Chapter Text
One of the many things that they do not tell young Jedi in training is how powerfully they will be drawn to Sith, if they meet them.
There’s a reason for that, of course. You do not point the moth at open flame. The Jedi order has always had a tendency to lock down emotions and pretend that they don’t exist, to hand-wave the Sith away as a tiresome requirement of universal balance.
The Sith, in this, are perhaps wiser. In the old days of Korriban, they warned their students about the Jedi.
You will be drawn to them. Power calls to power. They will call out to you like a dry land calls for rain.
If you listen, if you yield, you will pour yourself out into that dry land and nothing will be left behind. Jedi will bind you with their words and their weakness.
If you listen to them for too long, you will bind yourself and be sickeningly grateful for the chance.
Do not talk to them unless you are utterly confident in your power to bind them to you instead.
It is best to kill them quickly.
And young Sith nodded, only half-listening, and plotted to put knives in their masters’ backs. And young Jedi listened very, very earnestly to their masters’ warnings about the dark and vowed to never fail and never fall.
There are other things that their masters knew, Sith and Jedi both. The Jedi masters whispered it only to each other, and the Sith whispered it only to their Jedi captives in the dark. Things that students would have to find out for themselves.
Light and dark. Two magnets with opposite poles, drawn together by a force greater than either of them.
The counter to this is that if you try to force the same poles of a magnet together, they repel each other violently.
The Sith killed each other, more or less as a hobby.
The Jedi order, while they frowned on that sort of thing, did have quite a lot of masters that retired to distant, godforsaken planets, unable to stand other Jedi for more than brief social occasions. There were Force ghosts, of course, but they usually went away if you threw enough rocks through them.
None of which matters now. Korriban is a tomb, of interest only to archaeologists. Skywalker died, depending on who you ask, on a craggy rock or a salt plain red as human blood. (Probably there are still Sith somewhere, who no longer observe the foolish Rule of Two. Sith are like cockroaches, although generally they dress better.)
The only thing that matters is that there is something almost like a Jedi and something not entirely unlike a Sith left in the galaxy, circling one another, and it remains to be seen which one is the moth, and which one will be the flame.
Rey hates everything in general, but the ancient Jedi in particular.
The texts that she is trying to decipher were written in some language so ancient that the computers had to translate it, and no matter how many times she goes back to the words, they don’t change.
And she has no idea what they meant.
She understands all the words, of course. She isn’t stupid. But they are useless. They seem to be advising that the best thing to do, in any situation, was nothing at all.
No wonder Luke Skywalker had ended his days on that damnable island, if this was what he had to work with. The books practically told you to sit still and wait for moss to grow on you.
She runs her hands over the pages, trying to pull out some hidden meaning, some faint ghost within the pages that would tell her what to do next.
Nothing. Paper and hide, parchment and leather. No hidden secrets.
If you are angry, stop and think—very well, that wasn’t bad advice. But then: Never act unless you are certain, and if you are certain, be particularly wary, for certainty is a trap.
Rey wants to scream.
She closes her eyes and tilts her head back against the bulkhead and there it is, the sudden unwelcome whisper in her ears, the connection that hadn’t faded with Snoke’s death.
Shit.
She’s gotten better at blocking it off, but when she is tired or frustrated, sometimes it still slips through. Her only consolation is that Kylo Ren doesn’t seem any happier about it than she did.
She feels the moment that he recognizes her, the half-heard sigh.
Oh. It’s you.
“Not by choice!” she growls under her breath.
It never is, is it?
She can see him now, leaning against another featureless bulkhead, half in shadow. The scar on his face pulls as he turns his head.
“I hate you,” she tells him conversationally.
I know.
They are both waiting for the connection to fade. When it doesn’t, the silence stretchs out until it borders on excruciating.
Well. She sees him tilt his head back. How goes the Resistance?
Small talk. Dear ghosts of space, he is trying to make small talk. She doesn’t know if she wants to laugh or cry or scream.
“Like I’d tell you. How is the First Order?”
Oh, you know. Hux is a worm. Phasma’s got an eyepatch. We shelled a moon into oblivion the other day.
“You what?”
It wasn’t a very good moon.
She bares her teeth. “Monster.”
He bows his head, accepting this as tribute.
Another silence. She can feel the roiling dark on the far side of it, and wonders if he sees her light the same way.
No. You’re like crystal.
“What?”
He shows her. A lightsaber crystal, blinding white, the interior opaque with a hundred internal facets.
“That’s how you see me?”
Are you surprised? You’re a weapon.
Like me.
“I am nothing like you!” Rey snarls, and snaps the connection between them.
She sits in the cargo hold of the Falcon, trying to get her breathing back under control.
The first time the connection had flared to life, after Crait, she had screamed at him. Every obscenity she had ever learned on Jakku, and a few she made up for the occasion. She poured her rage and her anguish and her grief through the thread between them, and the damnable bastard sat there and took it.
And then he’d smiled, just a little, and whispered Anger is the path to the Dark Side.
She hit the air in front of her with her staff, just to wipe the smile off his face. It had worked, too. He recoiled and the connection broke, and she’d hoped that would be the end of it.
It wasn’t.
“Why are you doing this?” she hissed at him, the next time their minds touched. “Why won’t you let me go?”
She sensed surprise, and an unguarded moment of honesty.
I’m not doing this.
“What?”
It’s not me. I thought you were doing it.
“Why would I do such a thing?”
She felt an echo of their first conversation, seen from the other side, the rage washing over the connection, as fierce as a sandstorm blowing over the wastes.
To let me know that you were angry?
“You’d have to be pretty stupid not to have guessed that,” she growled.
Kylo Ren laughed. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever heard him laugh before. She sent him her anger and her loathing again and the connection faded away, but the sound of mocking laughter rang in her ears for hours after.
Now, weeks later, she is almost used to it. She can block it off sometimes, before it even starts. Rey suspects that he’s learned to block it too, because sometimes she will feel a snatch of presence, a shadow out of the corner of her eye, and then it will be gone.
Sometimes, though, it still comes through. When one or the other is too angry or tired or frustrated
(or lonely)
to block it away.