10. Chapter 10

            The next morning, Rey wakes unprompted. Without opening her eyes, she stretches her arm out across the mattress, expecting to brush bare skin. Her hand meets only empty air.

            She blinks and picks up her head. The lights are still low, but even in the dark she can tell that Kylo Ren is nowhere to be found. She can’t sense him either, which must mean he’s in some other corner of the massive ship. Rey sits up and turns her head to examine the impression his body made in the mattress beside her. He did sleep there, then. At least for a while.

            It’s unsettling in a strange, indescribable way to be naked in his bed without a part of him anchoring her. He’d fallen asleep first the previous evening, with an arm around her waist and his chest pressed to her back again. She felt his breathing even out against her hair, felt his muscles relax, and she marveled at how much he’d dropped his guard, how much trust he must have that she wouldn’t try to flee or smother him with one of his pillows. And she hadn’t wanted to. She turned over in his arms and watched his face for a while, fascinated by the way his hair fell into his eyes, by how the scar she gave him cut across his cheek, by how his jaw rested when all the tension was gone. She’d drifted off like that, in his arms, not uncomfortable.

            So to awaken and find him gone is disorienting. Rey gathers the blankets to her chest and allows her eyes to adjust to the dimness of the bedchamber. Perhaps she can figure out where he went.

            She eases out of bed and crouches down to feel for her clothes on the floor. She locates what she thinks is her tunic, but when she pulls it on over her head and gets her arms through the armholes she realizes it’s actually his. For a moment she considers resuming the search for one of her garments, but then she shrugs and fastens it. With Kylo gone there’s no real point in dressing herself anyway, except for her own comfort. Due to the size difference between them his tunic more than covers her up.

            Squinting around in the dark, she can see that the door to the private dining room is closed, and there’s no light on in the washroom, but the door to the closet is open, so he must have dressed in fresh clothing. She can’t tell exactly what from his wardrobe is missing without the lights on, so she moves out into the sitting room, which appears undisturbed. How she wishes she had a chrono on her so she could have some sense of time. After spending so long on Akiva, which has actual days and nights, a full day in Kylo Ren’s windowless chambers on the Conquest II leaves her feeling strangely unmoored.

            Rey has just pressed her hand to the control panel, feeling around for the slider that regulates the lights, when the doors suddenly woosh open. She nearly jumps, startled, thinking she’s found some exploit in the security system that will allow her to come and go freely, but then Kylo walks through the door and she realizes they were merely strangely synced once again.

            He blinks at her, not expecting to see her up and about. “Rey.”

            “Hello.” Now she can see what he took from his closet. He’s wearing one of the lighter, nearly semi-translucent shirts she’d noticed yesterday tucked into his trousers, and his hair clings slightly to his damp brow. He’s also carrying his lightsaber hilt. “Were you training?”

            He opens his mouth to respond, then closes it as he takes in her apparel, from her bare legs to the quilted tunic that almost reaches her knees. He isn’t subtle about it. “That’s mine,” he says.

            “I borrowed it,” she replies. “You weren’t wearing it.”

            He must like the look, because he reaches around to press the palm of his free hand to her lower back and sweep her in toward him, pushing her up onto her toes, so they’re standing chest to chest. “Back to bed,” he murmurs, and he tilts his head to kiss her.

            Rey doesn’t need much more convincing. But not much later, when she’s stretched out on her back on the mattress, still wearing his tunic, and he slides his hand down between her legs to press his index finger inside of her, something is off. She’s not as wet as she should be, not as warm, and she feels a little raw where he touches her. The sound she makes against his mouth is not unlike a pained chirp, and he winces, sharing her discomfort.

            “I’m sorry,” he says. The apology is automatic, and it’s genuine.

            She shakes her head. “No, no. We can make it work.” She reaches down for his wrist and pulls his hand up a little, so he can stroke her clit or let her rub against the palm of his hand.

            A few minutes of trying and it becomes clear that they can’t make it work. Despite how badly her mind wants him inside of her again — very badly — her body just won’t cooperate. In all fairness, neither of them had gone easy on it the previous night. After dinner he’d taken her standing against the wall of the dining room with far less preparation than usual, although at the time they hadn’t cared. When they finally made it back into the bedchamber, they didn’t sleep for another couple of hours. So perhaps it’s to be expected that no matter how much he stimulates her from the outside, or how much lube he applies to his fingers, or how much she runs her hands over his skin and reminds herself that she desires him more than anything right now, she can’t get comfortable. She doesn’t know. This is where they could do with the benefit of experience.

            Oddly enough, Rey is more disquieted by this turn of events than Kylo Ren. She half-expects him to storm off into the sitting room, frustrated by his inability to warm her up, but once it’s apparent that penetration is off the table he just shrugs, crawls down between her legs, and gets to work. After what must be at least fifteen minutes of licking and sucking at her with one hand around his cock and the other reaching up to cover her breast, he coaxes a colorless, shuddering orgasm out of her, as if her body simply gives up with a heavy sigh and lets them have it. There’s relief, sure, but no satisfaction. Not much satisfaction for him either, when he finishes a moment later with his head against her thigh, gasping for breath. They’d both wanted this to go a different way. What they managed feels like a mere consolation prize.

