Chapter Text
It was not Kylo's intention at first to take the girl to wife. His task had been to collect the Force sensitive scavenger and deliver her to Supreme Leader Snoke.
"Darkness rises," Snoke said, "and light to meet it."
Kylo thought his master referred to Luke Skywalker, a prospect that simultaneously elated and terrified him. The man Skywalker, who was his uncle, and the last Jedi. They had been unified in purpose once, but that was long ago. Kylo determined to seek the voice of his grandfather in guidance, to increase fasting and meditation. He must be prepared if he was to confront his former master again.
Then Snoke followed the well-trod avenues in Kylo's mind and showed him. A girl. A nobody. But a spark in the Force too incendiary not to put out.
"I would have this creature brought before me," Snoke said. "I will break her, the way I broke you, my rabid cur, and bring her into the Darkness."
"And what if she refuses, Master?"
"Then I shall kill her."
***
Between cornering the girl on Jakku and bringing her before the Supreme Leader of the First Order, an idea germinated and took root in the cracked foundations of Kylo's loyalty. She'd put up a fight the likes of which he'd not seen, except in the canyon krayt of Tatooine. Uncultivated, it was true, but her aptitude for the Force was apparent: it charged her and pulled at everything that drifted near, like static electricity. What was more, when he dove into her unconscious mind, he saw everything: the island, the vast ocean of loneliness, the fear. It spoke to him. They were the same, he and she. And if she could not be saved, then ... what was to become of him?
He felt her resounding, timid note in the Force. It occurred to him that he'd been aware of her subtle presence before now -- perhaps since as long as he could remember -- as one is aware of a familiar aspect of one's childhood home, only ever considering it when it is brought to attention after many years. Then the thing -- perhaps a corner in afternoon sunlight or the brackets of a shelf -- looks both alien and familiar. Or rather, she was the motif in a piece of music one has never paused to acknowledge, taken it for granted as part of the greater whole So Kylo felt as he stroked her Force signature, almost absently. Had Supreme Leader Snoke truly not detected her before now? Kylo was clumsy and volatile. Surely Snoke had lifted the pattern of her from the Force when Kylo had overlooked her.
Desire churned and welled within him. This was not his ordinary cocktail of pain and conflict. He leaned into the discomfort. Through passion, I gain strength. Through strength I gain power. The answer floated up onto the surface.
Kylo wanted her for himself.
It was not the Sith way for one with a living master to take an apprentice. There were, however, rare precedents of wife-slavery practised among the ancient Sith (the line of ownership in their kraterocratic system was rather nebulous and lax with consent). Kylo's own grandfather, the Sith lord Vader, had had a wife, from whose progeny Kylo proceeded. Although, the marriage occured before the man then known as Anakin Skywalker defected to the Dark Side. Still, marriage would offer the girl a singular kind of protection. A union of true affection put both parties at risk. But one of convenience? A legal role as wife would give his enemies, especially those within the First Order, pause to take her from him. And a Sith religious sealing would make anyone hesitate to interfere, without pristine and faultless cause. Even Snoke.
Kylo expected to be soundly punished for acting without his master's approval. But he was well-accustomed to pain. If he could chasten himself enough to take the brunt of Snoke's beating without lashing back, he just might get what he wanted.
And what he wanted, though he could make little sense of it as it came to him, was to keep the spark alive a little longer, at least long enough to recall the memory of warmth into his lifeless hands.
***
Rey's days bled, one into the other, so much so that she felt time retract. Her entire existence a series of single dashes carved into the durasteel side of the AT-AT, over and over again, the summed tally of a life unlived. When the black-robed hunters broke through that repetition, with their featureless, masked faces and weapons as of tongues of flame, she would have given anything to go back to the safe and unextraordinary.
How she knew they wanted her, she couldn’t say. She had heard that on wet planets, a downward press from the atmosphere foretells rainfall. This was something like that. A pressure descending on her, as though the many-thousand eyes of a demon watched from some secret place within her very self. No hope in hiding.
She ran. They followed.
She fought them off with her quarterstaff, and kept them on the chase for a night and half a day (sometimes losing them entirely) before they cornered her in the marketplace in Niima. Everyone -- vendors and scavengers, spice runners and Inner Rim merchants, ex-Rebel drop troopers and former Empire sympathisers -- scattered before them as before harbingers of death. Rey faced them alone. The pressing, pressing contracted all around her. The masked and caped figures fell upon her, as carrion birds to a corpse, and fed her darkness.
When she next woke, Rey was confined to an upward table, tilted on an incline. A small, closed space. She could feel the whir of mechanisms above and below. One of the masked creatures which quarried her stooped in a shadowy corner, seemingly regarding, though it was hard to tell. No light broached that impenetrable mask, which could illuminate the creature's thoughts or intentions.
She found her voice, pulling it thin and flat, in order not to betray her fear. "What do you want with me?"
The mask tilted, studying. Then a low, static voice, more machine than man, spoke: "A lot of people in the galaxy are looking for you, little sand rat."
Rey bristled. The restraints at her wrists bit into her pulse. "And what kind of person are you?"
