1
Poe smokes too much. Rey watches him from the doorway, watches the way the smoke curls around his face and crawls up towards the ceiling. Finn thinks Poe smokes too much too. Or at least he did last time they talked. They haven’t talked in a while, he said he needed some space and she said she needed to focus on training and, well, that was it.
Finn has been given a bunk in the C corridor and since she got back from the Temple and brought Luke with her she’s been rooming in the main building (primarily, she thinks, so Luke can wake her up at one in the morning to test her ability to battle while sleep deprived, but she doesn’t complain). And Poe– Poe’s been doing whatever he’s been doing. Two days after she got back, Poe returned from a mission somewhere in the Outer Rim dejected and tired. Finn ran to meet him, and, from her place next to Leia, Rey watched Poe walk right past him and slam the door to the B corridor.
She takes a deep breath and walks away from the door. Things affect everybody in their own ways, she reminds herself. That’s what Leia said. So Rey stands up straight like any Jedi should and opens the door into the blinding sunlight.
That night marks the tenth day in a row that Finn hasn’t talked to her. He’s busy. She knows he’s busy. He’s training with the new recruits half of the time and the other half he’s talking with the higher-ups about what the First Order really wants. She’s proud of him. More than proud. He’s come a long way from the scared boy running away to the outer rim.
But she misses him.
After dinner she makes her way back to her room. Her shoulder aches where she managed to slam the hilt of her own lightsaber into it that morning. The training is getting harder, everything is getting louder and brighter and more. She hates it. There’s a constant buzzing in her ears now that didn’t use to be there, a hum of people thinking, moving, talking. She wants it to go away.
She lies down. The room is too cold. She’s always cold now, no blanket of hot sand below her feet. Not that she would trade all this green for the rusty hues of the desert, but it’s so different. Gooseflesh pricks her arms and she shivers. And there’s a spike of cold that buries itself in the back of her mind and she falls to her knees.
She can’t get it out. She wonders if it’s going to freeze her whole body and then it speaks. It’s not a language or manner of speaking, per se (HIS FACE. HIS MASKED FACE). The images flash by in front of her eyes and when they stop her mind is empty and cold. And then they start up again and she wonders how much of this she can take and then—
It’s him, it’s him again, and she can’t breathe, and she can feel bonds forming over her wrists (HIS EYES. AND THE WAY HIS MIND GRATED AGAINST HERS). He reaches out, out, out, and she pushes him back but there is nothing to push him with and slowly she hears his voice. “Rey,” he whispers. “Don’t trust him.” I trust him, I love him, I trust him, I… “He abandoned you Rey. I never abandoned you. I never would. I promise.” He didn’t, he didn’t, he didn’t.
There is a screaming noise, she summons up the last reserves of energy she has and pushes him as far away as she can, pushes him all the way into the fading starlight. And he is gone.
Her head feels cold, wrung out. She’s shaking and barely manages to make it to the trashcan before vomiting. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and places her forehead on the cold metal rim. She should tell Luke. Was this what it felt like to Ren, all alone, hearing a voice tell him not to trust his master? She thinks of the way he spits out words and another wave of nausea overtakes her. What if Luke stops training her? What if he thinks it’s too dangerous?
And somewhere deep inside her she knows that’s what he’d want her to think, she knows he counts on her being isolated and scared and weak but she doesn’t care. She brushes her teeth and climbs into her bunk and sleeps curled around her staff, knowing that it’s useless, knowing that she can’t throttle him out of her own head.
The next mission she goes on is with Luke and a girl names Jessika. They fly to a tiny planet orbiting a dying star. Apparently there’s a woman there who knows more about the First Order than anyone else they have, but she’s unable to leave the planet. It’s an easy mission, Leia says. Fly in, get the woman, fly out. Good training. Rey wonders why her knuckles look so white when she says it.
They leave in the crisp morning air. Rey sits in the pilot’s seat, Jess, as she asked them to call her, in the copilot’s. Luke is behind them, watching Rey control their steady ascent into the sky and then, with a sudden burst of speed, into the great darkness of space.
Jess tells them the story of the time she and Poe were on a mission and had to fight off an incursion of Borcatu. “I thought they were scavengers?” says Luke, looking up at her.
