AN: It's been a while and ohoho what a dumpster fire TROS turned out to be! don't get me wrong, i enjoyed it while i was watching it, but thinking back on it? Yikes. I PROMISE this story will not have spoilers in case anyone still hasn't seen it. This is too far gone to not be canon-divergent now, so I'm sticking to what I want to do regardless of what that last movie said.
This one isn't as long as the two previous chapters, but I need to stoke the fire under my own ass somehow and get back in the habit of writing complete blocks instead of going on forever with little to no goal. Also, fun fact, this little project of mine has now been published for a full year! happy birthday to this increasingly lengthy mess.
After Aketaa stopped shaking from the shock and the cold, she huddled by her fire to probe the Force. Her shields were broken, that much was immediately obvious. She had been so used to holding them up that she didn't even think about it anymore, and that must have been why she didn't realize what was happening while it was happening. Kylo Ren must have done it; who else was there? Knowing her walls were gone, she felt vulnerable and exposed. Force knew what he would do now that he had a way in. There was no use trying to build up those shields again. Having torn them down once, it would only be easier for him to do it again, and she would rather save herself the pain of going through it another time. She would just have to be careful. She could still guard her thoughts, as the distance was so great that he wouldn't be able to focus in on the finer details of her mind. And anyway, this was such an off-the-radar place that there would be no records of its native species he could find.
Krishden returned to her camp after the moon was high in the sky, bleating a soft little melody and bumping its nose into her shoulder and arm insistently. With slow movements, Aketaa reached over to give it a cautious stroke. Its eyes closed, and it didn't move away, so she continued to pet down the sides of its neck. The blue pelt felt velvety and soft. It helped ground her, the repetitiveness and tactility of petting Krishden, and she appreciated that the animal trusted her enough to allow such a thing. How strange to be a predator so enamored with a prey animal. If the circumstances had been different, maybe Aketaa would be hunting the singers like she hunted the ground-dwellers and had attempted to hunt the tree-swingers.
It was harrowing, for several days, to know that Kylo Ren had access to her head and might show up any time he wished. She knew it was only a matter of time before he made his move. Whether it would be against her or towards her, she couldn't guess. Hopefully by now he wouldn't want to come kill her, but Aketaa didn't want to trust that hope. There was always the chance he would work himself up into one of his infamous episodes and decide to hunt her down in irrational anger. As time went on with not a peep from him, though, she started to relax, just a bit. Grudgingly, she admitted—though it was only to herself—that feeling the Force in the planet was even easier and more gratifying without maintaining those blocks.
On an unrelated (or perhaps related) note, Aketaa decided no more wintertime baths. It was too cold by far, and it was only getting colder. She had been on Echara, what, four months, going on five? There were no records of the planet beyond its existence and some vague coordinates that corresponded to an outdated location system, so Force only knew how long winter would last; she didn't even know if she arrived during summer or autumn. Ideally winter wouldn't last longer than another two months or so, but Aketaa knew there was a chance it could be more like three. She'd take dusty, dry Tatooine over this cursed winter any day. So, until the weather turned warmer and the danger of freezing to death passed, Aketaa figured she would do her best to bathe with a soapy rag—soaked in heated water, of course.
By the time it was cold enough for a wet snow to clump up the darkened blue grass, Aketaa was keeping to the warmer interior of the ship, only leaving to hunt. The ground-dwellers hibernated, she learned, as did the burrowers, and Aketaa refused to dive in the lake to find possible fish, so she learned through trial and error how to catch the tree-swingers. It wasn't easy, and it involved some Force-supported maneuvering more often than not, but she found the animals were bigger up close and meatier than she had expected. One swinger, cooked for a long time in a stew to make the tough meat palatable, lasted her almost a week.
When she wasn't hunting or worrying that she might burn down her ship with her indoor fire, she was typing on the datapad. It had become something of a journal, wrapping her musings on the Force, her daily routine, and observations of Echara all into one sprawling account. When this mess was over, she'd have to find someone to untangle it into its separate pieces for her. Having had more than enough time to ponder over it, Aketaa believed a new philosophy was vital to the Force religions, and she hoped her notes were an acceptable start to a new school of thought.
But then, without meaning to, Aketaa remembered how she had spent the better part of a decade in hiding, guarded. Some possessive, secretive part of her was reluctant to let anyone know where she had been. She was loathe to let loose the treasure that was a perfect hiding spot. It was a whole planet uncharted and unknown, a perfect place to avoid unwanted visitors, and if she began the work of identifying the ecosystem of Echara, it would no longer be so perfectly isolated.
