"Did you ever stop to think about what I was offering you?"

Rey breathes an exasperated sigh. She was playing a dangerous game, allowing this connection with Kylo Ren to continue. The electric intensity of their bond courses through her body, raw and warm.

But as much as she feels the danger, part of her, stubbornly, was holding onto to hope that she could get him to see the light, that she could have… that future.

Rey frowned pushing the thought away.

"Galactic domination, death and destruction…" she rattled off, not taking her eyes away from the controls of the Millenium Flacon, "so much blood," she whispered.

Kylo, standing in simpler black robes this time, tilted his head regarding her for a moment.

"No," he breathed.

"The POWER to make your own reality," he said evenly in his deep velvet voice, "A galaxy of your design…our design."

Rey looked up at uncomfortably soft tone in his voice, and locking eyes, felt the same sweeping terror she felt upon leaving the elevator to Snoke's throne room, knowing that this monstrous man's feelings towards her were…different.

She shakes her head of the feeling, tearing her eyes away from his devastatingly intense deep brown ones.

Rey chooses silence over answering his comment. Her heart twanging nervously, she focuses instead on checking over her instrumentation.

She was on a mission at moment. While Leah and company prepared a workable base on a new world, she was flying Poe, Finn and a handful of others to meet some potential allies closer to the mid rim.

Watching her hands, Kylo noticed how familiar the movements were.

"You're on the Falcon," he says almost to himself.

Kylo Ren took a step closer and stood beside Rey where the co-pilot seat would be. Rey looked at him warily as he stretched out his hands. Kylo imagined the positions of the instruments in the cockpit under his fingers, he remembered them well. He had been aboard it not long ago, a shell of the vessel he had grown up on, learned to fly on… had watched fly away as his parent left him, alone with voices in his head and in the care of his murderous uncle.

"I suppose you would be a fan of this bucket of junk."

Rey shot him a dirty look. The Falcon had saved the resistance. It represented her freedom from Jakku and it was more a home than any place she had yet to rest her head.

"Some garbage is worth saving," she spat, remembering how she'd called it garbage when she and Finn were running from the First order's Tie fighters. She would have preferred that quad jumped if it hadn't been blown to pieces in front of them. The garbage did them much better.

"Like me?" He asked deeply.

Rey's heart hammered in her chest as she looked back up at the dark figure standing over her, his face unreadable, his emotions an indiscernible swirl.

She stood slowly. Rey bravely, or stupidly, kept her eyes locked on his, searching for a clue on what to say next.

"You sound different," she remarked softly, not quite able to put her finger on what had changed.

He regarded her calmly. Kylo was certainly less angry than their last conversation when he promised that leaving him alive would be her demise. He had called her a fool for wanting to save him instead of destroy him.

He seemed to make a decision, raising his eyebrows in a way that said what the hell.

"For the first time in my life, the voices in my head are gone. I realize now that the dark whispers that tormented me from childhood were from Snoke, always from Snoke," he was opening up to her the same way Rey had done in the hut on Ach-To after her venture into the cave.

Rey did not hide the astonishment on her face.

"What?"

Kylo pulled up a chair in the approximate position of the co-pilot seat and sat down. Rey returned to the edge of her captains seat, totally enraptured and leaning towards him..

"He cultivated the darkness that was already inside me. He used me like Han Solo said… but I'm glad he did."

Fear came prickling back up Rey's spine.

"It's been interesting adjusting to the silence, being alone in my own head for the first time. But I see it all clearly now. Every part of my path has prepared me to rule without remorse or sentiment, to design a future of my will…"

"You're wrong"

He looked at her darkly.

"Your will is not what matters, we are instruments of the force, not the other way around. You must have felt what I felt when we fought side by side. The balance! How perfect and powerful it was when we fought against the First Order!"

"The force wills us together. To balance the galaxy side by side," he insists.

"But not on the back of billions of repressed and abused people!"

"If you were here maybe you'd have some input on what happens to those people, BUT YOU LEFT," he growls, "you chose to let them keep suffering rather than take my hand."

"You were going to kill my friends! Including your own mother," Rey is shouting back at him.

Kylo blinks in confusion.

"She… the general…"

"She survived the attack on the fleet," Rey responds, sensing his question, "She used the force to pull herself back inside the command ship. She was very weak but Leia was there on Crait when you tried to slaughter everyone. And I was on the Falcon thank you very much. Forgive me if I'm not rushing into your arms!"

Rage, confusion, pain come pouring out of Kylo as he tears his eyes away from hers and looks down at the floor.

Mother, he thinks, and Rey hears it. She is taken aback by the relief, longing, pain and dare-I-say love he feels for the Princess.

Kylo curses and stomps away, seemingly to the back corner of the cockpit compartment..

Rey is speechless and breathing hard. Was this really him? The man who killed his father…loves his mother? The seething dark lord stands with fists clenched, on the edge of a breakthrough or a slaughter.

Rey plays over their conversation in her head, and then slowly, as she gets her wits about her, a warm tingling of hope swells within her.

She thinks that maybe, just maybe, he wants to be saved.

They can at least agree that they both want the other on their team. And now, a shared affection for… Leia?

It may still be an impossible dream to have him betray the First Order… but…

Rey steps slowly towards him. Everyone else on board is in the middle of a sleep cycle. It's just them.

"You're not a sith," she says carefully, "and I'm not all light."

He continues looking away from her, peering up and out of what might be a window.

"I felt Snoke's power, I channeled yours, it was… so satisfying standing over the bodies of those guards. Now, I don't have a voice in my head but…"

But Rey gasps. Kylo turns his head over his shoulder to regard her.

"I did hear a voice," she whispers astonished at the memory. She hadn't had time to think about it before, "…when I gave you that scar…"

Kylo turns to face her, a soft intensity on his features as he hangs on her words.

"It told me to kill you, to finish you off, it was egging me on… it must have been him… must have been what you always heard…"

His eyes were alight.

"But I told it NO," Rey finds strength in her voice again, "And I let go of that wonderful dark power in the throne room, because my life is not the only one that matters. How can you be a Supreme leader when you think like such a selfish child!?"

He growls.

"If you destroy everything you hate there will be nothing left. Is that what you want? Because it seems to me… that you want to live. You want your mother to live, you want me to live…"

Kylo Ren steps towards her, crowding all of Rey's space, just a hairs breath from being pushed up against her. Rey has to remember to breath as she stares stubbornly back into his eyes, craning her neck up to face him.

Fear, adrenaline and something else swoop through her belly. She had an idea of how he felt about her, but there was perhaps nothing in the galaxy that had ever scared her as much as this magnetic, consuming feeling she had for…him?

"I want you to join me," he rumbled.

"Let go of your hate," and her hand is reaching up without her permission, her fingers hover over the warmth of his cheek.

She touches the scar that she gave him and it's as if the force itself sighs at the sensation. Kylo Ren's conflict and fury melt away, he breathes and closes his eyes leaning into her touch, relishing the peace and light that comes pouring in through their contact.

"Ben…," she whispers.

Rey feels his heart beat furiously together with hers, their auras hum, she can't take her eyes off of his face.

"Is this how you found me?"

"Hmm?" she questions absent-mindedly.

He opens his needy eyes and they are full of fire.

"The force… is showing me where you are."

GASP! Rey snatches her hand away like she's been burned. Terror consumes her. That's EXACTLY how she had found him.

"I'm coming for you, Rey."

And he's gone.

Panicking she flees the cockpit, running to wake up her crew.

She has to get them away from her, or they'll die.