Thank you very much for every single review. I'll keep the promise and keep these chapters short. Rey and Kylo Ren (or Ben?) continue collaborating on Dagobah. He hasn't got much choice, but then again - maybe he has.
The ship moans and howls like a living being, but doesn't resist. Rey can almost picture in her head the millions of fine threads of Force hurling to the ship, embracing it from bellow, pulling its every inch to the surface.
And sure enough, it re-emerges. Rey again feels that same elemental joy at their achievement.
But he frowns. He is anxious and jittery. Cold sweat comes running down his face.
They land the ship with a roar. The residual water splashes against their feet like a tidal wave. Rey shudders, unaccustomed at this amount of water and he just tenses. His long ceremonial overcoat is soaked now with both blood and water.
But it doesn't affect his obsession about the ship – he strides right in, with water still pouring from ship's sides.
No corrosion, no fatal damage to the engines, he informs her – they made a craft too perfect to be simply trashed by a swamp, Dagobah and the Light Side notwithstanding. But if it operates, it will operate on a breath of engine fuel.
He primes the ship and the craft makes an alarmingly faint noise – it's operating in power saving mode and only barely at that. His pale face appears from the twilight.
"Do you know where your Resistance is"? He almost squeezes the question through his teeth. Wasting their resources on the Resistance almost him – and by resources he means everything, from his ship to his time and his breath.
Rey shakes her head. It's all on the "need to know" basis and now she can only speculate, but doesn't know for certain. Her binary beacon is still – the other is in Finn's hands. It's either they're too far apart or worse – something happened to the rebels.
"Makes no sense to spend the last exhale of that fuel on mere conjecture", he remarks and turns the ship down.
As he stalks away, he looks up to the darkening skies and she realizes they have nowhere to hide as the cold and damp night sets in. A distant and apparently aggressive creature roars deep in the woods.
"I know this place", he says. "Only from the stories, but I remember everything".
And I'd gladly forget it, all of it.
"There was a small abode north – northeast", he adds. "Your Master was here last, and he might've left something useful behind".
For a change.