            As he shifts back up the bed to cover her she feels a tug on the environment around them. It’s a subtle pull in the innards of a ship this massive, but she knows it to be a marker of sudden rapid acceleration. “Did we jump to hyperspace?” she asks him.

            “Hm?” Kylo slides an arm beneath her and tucks his shoulder under her armpit so he can rest on his side with his head on her shoulder. “Oh. Yes. We’re taking a trip.”

            “We?”

            “You and I.”

            Rey rests her chin against the top of his head. “Where to?”

            “It’s— a surprise.”

            She frowns. “I’m not so sure I like surprises.”

            He leans up to kiss her neck. “Mm. Better than being bored. And you were bored yesterday.”

            “I never said I was bored.”

            “You didn’t have to say it. You were bored. Unless you were so cross when I left you alone for hours because you missed me.”

            Rey huffs into his hair.

            Kylo Ren slides his hand up under the fabric of his quilted tunic and rests his hand on her belly, brushing his thumb back and forth over her skin. “You won’t be bored,” he says. “That much I swear.”

            They touch down on a snow-covered planet, the likes of which Rey has never seen. In the last three years she’s visited countless new worlds, but her travels have mainly taken her to those habitable by sentient creatures. Even Starkiller Base, similarly snow-dusted, also had its forests; there was a sense that if one waited around long enough, spring would come and melt the ice away, and perhaps the planet would flourish. This place is different. It’s a valley of smooth, unbroken snow as far as the eye can see, interrupted only by white-tipped mountains and giant shelves of ice. No settlements, no visible life forms.

            Their shuttle lands near one of the glaciers, and Kylo Ren pulls up the hood of his cowl. He’d added more layers to his uniform, and wears a thick, woven surcoat not unlike the one he’d worn when they first met on Takodana. He’d told Rey to dress warmly, so she’s wearing the heaviest items in her possession: the leather coat, gloves, her high boots. Still, when the shuttle ramp lowers, a wall of stinging cold hits her face, and she recoils. “We’re venturing out into that?”

            He looks at her. “You don’t have a cloak?”

            “No, I didn’t have one made.” She frowns. “I didn’t really expect to be traveling, much less traveling anywhere cold.”

            “Right.” He crosses over to her and pulls off the cowl, shaking his head, mussing his hair. He moves to put it on over her shoulders, and she takes a step back.

            “What are you doing?”

            “You don’t have anything else to cover you,” he says, holding out the cowl. “You’ll freeze.”

            “What about you?”

            “I didn’t grow up in the desert.” He shakes the cowl in her direction. “Take it.”

            Rey takes it. She figures it’s not worth fighting him over. She pulls it over her head, then spends a minute or two fiddling with it, trying to get it to wrap around her shoulders like it does around his. It’s really more of a blanket or a scarf than an actual sewn garment, and Rey finds it a little ridiculous that he’d walk around wearing it with one end hung down his back like it’s meant to be a cape.

            She’s about to just give up and tie it around her head like she used to do with her jumper when working out in the sun but then Kylo, his mouth twitching, says, “Here, let me.” He reaches over and adjusts it for her, and suddenly the hood sits where it should and the fabric covers her neck, drapes over her shoulders. The pilot glances back at them for a moment, but says nothing.

            Rey exhales. “You could stand to wear something more intuitive.”

            “Clearly I just like to make my life as difficult as possible,” he counters.

            “Yes,” says Rey, as they’re hit by another gust of icy wind. “I’m getting that.”

            “Follow me,” he says, walking off down the ramp.

            Rey pulls the cowl a little tighter to her head, and on her next inhale she catches a whiff of his scent from the fabric, of his sweat and his soap and shampoo and whatever he applies to his face after shaving. She exhales forcefully and starts after him.

            Snow is usually easier to traverse than sand. When it’s freshly-fallen, it’s much less weighty. But the snow here is so deep that she sinks into it up to the middle of her shins, and her first few steps off the ramp are awkward and wide-legged. Kylo Ren, of course, walks ahead of her as though he’s perfectly at home here, even as his long garments trail behind him, catching loose snow clumps on their hems.

            Rey takes a moment to crouch down and pick up some snow in her hand. She closes her fingers around it, and it compresses into a tightly-packed, ridged shape, almost a cylinder. She remembers Rose telling her about the snowball fights she’d had with Paige growing up, how they’d gather snow into their hands and pack it together until they had crude spheres and then fling the snow-spheres at each other. Were she here — wherever here is — with her friends, they would probably be throwing snow around. She can imagine Finn and Poe trying to stuff it down each others’ jackets.

            But she isn’t here with them. She’s here with Kylo Ren, and she doesn’t think he’d be game for a snowball fight. She lets the snow fall from her hand.

            Kylo rounds one of the glacier’s jutting ridges, and when she follows she finds herself unexpectedly face to face with the metal frame of a massive door. Someone had carved a door into the side of the ice. It hangs open, rusted; by the giant snow drifts piled against it, it’s been open for some time. Years, maybe. The gap between the snow-covered ground and the top of the frame is twenty feet or so. She hears a crackling as Kylo ignites his saber, although she can’t sense any danger; upon turning around she sees him cutting into a massive pile of snow, melting a hole in the side of it.

