📝 ➤ @reyjustrey :// { cont’d }
Kylo’s met Rey’s smiling eyes with a cloak; they did not return the smile; they did not dull, darken, or glitter. There were no words to describe their look, no observable emotions that could be so easily bottled away for future study. His came and went in waves; a rush of adrenaline in the breast, a leaping or souring in the gut, a crest falling deep within him, dragged onto the shore, and ripped back into an interminable ocean.
Counsel, company, insight, need. Even if every muscle ached and his heart weighed heavy, he didn’t show it now. Instead, he became ossified with focus as he tried to build an image of Rey’s situation with what little insight she offered. No doubt she was with a Resistance unit, likewise stranded or under extreme duress, she just as alone as he. Despite the choices and tools Kylo held at his disposal, the lucky devil set the tin down. Defiance left him, but the fire remained. Its shadow licked his face.
So, you’ll starve together. How very noble of you.
Rey reminded him of someone. Sirax, of the Ren. Sirax, too, was like the sun. Twelve days in Coruscant’s underbelly, the Knights spent sussing him out, or so they’d thought. He was the one that recruited them; he who tracked them down and initiated contact. There were ten of them then; a clan. A band of their own. But at this moment, Rey evoked memories of someone else, remembered less fondly.
He was like a mason delivering a crude, unfinished tablet: no idea what he was saying, where it was coming from, and where it would lead, but he’d already begun.
Kylo spared his muddy helm a glance and continued.
—ran out of water within a few days, and only then did we realize there was nothing potable within fifteen miles of the wreckage.
He looked to the fire instead of Rey. Gradually, the rations began to settle, and soon they would cool.
No fruit. No relief. When we discovered a canteen that contained our last supply, we realized there wasn’t enough for all of us. We consulted the first Ren. He said, ‘Where there is hope, there is fear,’ and poured out every last drop. It was his way of showing us that we were equal.
Do you know how we survived?
And the cloak fell away, and his eyes came alive again.
We stumbled upon a Rebellion encampment and gave them the first Ren in exchange for food and medicine.
Ren should have said, 'Where there is fear, there is hope.’ Perhaps he knew fear and hope did not always exist on either side of the same coin. Those were the days when the First Order was still just a wart on the Republic’s tongue, and one did not shadow the other. Fear certainly ruled today. And there was a shadow rising over Rey now. Kylo perceived it rushing toward them and knew hope would not impede it. Hope was something he abandoned long ago. He traded it for wrath.
Statue still in the freezing dark, Rey watched Ren’s offering fall away, felt his words ripple through the Force into her mind and was struck, unbidden, by a memory. It was an old one – she, as a girl, in the baking Jakku heat, a pristine modulator in her hands offered up for Unkar Plutt’s appraisal. This same scene, same interaction, replayed again and again in her life as she grew, but in this iteration she was perhaps thirteen. They were lean years, all of Rey’s, and this one had been especially so. She was all bone and sinew, all hollow eyes and sharp cheeks and a worse, griping hunger in her belly than she had now in the ice and rock and snow. It was this comparison, this experience, that’d made it easy for her to pass her portion of what little her band had left back to them. These were famine stakes to them, while she…
‘-One-tenth a Portion’ Plutt had oozed, eyeing the skeletal girl.
The skeletal girl, who’d watched the same piece go for ten times that, protested.
‘So this’ she’d wheezed, holding the sliver between her fingers. ‘Is how you kill off competition?’
She’d been so fixed on Plutt she’d not seen the thug – one of his lackies – approaching behind her until a fist collapsed her sideways, winded. The sliver of a portion was pried from the fist she’d closed round it and was given back to Plutt through the razor wire that made up his storefront. He’d glared at Rey as she spat bile onto the sand.
‘That fast mouth of yours will cause you trouble, girl’ he’d told her.
What warmth there had been in Rey’s regard receded, though Ren, really, was only half the cause. Plutt’s cruelty wasn’t his fault, much as Rey did wonder if it was wisdom or a species of malice all his own he was trying to mete out through his tale about the first Ren. He had refused his group, his Knights, even a sip from their last canteen – enough for them all or not – and Rey, in refusing Ren’s offer, had likewise poured away a chance for her band to pass round something warm and steaming. Never mind the reasons behind that refusal. Never mind how being seen to magic something out of thin air – were that even possible – would not only raise questions about the extent of her powers and why she hadn’t provided sustenance with them sooner, but would paint her as somehow capricious for having refrained until now. Never mind how it would make her seem to have lied about the state of their provisions; make it look like she had something hoarded away from the group, something hidden.
