One week later…
Rey jerked awake with tears pouring down the sides of her face into her hair, her heart pounding and her lungs gasping for air.
The dream never failed to exact it's toll.
Sitting up, she wiped at the tears with trembling fingers, turned sideways, dropped her feet to the cold stone floor and scrubbed her face with both hands. The scabs covering her much abused knuckles pulled painfully and one broke open, she stared at the trickle of blood running down the middle finger of her right hand. Watched it gather on the tip of her chewed up nail until it formed a single fat droplet that splattered on the floor between her bare feet.
The sudden tingle in her spine was the very last thing she wanted to feel right now. Her eyes made it only as far as a crisp white sheet draped untidily across his lap before bouncing back to the blood on the floor. She forced her eyes to remain on that lone drop between her feet though his bare toes were scant inches from hers. "This really isn't a good time." She said thickly around the lump in her throat. She had no desire to speak to him under the best of circumstances and this was certainly not one of those.
"I couldn't agree more." He sounded every bit as reluctant as she felt.
Silence stretched uncomfortably between them as she did her best to recover herself from the dream. After what seemed like an enternity his curiously husky voice startled her by asking, "Bad dreams?"
"Just one." She admitted, wondering if he could read her mind from where ever he was.
"Me, too." She couldn't stand to hear the softness in his tone, it was too intimate, too devastating, she had change the subject.
"Why is this happening again?" She tried to summon her fury but she found herself too distracted by the situation to locate the gnawing anger that his presence should have ignited. "Why now?" Her head refused to wrap itself around the fact that she was, for all intents and purposes, sitting inches away from him while neither of them had on much more than a scrap of white cloth.
"I don't know." The low, husky, intimate quality of his voice sent tingling chills dancing across her skin when he added, "Look at me, Rey."
When their minds had connected unexpectedly, a year ago, the sight of his shirtless back, shoulders, chest, and arms had stolen her breath away, but this - his near total nudity - was so much worse than that. The sight stole her ability to breathe, speak, and think. His naked proximity set her insides to fluttering erratically, her heart to pounding and her bones to melting.
"There has to be a reason." His heavy lidded gaze was just as soft as his voice. He tilted his head slightly. "What was your dream about?"
Her eyes dropped away from his to an absolutely fascinating thin line of dark hair that began just below his navel and disappeared beneath the edge of the sheet in his lap. She shook her head, unable to speak, unwilling to tell him anything.
"Mine was about you." He said with an air of confession. "It's always about you."
"Always?" She nearly choked on the word as her eyes shot back to his.
"Always. Everynight. The same dream." He said haltingly and leaned forward, watching her like a hungry predator. "About you."
"The red room." She whispered and saw the ripple of shock that crossed his face. "Why?" She didn't want to ask but she had to know, "Why didn't you choose me?"
"I did choose you." His lie sounded so sincere she could almost believe that he believed it. "I chose you over Snoke. I chose you over the darkside. I chose you over everything."
"You chose to replace Snoke!" She said with a welcomed burst of anger lending strength to her voice. "You chose to allow your own mother to be shot at when you could have stopped it! You chose the First Order over the lives of everyone who ever loved you!" She finished, hating the brittle sound of her own voice and the tears stinging her eyes.
"Like Luke?" He asked, his voice carrying an edge of anger to match her own. "He tried to murder me!" He scooted forward, his knees and feet coming to rest on the outsides of hers. "My mother? She ignored me my whole life and then sent me away just when I needed her most!" His narrowed eyes sparkled dangerously, "Or my father maybe? A man I've seen maybe five times since the age of ten?" He leaned in so close she could feel his hot breath against her face. "They never loved me." He said bitterly. "Nobody has ever cared about me."
"That's not true!" She snapped at him. "Your mother always loved you! Your father! Your uncle! They died trying to save you! I risked my life trying to save you!"
"Why?" He asked, his eyes searching hers. "Why did you do that?"
"You know why I did it." She said feeling accutely uncomfortable.
"Say it." He sounded almost beathless.
She clamped her jaw shut, refusing to comply.
