Kylo avoids Rey at every possible moment after that night in the meditation room, refusing to meet her eyes when they train or meditate or even when they talk. She should be glad to be rid of his infuriating stare, but something about it makes her feel like there is something distinctly off, and it makes her uneasy.
Rey is even more nervous when he doesn't show up to her quarters that morning, and she waits and she waits but there is no sign of movement outside her door and no message calling for her on the comlink they issued her. She was surprised she was even given a comlink at all, especially as such a high-profile prisoner, but something tells her that it's just another way to track her every move. After a month, security around her is loosened slightly, and she no longer needs to be tailed by a 'trooper at every turn of a corner. But the cameras never stop watching, and Rey knows it.
She feels the stretch of a scar across her forehead as her face scrunches in apprehension, and she takes to pacing around the room and tapping on every surface, anything to keep her hands and feet busy and her mind distracted. It's not until the evening that she finally gives up on waiting and slides down the wall, just as she hears someone loudly punch the code in for her door. Ren rushes in, waving his hand sharply behind him to force the door shut as quickly as possible. Rey startles at his appearance, but she quickly falls back into her state of worry.
"Where were you?" she asks, but he is not focused on her, instead pacing the floor of her quarters, back and forth, back and forth. She grabs his arm and shakes him to his senses, and he stops, still avoiding her gaze. " Kriffing hell , just look at me! What is going on?"
He snaps his eyes up to her so quickly that Rey is almost unprepared for the intensity behind it. "It's the Supreme Leader. He wants you, both of us,now. " Rey feels her limbs lock, and she stays deathly still for a moment. She closes her eyes and lets the air flow slowly through her nose and out through her lips, once, twice, three times.
"Then we have to get going then, don't we?" There's a calmness to her voice that even Rey doesn't expect. She hides the layers of her fear behind a brave face and grabs her tunic as she starts toward the door.
"You don't know what Snoke can do, he won't hesitate to harm you in an instant if he thinks you aren't cooperating with him. I know ." There's a frigid terror behind his eyes that speaks volumes of his experiences with Snoke, and it nearly sends Rey into a panic. But she shuts her eyes to the dread and breathes in deeply, fortifying the walls of defense in her mind, and breathes out, expelling some of her blind fear along with the air.
"I'll have to make him think I'm cooperating, then. That's the only option." Kylo bows his head away from her, nodding slowly as she stands in the doorway, waiting for him to follow. "Let's go."
"Kylo Ren. Bring the girl to me," Snoke says as he leans forward on his throne with interest. Kylo steps to the side as Rey moves forward through the heavy darkness of the cavern, his face stony and emotionless. "Come closer, girl."
He reaches out a spindly hand toward her head and latches on so hard that Rey feels as if he will crush her. She screams out as he tears through her mind, shredding at every lonely memory and sorrow and private emotion she's felt until he comes to one part she's locked away in a durasteel box. Tears sting her eyes as a small exhale falls from his lips, a mixture of amusement and disbelief.
"You dare hide something from me, when your life hangs in the balance? You are much braver than I thought, girl. Let us see how brave you are against the Knights of Ren. Prove yourself ."
Rey sees them slither through the shadows from the corners of her eyes, and she whips around toward Kylo. His face is expressionless, and he turns away from her, unwilling to meet her stare. She should have known that he wouldn't help her, not around Snoke or his Knights. He never cared, and why should he, she thinks, as one Knight circles the ground around her, tossing her a practice saber to defend herself at the very least.
There's a rustle of movement behind her and Rey swings up just as a Knight bears down on her. His weapon is sharp and heavy, much less refined than a lightsaber, but there is immense force behind it. She swings her saber around to cut toward his ribs, but he is quick to action, matching her movements with a flick of his weapon as he blocks her attack. He is stronger than she is, and Rey feels herself being backed into a wall. The Knight grabs the hilt of her weapon and twists her wrist until she feels the tears streaming down her face and her teeth nearly grind into dust.
The saber snaps from her grasp but she lands a kick to his arm and knocks his weapon out of his hand. It slides across the floor and she rolls away, scrambling to grab it. She is much quicker and lighter than he is, but his weapon is heavy in her hands. Rey watches with wide eyes as the Knight lumbers toward her, practice saber in hand. A taunting laugh slips through his mask as he stalks toward her, twirling her saber and watching her like helpless prey. Her heart is in her throat as she looks around frantically for anything that could give her an advantage, but the Knights just seem to multiply around her, waiting to pounce.