            Rey comes up behind him. “What are you doing?”

            He sheaths his saber and looks through the hole. The tips of his ears are turning red from exposure. Stubborn man. He steps aside and lets her peer through, but all she sees is white.

            “More snow,” she says. “I don’t know what you were expecting.”

            “This has to move,” he says.

            “What?”

            Without bothering to explain himself, he stretches out his hand in front of him. She feels him calling upon the Force for just a moment and then there’s a spray of snow and ice and she crouches behind him and throws her arms up around her face to cover herself, so astonished that she doesn’t think to erect any kind of protective barrier. The wind catches the snow and blows it about and for a minute or two it’s as if the entire planet has gone white. Then it subsides, and Rey peeks out over her elbow.

            “A little warning would have been nice!” she exclaims.

            Kylo turns his head. His hair is now soaked. Serves him right. “Look,” he says.

            Rey looks. He’s parted the snow in front of them; now there’s an uneven ramp sloping down, a path that cuts through the drifts, terminating in— “Is that a floor?”

            “See for yourself.”

            He starts down the makeshift ramp. Rey walks quickly behind him, trying to keep up and keep from slipping at the same time. Kylo himself ends up sliding the last couple of feet down to the floor, and Rey skids after him down layers of packed ice. Then they’re standing together in the middle of what clearly used to be a sizable hangar bay, now empty and deserted, illuminated only by the daylight filtering in through the gap between the doorframe and the massive pile of snow.

            Kylo fumbles with his clothing for a second, then he produces two small glowrods from a hidden pocket. Wordlessly, he hands one to Rey, who switches it on. The resulting beam illuminates the small cloud of mist she produces whenever she breathes.

            “What is this place?” she asks, curious, entranced, as she takes a few steps forward and shines the light all around the hangar bay. The cold isn’t as unbearable now that they’re out from the wind, and the excitement of a fresh find, a potential new cache, is something she can never quite unlearn. There are clear signs that a battle took place here, by the scorch marks on the floor, the walls. The roof has caved in in a few places, but the cavernous room seems structurally sound otherwise; it doesn’t seem like there has been any activity here for years.

            “There hasn’t,” says Kylo, picking up where her thought left off. “No reason for anyone to come all the way out here, not after the scavengers finished breaking down the AT-ATs for scrap and stripped this place bare.”

            All the way out here. “Are we in the Outer Rim?”

            He nods. “We’re on Hoth.”

            Rey’s breath catches, and she peers around, taking a second look at their surroundings. She’s no longer naive about the realities of war, or of legends, but she still feels a certain amount of wonder at finding herself somewhere she’d only heard of in stories. “This is Hoth?”

            “It is.” Kylo also looks out at the abandoned hangar bay. “I’d feared the base would be buried under the snow by now. Fortunate that it wasn’t.”

            There are several tunnels leading out from the hangar bay. Rey shines her light down them but can’t see where they end. “Well, I’m not so sure about the stability of those tunnels,” she says. “And anything could be down here. Indigenous life forms, even sentient beings. You’d be surprised what people can survive if they’re determined enough to hide.”

            “So you don’t want to explore any further?”

            “Oh, no,” Rey says automatically, “I definitely do.”

            “Once a scavenger, always a scavenger,” says Kylo Ren, with a note of something suspiciously like fondness.

            They can’t journey too far from the hangar bay. They don’t have the right equipment for a true, thorough exploration, and it would be all too easy to lose one’s way in those tunnels and end up wandering, lost, for days. But even with those limitations, Kylo is right: Rey isn’t bored. It’s been so long since she’s crawled through the remains of someone else’s war instead of fighting her own. Knowing that this place has history, that it was a Rebel stronghold, a famous one, only heightens the thrill of discovery, even if the base was already ransacked a generation ago.

            Crawling through ruins is definitely one area where she has Kylo beat. There are a few tunnels he deems impassible that she navigates easily, crawling up fallen boulders on all fours to peer over and see what’s on the other side. The most exciting thing she finds is an old A280 blaster rifle, long overlooked, hiding under a few broken pipes; one must leave no stone unturned. She suspects it’s nonfunctional, and verifies that suspicion by attempting to fire a couple of bolts at the floor, to absolutely no effect; not once does she think of testing it by pointing it at Kylo. She tells him she might be able to fix it up, given time and the right tools.

            To her surprise, he lets her keep her find. He’s mostly quiet, watching as she evaluates whether or not a tunnel is likely to collapse, as she explains the differences between the scraps of Imperial and Rebel body armor they come across, as she peeks into every little crevice looking for hidden treasure. Sometimes he’ll ask a question, but he mostly seems content to see her so lively, so in her element, so thoroughly preoccupied. This is clearly the high point of Rey’s time in his company. She wonders briefly if he’s rewarding her for going to bed with him and then decides she absolutely does not care.

            After about an hour of wandering, they stumble on what must have been the base’s command center, going by remains of the displays and the outmoded communications equipment. This room took a beating when the shield generators were destroyed, and half of it is inaccessible, blocked by fallen tubing, by places where the icy roof buckled and crumpled. There will be no continuing down the tunnels from this room. But instead of backtracking, Rey lingers here for a moment. She thinks of the stories she knows. A young Leia Organa, about Rey’s own age, would have sat in one of these forgotten chairs and commanded an army.