"Say it, Rey. Why did you come to the Supremacy? Say it." He demanded with a hint of something akin to desperation in his voice.
She shook her head and remained silent. He stared at her, his face so impassive might have been carved in stone if not for the intensity of his gaze. Long minutes passed while he stared her down, his utter stillness a demand as loud as any shout. She hated the way it made her feel to have him staring at her like this.
"I've loved you from the start." He blurted, shattering the silence.
"What?" She yelped and jerked backwards reflexively.
He took a deep audible breath and said, "The forest on Takodona, you tried to shoot me, remember?" His lips twisted in a way that was not quite a smirk. "You were so fierce! Not a speck of fear in you! If not for the Force you'd have killed me a dozen times over. When I saw into your mind, I knew then… I had to have you… it was all I could do not to fall at your feet and beg you to love me." He reached one trembling hand towards her face.
"That's not true." She said breathlessly. Leaning away from his hand, she clamped his wrist firmly to stop it's progress. "I was terrified on Takodona." She said, pushing his hand back towards him and took an unsteady breath.
His face crestfallen, his shoulders slumped in defeat, he sighed, "Only after I froze you."
"No, I was terrified from the moment I felt you nearby." She insisted. "I could feel danger and rage and pain rolling off of you like a hot wind... I thought you meant to murder me." She couldn't bear to watch the way his face was contorting as he attempted to regain control of himself.
Dropping her eyes, she found that lonely drop of blood between her feet and stared at it as she continued to speak. "When I woke up in those restraints, and saw you… I thought you meant to torture me." She paused to take a deep breath before plunging ahead. "Everytime I was near you I expected to die screaming."
"I was frightened of you but I was drawn to you. I saw you murder Han Solo, a man I admired, but i felt your pain even more keenly than my own." Her eyes flicked upwards to his. "Then after… in the woods… you nearly killed the only friend I'd ever had. I wanted to kill you. I needed to end your reign of terror." She looked back down at the blood on the floor. "But there was something holding me back." Her voice was growing more unsteady by the moment. "I was relieved when the ground split open between us."
"I had so many nightmares about that fight." She could feel a prickle in her eyes and paused to steady herself.
"When this," she waved her hand back and forth between them. "This mind thing started happening I never imagined I'd come to see you so differently." She looked up, into his eyes. "You were Kylo Ren, the most terrifying creature in the galaxy… and then you weren't…"
She frowned, and looked away from him before continuing, "I thought I'd found this whole other person, buried down deep inside of you."
Her eyes took on a far away softness. "Someone real and solid… Who didn't just tell me I wasn't alone but made me really believe it."
Her voice went raw and throaty. "Someone who so understood how lonely I was that he had tears in his eyes just to hear me speak of it."
She rubbed her thumb absently across her tingling fingertips and continued, "Someone who cared so much that his hand shook just to be reaching for mine."
She looked back into his eyes, "It broke my heart to think of how he'd been driven into an impossible choice between the Darkside that welcomed him or the Lightside that feared him."
Her broken heart leapt into her throat, nearly choking her. "I thought that if I could just show him how much I cared, he would surely turn back to the light. I was so sure that he was worth dying for that I risked everything to try to save him."
Her eyes sharpened, her face darkened, "I nearly died trying to save him," voice cracking like a whip she spat, "from you!"
"But there was no saving him, was there?" She seethed. "Because he never existed, he was nothing but a cruel illusion that you used to seduce me!" The wound from that was still a raw and bleeding thing.
"When you were in my head you saw how lost I was, how much I needed to have someone give a damn! And you used that to manipulate me! I was just a tool for you to use to usurp power from your master!" She threw the last word at him like a hate grenade.
"You never cared about me at all!" She accused. "You were just using me the whole time!"
Her whole body vibrated with hatred, "And you have the nerve to sit here and tell me this pack of lies? Do you honestly expect me to believe that you love me?"
"You? Kylo Ren?" She scoffed then snarled, "You really are a monster!"
With no concious thought to do it her hand snaked out and slapped him across the face so hard it stung her fingertips almost numb.
In an instant she was alone in her room again.
