When: Room 1, Day 3, Morning
Where: The Dining Room
Status: Complete
Rating: Low
The situation in the house seemed to be going from bad to worse. Not only were they no further along in figuring out a way to get out, now there were rats swarming the upper floors. Having made sure the door to the padded cell that she and Leia had been sharing was shut tight, hoping it would keep the majority, if not all, of the rodents out, Rey made her way back downstairs, away from the chaos.
Her search of the Billiard Room the previous day had been disappointing, moreso because she couldn’t escape the feeling that she’d missed something. She had been in half a mind to go straight back there and resume combing the room - perhaps covering the half she’d reluctantly entrusted to Max - but her conversation about the mummified cat had sent its former keeper there to listen to the cylinders about Howard Carter and The Valley of the Kings and Rey wasn’t in the mood for an audience while she searched. Besides, years of experience told her that returning to the same scavenge spot so soon wasn’t to be advised. She knew it was much better to wait until she could go at the problem with relatively fresh eyes again.
With that in mind, when she got to the bottom of the grand staircase, she doubled back on herself and slipped through the doors to the dining room. She had passed through the room on her first day in the house - it felt like a long time ago now - but not since and certainly not for long enough to search it properly. However, she must have come through a different set of doors that first time and she realised, as she stepped into the room and let the door shut softly behind her, that she hadn’t quite appreciated then the spectacle created by the wall of mirrors that ran parallel to the enormous dining table.
Rey frowned as she approached the table, watching, transfixed, as her reflection did the same. There was something about the way she looked in the tarnished surface of the glass, the slight lag to her movements (or was it just a trick of the flickering light from the sconces on the wall?), which gave her a sudden yet strong memory of being in the dark, forbidding sea cave on Ahch-To. It chilled her to her core and she gave an involuntary shudder as she tore her eyes away.
Rey’s sense of foreboding was not entirely unwarranted, though the present danger did not arise - at least, not solely - from her flickering reflection in the highly polished wooden table.
For many years, Kylo had never been seen by anyone apart from his inner circle without his trademark mask and billowing cloak. In the early days of his defection from the New Republic, the disguise had been necessary. He was little more than a child then, and one with a famous family. When he rejected their name and chose a new identity, the mask had helped to conceal his past. After ten years, this no longer seemed so important to hide his face, but his decision to become the posterboy for the First Order had been a relatively recent one. There were few people who had seen it and lived to tell the tale, and fewer still in this strange place in which he’d now found himself trapped.
The effect, of course, was that he now found it far easier to hide in plain sight. Even so, he’d been cautious in the first days of his presence here, keeping primarily to his bedroom and avoiding the common areas except when it was necessary for him to leave. There were several members of the Resistance milling around, perhaps still more from the First Order, and though they were not likely to recognize him, a close encounter with Poe Dameron suggested that he was not entirely out of the woods. He was also sure - at least relatively sure - that Rey was here. Though they’d agreed to a ceasefire, the alliance was an uneasy one, as Rey was the only person here who could link Kylo Ren to his past and, effectively, fuck everything up for him forever.
He’d decided to venture outside of his room in search of - whatever clues this strange house might have to offer. This corner of the house had seemed quiet, and had sounded relatively empty (and thus hopefully ratless). He stepped into the room just as Rey suddenly pulled away from the table, finding his image multiplied in a series of massive and dimly lit mirrors that lined the hall surrounding her. He was fairly confident that she’d seen at least one of him.
“What did you see?”
The sound of the all too familiar voice made Rey’s breath catch in her throat as her gaze snapped back up to the mirror. Behind her in the reflection, she could make out the form of Kylo Ren. He wasn’t wearing his normal black tunic, no doubt forced instead to wear clothes out of a similar suitcase to the one she herself had been given when she’d arrived, but it was unmistakably him.
Although Rey had rationally known that it was only a matter of time before she would run into him in the house, she felt woefully unprepared for seeing him now.
“The reflection,” she said, forcing her voice to stay low and firm. She lifted a hand and slowly clicked her fingers, watching as her mirror-self did the same, just a fraction of a second later. “It’s like in the cave on the island.” She turned her head to look over her shoulder at the only other person in the galaxy who knew about her visit to that cave.
Kylo looked at her from under the brim of a large grey felt hat that left his eyes in shadow. On someone else, the look might have been intimidating. On him, it mostly just looked oversized, but did him the favor of pinning his ears in.
“You saw what you saw in the cave because the force was reaching out to you. Do you feel it here?” He asked, stepping in her direction, but maintaining distance. If Rey had discovered a way to connect to the force in this place, Kylo didn’t want to make any sudden moves until he felt it, too.
“No,” Rey admitted at once, looking down. She hadn’t been able to feel the Force at all since being trapped in the house, although being reminded of it made her feel a little crestfallen.
There was a moment of stillness before Rey lifted her gaze again to meet Kylo Ren’s. Moving slowly, like he had, she turned to face him fully, her own expression growing steely.
“Don’t worry,” she said in a clipped tone. “I haven’t been given an unfair advantage.” She just knew that was what Kylo was thinking. A ripple of disappointment passed through her, as it so often did when she thought about all the ways things had gone wrong since she’d left Ahch-To, when she thought about him.
“What are you doing in here?”
Kylo nodded solemnly, disappointed that their connection to the force remained elusive. “That isn’t why I asked.” It was half true. He had no interest in being outgunned, obviously, but if Rey’s connection had returned, perhaps his wouldn’t be far off. Now, he supposed, they were back to where they started.
“I wanted to learn more about this place. Whatever forces surround this house, they must be incredibly powerful, and unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. The force connects all things in the universe. Something more powerful than that defies understanding.” In a way, the thought was more comforting than thinking that something had permanently impeded his ability to feel the force. A temporary inconvenience brought about by some madman with unusual powers was better than being stripped of something he’d come to see as his birthright. Something that separated him from the mass of ordinary people who couldn’t understand him. What was he without that?
Rey always felt slightly off kilter when she was talking to Kylo, whether it was in person or through the Force bond they’d once shared. In all other matters, she was so sure of herself but, with him, she felt like she was standing on constantly shifting sand. It was disconcerting. She hadn’t been expecting him to correct her assumption. Moreover, she hadn’t expected to believe him. She never did and, yet, somehow…
Rey blinked, her chest rising and falling beneath the flimsy fabric of her dress. Hearing him speak, she realised she had been thinking about her disconnection from the Force in different terms to Kylo up until then. Where he’d seen a superior power, a threat that he wanted to understand and defeat, Rey had spent the last two days trying to wrap her mind around theories of alternate dimensions, molecular displacement and wormholes, dredging from her memory everything she’d ever read about the laws governing hyperspace travel in the hope that she’d remember something useful. So far, however, she’d come up blank and, worryingly, now that she’d heard Kylo’s interpretation, she felt like his theory might have more weight than hers. It scared her. The idea of something being more powerful than the Force was incomprehensible.
Whatever forces were at work here, whoever’s theory was right, Rey did find that she agreed with him (that seemed to be happening uncomfortably often lately) on what the next steps needed to be: learning more about the place they found themselves trapped in.
“I want to search this room,” Rey announced with determination, trying not so show how much his words had rattled her as she stepped away from Kylo Ren and walked along the length of the table. When she reached the end, she stopped and turned back to face him, a degree of hesitancy in the movement.
“Does our scope for limited collaboration mean that you’re going to help me? Because, if not, perhaps you could just...”