She woke inside a tent, her body curled against itself on a blanket. Half-awake, she blinked until all she could find was her reality. The yellow-gold tent and the scents beyond its boundary. Fresh dew. Grease, oil, machinery. Smells of food she had not yet tried. Her mouth watered. The Shorak language, still strange to her ears.
She sat up and found herself alone.
The entrance of the tent was pushed back, flooding the tent with light. Thassa stepped inside, dropping the tent flap behind her.
She wore robes of crimson red. Short sleeves fluttered around her upper arms. Her skirt carried a split on either side up towards her thighs. She cast an eye over Rey. She nodded to Kylo, stood just behind her.
"The boy told me you were awake. Get up, the day's short enough as it is."
Thassa turned on her heel. Kylo bent forward, holding out a hand.
"The dream—" she began, but the sentence died on her tongue. Thassa's shadow already receded.
"Obey and live, correct?" Kylo said. A smile slid onto her lips. She stood and ducked out from the tent.
In her head, she'd thought 3Z3 to be Jakku. Thought the station would be a cluster like the villages of Jakku, like Tuanul. She'd known the whispers of what had happened at Tuanul. The First Order, burning homes and rounding up the villagers.
3Z3 heaved of people. All of them wore tattoos, and the streets were bright with the multiple colours of their hair. Bodies jostled past bodies, hands shook hands. Bargains were made. There was no space to breathe, no space left unexplored or unclaimed.
Above it all, a structure of duracrete and glass. Its roof was a triangle that swooped in two gracious curves up to a sharp point. Though tall, it did not stand over the station's stone walls. The rounded walls of the station were sheets of windows. Shorak walked in gossamer and silken robes along white staircases, pausing to gaze down over the market and the streets. They watched the people in brown cotton below with obvious pride.
Thassa walked ahead of them. Eternal servitude. Rey wondered what the true sentence for what they'd done would've been. Death perhaps. After all, they had saved each other. A soldier was not supposed to have attachments.
The crowd thinned when they came closer to the station. The people gathered near the station ceased to wear the brown cotton, but yellows, greens, blues alongside the bright shades of hair and the intricate styles. The stairs leading up to the station fanned out in an increasing curve, until the final steps appeared to wrap around the building itself. They were made from white milkstone, a fresh crisp contrast to the earthy paths of the rest of the city.
Rey kept her head down, keeping a short distance behind Thassa. The milkstone was meticulously kept. The structure wasn't new. Nothing about this city was new. It was all ancient; the city's stories were their legends.
It was far from Jakku. If anyone stayed long enough there, their story was swallowed up by the sands.
The doors to the structure were glass, too, and slid open as Thassa approached.
"Little wonder they let the Peroenians believe the station's carrying a weapon," Kylo said, following on. "If any Peroenians got past the city walls, there'd be a war."
"The traders definitely don't know of this place," Rey remarked. If Cole and his thugs had, they'd have slit open Thassa's throat long ago and begun an assault on the city. Honour be damned when they could gain the largest haul of their lives.
Thassa led them through the wide open atrium. The high rounded dome sheltered them. Rey craned her neck back, looking up. They were surrounded by more milkstone and glass. Staircases lined the edge of the dome in a spiral. On each level, a wide bridge stretched across the space of the dome, one overlapping the other. False air blew a cold draft over the atrium floor.
There were no officials, seemingly, no soldiers standing guard.
Rey looked at each Shorak that passed them. Light-skinned, dark-skinned, they all carried strength underneath the satins and the paint.
"No need for guards," she muttered, and Kylo followed her gaze, "when your people are soldiers already."
Thassa stopped before a high set of doors, shaped in the form of the station's roof. At the highest point of the doors, a holo of a planet hovered in iridescent blue.
A keypad stood beside the door. Rey took in other doors visible to her. None of them had the same. Thassa punched in a code, and led them through. Rey followed.
Heated, gnarled lips spat out words at the far end of a long glass table. The most vicious debater was sat at the very head of the table. He carried a tightened square jaw, with green eyes that blazed. A high stiff collar covered the most of his neck, leading down to black tailored robes. His black hair was gelled back. His skin was pale white like the milkstone. Purple veins stuck out at his temple. A leader.
Around him, females and males, all wearing the brightest colours imaginable. They seemed, with their hair and their robes and their jewels, to be trying to stand out. Thassa was a market seller by comparison, wearing no jewels but only her dark red hair and crimson red robes.
The leader spotted her and held up a hand. Circles of gold paint covered his palm and trailed up towards his fingertips.
"Stop!" Each male and female Shorak around him—advisors, maybe—quietened. The leader briefly scanned Rey and Kylo. "So, you've brought me The First Order's enforcer. And a girl. What is your meaning?"