There's a tug at the back of her mind and Rey's first instinct is to push it away until all traces disappear. Instead, she gives in to it, and suddenly Kylo is in her head, flooding her with everything he knows about the Knight's fighting style, his weaknesses, and his strengths. He's got a strong swing, so he can break her defenses easily, but he is heavy and slow, and his knees are weak. Remember lesson number one, Rey , he tells her, and in an instant she remembers that first day they sparred. She remembers the way he locked her limbs in place with nothing more than a flick of his hand, and she remembers the Force, flowing through her right alongside the adrenaline rushing through her veins.
She's tired already from her encounter with Snoke, but she summons up the Force in bunches around her and wills it to wrap itself around his hands and arms and legs. The Knight stops dead in his tracks, struggling against the bindings she created and Rey takes the opportunity to wrestle the saber from his frozen grasp. He's rigid in his place, but his head is still free, and he puts all his effort into bashing his helmet up against her head so hard that Rey feels the scar on her head open up again.
Rey falls back to the ground, head pounding too hard to maintain her focus and the Knight breaks free, stumbling toward her. She crawls away with both weapons in hand and stands up to meet him, legs bent and ready to react to whatever he does next. He charges at her and Rey leaps to the side, swinging his weapon down hard at the back of his knees as he passes her. The Knight collapses as Rey kicks one foot down to the center of his back with a sickening crack, and a boiling rage pulses through her. She grabs her saber and pounds down at him again and again until she's sure he won't try to get back up.
Behind her, a slow smile creeps onto Snoke's face as Rey turns back toward him, chest rising and falling heavily as she looks down at what she has done.
"Very good, Rey. That is all; now, leave me." She turns to glance at Kylo, who continues to stare at her with an unfeeling expression. "You, Kylo Ren, will remain here. We have much to discuss." Kylo bows his head low toward the Supreme Leader, and does not look back as Rey makes her trek back to her quarters, a weighty silence threatening to do her in.
She knows that it's late by the emptiness of the halls, 'troopers long gone to sleep and most work stations abandoned for the night. Her bed is all but welcoming when she makes it back to her room, and when the lights shut off, Rey feels like she's suffocating. She could have killed that Knight, for all she knows, and the thought makes Rey sick to her stomach.
She had to kill once on Jakku. She was nine, and she was home after a day of fruitless scavenging, her stomach clenching at the lack of food. She didn't have much, but at least she was home, free from the hungry eyes of Unkar Plutt and the other scavengers. The sun had just disappeared behind the dunes in the distance, and a sandstorm was picking up outside as Rey pulled up her thin blanket up over her head in search of some solace. A rustling sound came from outside and Rey froze, not even daring to breathe. Footsteps got closer, and Rey grabbed her pike as she heard the clanking sound of a metal bowl falling to the floor. She scrambled out of sight as quietly as she could manage when she saw a shadow-like figure round the corner with what looked like a weapon in hand. Hands shaking violently, Rey leapt out of her hiding spot and swung her pike directly at the figure's head until it crashed to the ground. She struck at it until she was sure that her own was the only heartbeat to be heard in that fallen AT-AT, and then she sobbed. She cried until tears no longer came and her mouth is dry as the desert outside, and she didn't even look at the body until the sun crests the dunes once again.
Her red-rimmed eyes widened with shock when she finally saw it, a boy no older than her, round face wrapped to protect his eyes from the sandstorm. There was blood on the back of his head wrap and Rey gagged, but there was no food to throw up and no more tears to shed. Instead she rummaged through her home until she found it, a dried yellow flower, one of her only prized possessions, and placed it in his sandy hair as best she could. She dragged the body out to the Sinking Fields the next day, and watched as the desert swallowed up the last of her innocence, leaving behind only guilt and regret.
She has killed before, but Rey tries desperately to remind herself that this time was different, that the Knight deserved every blow she dealt. She still feels the Knight's Force signature lingering weakly, still there but barely holding on, and she feels somehow relieved.
She spends the next hour staring blankly at the wall with her body tucked into a ball the way she did when she was younger, shielding herself from any harm to come. It isn't until sleep finally starts to fall over her that Kylo stumbles through her door, color drained completely from his face and limping as he clutches at his stomach.
