19. Chapter 19

The door to the Vestibule responds easily to her command this time, a susurration of power that ripples from her fingers to the barrier, flowing not from a closed fist this time but from a wave of her open hand. It feels right, it feel easy . She shoots Kylo a quick sideways glance, gauging his reaction to her performance, and he nods in approval, a hint of pride tingling their connection.

Kylo Ren hurries them back across the Vestibule to the door on the opposite side of the wide empty chamber. It’s the same grey stone burnished to a mirror sheen and it opens to the same gesture of power. Side by side, they enter the hall. The ceiling is lower here, the stone thick jointed slabs, scuffed and chipped from eons of wear. The feel of this place is different too, not the cool ethereal resonance of the main temple room or the warm whimsy of the Archive, but something more tangible, more practical. "What did you say this place was?”

“Barracks for the Knights. This is where they lived day to day.” He nudges her shoulder as she slows to peer through an empty doorframe, catching a glimpse of ranks of bunk beds. “There’s nothing useful in there. Come on.”

“I’ll bet I could find something,” she snips back as he herds her further down the featureless stone hall. She thinks the twitch around his eyes and mouth might be amusement, but she wouldn’t bet on that. She follows him onward until the hall opens up into a high ceilinged room. The air smells odd and she sniffs, curious, as she steps out into the center of the room. The floor isn’t stone. It has a little bit of give - some kind of wood, maybe? She wouldn’t know - there’s not much wood on Jakku, but it’s nothing like she’s ever encountered and it adds a little extra spring to her step as she crosses it to look at the walls.

They are decorated with cloth hangings, and she’s never seen anything like that, either. She puts her face up close to marvel at the tiny designs in thread and ink picked out in greys, blues, reds, and greens in the finest detail. It’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen and it’s just hanging on the walls with no purpose except to be looked at. Very, very carefully, she steps back from it; she never wants to risk hurting something that magnificent.

Kylo joins her, glancing around the room as though it’s nothing special. “I think this was a training room of some kind. The really interesting things are through the door over there.” Despite the low rumble of urgency radiating off him, she doesn’t want to leave the astonishing room.

Rey could spend hours here trying to learn all the details of the pictures and still want more. Even as she turns away, she burns small scenes into her memory: an unrecognizable humanoid species dual wielding swords against something with too many heads to count, a pack of canids running through a river. She drags her eyes away from the hangings, fixes them on Kylo’s face. “Can we come back here sometime? Before…”

His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows and nods, the quiet chill of resignation passing between them unmentioned.   “You like it that much?” He looks back to the tapestries, nodding. “If we have time, we can certainly come back.”

Rey curves a corner of her mouth up in a sad little smile. “Thanks.” The small wave of pleasure he feels at her thanks flows over his buzzing impatience. She turns her back to the wall hangings and starts towards the door Kylo indicated. “What’s the floor for?”

“Standing on?” He challenges her with a raised eyebrow and a smug look.

“Funny,” Rey says dryly. “You should have your own cantina act.” She rolls her eyes, but some of the tension in her shoulders eases.

“Do you really want to know about the floor?” There’s something lighter to his tone. It tickles at the back of her mind as she moves towards the door.

“Yes!” Suddenly, something snags her ankle, sends her pitching forward. Rey tucks her head as she goes sprawling. The floor flexes, just a little, where her shoulder hits and there’s no savage impact as her weight comes down. She rolls out of the fall, scrambling back to her feet and spinning to face Kylo.

“All this just to fall without it hurting? I guess things were different back in the day.”

He snorts. “You could say that. Do you understand what I did there?”

“The ankle snare with the Force?” Frowning at the springy stretch of floor in front of her, she tries to capture the moment in her mind again. He had distracted her with something, an intonation in his voice she hadn’t heard before, and then there had been resistance against her foot where she hadn’t expected it. “No.”

“Okay.” His footsteps creak on the wood behind her. “Don’t move. Close your eyes. Feel with the Force, now.”

The back of her neck prickles as Rey complies. It’s still odd, it doesn’t feel right, to let her guard down even this little. Her ears strain towards him until she finds the Force, can feel through it all the ages of trainees who had taken falls here, submitted to instruction, searched the same feelings, walked the same paths. The Force guides her as it always has, and through it she senses a thick serpentine coil as it loops around her ankle, an extension of Kylo’s will made manifest. “I feel it.”

“I know.” She feels him smile through the Force, a strange new harmonization within their connection, an added layer of meaning. “Can you get out of it?”

Rey scrunches her nose and, balancing her weight on the free leg, works to extract the ensnared limb. It moves with her, a few inches off the ground, and then snaps her foot back down. Furrowing her brow, she tries again, but stepping forward or back, it’s the same.

