Chapter Text
PART ONE
Rey doesn’t know what to call him. Nothing seems to fit. He is an enigma, a forgotten epiphany, something useful but something dangerous. He is a contradiction, Light and Dark mixed in an awkward batch of black hair and sad eyes, and she pretends that she doesn’t understand him. That’s what she tells herself at night, when she can feel him calling for her through their bond.
That’s what frustrates her the most—that he calls for her, a scavenger, but he doesn’t acknowledge when their eyes meet briefly in the cafeteria, looks right through her as if she is a shadow.
He doesn’t make sense; nothing makes sense when it comes to Leia Organa’s son.
His reappearance on the Resistance base was startling. It reminded Rey of night and day. One day, the base was dark, absent of happiness and hope. The First Order was winning; people were dying. Poe had nearly lost his life during a dangerous recon mission, and ended up losing a leg due to an explosion in his X-wing. Rey could see the weariness on General Organa’s face, as well as every other Resistance supporter, whether it be a fighter or a civilian.
But, one day, she awoke to find Finn sitting on her bunk, his head low between his shoulders.
Rey feared the worse, thinking of Poe instantly, but Finn held up a hand before she could open her mouth.
“It’s not Poe,” he said quietly. “He’s fine.”
She sagged back into her cot, silent with her relief, but sat up ramrod straight when she felt it, the echo of a bond that she hadn’t felt since…
“Do you feel it?” Finn asked suddenly, shifting his torso to look at her. “Luke said you might feel something.”
Her eyes were wide in shock. Impossible, she thought to herself. Impossible. He cannot be. I would have known.
But Finn shook his head, almost like he read her thoughts. He waited to for a moment, almost like he was expecting for her to say something, but she stayed silent, uncomprehending with what she felt in the Force.
There was an absence. Not something bad, but a definite shift. From Dark to Light. From hopeless to hopeful. Faith. Something good, but something uncertain. A contradiction.
A contradiction.
There must have been a look on her face, because suddenly Finn took her hand, something she would have usually protested, but she just let him. He stroked his thumb against her palm comfortingly, but it did nothing to slow her heartbeat.
“Rey, he’s here,” Finn said slowly, after a time, “and—well, he’s asking for you.”
From night to day. From incomplete to complete. Rey felt the shift in him when she heard Finn’s words, when she acknowledged what she felt in the Force.
That had been the last time the man with no name had acknowledged her.
She relives that moment every day, how often depends on how she is feeling, and whether or not the bond is easy to ignore that day.
Rey sees him often. It is from afar, too far for him to know she is watching, but close enough to know that the gray-clad figure is him. His face is still scarred, but it has healed well and is one of the less ragged things about him. His broad shoulders loom above everyone else, and his steps are still heavy, maybe even heavier because of the leg injury she gave him the night in the snow. His black hair was wild when he first came to the Resistance base, but not it is well-kept, neatly cut every six weeks. He has taken to growing a beard, something that Rey tries not to dwell on, and he looks healthy, almost like he belongs there in his new gray clothes and standoffish attitude.
People whisper about him often, about Kylo Ren’s sudden turn to the Light. They call it his “recovery.”
“It’s a miracle,” she heard one official say after a couple months of his presence. “A miracle that no one can explain, but it’s a goddamned miracle.”
Those on the base attribute Ren's miraculous "recovery" to a plethora of things. Master Luke’s sudden reappearance, Han Solo’s death, a possible request by Snoke to end General Organa’s life.
The list goes on, and Rey finds herself arguing with each possibility at every turn. Her anger flairs at random times, sporadic and changeable like the man himself, and most of it is aimed at Finn, who annoyingly tries to decipher Kylo Ren’s return every chance he gets. She knows that she hurts Finn’s feelings, can see the disapproving looks that Poe gives her whenever she snaps at Finn, but Rey finds that her control is limited when it comes to Kylo Ren.
Her only consolation is that, at night, Kylo Ren loses some of his control too and cannot keep his mental blocks up. She often shares his dreams, and they are a strange mix of red and blue, of her face and Han Solo’s body falling into a pit of smoke. She sees realities (his mother, alive and smiling, or Rey’s figure off in the distance) and fantasies (a warm body sleeping next to him at night or a hand in his at random points during daylight), and the images confuse her as much as they excite her.