That thought looped on her as she looked at Ren. She did have something like that, didn’t she; this connection of theirs – whatever it was – that she kept studiously secreted away from her fellows. What danger might she be in, she wondered, if they found out The Enemy had a window in on her mind. Friendship with the Resistance’s upper levels of command, with co-Generals Finn and Poe as they’d fashioned themselves, would likely only get her so much protection.
Ren would have her risk all that, for food?
Indignation lit through her, boiled through their bond-
What should they do then? Feed me to what pursues us?
-and Rey whipped round where she posted sentry. She indicated the group with a look, a wild gesture and then, in the half-second that movement shifted her focus away from Ren and his all-consuming presence, the rest of the world both crystalised in her perceptions and rushed in at once and Rey froze. What had been fear’s shadow to Ren was to Rey the glaring lights of a troop carrier baring down on her party from perhaps a quarter mile’s range. It was a glow in the distance to her fellows, who perked where they crouched, looked round at it and realised, as their Jedi abandoned her post with a ragged gasping cry and hustled them to their feet, that their secrecy and stealth had been useless.
A frisson of horrified disbelief came out verbal, their petrified rescuee latching onto Rey --
“HOW DID THEY FIND US?!” she pled, screaming over the wind whipping round them.
One of their company answered but didn’t. “WE LEFT NO TRACE! NO TRAIL!”
And it was then, as her counterparts lost themselves for precious seconds in a whorl of whys and wherefores, that Rey felt the warmth of the little heater, still clung to by their rescued diplomat, against her belly. Four layers it warmed her through, to the point her skin complained and she had to push the trembling, petrified woman to arm’s length.
It wasn’t the cold that had undone them like she’d feared it might. It wasn’t hunger.
It was that thrice damned heater, seen like a beacon by even the most basic scanner.
With a cry, Rey snatched the wretched thing and tossed it as far as she could away from she and her companions. She then pushed her clinging charge back into her fellows’ arms and pointed along the line of the craggy landscape they’d been hugging as they made their escape.
“TAKE HER!” she barked. “TWO OF YOU, GO! THE RES—”
Again, the world around her crystalised.
Knowing rushed in, leant foresight of impending Hell and then—
Too late to block with the Force, too late for anything but a half-screamed warning, a bolt from the darkness tore the air and vaporised the heater where it lay some fifteen feet clear of Rey’s party down a rocky incline. The shockwave of it hitting flattened them, falling rocks killing two outright as they pelted down the cliff face that stretched for what looked like eons above them. The three that survived – two Resistance fighters and their rescuee, thank the Maker – scarpered when Rey pushed them to. They fled north and into the craggy landscape beyond the overhang they’d used as shelter. It was a death trap now, splintered and unstable and Rey, bloodied, wobbly on her legs and trying to shake off disorientation, tumbled all she could away from it in search of safer harbour—
The world beyond the crags was flat and open – as barren as any Jakku desert. Her only saving grace was the sound of the troop carrier’s engines dying as it landed; as those that’d manned it fanned out across her near surrounds in search of bodies. They’d lost the heater as a beacon now, the crags played havoc with their instrumentation and that awful howling wind that stung Rey’s eyes and reddened her cheeks, that deadened her fingers—It made searching for body heat tricky when the only source that wasn’t haring deeper into the crags lived under four layers of cloth and leather and was steadily being leeched by the elements. Like the bodies of her comrades were—
Grim inspiration came to Rey in a flash.
She hurled herself down as close to the ground as she could get while maintaining some manner of grip under her boots; some purchase which she might leverage to defend herself upon her inevitable discovery. Like a small, feral dunecat crouched in her den, she fixed on the sound of the militiamen approaching through the darkness; fixed on their numbers – five at a minimum, ten more likely; fixed on the fact that she was here not to win, but to buy time for her compatriots, for their rescuee, to escape. And it was with that knowledge between her teeth that she listened as the enemy closed on her position, that she felt the Force sing through her…And that she reached her left arm out blindly towards where she knew Kylo Ren to be.
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