well as he had hoped. He had never maintained mental shields in the Force like that for so many years, and he hadn't known that they would be so painful to dismantle. Breaking the guard of someone else always causes some mental pain, but he truly hadn't known it would be so immense for her. He had gotten flashes as it happened: a lake, trees, a pebbled shore. He heard her cries of pain ringing in his ears. She would never trust him again, in all likelihood, but then, had she trusted him in the first place? She hid from him and disguised herself as a memory, and she wouldn't give him any direct answers to his questions. Maybe she deserved to feel the pain as retribution for shutting him out. Still, he couldn't help but let her know it wasn't supposed to hurt that much.
Now her signature was strong, a brightly shining life open for him to see without her crumbling shields in the way. He prodded at it, trying to take its measure without letting her know. There was the Light, burning bright at her core, but here and there were mottled shadows of Darkness, flowing and mingling with the rays of the Light side freely. It was odd. He could feel the proportions fluctuate just in the short moments he sat there watching it. Was she conflicted and struggling? She hadn't seemed so when she visited him. Even now, he sensed no distress other than the pain he had put her through, though he wasn't sure how accurate he could be with these things given the ridiculous distance she had surely put between them.
If she could span it undetected, then so could he. He had the advantage of eight more years of training than she had, so getting into her mind should be a piece of cake. What would happen, he wondered, if he invaded while she was still awake and aware? All her visits took place while he was asleep or at least meditating. Would he see through her eyes, like the memory she sent by accident? He was curious, and he wanted more from her than he had already glimpsed today, so he put up a shield and dove into her mind.
It was more difficult than he had anticipated to worm his way into her head. She wasn't passive as she might have been while dreaming or meditating; she was active and alert. He tried to find that same orientation from the memory, trying to mimic the feeling of being in the middle of it as a silent observer. It sort of worked, he supposed. He heard her breathing, heavy and rasping, and distant nighttime calls of far-off things, again eerily loud and reverberant: the sound she received with her horns, fed through his ears. Her eyes were closed, and it was dark beyond the lids. He felt himself break out in goosebumps as the shocking cold she felt washed over him, and a pounding ache grew in his head. In a few blinks, the eyes were open, and he saw a strangely illuminated nighttime forest, lit beyond the power of her blazing fire. This was natural night vision: it was as if he were seeing through goggles, yet the image was color-corrected, not green-toned, and perfectly clear. It was incredible—and to think, many species saw like this all the time and took it for granted.
Barely a minute, but he had seen all he wanted to see. He left, leaving her sensory experiences behind. None of the flora he saw was at all recognizable, and he didn't even know if her night vision portrayed the true colors of her surroundings, which could confound any attempts as identification. At least he could rule out the more popular locations.
Finding her...why did he want to find her? Was there a reason to see her in the flesh, or was it reflex to track down the people in his past to finish them off? With no one to order her dead, he didn't think he would kill her if he found her. He found he didn't want her to die, though the feeling was nowhere near as strong as his utter desperation to stop Rey's torture at the hands of Snoke. He wouldn't kill for her like he would kill for Rey, because even after all that had broken between him and the scavenger girl, he knew he would do it all over again without hesitation. But as irksome as Aketaa sometimes was to him, he wouldn't kill her.
He had tried to, once. It was a different time, when he was young, angry, hurt, and desperate to prove he wasn't too weak to do it. "Kill them, all of them," Snoke had whispered to him that night. Following Skywalker's betrayal, he had been unstable enough to actually go on that rampage, setting fire to the campus of buildings at the academy and the temple itself, slaughtering those who tried to stop him. Three of his fellow students converted and followed him that night, and together they joined the Knights of Ren. Sparing their three lives had made him all the more determined to kill Aketaa when she refused to be spared too, and he had felt triple the rage when she got away. Weakness. And, really, it had been a mistake to amputate a piece of her headtail; she had channeled the pain, and that was how she finally escaped him: a Dark side instinct, actually, to use something like pain as a means of power and strength.
That was something he had realized when he was taught to do the same thing by Snoke months after his conversion. He had laughed at the irony of it then, that Jedi apprentice Aketaa had Dark side instincts and probably didn't even know it. Now, though, he thought about it more carefully, turning the idea around in his mind. It reminded him of Rey and the way her actions and words could be driven by fear, anger, and spite in a way the Jedi would have discouraged. Aketaa's words came back to him. "The world isn't black and white like they told us it is, and it's time you start understanding that," she had said.
The buzz of the comm interrupted his thoughts and broke his meditation. He growled as the blue hologram of Hux materialized on his desk. "What?" he barked.