She feels his yearnings, hears his calls late at night in her head, when he is awake and weakened by loneliness, but, at the same time, she feels the dislike he has for her, almost like a blame. His whirlwind of feelings gives her a headache and they scare her more than she would like to admit.
So she stays away, despite his late-night pleas, and she agonizes over the possibilities that await her, like the possibility that eventually he will stop calling, or that he will never let her go.
She doesn’t sleep well, and sleeps even worse when she remembers the blank look he sent her way earlier that day when they happened to make eye contact. She slowly starts to watch as bags form under her eyes, and her appearance goes from tired to haggard. She trains even harder with Luke on days when the sleep was absent, and if Luke notices anything about her condition, he doesn't say so. He simply teaches her, and she simply listens.
Poe figures it out the extent of the bond first, and it is by accident.
Master Luke resumed training Kylo Ren (at whose request, Rey doesn’t know), and the two spar often. It is not common knowledge, and Poe only knows because Finn knows. Rey knows because of the bond and the bruises she wakes up with on her sides from phantom saber strikes.
It is midday, lunch time, when Poe, Finn, and Rey sit together outside, in a section of the base that most people avoid because it is close to end of the force field surrounding the base. Off in the distance, Kylo Ren and Luke battle with the wooden sabers. Despite his age, Luke’s agility hasn’t left him, and the fight looks like an interesting one.
Poe and Finn watch as avidly as they can from this far away, and Rey avoids looking and follows the fight more through the bond. Kylo Ren is less careful with his mental blocks while he fights. It’s the closest Rey can get to him, so she allows herself this one weakness.
They fight elaborately. Twists and turns and forms that Rey doesn’t understand. She’s slightly jealous at Kylo Ren’s skill, at Luke’s willingness not to teach Ren but to fight him and see what he knows. Rey is still only on basic training with Luke, and she thinks wistfully of the days when she will be able to fight as an equal to Luke and Kylo Ren, though she does not picture herself training with Luke when she reaches that point.
She is in the middle of her daydreams when Luke gets a hit in, a rigid smack in the middle of Kylo Ren’s left ribs, and Rey doubles over in pain just as Ren lets out a sharp yell.
Finn looks at her strangely, almost like he cannot believe that she made any noise at all, and Rey blushes with the realization that she completely interrupted Finn’s story of a mission. She murmurs out an apology and makes eye contact with Poe, who looks at her with a shocked face.
Rey knows that she is caught, and she avoids Poe’s eyes for the rest of the lunch break and practically runs to Luke when he calls for her through the Force.
Kylo Ren is already walking away when Rey arrives, and she tries to mask her frown at her retreating form, because she can feel that he wants to stay.
She doesn't dwell on it long, because Luke beckons for her to follow him into the nearby woods, and Rey follows eagerly, ready for her mind to become preoccupied again.
She pretends that she doesn't feel his eyes following her into the forest.
Later that night, during dinner, Rey sits alone in the meadow near the cafeteria, her body aching from the skill training that Luke put her through. She sits on her outer robe, enjoying the breeze on her sweat-dried skin, when she hears Poe’s limping steps coming towards her.
She keeps her eyes trained on her food (something that resembles the rations she used to eat on Jakku), even as Poe plops down next to her, even when Poe takes the corner piece of her stale slice of bread and makes a noise at the taste of it.
Poe tries cracking a joke about the bread, but Rey offers him nothing but a gentle shake of her shoulders in a half-hearted attempt at a chuckle. They sit in silence, and Rey thinks that Poe isn’t going to say anything when he does.
“Rey, why do you have a Force bond with Ren?” he asks, startling her out of her thoughts. It takes her a minute to realize what he is asking, and she bristles instinctively at the nature of his question when she realizes that his voice isn’t accusatory. She winces at the words nonetheless.
There is no answer to give him; the bond was formed months ago, when Kylo Ren held her as his captive in his private quarters, when she was strapped to the chair with Kylo Ren’s hot breath on her cheek. It was done unknowingly, an unwanted byproduct of something that neither she nor Kylo Ren were ready for.
She knows that the situation wouldn't be difficult to explain, that those words would be easy to say, but for some reason, Rey doesn’t say them. Instead, her mouth keeps stubbornly closed.
“You don’t have to tell me, Rey,” Poe sighs after a long, awkward silence, and Rey slumps in obvious relief. “But—but I think you need to decide what you are going to do with it.”
“What I am going to do with it?” she asked, puzzled and slightly annoyed.