He -- for Rey assumed that whatever it was, monster or no, it was male -- had been crouching in the corner. Now he stood and moved toward her, into the center of the dim, sparse room. The cold raising goosebumps on her neck and arms, the hum of false light, along with the stale recycled air, indicated they had left Jakku. Her insides dropped. Rey had never left the planet before. But she knew, by some internal homing instinct, that she was no longer in the desert.
As he moved closer, his stature became apparent. It alarmed her. Her captor dominated the small space. It seemed to shrink in comparison. The pace of her breathing quickened. Rey had never known claustrophobia before, but she was not about to start now.
She glared her defiance, in a direction she hoped intercepted his gaze. "If you even are a person. And not a monster in a mask."
When he was near enough so that he had to lean to remain in her line of vision -- her neck too was restrained with a cruel hoop of durasteel against the interrogation table -- he said, "Would you like to kill me?"
In that moment, she would have lashed at any living thing that came within stabbing distance. Rey ground her teeth. "Why don't you unbind me and find out?"
The mask tilted again; she sensed amusement, at her expense.
"I am a monster," he said. "You can see that, without even knowing who I am."
"And who are you?"
"I am your deliverance."
She scoffed.
He straightened and circled the perimeter. "My master wants you. He wants to enslave you and make you his. I assure you, as one speaking from experience, it is not a role for the faint of heart. If you refuse to submit, he will kill you."
Rey’s brows knotted into a frown. "Who do you serve?"
"The Supreme Leader of the First Order."
The possibilities merged in her mind's eye, muddying her vision. "And you ... you want to help me avoid one or both of those outcomes?"
He ceased his pacing and pulled up before her. He wore black, trailing robes, belted across a tree-trunk waist, and a tattered cowl about his throat and head. "I do."
She stared at the inscrutable mask. "Why?"
He shrugged. "I have my own interests in mind. Tell me. What do you know about the Jedi?"
Rey mistrusted the line of questioning. But she thought to humor him for the time being. "The Jedi? They are -- or were -- a monastic order of knights, charged with keeping peace and prosperity throughout the galaxy in ages gone. Some of the oldest ones still remember them, seeing them. As for the details, I've read about them in a book once. They worship something called the Force. Most of the Old Republic era stories involve the Jedi. They've all but died out now, or so they say."
Her captor swept aside his cowl and put a gloved hand to his waist. From his belt, he unclipped a black metal cylinder. With a flick, a crimson laser flared to life, trembling and unstable; flames of red vented on either side of the hilt, making a deadly cross-guard. Rey did not intend to flinch.
"The Jedi embody the Light side of the Force. But they are only half the story. The Force has a Dark side as well. Those that follow the path of Darkness are called Sith. They were once the enforcers of a vast and mighty empire. It is the nature of the Sith to strive for power, but it is a treacherous and narrow ascent. Do you grasp this so far, scavenger?"
Rey nodded.
"To ascend as a lord in the Sith Order, an apprentice must murder his master. I am not yet of sufficient skill and power to kill the Supreme Leader. But I want an apprentice of my own. And I believe I've discovered a way to take what I want."
"I don't understand."
"You, scavenger. I want to take you as my apprentice."
"Me?"
"You need a teacher."
She blinked. His meaning skidded overhead, ephemeral and out of reach, like clouds across a scorched sky.
Then he drew near her, without moving.
It was as though all solid matter faded, ghosts contrasted with the razor’s edge of his being, which pressed against her mind. He -- he was inside. Running his fingers through her consciousness, as through strands of hair. Rey shuddered. It was a kind of cool submersion into a subterranean well -- like the first plunge into the deep dark of Empire wreckage, from the relentless heat and sand -- an invasion, refreshing and shocking both. He had been here before, she realised. While she slept. He'd crawled around her mind and read her most secret places.
The knowledge enraged her. Without knowing how, she hauled against him. The cool freshness resisted, but she shoved and burned away at it. She did not notice, until she successfully ejected him from the privacy of her mind, that the masked person had fallen back, breathless, his stance wide, braced for impact.
For a while, nothing was said. Only the sounds of their laboured breathing filled the bare, cheerless room.
Then he spoke, the kind of lazy satisfaction of a carnivore after eating its fill. "You see now."
Rey shook her head, harder and harder, until it felt like it would fly off its hinges. "No, I'm not a Jedi -- or a, a Sith -- I don't even know anything about the Force, outside a handful of ancient myths turned fairy tales. I just want to go back home! Please. My parents, my parents are coming back for me!"
Her captor twirled the living blade and extinguished it, sliding the hilt back into his belt. "I can't do that. We'd both be killed. Not a desirable outcome."
Rey's head fell with a thud against the hard table. All her life she'd been nothing, nobody. And now this abysmal truth, subverted in the worst possible way.
"I'll give you some time to think it through," her captor said. "We are not more than two days' from the Supreme Leader's flagship. I cannot buy any more time than that, so use it wisely." He turned in an eddy of dark material toward the exit, opening the pneumatic door with a wave.
"Wait! What is your name?"
Without turning he tossed back a reply. "You may call me Lord Ren."