Chapter Text
There was nothing useful about a nightwatcher worm. Its hide was too porous to be much use as leather, its meat too tough even for the stewpot. It oozed a midnight-blue ichor that was toxic to most lifeforms and burned through metals. But there was still an old woman back on Jakku who hunted for them anyway.
Her hunts were a weekly occurrence. She’d take a battered folding chair to the crest of whichever dune was closest to Niima Outpost—this changed, depending on the frequency of the sandstorms that rolled through from the Goazon Badlands—and sit in perfect stillness all night, one end of a wire stripped from an old Star Destroyer clutched in her frail hand, the other end trailing down into the sand, where a barbed hook speared a bloody slab of happabore flank.
Some nights she’d sit in perfect stillness and nothing would happen. Sometimes the wire would twitch, and then the old woman’s frail hand would seize it, suddenly strong, and her whole body would tip back in the folding chair as she strained to pull the wire in. Most of the time the creature gnawing on the smoked tongue at the other end would be a rangy desert mole, or even a large, hard-shelled sandflea, but sometimes it’d be a baby nightwatcher worm, eyes glowing red in the darkness, pale body glistening and crusted with sand. The old woman only ever caught the juveniles. The adult worms were too smart by half to take the bait.
Baby worm caught, the old woman would tally her catch on a slate she kept in her bag, then unhook the worm and toss it down the side of the dune. Watching this process—the worms rolling helplessly down the sand, silent, impotent, while a new mark scratched into the slate—was something of a rite of passage for the youths of Niima Outpost. It was as good an excuse as any to stay up all night drinking the sharp, antiseptic liquor that was the local poison of choice, stargazing, socialising, until the crazy old woman who fished for baby worms turned around and hissed for quiet.
Rey, like everyone who’d grown up at Niima Outpost, went out to watch whenever she could. It was something to do on a planet that was generally full of nothing and, besides, the desert was beautiful at night. If she had the portions to spare, she’d get her canteen filled with liquor and join the drinking. It put warmth in her belly when the nights were cold, and if there was any leftover during the day, it made an excellent disinfectant for small wounds.
One time, Rey got drunk enough to talk to the old woman. She’d been egged on by an offworlder who’d washed up in the Outpost, ostensibly to trade for ship parts, but Rey had suspected they were on the run from something. Jakku was a good planet to hide on. It was immaterial; the offworlder was cute, and wanted Rey to go and talk to the crazy lady in the folding chair, so she did.
Rey half-walked, half-crawled up the dune, plonked herself onto the sand next to the old woman’s chair, and propped her chin in her hands. The night sky doubled in her vision; the stars were too blurry to make out, but there were more of them than ever.
‘Why do you throw them back?’ Rey whispered. Even drunk, she was considerate enough not to scare the baby worms away.
At this, the old woman chuckled, ‘If I didn’t throw them back, there wouldn’t be any left to catch.’
Up close, Rey reflected that the old woman really wasn’t that old at all; an exposed patch of skin below her unfastened overshirt was pale and smooth, unbothered by the sun. The only old she was was old enough to be Rey’s mother, or old enough to remember who Rey's mother might have been, but it hadn’t felt like the time to ask.
Deciding she’d overstayed her welcome, Rey got up to leave, but lost her balance coming down the dune and tumbled head-over-heels, earning herself a sharp-tongued reprimand for scaring the worms away. Then she’d been too dizzy to get up. The next thing she knew she was waking up to sunrise with a headache and a dry mouth, sand pooling in the folds of her clothes. The cute offworlder had already left. Rey would be gone from Jakku too, a few months in the future. Gone forever, although she hadn’t known it at the time. She’d wondered once or twice if the old woman was still there, casting out her line, adding more marks to her slate.
About a year after she left Jakku, Rey came to understand that her relationship with Kylo Ren functioned in much the same way, except he was the one with the bait and she was the worm.
If she told her friends about it, they’d have hated her. She thought she might hate herself for it too, on days when she woke up in a good mood, days where things were going the Resistance’s way. But on days when she felt better than good—when she felt great—it was hard to feel any sort of regret at all, because they were all so damn impressed with her. Rey, the last Jedi, the one who always stayed behind. The one who always sacrificed herself so the others could get away. The one who always escaped. The one who the First Order couldn’t keep pinned down.
