She crouched on the floor with the bench poking into her upper back for a long while after she could no longer hear his steps in the hallway. Her forehead rested on her bony knees, her forearms circled around her shins, grasping each wrist with the opposite hand. Unbelievably enough, his last assault on her mind had been more brutal than the one before, and she let the tears that had welled up in her eyes fall onto her thighs as she thought about the things he'd seen. If he'd wanted the kriffing map, why had he needed to see all that? She shook her head slowly back and forth, wondering what utility he could possibly have with knowing her mortification at her developing body, with watching her as she…. she didn't know what the word even was for what she did in the night when she couldn't sleep.
Except now that she knew another human knew about it, she felt a twisting sense of unease deep in her middle. She carefully packed the feeling away, boxed it off and left it. For now at least.
Eventually, though, she did as always: she got up. Standing at the very end of her cell, she began measuring with her only tool available, her body. Silently she counted her steps, heel-to-toe, from one side of the cell to the other, lengthwise, then breadthwise. 24 Rey-steps by 14 Rey-steps, she mentally noted. Approximately 12 by 7 Imperial Measures, if the conversions she'd made from the encyclopedias she'd found in the ships on Jakku were correct. Reaching her arms overhead and standing up on her tiptoes, she could just brush the dim lighting array in the ceiling with her fingertips. The room was perhaps just over six IMs tall.
Now she ran her fingers over each crevice where the durasteel panels were knit together, and found them satisfyingly but disappointingly solidly welded. She whistled a low note of appreciation: both the Imperial destroyers and this newer First Order facility seemed to be solidly constructed. Her admiration at the craftsmanship of them was not tarnished by her current status as…. a prisoner. But, where was she? She hadn't even been able to tell if this was a ship, or some kind of planet-side base. The events on Takodana were a jumble in her mind, and she paced slowly back and forth in the aisle of her cell trying to sequence them into something resembling logical order.
Finn, trying to arrange transport off-world, her begging him to stay. Then a voice calling her from the lower level of Maz's, high and keening, obviously in distress and she had felt compelled to descend the ancient stone steps to do… to what, she didn't know. Despite her every instinct telling her to run at the voices she could hear whispering through the length of the hallway to the door, she entered the one where the voice seemed to emanate from. But there was no one there. Finding the wooden box, then her inquisitive scavenger's nature forced her to open it and there, nestled in the rags, was a curious piece of equipment she'd never encountered in any of her forages on ships before.
She cocked her head to the side, trailing her fingers along the cold durasteel of the narrow walls, fighting the growing tide of panic that was welling up in her core at the memory.
It was that thing that had given her the… vision, if that's what it had been- a lightening-fast replay of her own memories, mixed with voices she'd never heard before, scenes she'd never witnessed in person, and then the terrifying shadow of him, lunging after her with a glowing, red saber drawn, her stumbling over a tree root and nearly falling in her haste to escape, the dream-like wash of relief that she'd gotten away only to be quickly startled by the nightmare realization that he was still there. She'd dropped the object and bolted into the hallway, only to be confronted confusingly by Maz, who insisted that the object belonged to her, called to her. She'd run from the castle, and after she and BB-8 were amongst the ferns, he had found her. Once he'd rooted her to a spot using some trickery she couldn't see, he'd realized she'd seen the map to Skywalker.
You've seen it. You've seen the map. He'd sounded incredulous and angry. His saber had been mere inches from her jawline, its spitting, red blade radiating heat and giving off tiny sparks that had fallen hot against the span of her shoulder. And then…
She'd awakened, strapped down for examination. She sighed deeply at the residual panic she was still feeling from that episode. The food in her stomach was giving her a drowsy feeling, but she refused to let herself fall asleep. Who knew what could happen if she did. After pacing awhile longer, she sank back into her crouch and gradually let her mind wander back to what she'd seen when she'd managed to reverse his assault on her mind and turn it back into his own. The effort of it had raised a light sweat on her brow, as though she were physically exerting a pressure towards him. There had been a strong resistance, a few reversals back and forth between them, until she had simply fallen in, and the first thing she'd happened on was a dark well of loneliness, prideful arrogance, and unexpectedly, fear.