Stars, Aketaa hated being isolated. She wanted to be among a crowd of people again, whether she knew who they were or not. She wanted to feel hidden by the throng, just a face among faces in a crush of life. Echara was torture, and yet Aketaa couldn't bear the thought of losing its security.
—
This time, she was the one dreaming. He could sense the shift in her energy, the signal he had been waiting for, that switch over from active to passive thought. Inhale, exhale, and reach.
It was a completely different experience to invade a mind just to talk. He was used to digging for information, a process that was usually torture for those who resisted, and of course everyone resisted. Even before, when he had just broken down her walls and had wanted to see through her eyes, he had only focused on being undetected. She was in pain already from his efforts, and he was sure if that simple intrusion had hurt, she couldn't have noticed. This, though, was a delicate matter. He was a guest in her subconscious, like the apparition of an internal Force ghost. Except he obviously wasn't dead.
He found himself standing in the middle of a crowded street, with all dusty tan buildings and dusty tan people. It was familiar, but something was off. Through the myriad of species bustling about their business, eyes all squinting against the bright sunlight and hot air, he spotted the curved, white-and-navy shapes of her horns, and he realized what seemed so strange. Now he was seeing the scene from a different point of view.
The crowd thinned for a moment, just long enough to see her stumble over her own feet. Her hand, he noticed, was clutching her shoulder and cradling her corresponding headtail. Blood seeped through the cracks between her fingers. Even though he knew what was coming next, he felt a pang in his chest that seemed an awful lot like concern. He followed her, pushing through the fragments of a remembered crowd with ease. She ducked into the first real doorway they reached, and he went in after her.
They were in the bar. She all but collapsed in a stool at the counter, and he cautiously claimed the seat to her left. That teal-skinned Twi'lek was there, he realized.
"Can I getcha something?" the Twi'lek asked, resting her hands on the bar and cocking one hip. "Booze? Light apps?" With a look he wanted to describe as calculating or analyzing, the Twi'lek gave one up-and-down sweep with her eyes before adding, "Some bacta and a nap?"
There was only a thin whine in response. Deciding now would be as good a time as any to step in, he said, "Aketaa." He received a grunt, so he tried again: "Aketaa, it's me."
The white stripes on her brow furrowed, and then she turned her golden yellow eyes towards him. For a moment, she squinted at him, and then he saw recognition. "Well, cut my hand off and call me a sand rat; it really is you, huh?" She started to move to face him, but her headtail caught on the fabric of her top and stopped her in a wince.
"I really think you need some bacta," the Twi'lek repeated. "I have some upstairs."
"Oh," Aketaa wheezed. "Ah, Ky, this is Ryla. Ryla, Ky."
"Pleasure," Ryla the Twi'lek said, voice curt. "Come on upstairs with me, now."
It seemed this was a dream not easily derailed, perhaps because it was a specific memory. As gently as he could, he helped Aketaa off the barstool and around to the back stairs. "I just—ah, ow—just want the bacta," Aketaa told him. "That's all—just the bacta, and then we can talk."
"How much does that hurt, actually?" he asked, allowing her to lean heavily on his arm as they walked up the sand-brick stairs.
"Have you been shot by a blaster? Sliced by a lightsaber?"
"Obviously." The scar across his face should be proof enough of that.
"Yeah." She paused to grit her teeth as her headtail bounced a little too hard against her chest. "Imagine that, but dialed up to, well, the most sensitive skin on your body? I guess? Kriff," she hissed. "Did you have to take such a big chunk out of me?"
He had no answer to that. They made it to the top of the stairs, anyway. Ryla didn't seem to notice he was there unless Aketaa specifically pointed out his presence, which was fine by him. She stripped off Aketaa's wrapped Jedi tunic, leaving her in soft knee-length pants and a sleeveless top, meant for sleeping, he knew. After all, he had attacked in the middle of the night. With the grime wiped away and the wounds dressed with bacta, Ryla settled on the mattress in the room, next to Aketaa. Yellow eyes slid over to him again, and then Aketaa said, "Thanks, Ryla, but I'd like to talk to my friend here, alone, if you don't mind."
Could she pick up on his emotions during these dream visits? He hoped not, because he didn't really want her to know that he was both relieved and disappointed that she spoke up when she did.