Rey staggers toward him as he crumbles to the floor, pulling his hands away to reveal the blood crusted onto them.
"What happened?" she asks hysterically as he coughs up blood, his eyes struggling to stay open.
"Snoke, he- he found-" A shaky breath. "He found out about your pelt. He knows it's a Force artifact, Rey. He asked me what I knew about it, said- said you must have told me."
His gravelly voice is beginning to break, and Rey struggles to tear his layers away to treat his wound. A deep red gash runs across his abdomen, ripped open where stitches used to be, and Rey scans the room for bacta, or anything, to try to patch him up.
"He said he knows that-" Kylo stops to shake his head, turning away from her touch and wincing as she tries to clean his wound.
"He knows what, for kriff's sake, Kylo? "
"That I have compassion for you!" Rey's hands freeze where they are, trembling. "And that's against the rules, Rey; it makes me weak. He felt me help you during that fight, he saw it in my mind, he knows . And he made me pay for it."
"You…" her voice trails away, as she stares him directly in the eyes, and she feels it. "You have compassion for me?"
"I do." Rey shakes her head so hard that she nearly hits it against the wall but Kylo grabs her firmly by the shoulders. "I do, and I can't help it."
"You can't, you're supposed to hate me, you can't, you can't, you can't!" she cries out until her voice fades into sobs that rack through her entire body. There is only supposed to be light and dark, but here is Kylo Ren, trapped in between, and he has compassion for her . He's supposed to despise her with every fiber of his being, and she him, but Rey knows that nothing is ever that easy, or that direct.
I have compassion for you too, I can't help it , she thinks and pushes the thought at him. They don't speak aloud as she presses a bacta patch to his stomach and wraps it tightly to stop the blood flow oozing out.
She pushes herself up from her kneeling position and pulls his arms around her shoulders, helping him to her bed to sit down. She sighs as she assesses the damage, knowing her quick patch up won't be enough to heal his wound. "You'll have to go to the medbay."
"The Supreme Leader will know if I do. And besides, someone needs to take care of you too." He reaches up to brush his gloved fingers against the gash split open on her forehead, but she catches his hand.
"I'm fine," she says, standing up and pacing the room worriedly. "It's your wound we need to worry about." He looks up at her, eyes pleading with her desperately.
" Please . I want to help you. Let me help you." She exhales her resistance and resigns herself to his healing hands. She prepares herself for the stinging sensation of her wound being cleaned, but he just peels away his gloves and rests a bare hand against her head, closing his eyes.
His brow is knit in concentration and for a moment Rey wonders what he is doing, but then her she feels it, a warmth seeping from his hands and enveloping her being, melding together the broken skin piece by piece until it seems like new. She's breathless and confused, but her wound is healed and Kylo collapses onto the bed, fully drained.
She'd heard of Force healing before; a myth from her childhood, passed around from person to person, the story growing more fantastic the older it got. It was one of the first lessons she wanted to learn from Luke, but it was a difficult task that took incredible strength.
"Master Luke once told me that only a Jedi can heal without consequence."
Kylo pushes himself onto his elbows, taken aback. "I am no Jedi," he warns her, the offense laced through his voice.
"You're right. But there is light in you, I know it." She grabs his wrist and presses her lips gently to his palm, his eyes fluttering shut as the warmth of her breathing spreads throughout his skin. "Thank you."
"I don't care about the light, or the Jedi, or the Resistance, or any of it. I just care about you," he says, and before she can even react his palm is gone, replaced by his lips on hers. She jumps a bit at first, the air knocked out of her lungs and she can't catch her breath. At first, it stings her split lips, but there is so much warmth and feeling behind the kiss that it doesn't matter to Rey. All she cares about is how his lips linger even when he has to pull away to take a breath, and how the bond between them flares when his thumb brushes soothingly against her cheek. His nose bumps gently against hers and she feels all the blood flush to her face as her eyes open. His eyes are sad but when they pass hers she sees a little flash of hope, along with a feeling that she can't place just yet. A fleeting connection, and a look behind his eyes that seems to be telling her that maybe,just maybe , they don't have to feel alone anymore.
She pulls away, the small smile that graced her face earlier falling away as the realization of their situation washes over her.
"What are we going to do?" she asks, and his expression speaks volumes. His head drops to his knees as he shakes his head with a slow sigh.
"I don't know, Rey." I don't know.