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“We met, once before,” are the first silkily pronounced words from Bazine Netal’s painted lips when Rey steps inside the interrogation chamber.
From his seat across the prisoner, Major Brance twists the jut of his chin slightly to acknowledge Rey with a nod and an apologetic, “Miss Netal said she would be much more forthcoming about intelligence details with your additional presence.”
At Rey’s lack of responding recognition, Bazine arches one of her dramatically accentuated eyebrows and amends, “Well, we weren’t formally introduced, but we happened to cross paths at the same watering hole on Takodana months ago. When a certain First Order raid crashed the party. You remember that, surely?”
A flash of faces. Han’s. Now a faded estimation. Finn’s. Familiar and now well-memorized. Maz Kanata’s visage, pruned with age and yet bursting with vitality.
“I’d never seen so many people crowded under one roof,” Rey responds, eyes narrowing in study of the mercenary’s distinctive features. “Don’t quite remember running into you there, but I’ll take your word for it.”
“You have your line of work, and I have mine,” Bazine says with a smile, as if they were about to trade secrets. Prisoners associated with the First Order often carried themselves with a similar hauteur, initially at least. Rey is not here to trade though; she is here to take, and with that thought, she freezes because for a moment, she reminds herself of him.
“I never forget a face,” the apprehended mercenary continues. “Though between the two of us girls, I have to admit, I wouldn’t rank you among the most noteworthy beauties I’ve come across.” Her eyes slit, mouth lifting into a curved knife of a smile. “Which is why I was...intrigued when I heard of how much Kylo Ren is offering for any morsel of information regarding your whereabouts. You should hear the talk in saloons frequented by officers taking temporary relief from the Finalizer. They say he’s obsessed with you.”
Brance glances to his side before pointedly clearing his throat. “Back to the matter we were discussing before, Miss Netal, your activities in Hanna City have not gone unnoticed --”
“He paid for a girl with hair like yours.” Bazine addresses this to Rey as if Brance hadn’t spoken at all. “A face like yours.” A perusal running down Rey’s figure, lingering at where the edge of a grease-stained sleeve brushes the knuckles. “Probably softer hands.
“This is not the intel you agreed to --”
“No, this is better. Oh, don’t tell me you don’t see the opportunity. When a man has such fixed specifications for even a proxy in his bed --”
Rey leaves the room before she can absorb another poisonous word.
Truthfully, Bazine’s coy words deliver no revelation.
Rey’s wandered into enough of his dreams that she can concede the mercenary was probably not lying.
It started on Ahch-to, when she used to collapse on her pallet after hours of honing saber stances with Luke and lifting boulders, increasingly intimidating in size, higher and higher into the air until she could pitch those large enough to crush a man’s skull.
At first, she thought her own mind was merely reliving the memory of the nightmare she’d encountered on Takodana. After all, Kylo Ren, the wraith of him, still materialized from behind tree and stone with that hellish blade.
Except, in the dream, he promptly sheathed it as her blaster-wielding arm froze down. In place of heat humming dangerously close to her bare neck, the vibration from his mask: “Don’t be afraid.”
Words she hadn’t heard from him until he’d removed his helmet.
During the second or third dream, he revealed an unscathed face to her in the forest. Tilting his head of dark locks, he approached her uncertainly and ventured, “Here, I sensed only a trace of it, but later...don’t tell me you can’t feel it.”
She assured herself it was just a trick of overlapping memories -- why would he replay the deeds that led up to his humiliation -- until the sequence changed completely in the fourth dream.
No sound of blaster rifle fire in the distance. Just the soothing refrain of water rushing over tiered bedrock. She stared at this unfamiliar marvel, delighted that water could manifest in so many new forms, and leaned close enough with outstretched arm that she could feel the water tickle her fingers. With her attention diverted, she did not notice him until he was almost right beside her, and her dream self was not startled at all by his unmasked presence. This conjured up being who wore her face accepted his hand helping her to stand on the slippery rocks. Accepted his kiss as if it were a completely natural, logical thing to do.