"So," she said, breathing a little easier and looking a little more relaxed now that the bacta was easing her pain, "you figured it out." Aketaa patted the space on the bed next to her, indicating he should sit. "I know you're not going out of your way to mask your presence because I can sense your signature here, but I'm a little surprised that I'm not in excruciating pain right now."
He scowled. "I'm not interrogating you, and you're not resisting."
"I know. But after you disintegrated my shields down to nothing with absolutely no warning, I was concerned that all of your visits might hurt similarly."
"How would you have had me warn you?" he snapped. "It was precisely your shields that prevented such communication."
"Maybe you could have waited and actually brought it up during our next conversation?" she suggested.
"Yes, the conversations that were up until now entirely on your terms."
She frowned. "Okay, I admit it was unfair to drop in repeatedly without your consent once I stopped the dream figure ruse. It was also unfair of you to attempt killing me and to destroy the place and people I had called home for over ten years."
"Touché," he admitted. "Can we call it even?"
"Absolutely not." Gingerly, she adjusted her seated position, bringing one leg up to lean on with her elbow. "It'll be even only if I set fire to your life and maim you with intent to murder, which will never happen because I'm not influenced by the mental intrusions of a villainous psychopath." She paused just long enough to make him uneasy, but then continued, "We'll never be even, but that's a good thing. I'm not looking for revenge. What you did wasn't okay, and you shouldn't have done it, but I do forgive you for doing it."
He shifted. Her words were full of Jedi-taught magnanimity, certainly: forgiveness and letting go were the ways of the Light siders. Yet, her tone was almost…disgruntled. "You forgive me?"
"Well, yes," she shrugged. "I do blame you, of course, because if I didn't blame you then there would be no need to forgive you. I blame you for for actions, but I also blame your influences. If the world had been kinder to you, and if Snoke hadn't gotten to you, then maybe you would have decided not to go on a rampage. If Master Skywalker hadn't lost control of himself for that one moment, then maybe there wouldn't have been a different catalyst. In the end, you still chose to do what you did, and I forgive you for that."
That, he decided, was something he'd have to process later. The tan surroundings began to dissolve and dematerialize, and with a gentle smile, so did Aketaa.
—
Ever since he invaded her dream two weeks ago, Aketaa had been in a bad mood. "Okay," she growled at the trees. "Okay, so it sucks to have someone show up in your head unannounced. I get it!" She screamed, "What else was I supposed to do! How else was I going to reach him!" She groaned, "I know, I know, he gave me a taste of my own medicine and I don't like it, I know." Would she do it again if time rewound? Probably. She still saw no other way to communicate with him while maintaining a safe physical distance. Did this mean she'd have to tolerate his communication via the same established method? Yes, absolutely, and Aketaa was thusly frustrated with no solution besides gritting her teeth and bearing it. The trees, with their snow-laden boughs, offered her no help.
All there was to do was wait. She sat by her fire, writing out her internal monologue on the datapad, Krishden at her side as blissfully nocturnal as ever. Nothing else to be done but wait and wonder about the machinations of the First Order and the Rebellion, the balance between Light and Dark as it could manifest in a Force-user, and the relationship between Rey and Kylo Ren. She could reach out to him, but she didn't want to. Stubbornly, she wanted to wait for him to come to her again if he really wanted to talk, as much as she didn't like being caught unawares in the middle of her dreams.
When the lake froze over, Aketaa wrapped herself in as many cloaks and blankets as she could cobble together and stuffed her feet into her moccasins. Krishden bounding happily alongside her, she trudged through the thin layer of wet snow, intent on doing something, anything, that would provide a much-needed change of pace. She had never seen a frozen body of water before, and there was no time like the present. Though she was shivering and her extremities were going numb from the cold, the sun glittering on the surface of the ice and snow was beautiful and ethereal enough that it took Aketaa's breath away. A slight dusting of snow had collected in patches on the lake surface, and she could see the small tracks patterned on the clean slate here and there of taloned and toed feet. Some sort of bird-like species must have escaped her notice, though if they were fish-eaters that only lived by the lake, that could explain why. Now that it was frozen, perhaps they would migrate away. There were hoof tracks like Krishden's, too, trailing around the edges of the lake where the ice must have been sturdier. Aketaa wondered how it would be to walk on the ice herself, though she wasn't sure if it was possible. Maybe she would be too heavy and fall through. Or would she melt it with her feet? It was best not to risk falling into the cold, cold water again; she shivered just thinking about it.