            “How much do you know of the Galactic Civil War?” Kylo asks her, out of the blue.

            Rey wipes a gloved hand across one of the neglected, decrepit consoles, scraping over a layer of frost. “I know enough.”

            “Then you know of the Battle of Hoth.”

            All Rey knows of the Battle of Hoth from growing up on Jakku is that Luke Skywalker felled an AT-AT with nothing but a lightsaber and his wits, that rebel pilots managed to take down others by circling them in airspeeders, tying cables around their legs to make them trip and fall. Tales for children. But she says, “I do.”

            “The Rebellion’s most catastrophic defeat.”

            Rey picks up her head and turns to look at him. “What?”

            “It’s not unlike the Siege of Crait, what happened here.” Kylo stands with his hands at his sides and cranes his head to look around the room. He takes in the roof, half caved in. He takes in all of the broken, abandoned equipment. And he takes in her, last of all. “Wait long enough and history repeats itself. Sometimes you don’t even need to wait that long.”

            “What are you talking about?”

            “So you don’t know.”

            “Kylo.”

            He walks to one of the walls, runs a finger along one of the marks there. A scorch mark left by a blaster bolt. “This was the Rebellion’s main base,” he says. “Echo Base. They spent two years constructing it. They only inhabited it for a month before the Empire found them.”

            Rey hefts the strap of the blaster rifle up on her shoulder and sits down on the chair in front of her console. It creaks in protest, long unaccustomed to bearing any weight. “But they were able to evacuate.”

            “Barely,” says Kylo Ren. “They suffered heavy casualties. And seventeen of their thirty transports were destroyed.”

            “Oh.”

            “You didn’t know.”

            He looks away from the scorch mark and back at her. Rey shifts on her seat. “Well,” she says, “when people talk about the battles from the Civil War, they don’t focus on those things. They focus on the heroism and the ingenuity and the daring escapes.”

            “That’s the power of the victor’s narrative. Triumph even in defeat.” The t in defeat is over-enunciated, as if he’s trying to drive the point home. He crosses over to her and sets his glowrod upright on the console so its beam reflects off the ceiling and provides the room with some semblance of lighting. All his sharp angles look harsher in that light. “The reality is much messier. But you know that now, Rey. After three years at war, you know that it isn’t like the stories. It’s this.” He turns at the waist as if to allow her to look past him, to give her a better view of the defunct command center. “It’s ruins. Necessary ruins, but still ruins.”

            Rey watches his face, uneasy.

            “Someday they’ll tell stories about us, too,” he continues. “And they’ll get us wrong.”

            “Where are you going with this?”

            He gives her his full attention again. “The Rebel army cornered in this base as they faced the advancing Imperial army, outnumbered, outmaneuvered. The destruction of the transports. You know those details because they’re the same. Your people, your Resistance, they lived them too. Because it’s cyclical. The wars of our parents just become our wars.” He pauses. “But we can break the cycle. You and I.”

            “Oh, no,” Rey says softly.

            “No, listen.” One of his hands clenches and unclenches. “Listen to me, Rey. We could become something the galaxy’s never seen before. We could— end all of this. If you just…” He struggles for a moment to find the right phrasing. “If you make the right choice this time.”

            “Kylo.”

            “If you choose to stand at my side, and we unite everyone under our rule,” he says with quiet conviction, “none of this has to happen again.”

            When he finishes, the room is dead silent but for their breathing. Rey finds herself wishing, despite knowing dozens of things he does not know, that she was just slightly more educated. She wishes she knew more about history, so she could rebut him in the language he’s speaking. She wishes she knew more about politics, so she could tell him why uniting the galaxy under one rule would never work. But she knows her heart, still. And she knows herself. And she knows exactly what she needs to say.

            “I’m not the only one who could make a choice.”

            He exhales through his teeth and turns his face away.

            “You’re Kylo Ren,” she says. “You’re the Supreme Leader of the First Order. It is well within your power to broker peace—”

            “Peace?” he echoes, with incredulity. “The galaxy will only know peace when the Resistance is destroyed.”

            “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

            “There’s no other way. We are children of war.”

            “You’re being dramatic.”

            “I’m not,” he retorts, and he certainly sounds childish.

            “How can you say that? How can you say that you’re a child of war? You come from a place of such immense privilege—”

            “You don’t know where I come from.”

            “I do!” Rey asserts, practically shouting it. “I know your family. The type of people they are, the life you must have had.”

            “You know nothing!” he snaps back, his voice rising. He checks himself and tempers it. “You don’t know as much as you think. How the war changed all our lives. You don’t know— my mother, how the reconstruction of the Republic took precedence above all else. Above her own son.” He frowns at her. “No, you do know that much. You know what it’s like to call out for your parents at night, only to have no one answer.”

            “Stop it.”

            “You, Rey,” he says. “You grew up in the graveyard of the Battle of Jakku, the final conflict. Without realizing it, you have always understood the cost of war. But you don’t— you don’t know how easily the galaxy is catapulted into it. How the galaxy despairs for something new. The balance we could bring.”

