Chapter Text
It was months before the pain stopped, and to her dismay, Rey couldn’t tell if that was because the bond had been broken, or if Kylo Ren’s torturers had decided he had had enough. Rey couldn’t tell anymore which she preferred, because she had been waiting for this — waiting for the end of the nighttime agony that was not her own, but the pain had also been a reliable way to tell that they weren’t onto her yet. That Snoke wasn’t yet planning an attack.
No pain could mean that they had Kylo’s cooperation. No pain could mean that they were coming. And Rey, who had been passing off her cries as headaches and night terrors, had no one to explain this new and complicated fear to.
So she reached out to him, but she heard nothing in return.
*
An alarm blared and Rey bolted upwards in her on-call bunk, then looked over at Finn, who was also awake, also confused. She nodded to him and he drew a tired hand across his face.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. Should we get up?"
Finn sighed. “I guess so.”
In the hall, there was chaos, and Finn had to step back as a frantic BB-8 rolled by, squealing and beeping. Behind it, as always, was Poe, who skidded to a stop in front of Rey. She didn’t miss the expression, the half-flash of sorrow that overcame him. Rey felt a pit form in her stomach, something heavy like lead. They didn’t have to communicate it.
Poe turned his gaze to Finn. “Meet me in the hanger,” he said. “We’re going to be flying out.” He paused. “You’ll want to go to the control room,” he said to Rey.
She closed her eyes. Because she knew he was here.
He was here, but she didn’t feel it. He had arrived flanked by four fighters, but she couldn’t figure out why. The control room was a mess of sounds and shouts and Rey was grasping onto any bit of information she could catch.
There was loss on both sides, but Kylo — he wasn’t shooting. He was steering straight for the hanger, and Rey wanted to scream, she wanted to tell them not to shoot, that this was happening for a reason and can’t they see that he’s not retaliating? But she didn’t, because to speak up would result in questions that Rey couldn’t answer.
And so she watched as Finn’s ship flipped around, tailed Kylo, and shot one powerful blast into the engine. Kyle’s fighter went up in orange fire and came smashing through the hanger. She heard her voice ring around the room before she could stop it.
They had won. Every one of the First Order ships had been decimated, every one but the one smouldering in the hanger. The one with the man on his hands and knees in front of it, wrapped in a cape with stringy hair falling in front of his face. Rey arrived first, having run from the control room, and then Poe was there, jumping out of his X-Wing and launching himself towards them.
Others began to crowd, and Poe held up a hand with a commanding air, begging no one with a blaster to kill the man on the ground. He would be arrested, sure. Interrogated, definitely. But he couldn’t die. Not yet. Not before they had answers about this attack, and more information about why there was no fleet behind him, or where the rest of the First Order was.
When Kylo Ren looked up, his eyes found Rey’s, and she could sense the pain there, even if the force wouldn’t share it with her. There was a plea and no shortage of shame. But this had to have been the plan, it had to have been intentional.
So Rey turned her back on him and walked through the crowd of bystanders, not ready to feel anything else from the man who had closed himself off from her.
The man who only months before has risked his life to save her own.