Rey woke to find herself still tangled in a meager coverlet, still sheltered by the stone walls of the hut on Ahch-to.
She had never touched anyone’s mouth in such a manner before, and yet her mind had transmitted the sensation of supple, moist connection, the surrender to nerve endings igniting so palpably that she felt her lips still tingling with the remnant of it.
While the rest of her was paralyzed in processing why he would ever kiss her, why she would ever seal their mouths closer, regardless of it being a dream.
For days afterwards, she flinched whenever Luke sent a curious glance her way and suppressed her urge to confess like an exposed criminal.
During the fifth and sixth visual reels of reverie, she watched as a third-party voyeur as Ren kissed the girl in the dream, in his dream. Pure fantasy, this one who returned his want with equal hunger.
The seventh time she encroached into this territory of hallucinations, she discovered that she could in fact participate, and she laid a hand on his arm to push him away.
“This isn’t how it happened. This isn’t something that will ever happen.”
With that, she pulled herself from the dream and woke up, her body cold despite the low fire in the hut.
The dreams stopped after that.
Now, she wonders if it was because he found himself a surrogate.
Good. Good riddance, Rey affirms to herself. Tries to ignore how disgruntled Bazine’s “intel” makes her feel.
On Ahch-to, Luke became real to her, the aura of legend wearing off, whereas the war faded into a far-off tale, like the kind she used to overhear from travelers at Niima Outpost.
In Hanna City though, the very real stakes of the war dig into her comprehension like daggers. They’re here because Leia is, representing the Resistance in talks with the fledgling members of the new Galactic Senate. Around the relatively modest chamber, the delegates murmur amongst themselves with wary, hassled faces. A conspicuous fraction of the seats are unfilled, either because no replacement was chosen in time or because the candidates feared understandably that even assembling here would inflate their chances of being blown into particle dust too greatly.
A dizzying multitude of names arise during the conference, and Rey, playing the role of political aide to General Organa for the day, transcribes as many notes as she can into her datapad, but one name in particular is repeated often enough that it persists in her memory without trouble.
General Hux. Former base commander of the Starkiller project.
“This young climber appears in the holocam message we received earlier this week,” their Chandrilan host delegate explains, gesturing at a magnified blue projection with an expression of severe distaste. “General Hux reminds us that as of this month, Nopces Prime has formally agreed to a treaty of cooperative terms with the First Order and that other planets in the Bormea sector are also considering entering into similar negotiations. Based on the recent jump in reports of First Order ships moving into the Mid Rim to disrupt trade routes, it seems that they are once again preparing to initiate more offensive engagement with the New Republic.”
By the end of the day’s session, Rey overhears of at least four other planets deliberating on negotiations of compromise with the First Order.
That one, Rey notes while she peers at the holographic figurine of the general looking down at them as if he already ruled this planet as well.
That one will be a real problem.
She visits Bazine Netal once more, this time unaccompanied by other ears in front of the mercenary’s detainment cell. She remembers the woman on Takodana now. Vaguely. Lithe limbs stretched out in the thick-armed embrace of a Dowutin male that had seemed like the type to punch your lights out if you stared a second too long.
“Perhaps I’m presuming too much of your area of specialized expertise, but what do you do when someone might not believe in your advances?”
Clearly amused, Bazine scans her from head to toe. “Do you have low self-esteem?”
Rey blinks at her. Only since arriving on Chandrila has she had access to a mirror on a daily basis, and she has mistaken her reflection, groomed by Leia’s oversight, for a stranger more than once.
“The girl I mentioned before,” Bazine says lightly. “Lord Ren sent her away. Not just her, but the backup that the agency had sent as well. They felt quite insulted, which is probably what finally prompted them to gossip with a few of their associates in Chaako City.”
“Chaako...a desert city.”