“These ones weren’t, anyway,” says Jess, and just then the map she’s holding bings loudly and Rey starts their descent onto the shriveled planet.
They’re almost down, through the atmosphere and descending quickly, when the ship lurches to a stop. It hangs suspended, as if by some giant puppetry device, trapped in midair. Rey checks the controls, then leans over so Jess can take a look. They should be moving.
The familiar chill settles over Rey. She swallows hard, then looks at the others. They look fine. Jess is tinkering with something above the copilot’s seat and Luke is staring out the side windows, his eyes squinted to see through the raging dust storms on the planet’s surface. Rey stands up, trace-like, and walks over to the other window. Outside, void stares back at her. No sky, no stars, just empty blackness. She should hit the glass hard, break it with the force. She should jump into the void. It would be so calm, so peaceful, so right… She raises her hand and—
“Rey?” It's Jess’s voice. “I think I got it.
Rey blinks. The sky is sky once again, and her hand is raised. She lowers it, takes one last look out the window. Still sky.
She sits back in the pilot’s seat and takes off the break. The break wasn’t on before. She hadn’t put it on. The ship continues its descent. She lands in the middle of a huge field of rust colored grass, dried and cracking at the roots.
It’s a half miles walk from the landing space to the woman’s house, and they encounter nobody on the way. The trees here all taller than anything Rey has ever seen, but thinner too, as if somebody has sucked the substance from them. “Why are they like that?” she asks Luke. He doesn’t look at her. “They’re dying.”
The woman (Luke says her name is Ellann) lives in a tiny house at the edge of a dense gathering of trees. When she opens the door, Rey is supposed to see how young she is. She doesn’t look much older than thirty. Luke whispers something in her ear and she nods, then turns to face them. One of her eyes is missing, the socket covered in pink scar tissue. “Thank you for coming,” she says softly, holding out a hand to Rey and Jess. “I hope it wasn’t too hard.”
“Not at all,” replies Jess. “We should head back to the ship, though.”
Ellann nods and they begin their return, through the dying trees and across the broken grass. As the ship draws nearer, Ellann looks more and more nervous, wringing her hands together and picking at the sides of her sleeves. Rey places a hand on her lightsaber and she can see Luke, ahead of her, do the same.
And then there’s the cold again and her brain is protesting and (BLACK GLOVES, ITCHY FABRIC) he’s close, he’s so close and so (THE OILY SMELL OF HIS HAIR, THE FEEL OF IT ON HER CHEEK) far away, the same time, he’s here, he’s here, he’s—
“Rey.”
He’s here.
She looks up and Luke, in front of her, takes her shoulder. “Rey, breathe.”
“He’s here.”
“I know.”
Of course. Of course he knows. “Why did we come, then? Why did we stay?”
“We had to get Ellann.”
The cold is spreading to her stomach. “Why?”
“She knows how to make things better, she—” he stops suddenly, touches his head. “The cold,” he says. “It’s so…”
Rey nods. It’s spreading to her legs. Soon she’s be stationary here, unable to move, unable to do anything but wait for him to come get her. Luke knew, and he didn’t tell her, he knew and he still brought her along. The tree next to her is so far away. It’s moving farther. It’s dissolving into tiny specks… it’s gone. She registers that with only mild surprise.
Luke places a hand on her shoulder. He has his lightsaber drown and his face looks lined and old in the half light. She draws hers, too, feels the cold metal in her palm. Her legs are warm again. (HIS WARM BREATH ON HER NECK.) He’s here, somewhere, lurking invisible in the shadows.
She closes her eyes and takes a second to center herself. When she opens them again the world has dissolved around her.
She finds herself in a shining black room with a white strip down the middle. The walls are slanted, giving the illusion that the celling is somewhere far away, that this room could open into the whole of the galaxy. She hesitantly takes a step forward and Luke appears. “Careful,” he whispers. “Don’t move too far away from me.”
They walk that way, pressed nearly together, towards the back of the room. Except there is no back and the walls, which once seemed solid, keep retreating farther and farther the more they advance. (HE’S HERE.)
He steps out of the shadows and time slows down, shifting from frame to frame with disturbing lethargy. She sees him move, she sees him move again. She sees him lift his leg and then it happens again, only this time closer, he’s not wearing his mask and she can see every hair on his face in this strange light.
