'Don't you have anything better to do?' She'd answered the door in her shift, bleary eyed from the sleeping pills. 'Like errrarghhh.' She made a choking noise as she stepped back.

'General Ras? He's already left our employment.'

Squinting seemed like the least painful option as she tried to focus on the black blur. 'You let him live? After he ambushed and nearly killed us? You have changed.'

'I didn't have a say in it. I went to his quarters after I'd dropped you off with the medics and he'd already resigned, in a manner of speaking. Blaster bolt to the head.'

'I'll be doing that if this headache goes on much longer. Give me a minute to get dressed.'

She left him in the lounge and went for a quick shower, donning her own clothes, now dingy grey with overuse and returned towelling her hair, wincing at the strain in her arms. 'I'm not doing anything that involves lifting,' she announced, bending over to pull on her boots and feeling the sore, pulled muscles in her legs. 'Or running.'

'My master always made me run around that hangar fifty times after a combat session. Said it was a test of mental character.'

'Your master was a homicidal megalomaniac.'

'And yours isn't?'

'I'm not sure what you are, any more.'

'I'll consider that progress. Shall we go?'

He let her sit on the floor just outside the entrance to their usual training space, hidden from the curious glances of the personnel working on parked fighters by a pile of storage boxes. He gestured towards the dual winged shuttle to which she'd staggered back to the night before, heavily supported by an arm around the waist.

'This is an old exercise. Lift the ship, but don't scratch it, or I'll be cross.'

Because they were side by side, it was easy to nudge him in the ribs. 'How cross?'

'I've killed people for less.'

She struggled, but there was no danger to his paintwork because no matter how hard she stretched out, the metal hulk refused to move.

'The problem is,' he remarked after a while. 'That you only look at the surface. You know it's a shuttle, so you're expecting it to be heavy. Your expectations are holding you back. Look deeper.'

'What? Focus on the electrics or something?'

'No. What I mean is, your view of life is very black and white. You're a Jedi, that's a shuttle, I'm a homicidal megalomaniac. Look deeper.'

She glanced at him askance. 'That really is a shuttle, Ben. It's never going to be anything else.'

He rested his head against the wall, eyes fixed on the ceiling. 'All my life people have wanted me to be one thing or another. Light side or dark side. When I was little, my parents expected me to be perfect – and they couldn't stand the thought that I wasn't. It was always 'Ben doesn't want to do his homework, maybe he's turning to the dark side' or 'Ben kicked the cat, he must be Lord of the Sith.' I tried so hard to be what they wanted but I was never good enough. They were glad when I went away to train, it meant they didn't have to deal with me anymore.'

A shadow crossed his face and he spent some time jamming his gloves more closely onto his hands.

'Then I met someone who told me it was alright to be different. But it turned out that he wanted me to be perfect too, and it was 'Kylo, wipe out that village, prove you're not a Jedi' and 'Kylo, murder your friends, demonstrate your loyalty.' I tried to live up to his expectations too and I failed. No one has ever just wanted me for who I am, because who I am isn't good enough. Everyone I meet wants to change me.'

She reached over and brushed his leg.

'What I'm trying to say is…don't feel too bad about what happened to you last night. I understand what it's like to be pulled in both directions. I'm probably the only person who understands.'

She sat back again, frowning. 'What do you think happened to me last night?'

'You felt the power of the dark side. You enjoyed it. The authority. The violence. The blood. It's alright. That's why I asked you to let the past die. Let go of the light and the dark and just be who you want to be.'

'But I haven't turned to the dark side.' She folded her arms.

'Let go, Rey. Embrace your destiny.' His tone was still soothing, but his assumptions irritated her.

'I really haven't turned. I haven't.'

He crossed his own arms, his temper flashing. 'I know what I felt. Stop lying to yourself. You enjoyed it.'

'Yes, I enjoyed it, but I haven't turned to the dark side. I enjoyed it because I was with you.'

There was a very, very long silence, in which he resumed his minute consideration of the ceiling and she looked anywhere else but at him.

Eventually, she attempted to see the shuttle as something more than a shuttle, reached out, and managed to destroy two of its landing struts and crash the nose into the floor.

'That'll polish out,' she said.

'It doesn't matter.'

His hand unpeeled itself from his leg, moved across to her lap, picked up her hand, and held it.

She looked at the ceiling. Handholding had been normal last night, she hadn't given it a second thought, but here in the hangar bay, here in the daytime where it seemed to mean something different, here, it made her mouth dry. Her heart thundered in her chest, her stomach tensed, and she was glad he still had his gloves on because her palms were sweaty.

The obvious answer was to yank her hand away, remember the atrocities he had committed, the people he had killed, the fact that he was an enemy to everyone she called a friend, but she'd never been attracted to the obvious answer. He wanted her to let the past die, and that included his past, maybe more than anything else.

She let him hold her hand, and after a while, she held his back.

Even more time passed before he said, 'Let's try that again.'

The fingers that weren't cocooned in her lap raised, and the shuttle along with it, sliding smoothly and easily into the air, glittering in its pristine majesty.

'Take it,' he said, and she tried, she really did, but it landed so hard that one of the wings dropped off.

'It's fine,' he said. 'I'll order a new one.'

'I'm not sure you can afford it. I've been meaning to ask you something though – what's the point of the First Order? What's it for?'

'Haven't you read any of the stuff in your room? There are supposed to be, I don't know, pamphlets?'

'I lost all four thousand and thirty of them.'

'It is the task of the First Order to remove the disorder from our own existence, so that civilisation may be returned to the stability that promotes progress.'

'And after you've done that, once you've removed disorder from the galaxy, what happens then?'

His attention was on his fingers, twined through hers, white on black. 'At the moment, I really don't care.'