“I guess he wanted a desert girl.” Bazine’s expression shifts from mocking to exasperated. “I don’t know what you’re fretting about. If he sent those two away, then he isn’t looking for a practiced, perfumed hand. He’s seeking something more elemental I suppose. Therefore, you already have the advantage. He will want it to be true.”
“Besides,” Bazine warns, leaning back like a languid feline though her tone acquires a discernible edge of grimness. “From what I’ve heard of the hierarchy on that particular ship, you might need to worry more about others.”
When Luke calls her to an emptied courtyard for training the day after that, Rey doesn’t ignite the saber he has urged her to keep.
“I need help with learning some new skills,” she confesses. “Particularly, the maintenance of thought shields against those who are experienced with probing.”
Her Jedi master has appeared more at ease in the last few days, but upon hearing her request, he looks as harrowed as he did when she first laid eyes on him.
“Ah, that skill,” Luke murmurs, like a man already preparing to let her down. “It’s one I never acquired great competence with.”
His face softens. “We can try, of course. But it might not be enough.”
She found the flimsi among Luke’s collection of oddities back on Ahch-to. By Luke’s estimation, the flimsi was likely once part of a Jedi’s notes in relation to a more substantial repository of knowledge.
Eyes tracing the elegantly scripted Aurebesh, Rey has her doubts that the few lines recounting this dreamswimming technique will even be useful.
Her cheeks flush because she also doubts that this long-deceased Jedi scribe could ever have imagined someone applying the technique in the manner she is about to try.
She initiates the dream in the same environs he preferred. The forest, lush with life unlike the other two turfs on which they faced each other. Her hands quick and efficient, Rey unbinds her hair to graze her shoulders and unwraps the gauze around her arms before wandering like a girl lost in this landscape of shadowing timbers. At the eroded ledge where the water streams in white ribbons, she bends to cup a palmful of it and drinks what doesn’t trickle out from between her fingers.
When she lifts her head from the rim of her own making, she knows that she’s no longer alone.
“It was not my intention, before, to share such dreams.”
Kylo Ren approaches from a distance, his boots treading a new path through the moss and fern undergrowth. No helm worn or carried, and her eyes are instantly riveted to the scar she left across the compelling planes of his face.
The instinct to run still surges in her. From the raptness of his gaze, she knows he would give chase, but in place of pure dread, there simmers something akin to anticipation, a nuance of heady accomplishment that he came as summoned and that she can read this creature as longer a complete enigma.
“You don’t seem like the type to share anything.”
“Yet, I offered to share knowledge of the Force with you.”
“From what I’ve seen, I’d wager there might have been an ulterior motive in that offer.” From someone else, it might have come across as coquettish, but from her, it borders on accusation.
He moves his mouth quite a lot, Rey notices, as if he were constantly on the brink of saying things he should not.
With a flare of frustration, Kylo Ren demands, “Why are you here?”
The next part turns out to be the hardest to vocalize from around the swelling of betrayal clogging her throat. “You were right. I have found the elders around me to be disappointing.”
This is a dream, she reminds herself. Consequences from whatever happens here do not necessarily have to carry through to reality.
Her hands flit to unfasten the belts around her waist, the cross of gauze scrap dismantled as she begins to pluck at her tunic as well. Rags shed at her feet, she leans back against the slope of rock behind her and because she possesses not a single clue as to what posture comes across as enticing, she settles for fighting total rigidity and the compulsion to cover her bared torso with her arms.
He isn’t quite looking at her, his concentration fixed somewhere around her feet and discarded apparel. That vexing twist of the mouth again, as if his lips were parched and he wanted to drink of something.
“You dreamed of the same thing every time,” she dares to say to him. “Show me something new.”
And his eyes finally scorch a path upwards to meet hers.
Through dream, she learns that the calluses of his hands, dipping past her waistband to trace the full curve of the yielding seam between her thighs, provoke a much more potent reaction from her body than her own touch.