There were the briefest flashes of what she presumed to be his memories, too quick for her to parse in the heated moment, but now she found she was able to slow them down, still-frame them in her mind's eye and observe more carefully. More than just the images, she realized she could sense his feelings as he'd been part of them. A woman's face, kind and strong, but always a bit sad behind her brown eyes. A group of adolescents, watching him with wary expressions as he sparred with an unseen teacher using a wooden staff, a feeling of vengeful pride blossoming in his chest. Standing alone in a docking bay watching a ship recede into the atmo until it was speck that blurred with the stars.
It had been a strong feeling of inferiority that had lead her to his thought of Darth Vader, a deep, uncut vein of yearning, a desire to do more and be more, and she hated herself for admitting… she felt it sometimes, too. But she shook her head against the nascent thought of sympathy with this monster. They were nothing alike, he and she. It sickened her to think what he'd done to countless others, if his treatment of her had been any indication, and even thinking back over her own imprisonment lead her to hate him more deeply than she thought herself capable of.
Thinking back over the events of the day, she saw arched, paneled glass of the Millennium Falcon's cockpit, the stars lengthening into streaks as the ship pulled forward and lurched into hyperspace. Her guts felt like they'd been stretched forward out of her middle, then mashed back in. She glanced over at Han next to her in the pilot's seat, his gnarled, scarred warrior's hands steady on the controls, and felt a sense of overwhelming comfort, of being taken care of for perhaps the first time ever. Things would be alright. Han looked over at her, winked, and said, "Not bad for an old hunk of junk, huh kid?"
Chewie roared a short bark of agreement from the jumpseat behind her, and she felt his great, hairy hands squeezing her shoulders in reassurance. But…. no, that wasn't right, Chewie had been wounded, in the med bay with Finn. She glanced down then at her lap and it was not her own. She saw a child's legs, dangling off the edge of the seat, a child's hands rubbing nervously on its thighs to calm the queasy feeling of flight sickness.
This was not her own memory.
She opened her eyes and stared around her in disbelief. What had he said to her?
Han Solo… He would've disappointed you.
She scowled now, eyes closed, as she sifted through his memories until she happened onto it: a gawky boy, tall for his age, standing at Solo's elbow, watching the man shaving. To get the man's attention, he'd deliberately knocked the cake of soap into the sink without touching it, watching earnestly as the bar did a few neat slides in the basin before settling at the drain.
"Did you just do that?" Solo's voice was unexpectedly sharp, surprising her.
The boy shrugged, suddenly apprehensive at Solo's displeasure. "I taught myself how to move things."
They stared at each other for a long time in the mirror, Solo rinsing his razor and flicking the water into the basin without breaking eye contact. Finally he said, "Maybe you should tell your mother about that, kid."
She raised her head suddenly and stood bolt upright, paced several turns back and forth in the room. She knew what it meant, danger to Han, mortal danger to everyone she knew who'd been left behind on Takodana. If Han had known Luke, and she had the map to Skywalker's whereabouts in her stupid brain, and this man wanted it… Han was but a link in the chain to the end goal, as was she, and Finn, and everyone else in the Resistance, most likely.
Her breath came shallowly now as she turned tight circles, her knuckles pressed to her lips in determined thought. She had to get out of this blasted cell, had to run, had to warn them. The Troopers stood at attention outside her door again. She made her way to the door and placed her hand on it, trying to determine which side he was on. If he had been able to force himself into her mind, and she in turn had been able to insert herself into the mind of her captor and torturer under duress, perhaps she could do it at will to others? Even back on Jakku, she'd heard stories of children being kidnapped and forced into service by the First Order. Surely there was a way to exploit whatever residual humanity might remain in their heads. She placed her forehead against the cool steel of the door and pondered.