They’d have thought differently of her if they’d known Kylo was letting her go.
Rey knew the First Order flagship like back of her hand. She could navigate from the shuttle bays to the interrogation suites—or, sometimes, Kylo’s quarters—with her eyes closed. She had a knack for making her escapes look convincing, and was very good at putting up a fight. It wasn’t fun if she didn’t fight, and fighting gave her a chance to put some dents into the whole sorry organisation, no matter how minor those dents were.
But the most fun of all came in not knowing whether the next time might be the time when Kylo would choose to keep her.
It was predictable, then, that when the mission on Fondor went south and the Resistance strike team she was leading got strafed by fire from a Lambda-class First Order shuttle, that she was the one who volunteered to stay back and cover the others. Before the shuttle had buzzed them, she’d seen another ship drop down from the lower atmosphere. Dark, wedge-shaped, and belching black exhaust smoke, it wasn’t a ship she recognised, but Kylo had a habit of changing ships to match his moods. With an entire fleet at his disposal (and an impressive private collection besides), he could fly something different every rotation. No need to take a normal shuttle when a battered lump of a vessel flooding Fondor’s atmosphere with pollution could express his displeasure far more efficiently.
The Resistance had gone before the ugly ship even touched ground. Rey wasn’t worried. They’d be back later, or would pick her up from whichever jump point she managed to escape to. Last time, she’d stolen one of Kylo’s prototype TIE Silencers and flown it halfway across the Dantooine sector just because it had a hyperdrive and she could. It had taken Poe over a day to get to the rendezvous point, and he’d been very impressed that she’d managed to capture an enemy prototype. The mission debrief, therefore, had been brief, which was just the way she liked it. Nobody had to know that Kylo had literally unlocked the hangar for her.
The Resistance thought of her like the lead character in a holodrama: bold, daring, hyper-competent. None of them had put the pieces together yet and figured out that, yes, she was all those things, but she was a little sick in the head too.
Rey had been running in the opposite direction from the Resistance’s launch point for ten minutes before the wedge-shape ship touched down in a clearing just ahead of her. The woods in this part of Fondor weren’t really dense enough to hide in, and so she dropped to the ground behind a thicket of long grass, breathing hard. The smell of damp soil filled her senses.
The ship might have been a prison transport once upon a time. It had a certain flair of brutality. Beaten panels of scorched metal had been blast-welded where portholes might have been. A huge gun turret at the top swivelled lazily from side to side. Rey’s heart beat faster. Kylo would have to be in a foul mood to choose a ship like that.
Except she couldn’t sense him in the force the way she normally would. Kylo in the force was like a stormcloud swelling on the distant horizon, a dark shadow in the corner of a bright and empty room. She always felt him before she saw him. This time he wasn’t there.
The ship’s boarding ramp extended. Six people exited, all dressed in black, all heavily armed, and all familiar to Rey in some way that she couldn’t place. Immediately, she recognised them all as force-sensitive, but their presences registered as little more than dim flickers of energy on the edge of her awareness.
One of them—taller than the rest, and with a shock of bright, unnaturally red hair flowing from beneath a spiked black helmet—turned, and looked directly at where Rey was hiding.
She felt cold all over. Her grip tightened on her blaster. But she didn’t dare move. If this ship wasn’t Kylo’s, then maybe it was nothing to do with the First Order at all. The First Order had a command from their Supreme Leader to bring her in alive and unharmed; whatever command these six force-sensitives followed was anyone’s guessed.
At least she could fight. At least she was good at fighting. She had her blaster and, if needed, Luke’s old lightsaber holstered at her belt, even if she didn’t have much faith in the repair job she’d done on it months before. Sometimes the visual of the saber was all it took to send an adversary running in the other direction. A Jedi strove to avoid combat, after all.
Good thing she wasn’t a Jedi. Not really.
The redhead looked away gestured to the sky above, saying something to their five companions. Rey relaxed and looked up. Through the clouds, she could just about see the arrowhead shape of a Star Destroyer in high orbit. The Lambda-class shuttle that’d fired on her and the Resistance was nowhere to be seen.