This is how she learns that one of his fingers, parting the well-rubbed pleat of flesh to slowly slide inside, earns a hitch of breath from her and that two fingers instigate a buck of her hips and a spill of wetness along his buried knuckles. He tries three fingers once, and they sag to the earth together as she grinds against his hand, her consciousness swimming between soreness-fullness-pleasure-bliss as he presses deeper, his free hand proceeding to stroke her lower belly.
This is how she learns to clench around his fingers, palpable enough that he groans and closes his eyes at how intimately her flesh joins and clings to his.
As if this is affirmation enough that she truly, truly wants him.
The eve before she sets out to depart Hanna City, she decides that extra precaution is warranted.
Seated on the floor with legs crossed, Rey focuses on keeping her thoughts clear and open, on relaxing her mental barriers, on not pushing back as Luke places two fingers at each of her temples.
“We’ll start with adjusted perception of your current allies,” he murmurs, and he grasps onto her memory of seeing him, the Jedi legend, for the first time on Ahch-to. In her mind, he is now slower to turn towards her, his countenance conveying no welcome or warmth, and the delivery of his words curt and rancorous.
“You harbored more and more doubts about what I could teach you. You began to fear we were moving too slowly for the pace of the world. That while those you cared for were throwing themselves directly into the fray and risking their lives, you were wasting precious time practicing with outdated weaponry and studying the esoteric.”
A flush suffuses her face at hearing this because it verges on the truth. Implanted thoughts would stick longer, Luke had forewarned her, if they linked from true thoughts.
“When you found out that General Organa and I were once acquainted with whom became known as Supreme Leader Snoke and that we failed to identify him as a far-reaching threat -- when you found out that I once knew your parents and that I failed to protect them from Snoke, your qualms about my methods increased ever more. Then, when you came to Hanna City, you saw firsthand the faltering, ineffectual bureaucracy impeding the New Republic from decisive action, and thus, you began to contemplate that the teacher who had so reluctantly accepted you as a student would continually hold you back. That there was someone else out there from whom you could gain more.”
Her brow creases and her hands clench from the growing ache that feels like it could fissure the lobes of her brain.
“You will try, at first, to shield your hatred of Snoke. Eventually, let Snoke sift that out of you. He will expect that animosity, will savor it even because he believes such emotions could feed your ambition to outpace even Kylo Ren in learning the Force.”
Luke pauses and doesn’t speak for such a protracted lapse that Rey opens her eyes to peer at her master in confusion.
“What finally turns you against me,” he resumes slowly. “Is the realization that I have done this to you before.”
As Rey stares at the guilt etched in his face, she feels the Force plucking and rearranging, enhancing and diminishing this thought and that memory and myriad ruminations mingled with resentments, and she knows with a hardening heart that what he just said is true.
Naboo, the local folk say, is a world fashioned for girls in love.
Rey wanders through the sandstone-paved streets of this secluded Lake Country village like a girl intoxicated with freedom. Liberated from hunger gnawing at her insides and junkyard bosses, from responsibilities and Jedi masters. Summer swelter greets her here, and she takes to dressing like some of the bolder local girls do, baring her midriff in a wrap of lilac grey chiffon that crosses over her breasts and spills from her waist as a skirt.
The ferryman transporting her down the western shore of the lake generously narrates the history of the estates and country houses as they glide past.
“Do you see the rust-green dome peeking over the trees on that island? That once belonged to the Emperor’s family. As for the house on this peninsula, well, it’s passed through the hands of several owners, but among the most prominent was the House Naberrie. I don’t believe anything else is situated in these parts. Are you sure I should leave you here, miss?”
“Yes, I’ll be fine. You’re not one to gossip about your customers, are you? Business was slow today, and you never encountered me as a passenger, understood?”
He nods with an expression as dazed as if his vision were recovering from looking too long at the sun, and she steps onto the docking platform without a glance back.