There were mushrooms pushing up through the snow here and there, probably growing on the winter-dead underbrush, but Aketaa didn't trust unfamiliar mushrooms. It was too difficult to guess which ones might be edible and which might kill you in seconds. She'd been using the bittersweet bulbs of some tall blue grass to flavor her stew, and once in a while she would spot the wilted foliage of the starch tubers, but her herbs were unavailable until spring, assumedly, as were the juicy ground-dwellers. While she was out, Aketaa dug up some more bulbs to take back home with her.
Krishden trailed along behind her to and from the lake, being quite patient as Aketaa did her bit of foraging, but as soon as they were back at camp, the singer trotted inside and curled up to sleep the rest of the day away. Aketaa stowed the bulbs with her other stocked-up vegetables and sat with her datapad.
"The concept of an order honoring the cycle of life and death in nature, as driven by the Light and Dark energies of the Force, feels the most appropriate, I think," she said. "It feels true that we should accept and embrace both Light and Dark in ourselves and the world. That's the balance Master Luke was finding, I know it is. I suppose we have to trust that the Force itself is the best protector of its balance, though I don't believe that means we should do nothing in the face of oppression and wanton suffering. That's something I still have to figure out, Krishden."
The afternoon was a studious one, and then Aketaa paused for a stew dinner. She decided it might be beneficial to spend the evening meditating on the problem of injustice, so she did. If she started where she was certain, namely that both Light and Dark must coexist in balance, then she must extend that of course to the cycle of life and death, which further divides into the things associated with life and the things associated with death, and at its most basic, positive and negative. Should that allow utopias and tyrannies to exist at once? But utopias are impossible—because of the inherent Darkness in everyone. Maybe it was more about accepting that there is evil in the galaxy and always will be, as there is good and always will be, and these things will appear together on large and small scales. Is it wrong, though, to work towards a goal of spreading Light? Perhaps not, as long as it is understood that the Dark must also be there. Where, though?
Aketaa took a mental step back from the problem of sentient societies and returned to nature. It was simpler in nature. Birth, growth, reproduction, death, decay, nourishment. Happiness and sadness. Generosity and short tempers. Forgiveness and revenge. Love. Fear. It solved nothing for her.
Hours must have passed; the night was at its darkest and Krishden was gone, probably to graze in the snow outside. With a sigh, she typed some thought about how at the level of nature, the Force truly has full glory, but when societies are built and organizations must come together, problems of great complexity arise, in which it seems good people must be aligned with the Light side and bad people must be aligned with the Dark side, but perhaps this is not so. Perhaps the Force does not govern our choices, only influence them by means of our natures and situations. That was all Aketaa could muster on the topic. Tired of thinking, she went to sleep earlier than she usually did.
—
He retired to his quarters earlier than he usually did. After having to listen to Hux blathering on in flowery words to admirals and heads of departments all day, then listening to an extra, disdain-filled lecture from the scrawny weasel about how he wasn't taking the role of Supreme Leader seriously enough, what else could he have done? If he were a different man, he would want a drink. But he was himself.
The troopers chatting in the corridor went dead silent. He looked up, and immediately looked away. Rey was standing facing the wall of his quarters, completely soaked and completely naked. Water from what he assumed was a shower was collecting in a puddle on his floor. Apparently the Force had yet again caught one of them at a bad time, though none before had been quite so compromising as being in the refresher. For her sake, he didn't move and tried not to make a sound. Maybe he could spare her the embarrassment of realizing the bond had opened. Then he heard her gasp—no such luck then. He still didn't look up from his hands until he heard the troopers in the corridor again, signaling that the moment was over.
He'd clean up the water later. For now, he figured he might as well see what Aketaa was up to. At least she would have something interesting to say to him—or anything to say to him at all. Sitting on the edge of his bed, he breathed in, and reached out. Her signature pulsed gently with the peaceful rhythm of sleep, so he entered her mind on metaphysical tiptoe. It was still unclear to him how exactly he was supposed to do this, but it worked last time, so he hoped it would work again.
It did. Orange grasses surrounded him, nearly as tall as his chest and rustling in the dry wind. He spun around, searching for her striped horns. They should be visible, and they were. She was spinning, arms thrown out and headtails whirling. As he walked towards her, he saw she was smiling like she used to when they were young. She was wearing tanned leather and light-weight fabric in a style unlike anything he had seen her wear before.
"Aketaa," he called.
She stopped spinning in the sort of loose-postured way of someone carefree and happy. "Ky," she answered, still grinning, "you're here." Then the smile faltered. "I thought my mother would be here." Before he could say anything, she continued: "I don't know what I expected. I can't even remember my mother's face. I know you better than I knew her."