            Rey is quiet for a moment. She knows she and he have vastly different ideas of what balance would entail. She would angle for a ceasefire if that were within her power, but she can’t picture him sitting down to negotiate with Leia, or really anyone. It’s his way or no way at all.

            So she pushes back. “Say I did join you. Then what?”

            “Then we would bend every star system to our will.”

            “It’s not as if all your problems would magically vanish. The Resistance will not yield. Your mother will not yield. As long as you try to impose your will on others, people will stand in opposition to you.” Rey’s voice is certain, defiant. She knows what she’s saying is right. “There would still be war in the galaxy. It won’t end. You can’t force it to end that way.”

            “Together, we could. The Light, the Dark. There would be no division. We couldn’t be stopped.” Kylo crouches down in front of where she sits and puts his hands on her thighs, then slides them down to her knees. And he looks up at her. “That’s the new path forward. It’s what we make of it.”

            Rey inhales. Her stomach twists. “Don’t.”

            “You know we could do it. That’s what frightens you.”

            “No, this is— it’s a delusion.”

            “You know how well we work together,” he says, lower now. “Fit together. You’ve felt it.”

            “No, I— no.” She can’t believe what she’s hearing. “Just because we— just because in the bedroom— that doesn’t mean anything!”

            “When we touch.” He runs his hands back up her legs, to the hem of her jacket. “From the first moment we touched, you’ve known. We’ve both known. We’re meant to stand together.”

            She looks at his hands, how they fold over her thighs, and how, in size, he dwarfs her, but in power they’re matched. She wonders what he’d say his intent was, if she asked. Not to consume her, not entirely, although it was that not long ago. In his anger at her rejection, anger that festered inside him like rot for three years, he thought he would devour her. Now it’s back to the old dream, the dream of him and her taking on everything else side by side. Of equals.

            “Rey,” Kylo says, his voice laden with a quiet intensity, “I won’t ask again.”

            That’s the complication. They both know what it would mean for her to refuse. The ensuing silence stretches out between them for far too long.

            “Let me— let me think about it,” Rey says. It’s not convincing. The words are too tight, too clipped.

            Kylo casts his eyes away from her. “Why should I? I know your mind.”

            Rey says nothing. There’s nothing left to say.

            He takes his hands off of her and pushes back up from the balls of his feet to stand. He turns to face away from her, face the entrance of the chamber instead. “We’ll return to the ship. I need to make—” He has to stop and set his jaw, to wrap his mind around the word. “Preparations.”

            “Preparations,” Rey repeats, as if questioning, although she already knows what for.

            “You won’t be persuaded,” he says. He looks over his shoulder, not right at her but at a point on the floor about two feet in front of her. “I feel that now. So I’ll…” He pauses again. Rey marvels at how much harder it is for him to say these things aloud now that there’s certainty to them.

            Finally, Kylo Ren raises his eyes to her face. And he says, “I’ll give you the death you deserve.”

            Upon returning to the Conquest II, Kylo escorts her to his chambers, takes her salvaged blaster rifle, and then disappears for a while, leaving Rey locked in with her thoughts of escape.

            She has faith that she can get away. Not because of any superstition, and not because she thinks the Force will provide, but because she knows what she’s capable of. The best window is probably just prior to the execution. Kylo can’t stay by her side forever. When he leaves her under guard, as he will likely have to, she can break out of her bindings on her own. She’s done that several times now. If she can wrest a weapon from one of the guards posted to her she’ll be well on her way to freedom.

            She would rather have her saberstaff, of course. She’ll have to figure out where it’s being kept. It’s highly unlikely that she could talk Kylo into letting her have it back if he won’t even let her keep a broken blaster.

            The other problem is whether there’s a way to preserve her life and the integrity of her mission at the same time. If there is one, she can’t see it. The gala she’s meant to keep Kylo Ren from cancelling is only five days away. Surely a galactic manhunt for an escaped Jedi prisoner is enough of a reason to call it off. He’ll legitimately be too busy trying to track her down to host a party. But maybe if he sends the fleet after her and she manages to hide for a few days, forcing them to comb through every star system, the Resistance would still have the opening to attack those Dreadnoughts... She’ll have to find some way to contact Poe and Leia.

            Rey wonders if she should have tried to convince Kylo that she really was considering his proposal, just to stall for time. A better spy might have. Nara Ordula probably could have pulled that off. But whatever that trait is isn’t in her. And besides, they’re too close to each other for straightforward deception now. Concealment, sure — they can conceal all they like. But lying is a different beast altogether.

            She showers, hoping the warm water might help untangle her thoughts, and she can’t quite bring herself to dress after. She’s weary, and not just from physical exercise. So when Kylo returns, she’s sitting on his bed with a towel wrapped around her, feet resting on the comforter.

            He approaches her with some trepidation. Of course, from this point on, he can only be the bearer of bad news. But she doesn’t react to his presence, so he sits down on the edge of the bed, next to her, and begins removing his boots. He doesn’t look at her. “It’s to be tomorrow morning,” he says.

            Rey turns her head, but her gaze doesn’t find his face, either. She looks over her shoulder at his thighs, his knees. “So soon.”

            “Well, I—” He pauses, swallows. “There didn’t seem to be any point in prolonging it.”

            “No, you’re right.”