A push with the Force, and the heavy doors of Varykino open for her, ushering her into a ghostly tableau of shrouded furniture and a carpet of dust. She roams through rooms both spacious and snug, navigating the interior with a scavenger’s instinct. As she examines the walls of one of the bedrooms, a tract of wood paneling catches her eye, and with hand-delivered exertion, it gives way to a narrow chamber. A workshop by the looks of it. Running through the tools arrayed on the workbench that projects from the wall, she sets down the pouch she brought with her and withdraws two kyber crystals from the inner contents.
It’s not until hours later that she feels the faintly cast-out probe. They have not swam in each other’s dreams for days, and he is needful from the deprivation of it.
Laying down the blade emitter she has been working on, Rey angles her face towards the ceiling as if she could hear someone in another wing of the house calling to her.
Come then. Come here and collect your student.
Kylo arrives in the late evening of the next day. Curled in slumber on one of the dusted-off chaises, Rey awakens with the sharp awareness of his presence descending on the jut of land where the house sits.
With the lighting panels burned out, she had opted for coaxing forth a subdued fire in this room’s hearth before she tucked in for the night, and it’s an almost amusing sight to see him emerge amidst the luminescence like a spectre from a fairytale.
“So in addition to firing at whomever you’d please and stealing, you’ve added trespassing to your charms,” he drawls, perching somewhat on the arm of one of the sturdier chairs in the room.
She raises her upper body slightly, resting her chin on the heel of her hand. “Does it bother you, seeing me treat your ancestral possessions so casually?”
He leans back to more thoroughly appraise the vision of her, his dark irises reflecting the licks of hearth flame. “No,” he rasps. “You look like you belong here.”
She sits up more fully, and his eyes follow the downward slide of her robe, serving as a blanket, off her shoulder. Nodding at the dark panes of the window behind him, she asks, “Did you come by speeder?”
“Yes. The shuttle I left back in Theed.”
“Alright. Well, I don’t trust either of us to not pitch ourselves into the lake by navigating at night so we’ll leave here in the morning. Now, are you going to let me sleep or what?”
The impatience with which he crosses the floor to seize her signals that the answer is no.
In the dreams of Takodana, shame had stymied how far she was willing to go with the fantasy.
Here, in this house that feels like it was made for affairs that should not happen, Rey allows herself to map out his body and be explored in turn, to conquer and be conquered. Like two competing cartographers, they skim and stroke their hands and mouths all over each other, persistently seeking out the nub or ridge that elicits more response.
Her cunt feels like split fruit for devourment, dribbling juices all over her inner thighs as Kylo eases her open with his tongue and fingers and finally feeding his cock through the lips he’s licked swollen and raw to accept the strain of him.
He wanted her below him, and she bucked him off to scramble on top, and they end up on their sides, churning against each other at the bottom of the chaise, their limbs sliding on the slippery velvet of the furniture slipcover they tossed to the carpet. So much for the dignified comportment one would expect from the son of Alderaanian and Nabooian gentility. She's grateful that the portraits in this room are still covered, lest she imagine their solemn, painted faces morphing into visages scandalized by how the scion of their house fucks her on the floor.
“I wondered what this would sound like," he says as he releases her nipple from the lave of his mouth long enough to send the remark whispering across the sensitive skin there. “Outside of the dream. What it would taste like.”
She wants to yank on one of his ears and tell him, beg him, to finish what he started -- has half a mind to grapple him for more control of the pace again -- but at least he can read her mind in this because he brings one arm under her thigh to hoist her legs wider apart before thrusting into her tenderness again. His mouth returns to her breast, sweat-slicked strands of hair tickling and nose nudging the flesh there, inducing her to writhe, her back encompassed by his broader chest, as she wavers between pressing closer to the thick root of him and rolling away.
Wanted, she thinks as he fills her again, hard enough to make her breath stutter and the remaining rational part of her cognition wonder if she will be too sore to ride a speeder in the morning. Isn’t this what she had intended? To be wanted and bonded so desperately close until he could no longer decipher his motivations and desires from hers?
But not yet, she steadies herself with an unfurling smile that he cannot see. Not quite yet.