When she looked back at the ship on the ground, five of the masked figures were walking away into the woods—and the redhaired one was heading straight for her.
Kylo always let her go. Kylo never hurt her, not unless she let him. But Kylo wasn’t here.
The redhead stopped at the edge of the clearing, close enough for Rey to see the array of weapons attached to their belt. Two sheathed daggers, a pouch that no doubt held a thermal detonator, a baton, a collapsible staff. Nothing she couldn’t counter. There was something Kylo-like about them, in their all-black uniform and helmet—although she hadn’t seen him wearing his for almost a year—but they didn’t even have a quarter of the force signature that he did.
It’d be easy to take them out. Rey tightened her grip on the blaster, set her finger on the trigger—and, with a jolt of panic, realised she’d forgotten to prime it, and wouldn’t be able to do so now without alerting the whole area to her presence.
‘Rey?’ the redhead called out, in a husky, surprisingly feminine voice, unaltered by a helmet vocoder. ‘I know you’re there. Come out. I want to talk to you.’
Rey grit her teeth, trying to reach for the saber at her belt without making any noise. It was exceptionally stupid of her to have wound up in a situation like this without a primed and ready blaster—Poe would have confiscated it off her, if he’d been around—but that was what happened when your enemy never really was your enemy. It was what happened when you started thinking of yourself as unkillable.
The redhead sighed and removed the helmet. Beneath it was potentially the most beautiful woman Rey had ever seen in her life. Her hair—dyed, surely, because up close it was the precise colour of fresh blood, and just as glossy—spilled over her shoulder, framing a haughty, perfect face. Her eyes were unusually pale, a bright shade of green that stood out against her warm brown skin. A tattoo in dark burgundy ink snaked around one side of her neck, curling into abstract shapes that looked soft one moment and jagged the next.
She patted a pouch on her belt and tilted her head to one side, lips pursed in a mock pout. ‘I know you’re not cooperative with him, but you can play nice with me. I have a stun grenade. Don’t make me use it.’
A twig snapped in the undergrowth nearby. Rey seized the moment and primed her blaster, bolting upright, ready to fire and hit the strange woman in the knee—but the weapon flew out of her grasp and slammed into the mud.
‘That’s a dirty trick,’ the woman said, her fist closing around empty air. She'd pulled the blaster right out of Rey's hand with the force. ‘I said I just wanted to talk.’
Rey’s fist closed around the saber’s hilt. She was conscious that her clothes were covered with dirt, and that she was still a little out of breath from her run. Not like the woman standing a few feet away from her, who was perfectly composed and smiling placidly at her.
‘Who are you?’ Rey demanded. ‘Did he send you?’
The woman laughed. ‘Oh, no, he doesn’t know I’m here. Shall we talk on my ship?’
Rey shifted her balance, her feet digging into the soil. ‘Here is fine.’
‘I think you’d prefer the ship.’
‘I’m fine here.’
‘Suit yourself.’ The woman inclined her head slightly. ‘My name’s Tava Ren. Leader of the Knights of Ren.’
There was a beat of silence. Rey felt compelled to look away; Tava’s pale eyes were unsettling to look at for too long.
‘Should I have heard of you?’ Rey said.
‘Yes,’ Tava said, without hesitation. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t. Doesn’t he talk about us?’
The name had jogged Rey’s memory. Kylo, of course, used the name Ren, but she’d never really known why, beyond the suggestion—something she’d inferred, rather than been told directly—that it was a childhood nickname he’d adopted. She’d never thought of it as a title. Kylo had never mentioned any knights to her—but, then again, they didn’t have much in the way of proper conversations these days.
She shrugged. ‘No. Never heard of you.’
Tava exhaled. ‘He loves his secrets, doesn’t he?’
Her voice seemed to echo inside Rey’s head. For a moment she could only think of the most obvious answer for why Tava had come to her: Kylo had never just been interested in Rey. There’d been another woman in the picture all along.
Except—and she had time to think on this, as a smile tugged at the corners of Tava’s lips and she went on saying nothing, clearly enjoying watching the gears turn inside Rey’s head—that it didn’t make a lick of sense. If Rey knew anything about Kylo, then she knew that there was nobody else, because Kylo was the most one track-minded person she’d ever met in her life. He wanted her and her alone. That was part of the appeal.
