Rey is happy and content. This is how she knows she is dreaming again.

Luke says she can learn to control her powers even in her dreams, using her time asleep to continue her training, or to explore new worlds. Rey understands this to some extent. Back home on Jakku, her dreams were the only escape she had from the punishment of her life. She could fly among the stars, or be swept into the loving arms of her family, whose shadowed faces in her waking hours became clear as day at night. Luke has guided her meditations as she has learned to take control of her visions, allowing Rey to step from fantasy into fantasy.

In her dreams she has always been powerful, which is why the itch behind her eyelids discomforts her now. Rey is happy in her dreams, but worry tickles at her mind.

She's being watched.

There is only one possible intruder. Luke respects the privacy of her mind, and there are vanishingly few others who have the ability to violate that line. This is no nightmare.

He's smoke, nothing more. Rey turns to find the shimmering shadow behind her, emanating malevolence and curiosity. Her dream brings her lightsaber into her hand, lit and ready. A single swing cuts through the smoky cloud, cutting the vapors to curling ribbons.

"Go away."

Smoke has no form. He cannot be killed. The knowledge forms in her stomach as the shape reforms, clearer now. He's wearing his mask, which makes this easier. Behind the mask, he could be any monster. She strikes again, parting the shadows.

"You know that's not going to work," says Kylo Ren in an irritatingly smug tone.

"You're right."

Rey looks at her lightsaber, and she pictures in her mind a different tool, one of the vacuum-suckers Unkar Plutt used to clean sand out of engines. The weapon shifts to the wide-mouthed tool with the long handle. Rey flicks the switch, and points the sucker at the smoke. In moments, the dark black cloud is pulled into the mouth of the sucker and pulled into the disposable bag at the other end of the handle. Rey smiles.

The cloud reforms. "Care to try again?"

Rey calls him a rude word and wills herself to wake. Her eyes open to darkness and the clammy cold of another night on Ahch-To. From the next tent, she hears the steady breaths of Luke's slumber. Chewbacca is sleeping on the ship. She ought to sleep there herself, rest in a bunk instead of a bedroll on the ground. Instead she crawls out of her tent and goes for a run.

She's forgotten her dream by that night. Only when she rests her head does the itchiness return, the feeling that someone is watching her behind her with her own eyes. Her dream-self turns and spins, but there is no black cloud following her, only unease.

Luke has given her a few lessons on how to shield her mind. She practices this now, imagining a protective shell covering her with a warm, glowing light.

Warmth reminds her of times she honestly can't remember. Her dream parents come to her, beckoned by her longing. "We're so proud of you," her mother tells her, embracing her.

Her father's hand is on her shoulder, squeezing. "A Jedi in the family? That will be something to brag about."

"I'm not a Jedi yet," Rey tells them, as she always does.

"The Jedi are dead," says the voice behind her. Her parents look. Rey refuses.

"Why don't you introduce us to your friend?" her mother says, and Rey knows she is no longer in control of her dream.

She will not look at him. "You need to go. He's a killer. He'll hurt you. He wants to kill me."

"I don't want you dead, Rey," says the voice. He's right behind her, speaking in a low voice into her ear. "You know that."

"Run," she tells her parents, but her parents are gone. They were never here. Dreams aren't real. "You aren't real," she says to Kylo Ren.

"That isn't true. I'm the only real one here with you." He stands before her, although she hasn't moved. He holds out his arm, and she sees where her parents are walking away. "They're the false ones."

"It doesn't matter." Rey closes her eyes, prepared to wake up and lose another night's sleep.

Ren grabs her wrist. He's solid, flesh and stone. Touching this way, she can feel the puffs of his breath, and sense the silvery jumping thoughts inside his mind, flashing on one thing and another. Anger, guilt, worry, attraction, fear, hope, hate, these compete for his attention and capture hers. Could she bridle these emotions, direct her to her own ends?

He lets go, seeing the intent in her mind. "It's not that easy, scavenger."

Rey wakes up. It is the middle of the night.

By the third day, Luke notices she's no longer sleeping through the night. "You need your rest. You're physically exerting yourself past what you're used to."

"I used to climb through the belly of dead Star Destroyers in the desert."

"This is different." He's infuriatingly calm. He isn't reading her thoughts because he isn't that rude. Nonetheless, she feels that Luke can see through her tales of insomnia like she's a five year old telling lies about where the sweets went.

"I'm having bad dreams," she allows, which only brings questions. She should be practicing her lucid dreamwork.

Chewbacca joins them for meals. He's no Jedi, but he's known Jedi for most of his life, and he's as insightful as one. Taking a huge bite out of his own breakfast, his stare bores through her, then turns to Luke. With a growl, he tells his old friend the cub is visiting her at night.

Luke's face draws into a careful blank, the same he wears whenever his nephew is mentioned. Rey speaks Kylo Ren's name as a curse, Chewbacca as a moaned sigh full of anger and regret.

Her teacher watches her. "Is that true?" A pointless question whose answer he already knows.

"They're just dreams," but the lie is hot on her tongue and he has no reason to accept it.

"We'll work on your mental shields today. I'll teach you to defend yourself."

"He's not attacking me. He's just watching" The admission brings the slightest movement of muscle on Luke's cheek. He hadn't been sure, not really sure. He hoped Chewbacca was wrong.

He closes his eyes in thought. "He can pluck thoughts from your mind if you're not protected. Ben pulled names, faces, the location of worlds from my mind, and he used that information to murder people."