            But she can feel the conflict brewing inside of him like a storm, and it intrigues her. He’s committed to his path, certainly. He’s made that very clear to her time and time again. He’d like to believe he has no conflict left in him, as she would; that would make everything simpler for them both. But they know differently. They know he’s only scheduling her execution for tomorrow so that he doesn’t lose his nerve.

            Rey watches through lowered lashes as he unclasps his belt, as he unfastens and removes his surcoat. She asks, “And it will be public?”

            “Very public,” he says as he pulls off one glove at a time. “Performed in front of an assemblage of officers and Stormtroopers and broadcast on the HoloNet.”

            So he can’t choke, Rey thinks. He’ll have to follow through with it or risk looking weak. “All right,” she says. He’s only setting himself up for disappointment when the guest of honor doesn’t show.

            “It hasn’t been formally announced yet, but it’s only a matter of time.” He pauses again. “Your Resistance— friends.”

            Rey does look up at his face now, and finds him already watching her, studying her features like he’s trying to memorize them. “What about them?”

            “They’ll know your fate,” he says, “if that’s any comfort.”

            “It isn’t.”

            “I... figured.”

            Rey turns her head away again. She hears more rustling as he continues shedding his clothing, and then he wraps his arms around her waist from behind and lies down on the bed, taking her with him. He tucks his body around hers as though to shield her from everything outside of him, as if that’s the threat, as if the threat isn’t sharing the bed with her. He lifts one hand to stroke down her bare arm, up, down again, and she can feel him through the bond marveling at her wiry muscle, at her light downy hairs there, at her warmth.

            “I consulted with one of the doctors,” he says. “About the possibility of conception. Whether that was a valid concern.”

            Rey exhales, closes her eyes. “What did they say?”

            “That it was too early to tell. That even if something had taken, there was a two-thirds chance it would never become viable.” He swallows again, audibly. “Although that means the probability—”

            “I’ve had an injection,” Rey says sharply, as if it’s a blade with which to wound him. “Don’t lose any sleep over it.”

            “Oh.” His hand pauses. “As a... general precaution?”

            “It regulates my cycles.” This isn’t a lie on its face, since the injection does also do that, but of course it’s not the truth, either. Telling him why she got a birth control injection would reveal that she knew in advance she might end up in his bed, that there had been premeditation behind her capture. She elaborates, “Now I only bleed twice a year.”

            Kylo nods. If he senses the half-truth, he doesn’t press her on it. Perhaps he’s too busy wallowing in his own sorrow to care. There goes any excuse he had for prolonging her life. Rey wonders if she should have said nothing, let him struggle with the possibility a few more days, bought herself time. But she would have had to lie with him again as they tried for something impossible, and at this point that would just feel like the biggest falsehood of all.

            He says aloud, “Practical of you.”

            “You know me.”

            “I do,” he agrees softly. “I do know you.”

            He raises his hand to her hair and brushes it away from the nape of her neck so he can press his lips to her skin. Then he folds his arm back around her waist and crushes her close to him, his chest pressed up against her back, and he breathes with harsh, ragged breaths as if he’s exerting himself, or on the verge of some kind of attack, or suppressing sobs. His fingers curl in on themselves and slip under the hem of her towel, and he brushes his knuckles up and down the skin of her stomach so lightly that he doesn’t even seem to realize he’s doing it.

            She can sense him trying to wall her out from their bond, but he isn't completely successful. It’s not just their connection he’s stifling; she can feel him pressing everything down, compacting it so it can be managed and discarded. He’s trying to call on his Jedi training, the old ways, to lock the feelings away. She can’t imagine he was ever good at that, even when he was Ben Solo, because she feels all his desperation, and all his frustration, and such pure unadulterated anguish that it might drown her. This is it for him. If there is still some small chance he’ll return to the Light, if there was ever that chance, it would die the moment he snuffed out her life in service of his grand plans, his blurry vision of an ideal future. Her, his opposite and his equal, his lover and his enemy. One of few combatants to have ever bested him. The only person who listened to him as a confidant. And the only woman he—

            It’s as though a door slams shut, and Rey is left with her own thoughts once again, a slight ringing in her ears.

            “You don’t have to do this,” she whispers.

            “But I do,” he says. He, too, talks quietly, as if someone might overhear them. “I have no choice.”

            “No one is making you,” she insists. “You always have a choice.”

            “So do you.”

            Rey shakes her head, very slightly.

            Kylo sighs. “If you keep standing against me, eventually you’ll have to fall.” He inhales, taking in the scent of her hair as if for the last time. “Better not to prolong it. Better to root it out.”

            “You’re convincing yourself.”

            “I don’t need convincing,” he says, with an obvious waver in his voice. “My mind is clear.”

            “We’ll see,” she says.

            She doesn’t move away from him. She should. He doesn’t deserve to touch her anymore. But there’s a weight to her limbs and all she feels is nothing, nothing. Rey recognizes this as the nothing one feels in self-defense, when negative emotions would otherwise overwhelm and paralyze. She felt it when she was young, sometimes for days on end, when her loneliness crept toward her and threatened to send her crying. That’s when the nothing would kick in, and she would cover herself with it like a blanket, and carry on.