She has felt a lot of different form of fear over the years, but this is the first that she can feel physically cutting her, choking her. “Hello, Rey,” he says, and her ears are ringing but she can still hear him clearly, and Luke is next to her, breathing by her shoulder.
She presses her lightsaber and feels the air around shift and hum. Maybe it’s a very short time that they’re standing there like that. Or maybe it’s a very long time. Time has no meaning and he’s here, standing next to her. She can feel the heat radiating from his body.
Then Ellann is next to her. The other woman smells like woodsmoke and grass. The room is shifting, morphing into a glass cube. There’s ocean on one side and sky on the other. Ren is standing there, still, his hand covering his lightsaber, his eyes trained on her intently. There is a pendulum on the other side of the room that swings ominously back and forth. She closes her eyes. It’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok. She realizes that the pendulum is swinging in time with her heartbeat.
Finally, Luke moves. “Ben,” he says. “Let us go.”
Ren stays where he is. “Rey, come with me.”
She can’t talk. The pendulum speeds up.
“She’s not going anywhere,” Luke says, and touches her gently on the back. Something clicks in her brain.
Ren smiles in that slow, predatory way that he did before. “Ellann, would you like to help bring Rey with us?”
Ellann steps forward to join him and Rey can hear Luke stifle a cry. “Ellann,”he says, and his voice is laced with a sadness she hasn’t heard before. “What are you doing?”
She looks at him and there’s no hatred in her eyes. “Getting on the winning side.”
Then the world is gone.
She finds herself again, lying on the grass with the trees towering above her, skeletal fingers. She stretches her own hand up to meet them but they’re too far away. She hears muffled voices, the sound of lightsabers, and manages to sit up and look around.
They’re back on the planet and everything is the same as before they left but there’s blood on the ground and Rey realizes that it’s her own. She feels her stomach and quickly realizes that the wound isn’t life threatening. She can’t remember what happened.
She stumbles to her feet just as Luke yells out her name, one note of pure terror. She turns. Ellann is behind her, lightsaber in hand, bearing down. This is it. She tries to move to grab her own, to bring it up but she can’t find it. Her hand scrabbles against her side. Nothing. She’s going to die here, and this woman will kill her. And then Luke is there, is a blur of light, he strikes, her eyes won’t follow what’s going on, they snap from moment to moment, no continuity between the seconds. In one flash Luke is there, lunging, in the next he’s nowhere and Ren is standing above him. She finally manages to wrap her fingers around the hilt and rush forward, and then Ren and is gone and she’s face first in the grass, her lightsaber buzzing somewhere near her.
It is a few moments until she can hear anything, but when she does, it’s her own name that enters her ears. “Rey,” Luke groans.
She sits up painfully and finds him. He’s a few feet away, lying on the grass. She bends down to look at him and sees the red stains covering the front of his robes. “No,” she says, “Luke, listen. We’ll find Jess and head back to the ship.”
He smiles and his teeth are dark red. She winces. “Rey. There’s so much I never taught you.”
She forces herself not to break down. “And you still can. We’re going to find the ship, ok?”
“Stop talking, I don’t have very long and I have a lot to tell you.”
She kneels down in the grass next to him. “Tell me.”
He clears his throat and grabs onto her wrist. “I’m sorry I left you. I never should have. I was scared what Ben might do if he knew somebody had survived. I never wanted to leave you, it was—” he coughs. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
“I understand.”
“You don’t. Ask Leia… when you get back. Talk to her. She’ll tell you everything. Ellann…” he trails off and Rey shakes his hand gently. “Ellann was another student being trained. She left with him. A few years ago Leia got a communication saying she had made a mistake and needed to leave. She got her out and brought her here until Ben was weaker.”
“She was still with him?”
“Apparently.” His grip on her wrist loosens. “Promise me— promise me you’ll end this. You have the strength to end him.”
She doesn’t even think about it. “I promise.” She can feel the breath rush from his lungs and she can feel his heart slow down and god, she wishes she weren’t so hyperaware, because she can feel the exact moment that his life force is extinguished and every piece of him goes back into the wide universe, and it feels like someone is ripping her brain out.
He dies smiling.
She’s still holding him when Jess finds them. She’s still holding his as they climb numbly onto the ship. She’s still holding him when they fly towards the stars.