Rey left the tent while Kylo Ren still slept for the next couple of days to explore the other tunnels. On the first day she could do nothing but fume about his arrogance from the previous night. When her anger started to fizzle, she remembered how she didn't have to save him from the snow and could have just let him freeze to death, and got angry about him again. After hours of cyclical frustration, she headed back to the tent irritated at herself for wasting time and not really looking for her crystal. They didn't speak to each other until Rey picked up her plate and noticed something odd about it.

"Why is there a big dent in my plate?" she demanded.

"I folded it in half."

She gaped at his stony face. "Why would you…you know what, I don't care. You can eat off of it."

She shoved it in his hands and scooped up her meal on her other plate before eating it outside of the tent. She didn't have to share her food either. She could have let him starve. He apologized for the plate when she re-entered but she didn't answer him, instead opening one of the Jedi tomes she had brought to read. Now and then she glanced at the communicator, but she left it untouched. For now.

The next morning she left the tunnels again, her anger mostly settled in her bones like dust. She looked at the caverns, cleared her mind, and felt into the Force for even a whisper of her crystal. She followed a twinge down a winding path spiked with purple gemstones.

She was a child again, cleaning nuts and bolts with the scavenger girl when they were still friends.

"I can't wait to get off this rock," the scavenger girl said. "Next ship that comes, I'm gonna get myself hired on. Maybe get you hired on too."

"I can't. My parents," Rey muttered.

"Right, your folks. I'm sure when they come back they'll probably have all sorts of treasure and food and stuff."

"I just hope they come back soon."

"They will. When I get off world, I'll make them come back for you."

She sounded so sure of this fact that Rey fully believed her, and thanked her in advance. When a new ship landed, the scavenger girl went to talk to the off-worlders. She came back to the marketplace bruised and with a black eye.

"Nothin' happened, Rey. Stop worrying," she told Rey before knocking her out with the short club.

Rey woke up crumpled on the rock floor, blood globing on her eyebrow. Gingerly she sat up and touched the stinging cut on her forehead. She traced the blood back to a sharp corner of a crystal growing out the ground. Were these damn visions trying to kill her now?

She stumbled back up the way she came. By the time she reached the tent, the bleeding had stopped and was sticky on her brow.

"What happened?" Kylo Ren asked as she cleaned her forehead with a sponge from the first aid kit.

"I had another vision of..." She looked away from him. He didn't need to know nor did he care what her visions were about. "I had another vision, I fainted and hit a crystal."

"Maybe I should accompany you so if you have another—"

"I don't need your help."

She could feel his glower on the side of her face, but he didn't argue. After she sealed her wound she made their rations (with polystarch instead of eggs) so they could eat it in stifling silence. She looked down at her plate and silently cursed herself for gobbling her ration down, but then Kylo Ren slipped his plate with a full piece of veg-meat and a half of his half of the polystarch.

"No, this is yours," she said, trying to give it back.

"And I'm giving it to you," he said, pushing the plates back with his thumb. "You need it more than I do."

She feared for a moment that he had read her thoughts on letting him starve, but she ignored it. They hadn't shared dreams in the last couple of nights, and she hadn't felt him trying to invade her mind at all ever since they landed on Ilum.

"Thank you," she said, and forced herself to eat slower this time.

He nodded and made himself tea to sip on while he nibbled on his bread. Even though it was only a little extra food, Rey already felt more energized than she had in the past week. Her mind felt clearer, lighter, faster. She thought back at her visions, and tried to understand why she had become so focused on this scavenger girl from long ago. Her eyes fell on Kylo Ren holding her tin cup.

"Do you want to know what my visions are about?" Rey asked him.

He blinked at her. "If you want to tell me about them."

"They're about when I was first left behind on Jakku." She saw his face flinch, but she continued. "I was only five or six, and I didn't talk to anyone at first. There was an older girl who was friendly with everyone at the outpost. She would sit with me and talk we me, and we became friends. She said she would even bring my parents back to me, and I believed her. I've been having visions of when she betrayed me. She had knocked me out and stole my portions. I saw her again a few weeks later on a scavenge, and I hit her in the face with my staff before she even spoke more than a word. She fell and I ran and I never saw her again.

"I don't know why I'm having these visions of her, or how they're going to help me find my crystal. I felt guilty about possibly killing her when I was a child but she…she had betrayed me and left me to die. I couldn't trust her again."

He folded his hands in his lap and spoke slowly, "Maybe she's a warning."

Rey nodded, looking carefully at his somber face. Somehow throughout the course of the week, she had felt a tendril of connection with him that was bruised from his earlier insult. She remembered him laying motionless in the snow, and then the scavenger girl fallen in the sand.

Suddenly, everything snapped into place.

"When the storm passes, you can either come with me to the Resistance, or return to the First Order on your own," she said, which made him nearly drop his tea.

"What do you mean?" he said, his eyes searching her face.

"When I decided to carry you to the temple with me, it wasn't because I wanted to take you back as a prisoner to the Resistance. I didn't want to leave you to die by yourself."

She flushed and looked away from him for a moment.

"That doesn't explain why you're letting me go," he said quietly.

"I'm letting you go because I think you're right. The visions are a warning to not repeat a past mistake."

"I thought you said she couldn't be trusted again."

"I couldn't trust her again. I don't trust you either," she said, her voice starting to shake, "but Luke has shown me the value of compassion, even in the face of enemies. If I hadn't killed my once-friend, we wouldn't have been friends again, but she could have had the chance to be a better person if she were alive."

"Or she could have been far worse, and stole from you again. Possibly kill you."

"Yes, but I ended all of possibility for her to change when I killed her."

They fell silent for a while, until Kylo Ren let out a short sigh.

"I won't take you to the First Order."

Now it was her turn to eye him with a glint of suspicion. "Really? I thought it was your assignment to capture me."

"Consider it payment for saving my life when you didn't have to," he said gruffly. "I'll stay in the cave when the Resistance picks you up, and I'll hail down the First Order once you're out of orbit. No one will know what happened here."

It didn't surprise Rey that he wouldn't even consider coming to the Resistance, but she did like the idea of no one knowing about their cohabitation. Kylo Ren poured himself a new cup of tea and raised it.

"To no one ever finding out about this," he said, sipped it and handed it to Rey.

"To going our separate ways peacefully," she said before sipping the pungent black tea.

Now all Rey could do was hope that he would keep his end of the bargain and not prove her interpretation of her visions wrong. If not, well, she always had Luke's lightsaber holstered at her side.