            Rey told herself before undertaking her mission that she didn’t hold out any lingering hope for him, yet somehow he still managed to disappoint her. Like she, too, is disappointing him. Maybe each other’s greatest disappointment was all they were ever meant to be, in the end.

            Prisoners sentenced to death get their choice of last meals, she learns. Anything they want, they can request. But Rey doesn’t know what to ask for aside from the rolls they had the first time they ate together, so she leaves the rest to Kylo, who is more accustomed to sophisticated food anyway. By dinner they find themselves, once again, sitting together at one far corner of the long dining table, avoiding each other’s eyes at all costs.

            The robed attendant brings forth the rolls, piping hot, and sets the basket down on the table. Rey takes one and passes it back and forth between her hands as it cools, then picks at the crust with a nail. She can’t imagine eating it, or anything else, right now.

            Kylo watches Rey play with her food, but the reappearance of the attendant saves him the trouble of making a comment. The attendant holds, in gloved hands, a bottle foggy with condensation. It contains some teal liquid, which they pour into a slim, gold-rimmed glass flute at Rey’s place setting.

            “Toniray,” Kylo says abruptly. “As far as I can tell, the last remaining bottle.”

            This attracts Rey’s attention enough to make her pick up her head. “Why the last bottle?”

            “It’s an Alderaanian wine.”

            Rey’s eyebrows shoot up.

            “It was gifted to me by a collector who wanted a favor,” Kylo says, as the attendant fills his flute. Bubbles swirl in the wine, then rise to the top as it settles.

            “Did they know the significance it might have to you personally?”

            “No, I don’t think so. My origin is the subject of much speculation. Few know the truth.” Kylo pinches the stem of the glass between his thumb and index fingers, but he doesn’t move to pick it up and drink it. “Regardless, Toniray is rarer than rare, and priceless.” He watches new bubbles rise from the bottom of the glass. “I was saving it.”

            “For a special occasion?”

            “A funeral. A wedding.” He shrugs. “This is close enough.”

            The room brims with emotion, both hidden and openly felt. She senses an undercurrent of nervousness that she assumes comes from Kylo. What does it matter whether or not she approves of his offering? He thinks she’ll be dead tomorrow regardless.

            Rey runs a finger around the rim of the glass. “I don’t really drink much,” she says. “It gives me visions.”

            “I don’t either. But one glass can’t do much harm. To mark the occasion.”

            “All right.” Rey picks up her flute and reaches over to tap her rim to his, and she says a bit sardonically, as if giving a toast, “To mark the occasion. Maybe save the rest of the bottle for that wedding.”

            That startles him for some reason, but Rey is past the point of paying him much mind. She holds the glass up to catch the light of the chandelier. The wine really is a wonderful color, like the ocean in a shallow sandy cove.

            “Some people can drink to forget.” Rey watches the bubbles rise in her own drink. “Never thought I’d envy them. On Jakku that always seemed like a miserable way to pass the time.”

            “Is there any way to pass time on Jakku that isn’t miserable?” Kylo asks.

            This startles her in return, the attempt at true humor at the very last possible moment. Black humor, some might call it. Too little and too late. She just looks at him, and doesn’t laugh, and doesn’t smile, and doesn’t do anything.

            He shifts, uncomfortable. “Try it,” he says, voice barely above a whisper. And there’s the nervousness again. How is it that sensation sneaks through when he’s locked her out of the rest of what he’s feeling? “Just— try it. It’s for you.”

            “Fine.”

            Rey raises the flute to her lips and tips it back. The wine is cool, sweet, and the bubbles burst on her tongue, tickling it. She’s no expert when it comes to wine, but it’s a pleasant enough drinking experience, and she can understand why this vintage might have been prized even before Alderaan was blown to bits by the Empire. She takes a good long drink of it as Kylo watches, and then puts her glass back down, swallows, and nods, as if to say she’s finished and now it’s his turn.

            The nervousness in the room abruptly reaches a fever pitch, becoming proper panic now. She looks at Kylo’s face, but it’s unreadable, although there’s an intensity to his eyes as always. But not— he’s not nervous. It wouldn’t make any sense for him to be nervous. He’s still trying to keep the lid on his misery, and that completely consumes his attention. Rey is the only one chasing down the source of that jarring panic, so she’s the only one who catches the errant thought, a thought that belongs to neither her nor Kylo Ren, but to the third person standing in the room, still holding the chilled bottle of Toniray.

            The girl wasn’t supposed to drink first.

            She sees Kylo raising his own flute to his lips as if in half-time, and without thinking she holds out a hand and cries, “Don’t!” The ensuing Force-push is so strong that the flute flies out of his fingers and shatters completely against the wall, rivulets of blue wine racing to the floor.

            He turns to look at her. She feels his confusion. It’s genuine. “Rey?”

            “Something’s wrong,” she says, and she looks past him to the attendant only to catch just a glimpse of fluttering purple robes as they flee into the passageway. “Something—”

            And then the poison — what must be poison — kicks in, acts fast. Rey feels it first in her calf muscles as numbness, weakness, which quickly travels up her body until it’s impossible for her to keep upright in her chair. She folds over herself, falls onto her side on the floor, and then there’s a tightness in her chest and she thinks no, no. She starts taking quick, noisy, panicked shallow breaths, her mouth open, not unlike a fish stranded on the shore, or more hopelessly in the middle of a desert, baking alive under the sun. Her arms are about as effective as fins on land. She can’t move herself and can’t speak for breathing, but breathing isn’t working either. She can’t, she can’t, she can’t breathe.