He didn't know how to respond. He couldn't tell if she thought he was part of her dream or not. Better to be direct about it. "I'm not part of this dream. I just wanted to talk to you."
"You—oh." She blinked, then she turned away from him to look out at the landscape. "I don't know which is sadder, dreaming that I'm totally alone on Shili or believing for a moment that I construed you as the only family I have left." After a moment's pause, she started walking away, so he followed her. "I'm a pack species, you know. Being totally alone doesn't come naturally to Togruta. I think I'm starting to go crazy."
"Are you somewhere…uninhabited?" he asked. Maybe he could gain some further clue of how to find her.
"Maybe. I haven't found any other sentient life, but I haven't looked very hard."
They crested a hill, and he could see a primitive-looking village down in the valley. Aketaa walked on, and he realized this must be what she remembered of her home before coming to Skywalker's academy. The dirt path they followed was gray, and the tall orange grass melted into a shorter yellow type. As they came upon the village, he noted the huts were constructed from woven yellow stalks no thicker than her arms and mats of orange grass. It was deserted.
"So this was meant to become a nightmare," she said. "Kriffing good thing you showed up, then. Better to have you with me and know this isn't real than to eventually make my way here with the expectation of seeing the tribe I remember and find it empty."
There was a thickness in her voice, and as he stepped towards her, she turned to show him the tears rolling over the white lines on her cheeks. To his surprise, Aketaa closed the distance and threw herself against his chest, hands gripping his black jacket. One of her horns banged his nose, but he raised stiff arms to hold her anyway. It felt awkward, but he knew her inhibitions were low and her emotions were high, it being her dream and all. He'd experienced the same feeling himself when she visited his dreams. For her sake, he tried to relax into the hug. It was what he owed her after invading a sensitive dream.
Admittedly, waiting as Aketaa cried onto his shoulder was not what he planned on doing, but that was fine. There wasn't exactly a plan in the first place. He just wanted to talk to someone. About what, he didn't care, really. The longer she went on crying, though, the more he wondered if she would ever stop on her own. Maybe this was the course of the dream and he had to do something to change it. He decided to try that.
"Can I complain about my day?"
She stopped her shuddering sobs and leaned a bit away to look at him. She let go of him with one hand and wiped at her wet face. She nodded. And then she returned to what felt like trying to be as close to him as physically possible, propping her chin on his damp shoulder and wrinkling up his jacket in her fists. But at least she stopped crying.
"I think I wanted to kill my hateful general even more than usual today. He kept giving me those disapproving looks of his during these awful meetings I had to sit through. They were about extremely mundane things like taxes and property rights, if I recall correctly. Then Hux must have fancied himself superior to me and he gave me this whole speech about responsibility and respectability and handling the fate of the First Order, I don't know, and I had to restrain myself from impaling him then and there. He thinks he's so smart and so influential, some master strategist and tactician, and suave, too, and he just looks like a rat, honestly. I kriffing hate him."
He heard a sniff, and then: "What's stopping you from killing him, exactly?"
"Habit, maybe. There would have been consequences if I killed him before I was Supreme Leader, but now that I am Supreme Leader, I am the one who inflicts the consequences."
"You might have an uprising on your hands, though. Mutiny on account of tyranny, that sort of thing. Your general's colleagues might get worried about their own necks if you start killing off the council members you don't like."
"Maybe it would make them more compliant."
"I doubt it. I don't think your reputation is the right kind of dangerous and powerful for that. More likely they'd think you too temperamental or prone to irrational outbursts or something and seek to replace you with someone they like better. They're afraid of you, but you're not stable enough to project impenetrability."
"Excuse me?"
"You heard me. And you know I'm right. You're young and inexperienced with politics."
"I thought you said I was getting old."
"Hm, only compared to how young we used to be. Compared to your council, who I'm assuming are all at least 50, you're the young one." She pulled away, to his relief, and took a step or two back so she could see him. "If you really want to stay in control of your First Order, you'll have to show them you can stay in control of yourself. That's my bet."
For a moment, he studied her. Those golden-yellow eyes of hers were swollen, the whites reddened from crying, as was her angled nose. Despite this, there was a focus in her expression, caught by his mundane talk. He asked, "Why are you advising me on how to be a better Supreme Leader?"