Rey flicked her eyes towards Kylo. There was no pride in his face at the mention of the First Order. Indeed, there was nothing at all.
"They fought badly in the arena. I thought you'd wish to look upon them," Thassa explained. The leader scoffed. His cloak flapped out behind him as he sat. The other Shorak hurried to do the same, taking their seats around him. Thassa remained standing.
"I doubt as much. If they fight badly in the arena, they die in the arena." The leader glanced at his gold-painted fingertips. "Their misdemeanour must be worse than that for you to spare them."
Thassa blinked, but held herself with graceful firmness. She only leaned forward to pick up a datapad from the table, her fingers flicking through pages of information.
"It is not my place to say, is it, Father? Sit," she said, waving a hand to Rey and Kylo. Her fingers still worked dexterously with the datapad. She sank into a seat at the right hand of the table, far from the other Shorak. Kylo and Rey shared a glance. Her body stiff, Rey swallowed. She quietly sat opposite Thassa, her attention flitting about the room. It was the size of an amphitheatre, but only contained the table and chairs. Where Thassa's siblings, and her father, sat. Kylo sank into the chair beside her. His palm settled on her thigh.
Thassa spoke again.
"I wonder how Asori is. Pity she is not here." Her lick of a smile told Rey of affection, and hidden pride. The leader scowled in Thassa's direction.
"Careful, Thassa."
Rey swallowed back a gulp. A sibling then and a sore subject. Lost, maybe. Or worse.
Finn. Luke. Rey's heart sank against her chest. The space left behind as she remembered them ached. She yearned for some way to contact them. What she would say to them, eventually. How she would explain what had happened.
"My name is Talak." His sneer became a curl of the lip. He looked at them like they were dirt underneath his shoe. "I know of you, Kylo Ren, and of what happened in your appraisal."
"Saving a human girl instead of himself. I don't know why Thassa brought them here instead of killing them both. Perhaps her age has skewered her judgement." The statement came from a well-fed, pampered creature who sat three seats down from his father's place. He had rings on his slim fingers, and his hair was coloured a sunlit yellow. Its gelled back strands framed his long square-jawed face. Handsome, but without beauty.
Thassa's attention did not leave her datapad. Out of the corner of her eye, Rey saw Kylo's mouth move with a smile.
There was a touch of the general about their captor.
"Cowardice is not a rival for age, Tylan," hissed one of the females, opposite her yellow-haired brother. Hair of a shocking violet surrounded her sweetheart face. Her glare focused sharply on them. "The rules for outlanders apply to all. They fought badly, they must be executed."
"If they are moved to sentiment enough," said another Shorak, younger than all his siblings but with the most pinched features and sharing his father's white skin, "then they should live out their shame. Give them servitude, Father."
"Death," repeated the violet-haired female. "I would have executed them on the spot."
Talak ignored the bickering. He still watched Rey. His contemptuous look flickered down the path of their bodies, hers and Kylo's.
"I give them another sentence. Neither death nor servitude." Rey watched Kylo, seeing out of the corner of her eye Talak's lips spread in a smile. It became a laugh. "I've no need for you Kylo Ren, nor your woman. Your sentence is exile. Let the Brintak have you."
Rey felt Kylo's hand at her elbow. Letting out a breath, the sound shaking in the still air of the amphitheatre, she rose to her feet. Thassa walked ahead of them, punching in the code. Rey turned her head, smiling as Kylo's hand threaded into hers. Thassa led them out into the open space of the atrium. The crowd of Shorak within the station had thinned out. All at work, deep in discussion.
"Your clothes are with the tailor in the market. Take them from him, wear them and return our cloth. Then you will continue north through the market, and you won't stop for anything. Once the gates close behind you, you are no longer under our protection. Stay away from the toroc trees at night, the Brintak are particularly hungry then." Thassa gave another smile. It was triumphant. "You played your parts well. Thank you."
She departed then. Rey stood in the quiet.
"I think we were just part of a coup," Kylo remarked, his smile growing wider when he looked at her.
A shred of comfort bloomed in Rey's chest. "We were nothing but dolls," she said, thinking of her pilot, sewn clumsily together. They walked towards the glass. The doors slid open with an easy, quiet hiss. Their hands stuck together tightly while they wove their way through the market.
Now they were free. Free to remember what they had done. A dark feeling stirred in her gut when the gates of Station 3Z3 closed behind them. Dreams were easier than reality, but the consequences were inescapable. Soon, she would have to face them.
Night reached them and they sought shelter in a shallow valley west of the station. Their robes had been cleaned and repaired by the tailor in the marketplace. No trace of past battles shared. When alone, changing from the brown cloth, Kylo had tugged on his gloves and examined his robes, the thread joining the rip at the lower stomach. Feeling his hands over his belt, his face fell blank.