            She hears the scrape of chair legs and someone say her name, and then Kylo Ren is kneeling by her side, pulling her head up onto his knees, cupping her face with his gloved hands. She looks up at him, at his hair falling in his face, and the sheer horror in his eyes is like nothing she’s ever seen from him before. “No,” he says. “Rey, no. Rey—”

            Focus. Bodies are machines like any other. She’d learned that setting her own broken bones as a child. The problem’s mechanical, so diagnose the problem. Her chest isn’t moving and her lungs aren’t inflating and deflating like they should. It’s nearly impossible for her to center herself through breathing when her breath won’t come, but clumsily she manages to reach out for the Force, grasp it as though with shaking fingers, and route some of it to her diaphragm, to the muscles at her ribs. She manages a slightly deeper inhale as her rib cage expands. How much time did she buy herself? A few seconds only? Her head spins.

            Breathing’s something you never have to think about. It’s an automatic process. Your brain does it for you. The second you concentrate on it, it becomes harder. But Rey’s brain and her muscles aren’t speaking right now, so she has to do not only the thinking but the labor, all while trying to keep hold of the Force, which keeps slipping from her grip as though someone has coated it in oil. She can’t keep doing this forever. There are stories in the sacred Jedi texts of Darksiders who have kept themselves alive on the strength of their anger alone, but Rey’s not angry, just surprised, and alarmed, and disappointed in herself for succumbing to something so rudimentary, and maybe a little afraid.

            Rey looks up at Kylo as she manages another true inhale, although it’s feebler this time. When she thought about her death, this is not how she imagined it. True, during a war it’s futile to think about growing old, and in some versions of her premature passing he’s there with her. That aligns with her expectations. But when he’s there, he’s the death of her. It’s never something completely unrelated that takes her out. It’s him, or more often the pair of them, together, pressed against each other on the ground with identical smoldering wounds. Ushering each other to the final rest. Light for Dark. Balance.

            She thought she’d get to see her friends and her pupils again before the end. She wishes she could tell Kylo to tell Finn she’s sorry, because she is truly, deeply sorry that she won’t come back to him like she said she would. There’s no guarantee Kylo would pass that message along, and although she’d like to think that some desire to honor her might compel him the chance is likely slim. It doesn’t matter. Trying to get the words out would mean wasting another precious breath. Her vision is already darkening around the edges, and once she falls unconscious, that’s it. That’s all. It’s over.

            Maybe she’s glad Finn’s not here to witness this. It’s becoming an ungraceful and drawn out way to die as her breaths grow more staccato, as her lungs refuse to work every other time she tries compelling them, as she fights to stay awake even though she can no longer feel the Force. Yes, it’s a mercy that Finn’s not here. But at least she’s not alone—

            Her chest jerks off the ground and she thinks she hears something snap and there’s pain and she takes a delicious, gasping breath and air floods her lungs like it’s meant to. Her eyes focus on a hand, outstretched, trembling above her sternum, and she looks up and sees Kylo, his jaw clenched, eyes focused, and she arches off the ground again and she gasps again and his other hand is cradling her head and he’s saying please in that same soft way he did when he begged her to rule by his side as Snoke’s throne room burned. Only this time it’s worse, it’s a thousand times worse, because his voice is so quiet and watery as he begs whatever is happening inside her to stop. As he begs her to stay alive.

            He’s so pale, pale like moonlight, and he looks down at her with the face of a man whose entire galaxy is collapsing in around him. And she knows now for certain that he could never have stomached killing her. He can’t take the thought of her dead. They’ve circled each other for so long — does he even know who he is without her? But it’s not that. No, it is that, but it’s not just that. Something else has to account for that expression, for the fear and the desperation he draws upon to keep pushing air into her lungs.

            For a second, a lightning flash, she can feel his mind with striking clarity, and it’s obvious, it’s been obvious all along: he can’t lose her. He can’t watch her go again. Her first rejection twisted his insides up into something thorny and ugly that only in the past couple of days, or only just in this moment, has begun to unknot. And she sees him within it, laid bare. She sees that he had taken a devastating truth and he’d wrapped it in venom and obsession and vitriol because hurting is so much easier than being hurt.

            But she’s dying now, and the wrapping falls away. In the shaking of his hand and the quiver of his lower lip and the way his breath, too, comes short, she sees what he’s been hiding so desperately, from her and from himself.

            And—

            Oh.

            Of course.

            But Rey is unable to make sense of this thought, and it slips away from her like the Force had. She feels herself fading, even as her chest rises and falls for a third time. Over Kylo’s shoulder, edged in blue, she thinks she sees Luke Skywalker, robed, solemn. He doesn’t say anything, but Rey can clearly see the frown turning down the corners of his mouth, the crease in his brow. He looks so sad.

            Then Kylo turns her face back to his, his hand cupping her cheek, and he says, “Rey,” and the last things she sees are his wide dark eyes filled with terror, and the last thing she hears is her name, falling from his lips like a prayer.