“It’s not a physical thing. Stop treating it like one.” His voice is much closer now, quiet and heated against her ear.  She takes a tense deep breath and sinks deeper into the embrace of the Force. “Think, Rey.”

Use the Force. All at once, the thought is simply there, as though it’s always been there. Instinct prickles, or maybe it’s the phantom touch at her ankle; this far into the center of herself she’s no longer certain. Then again, advice like that should have been useless, should have prompted the question ‘ Use it how? ’ But she understands, for the Force is hers just as much as it’s his, or anyone else’s, or perhaps that’s backwards and they belong to it . Either way, after a false start she wedges her own will against the restraint and pushes back, slipping out and opening her eyes. Her heart hammers in her chest and sweat itches around her nose, but she did it. She can do it. She feels it in her bones, in her blood. This power is hers.

His hand grips her shoulder, warm through her tunic, and there’s a surge of approval through the bond. “Next time, don’t take five minutes to get out of it.”

She huffs at the admonition, but it’s easier the second time, and the third. As she learns the holds, she learns to feel his intent as it forms and react to that instead of waiting until her motion is restricted. The annoyance that creases his features the first time she preempts him is something she’ll treasure forever. Her successes encourage her to push harder, to send her own short bursts of power after him. She can’t convince them to stretch and ensnare the way he can, but she feels the sting where they connect against his body on her own skin.

Such prolonged use of the Force wears her down faster than she’d like. The next successful binding he throws around her legs sends her crashing to the floor, rolling and coming to a rest on her back, chest heaving and sweat cooling on her skin. She closes her eyes and rests for a moment as his footsteps draw near.

“Are you planning on lying there all afternoon?” He nudges her with the toe of his boot. “Get up.”

The smile she feels tugging at her cheeks is an unfamiliar gesture after so little use these last days. Working with Kylo is very different from Master Luke’s lectures, endless rounds of meditation, and combat drills. But she doesn’t want to think about that right now. Whatever it takes to get out of here, she had promised herself. She’d deal with any Dark Side contamination afterwards. Survival comes first.

The thought sobers her, wipes the smile off her face as she opens her eyes. He extends his bare hand to her and she grasps it, skin against skin.  Energy floods her body through their connected palms, a surprise rejuvenation. She hops back to her feet and drops his palm but the strength remains coursing hot in her limbs. “What now?”

She feels good, she wants to get back to training. “What’s interesting? What’s next?”

“You need to get better at the bindings. The projectiles are a start, but you need to be able to root an opponent in place.”

“Why? Is Snoke going to try and run away?” She can’t see the Supreme Leader doing that.

Kylo grimaces, “He didn’t get old by standing and dying nobly. More to the point, if he gets into my head while we’re fighting him, I would like you to have a non-lethal way to keep me from killing you.”

“Oh,” The consideration sends a chill down her back, she hadn’t been thinking in those lines when Kylo had mentioned Snoke messing with their heads in combat. “That seems sensible.”

He narrows his eyes at her, through the bond she finds him as disturbed by the idea as she is. “Begin.”

The Force answers her thoughts and gestures, quick and easy, but refuses to wrap around his legs. “Are you doing something to counter this?” Rey wipes sweat out of her eyes and scowls in frustration.

“You tell me.” Kylo’s look of calm shoots a little frisson of irritation down her spine.

Another deep breath; she centers herself, pushing frustration aside, and tries again. It’s not a physical thing, it doesn’t move like a coil of wire or rope and her familiarity with the physical comparisons is almost a hindrance.

Will it to be so.

Kylo’s voice murmurs inside her mind and it feels like cheating, to just want something and have it manifest It goes against everything she’s experienced, but he’s the instructor, so there must be something to that advice.

She wants this, needs this power to destroy Snoke, to escape .

Something clamps over his foot for an instant before he steps easily out of it, and she doesn’t need to be told to try again. Standing quietly in the center of the floor, she fights with her mind, learning to weaponize concentration. Her legs slowly go numb with the lack of motion and, in time, just give up, dumping her without ceremony onto her backside. Rey makes a disgusted sound as she sits back up and begins massaging life back into her legs.

Kylo pushes hair away from where it’s plastered to his forehead. “That was good. You learn quickly and you have natural instincts for letting the Force guide your movements. Tomorrow we’ll work on mixing that with hand to hand combat. That will give you a working foundation.”

She stands cautiously, stamping her tingling feet against the floor and covering a yawn with her fist. “What next?”

“Rest,” he declares. “There’s nothing to be gained burning out on the first day.”