Aketaa sighed and shrugged. "I'm too tired of picking sides. I care about you, Ky, though I don't agree with your Order. Just because I hate what you stand for doesn't mean I have to hate you. And I'd say the same thing if you were leading the Resistance. I don't belong to any faction, Jedi, Resistance, First Order, Knights of Ren, Sith, none of it. I can only be me."
"Then why spend so much time and energy, even going so far as to hide on a remote planet where you live in isolation, to change my beliefs?"
She frowned and opened her mouth, poised to give him some retort, but she didn't. Instead, Aketaa closed her mouth and looked down, shaking her head. Her headtails swayed with the motion. Then she sighed and began to talk away, further into the village. Outrage erupted in him. How could she leave him in the middle of a conversation?
"What are you, some common coward?" he shouted. "Answer the question!"
Voice growing unrealistically faint and distant (he chalked that up to the dream setting), Aketaa yelled back, "It's the same question I keep answering over and over, you just don't like it!"
Moderation and anti-extremism, yes, he knew. "I want to hear you say it!" he said, jogging to catch up with her. He found her sitting on a fur cushion in one of the huts, large pelts serving as a layered carpet. It seemed barbaric, but she looked like she fit right in with her bright skin, flashing eyes, and stately horns. "Explain it to me," he ordered, sitting on a grass pallet across from her.
"Are you ready to listen?"
"Yes, as long as you're clear about it. No riddles and ominous declarations like you tried to pull before. Just tell me what you have to tell me."
She huffed. "Fine. I don't believe it's wise to choose sides of the Force. The way I see it, the Force is both Light and Dark, but that doesn't mean one is inherently better or worse than the other." Aketaa leaned forward, her longer headtail trailing along the furs. "Good and bad don't equate to Light and Dark. To say so is to ignore the big picture. Think about the galaxy, the universe, the planet under your feet. All of it follows the cycle of life and death, creation and destruction, in an inevitable pattern that maintains matter and energy: that is the balance of the Force, Ky," she said, tone insistent and firm. "We as living beings are physically tied to this cycle and this balance, and it's foolish and arrogant to pretend we are above that simply because we can interact with the energy of the Force."
As he listened to her words, his mind followed her reasoning through, and he found it an appealing idea. Thinking forward to the next steps of her argument, he said, "You mean to apply this to the nature of individuals, to remove the need for conflict so many Force-users have felt throughout history."
"You and Rey included," she nodded. "There is no enlightenment and ascension to complete Light or Dark, just as there are no utopias. Everyone feels fear and love and anger and joy, and everyone has a balance of both Light and Dark in their nature. I don't see why we can't embrace them both at once in a mirror of the natural world of which we are a part."
He recalled the feeling of her Force signature after he finally did away with her shields, and the way the shadows commingled between the bright rays without distress. He was reminded of her repeated use of pain and fear to fuel her power and sharpen her senses when she needed to defend herself. Rey had always done the same.
"I will spend time considering this," he told her.
She snorted. "Finally." At his sharp look, she inclined her head. "I know, I'm sorry, I shouldn't be rude when I should be thankful you're taking me seriously." Aketaa looked up again to look into his eyes with a golden intensity, and said, "We'll speak again soon."
The dream faded away.
—
Upon waking up, Aketaa felt so many emotions she thought she might burst. She thanked the Force and everyone she knew to be in it that he finally, finally had decided to listen to what she had to say. Part of her worried that she was being naive; maybe was going to dismiss her offer of a new way of thinking and decide to hunt her down after all. Furthermore, just because he showed up in her dream and mitigated some of its impact didn't mean she didn't still receive the message her mind was telling her. Victory, relief, excitement, anxiety, anticipation, loneliness, yearning. Everything swam together in her head.
She'd just have to wait until he contacted her again. It was annoying, but she understood that Kylo needed time to think, now, and her showing up to pester him about it wouldn't help her cause. Knowing his stubbornness, it might even cause him to drop the idea altogether if she tried to talk about it too quickly. Yet Aketaa was so heart-wrenchingly lonely, especially after that dream threw it in her face. She'd have to make a change.
Could she really leave Echara though? As time wore on, the winter began to thaw, and though she had heard nothing from Kylo, she was occupied again by the snow melting a little more each day. Life began to return to the forest where the cold had choked it out. When the ground-dwellers came out of their hibernation, Aketaa praised the Force to taste their meat again, and it wasn't much longer after that before she found sprouts of her flavoring herbs again. Aquamarine vibrancy was returning to the trees, and Aketaa started hearing the singers at night again. The herd must have finally returned to the area.