‘Well, you’ve heard of us now,’ Tava said. ‘I have a proposition for you, Rey. I’d like to teach our Supreme Leader a lesson, if you’d help me.’
Rey realised she was still holding onto the saber with a white-knuckled grip. If she knew anything else about Kylo, it was that he wasn’t the sort of person you could teach a lesson to. Nor was she. ‘What kind of lesson?’
‘Still working out the finer points of it,’ Tava said, ‘but I’d like, I think, for him to grasp a finer appreciation of the tools at his disposal. Maybe be a little more efficient with his time. I’m sure you know very well what he’s like.’
Rey forced herself to look Tava in the eye again. Nobody besides Kylo knew the extent of her relationship with him, and, even then, she suspected that neither of them really understood it either. Could she freely admit to knowing what he was like? Did she know, really?
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said.
Tava spread her hands wide. ‘I’m under orders to capture you. As are my men. The whole fleet has a standing order to abandon all current mission objectives and divert all resources to your capture if you’re located. And they do capture you! They’re good at it! Funny, then, that you seem to be so good at running away as soon as they turn you over to him. And that you never yield any useful intel despite all those hours in the interrogation chair. Tell me, how many times have you been on his flagship? And does it do something for you too, knowing an entire fleet is at your beck and call for the sake of some sort of sex game?’
White-hot anger flashed inside Rey, like she’d been shocked by a live wire. She hadn’t even called it that to herself.
‘It’s not like that,’ she growled.
‘Oh, I’m sure it isn’t, sweetheart,’ Tava said. The husky rasp of her voice—the way she’d put emphasis on sweetheart—did something to Rey that made her stomach feel tight. ‘But you realise it’s inefficient, don’t you? That it’s a waste of your time? Does he even touch you? It doesn’t seem like his thing. Does he just make you watch while he touches himself?’
Rey grit her teeth. The way things went with Kylo never were simple or predictable. As it stood, they’d accomplished nothing more than open-mouthed kisses that usually gave way to biting, or fully-clothed grinding where sometimes—if it went on long enough—he’d let her put her hands around his neck and squeeze until he went red in the face.
Once they’d got carried away enough for the interrogation pretence to drop, and had ended up in a scenario where she’d had her shirt bunched up around her neck and his erection had dug painfully into her hips and she’d thought that maybe—just maybe—it would finally happen, but then he’d got a priority comm alert and they’d had to abandon the whole idea. It had taken her longer than usual to escape afterwards, mostly because she was hoping he’d find the time to come back and ravish her, but also because her legs had been shaking too much to run. The First Order’s interrogation chairs were monstrously uncomfortable, but the wrist and ankle restraints got her turned on like nothing else.
It was likely it wouldn’t have gone much further anyway. She was fairly certain that the interrogation suites had audio monitoring, and, no matter how cartoonishly evil they were, the First Order did seem to draw a line at sexual coercion being used as an intelligence-gathering tool. If they were both clothed, and Kylo never actually did more than touch her, then he could maintain the fiction that she was his prisoner and he was only doing his job. Also, they both clearly got off on the tease as much as anything else. Actually going all the way and fucking would have just ruined the whole thing.
Tava clucked her tongue and looked back at the ship. ‘You’ll go free, whether he learns or he doesn’t. And I’m not going to hurt you. I follow nobody’s orders except my own. All I want to do is prove a point.’
‘Prove it how?’ Rey could feel the heat in her face, the racing beat of her own heart. Normally she tried to save her memories of the interrogation chairs for late at night, when she could be alone in her quarters in the Resistance base. It wasn’t something she liked to remember much in daylight. Certain thoughts were best kept for the dark.
‘I’d like to show him how to do an interrogation properly. One that actually extracts some useful information.’
Rey was still holding onto the saber at her belt. One quick motion and she could have it drawn and lit, held at the other woman’s throat. 'You said you wouldn’t hurt me.’
‘And I won’t,’ Tava grinned wolfishly, one of her sharp teeth snagging on her full lower lip. ‘Pain isn’t the only way to make someone talk.’