Poe senses this, and he places a calming hand on her shoulder. “I am not telling you what to do, Rey, but you need to understand that a Force bond—well, that’s no small thing. I am not a Jedi—hell, I am not even Force sensitive—but I know that those things, these bonds, can be something dangerous.”
Poe stops, as if offering to give Rey room to argue with him, but Rey just nods her head. “I know what a bond does to you, Poe,” she says after a moment.
He nods. “I know you’ve felt the effects,” he says, “and that’s why you both need to decide what you want.”
“Both?” she asks, immediately, saying the word like it burns her. She’s looking at Poe now, and his eyes are tired but honest.
“Yes, both,” he replies. “Look, Rey—I knew Ben Solo. I knew him. We were friends. I knew how he worked, and the man I see when I look at Kylo Ren resembles the guy I knew who left when we were fifteen.” Poe shakes his head, breathing out a chuckle. “I swear, Rey, he looks at you, and I see a spark of something good.”
Her anger cuts him off before she can even form words in her head. “Kylo Ren does not look at me,” she hisses, standing up abruptly and walking away. “Kylo Ren cannot stand me.”
She doesn’t need to look at Poe to feel his confusion. “Rey, have you not seen him looking at you?”
“No,” she says angrily, and she has to restrain the urge to Force throw the rocks on the ground across the meadow. “Kylo Ren does not look at me—he avoids me.”
“And you are mad about this?” Poe asks in disbelief.
“YES!” she shouts, anger unbidden, but her anger melts away when she realizes what she has just said. Instead of anger, embarrassment floods her, and she feels a blush creep on her cheeks.
Poe leaves her alone after that, after patting her tense shoulders. “I didn’t mean to upset you,” he says quietly, “but I stand by what I said—you both need to decide what you want.”
Rey doesn’t respond, listening to Poe limp away. She looks at the stars beginning to pop up as dusk shifts to night. Her mind races with Poe’s words.
Have you not seen him looking at you?
She sighs, suddenly reaches down to gather her robe, now damp, and turns to leave when something in the trees catches her eye.
It’s him, standing in the tree line less than fifty yards away, his eyes boring into her own, his scar clear on his face, illuminated in the muted, green light of the moon circling the planet.
Through the bond, she can feel his jealousy, and flashes of Poe’s hand on her shoulder flicker through her mind, an echo of his own thoughts, ones that he willingly let her see.
You’re jealous? she asks him, startled by the realization. Jealous of Poe?
She doesn’t think that she will get a reply, but he surprises her. She sees his lips move with her reply, and the wind carries his words until nothing but a whisper reaches her ears.
"I am always jealous."
He disappears into the tree line, morphing into the shadows like a wrath, and Rey stands there in the meadow, robe in hand, eyes on the spot where the man she didn’t understand once stood, ignoring the chill that she feels when she realizes that Kylo Ren still has the power to use the darkness to his advantage. His words still ring in her mind, and she cannot shake them as she begins her trek to her bunk.
I am always jealous.
That night, as she gets ready for bed, she feels him calling to her, the strongest she has ever felt him. The words come to me ring out in her head like a beacon, and she knows she can’t ignore him any longer.
He quiets in her head when he feels her navigating to his bunk, and his silence only adds to the tension she feels in her shoulders.
What am I doing?
Her own question echoes in her mind, and she shields her inner turmoil from him. Her excitement at the prospect of talking to him seems to be overriding any self-preservation or logic she has, and she doesn’t want him to know the effect that he has on her.
She reaches his door before she is ready to comprehend the situation, and she contemplates turning around and going back when the metal door slides open. Suddenly, she’s pulled into Kylo Ren’s private rooms, her back against the cool metal wall, with Kylo Ren’s hands on her hips.
Rey is reminded of their first meeting, of the time in the forest when she had no knowledge of her future and he still wore his mask. She remembers the garbled sound of his voice through his helmet in her ear, and she shivers when she feel his breath on the same ear as he presses her against the wall.
They do not move, both frozen in the reality of the situation, and Poe’s words come to her mind. His hands instill an ache between her thighs, and she knows that she is not imagining the hard push of him against her stomach. The thrill that goes down her spine does not go unnoticed by him, and his eyes glitter with what she recognizes as lust as his hands trail up her abdomen.
You need to decide.
She opens her mouth, fear almost blocking the words, and says, “Kylo Ren, why am I here?”