He should've snarled. Should've been angry, made plans to replace his stolen tracker with a comms unit, if he could steal one. He brushed his fingers again over the place where once his tracker had been. There was no anger there, inside him. Not even when forced. No spark took, no flame ignited.
He wondered when fire had been replaced by air.
Shoulders hunched, he stormed through the crowd, finding her standing awkwardly off to the side, her hands held at her waist. She bounced on her heels, growing still when he stood before her.
Though they stood before one another there, as bodies passed, they didn't speak. Their thoughts were so tangled, it didn't seem necessary. They merely turned and headed through the crowd towards the doors of 3Z3.
She did speak, however, as she lay beside him in the valley's grass, underneath the starless sky.
"I know you feel it."
Kylo flinched. She gave a sad smile, and spoke again.
"Guilt. Every single life. Every single moment spent with the First Order." Her casual tone, as if she were merely telling him about the stars above, made the words worse. He felt the wind, the soft breeze, rather than the night's heat.
"You feel it so deeply that if you don't keep it at bay, you'll collapse."
"Leave it alone, scavenger." She scoffed at his address. Scavenger. After what they had seen, what they had done, he still tried that. He knew such a tactic was pathetic.
Sitting cross-legged beside her, Kylo straightened his shoulders. He found himself watching her, how still she was in the face of the night. He found himself catching her features. The flesh of her mouth, pink. Lips softly closing and parting, considering her next words. The space between her brows, creased with puzzlement and a yearning.
Observations like that were far beyond anything. He felt uneven, unsteady. An infant beginning to walk, wailing whenever he failed. His mind called for a solution.
All he found was her. Her naked form, underneath him, calling for him and begging him to help her reach ecstasy. Maker, but he wanted her. He'd thought giving himself to her would rid him of it. Renew his purpose and pull him back to what he knew.
"You told me you understood," she said.
"I do understand," he insisted. "But this is… reality."
Lies. The whole world was changed. The trajectories, the futures they had seen and felt within the eternal path of the Force, flashed behind his eyes. The knowledge that she had imparted onto him. There was a reason why she spat the word 'Jedi' and dismissed the old ways.
The Force was above it.
It was… bigger . Nebulous, almost, in its unknowable state. The Force, as they had seen it, was a soul in its own right. Through cycle after cycle, its perfect paths had been torn into pieces by them, the Jedi and the Sith, the two sides warring and feeding it with every triumph and every fall.
He'd looked upon the universe and known.
Using it as a weapon was to trivialise it. To think you could be defined by it would be to wilfully misunderstand it. The Force did not shape anyone. It lived within everyone. It relied on the Light and the Dark. Not one or the other.
No , screamed his memories. Hiding in his bed, the covers pulled over his body, trying to escape the voice which plagued him, however far he ran. No, the Force is your weapon. It does not define you. They lie, Ben. It defines…
The memory scratched and hissed. His father's grin stared down at him. I don't know what the hell it defines, kid. He sat in the corner of the courtyard in his childhood home, surrounded by sweet-smelling flowers. Han Solo sat in a waistcoat and shirt, with eyes that dimmed with confusion while his son spilled hot tears onto his cheeks. Han Solo rubbed his cheek, shrugging.
I can't explain it. I'm sorry. Maybe you should talk to your mother.
( I'll comm Uncle Luke. He can come here, and you can talk to him , had said his mother with gentle impatience. A holo of a Senator frowned down at him.)
His breaths shook, his fingers trembling when Rey touched him. Cradling his jaw, she drew her thumb over the hollow of his cheek.
"You think of them all the time."
"You idolise them," he bit back. His fingers still trembled. He breathed, but that still didn't calm him. Everything was different, even the shade of her damn eyes. Before they were nothing but a dull brown. Now he looked at them and they were what they always had been: soft, soft ochre. Flared into hazel when they burned in battle.
"Maybe," she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. Her hand slipped away from his cheek.
Kylo held her wrist. He was gentler than he should've been. Instead of pushing her away, he held her hand closer to his skin. He turned his mouth towards her palm. His breath was warm against it. Rey's breath hitched. "I – I heard enough stories of the smuggler who did the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs," she murmured.
"Am I still your captive, Rey?" Her name lingered in the air and on his tongue.
"I don't know what we are."
Kylo smiled. He softly pushed her hand away from his cheek. She tucked it against her waist, hugging herself tight.
"We'll continue west as soon as it's light, towards the canyons." Her throat bobbed with a gulp, her eyes tilting up towards the sky. "Can't waste time."
The rest of the night passed in silence. As he finally fell into sleep, he felt her beside him in the grass. He heard her soft breaths.
For the first time, he slept without dreaming.