The words are quiet, filled with answers to questions she hasn't brought herself to ask. Setting himself apart from his sister and all the people he cared about meant protecting them from accidental betrayal by his own thoughts and emotions. Ren's first victims had been those close enough for him to hurt.

"I'll learn," she says, because there are lines on Luke's face she helped put there.

Rey makes excuses to herself not to sleep that night. Her brain is thick and too full with knowledge, sloshing with old Jedi lore and new tricks. She spends the lingering hours under the stars practicing how to breathe and listening to the few insects who still buzz at this time of year as they scrabble for carrion and bird dung along the shore. The Force moves through their delicate wings and kyber-hard shells, connecting her to each small life, connecting them out to each dim star far above, and every life that lives on every world circling those stars in their endless dance.

She slips from meditation into sleep without realizing it. The sky is still dark, the insects still chatter, and the dark cloud sits beside her on the wet grass, solid as water.

"Go away," she tells him, drawing power around her like a beetle's carapace.

Ren leans back on his arms, staring upward at the stars. If he is scanning them for familiar points, attempting to triangulate her position, he's going to be in for a surprise because Rey doesn't know the positions of the stars. They twinkle above her in the same constellations as her nights back on Jakku, all the nights of her life.

"The odd thing is," he says, "my uncle taught me these same tricks he's showing you. I know the means to bypass them. He can only teach you what he knows. I've learned far more since I left his side. Would you like to see?"

"You have nothing to teach me that I want to know." She stands, and she sees that she is no longer wearing her usual clothes, the hard-wearing cloth that is all she owns. This is a dream, and not only her own. As she stares at her arms and down her body, she finds herself awash in glittery darkness, as if she is gowned in the night sky. Distant pulsars shimmer down her side, and stars in every hue glimmer as she moves. It's a mercy the neckline is high and the skirt is low.

She stands with one hand at her hip. "I assume this is your doing?"

"You look better draped in starlight. If I'm to be dragged here nightly to stare at you, you may as well be pleasant to look at."

Rey swallows the barb. Good. She'd rather Ren not enjoy seeing her. "What do you mean, dragged here? You've been invading my dreams."

He moves to his feet in a motion that has nothing to do with his body. "Hardly. Your dreams are dull. Parents you don't remember and stories from your childhood? Boring."

"Then leave," Rey says in exasperation.

"I can't," he replies in the same tone. "You called me here. You keep calling me here. I could be enjoying myself in my own dreams getting to know a troupe of dancing girls, or decapitating people who annoy me. Instead, I find myself here on this chilly, boring island with you as you work out your issues."

She wants to say cruel things about Ren's own issues, to point out his choice in dreams is indistinguishable from a petulant fifteen year old's. She wants to fight him. She wants to flee. But if he was capable of hurting her here, she would already be dead, therefore he can't harm her. He can't get her location, and she doesn't know the current whereabouts of the Resistance, only that they will have surely have found a new base. It is possible Kylo Ren is telling her the truth. He doesn't wish to be here any more than she wants him here.

"Luke taught me how to control my dreams," she says, feeling the words take solid form inside the air before her. "You started appearing once I learned."

"I told you that you called me."

She shakes her head. "I would never call you. I don't want you here. I've told you to leave. Why are you still here?"

His shrug carries a deep disinterest. He's wearing starlight, she notices, amid a deeper shade of darkness, and the stars surrounding him are muted and sullen.

"I'm going to wake up now," Rey says, and she opens her eyes to find she's still sitting in her meditation pose. The cold night air has sunk into her muscles. Above her, the stars watch and have nothing to say.

He's there the next night.

And the one after.

Rey sleeps on the Falcon, hoping her nightly visitor will be too furious with his own childhood issues to set foot aboard the ship. In her dreams, she is happy, visiting with her parents until her mother takes her hand and smiles down at Rey's glimmering dress.

"I'll see you later," Rey says, banishing them. "Where are you?" she grumbles. A half-shadow against the wall reforms into her hated enemy.

"Don't stop on my account."

She glares at him, and moves out of her cabin. She's familiar enough with the ship to know her way around, and she supposes so is he. She moves to the cockpit, sitting in the pilot's seat with an insouciant smile as she reads the discomfort on his face. "Don't mind me," Rey said, turning to the control panel.

"This ship should be mine."

"There are a lot of things you think ought to be yours that aren't and won't be." She doesn't intend to dredge up a vision of her lightsaber, but there it sits on the other chair. Ren lifts it into his hand with a thought, but he's spent many nights on his own dreaming of the handle smooth in his own grip. She knows this for a fact.

"I can teach you how to use this."

"I have a teacher."

"I'm better than he is. The next time I fight him, he'll lose. Skywalker knows it. That's why he ran away."

She shakes her head. "He ran to keep you from hurting the people he loved."

"How did that work out?" Ren asks with a thin smile. How dare he stand here and smile. Rey feels the rage boiling in her belly. The lightsaber yanks from his grip and into her hand, and lights at a thought.

His smile doesn't waver. "Good," Ren says. "Anger is the first step."

Rey wakes up in her bunk, and she bites the inside of her mouth to stay awake the rest of the night.

She makes Han join her in the next dream, recreating him from the few strong memories she carries. Ren stays away, lurking at the edge of her vision as she asks his father every inane question she can think of.

The visits with her parents don't hurt. Rey has no memories of them, not real ones. The images she has left of those days are clouded. For all she knows, she never knew her own parents and was raised by some distant cousin, or her grandparents. She stayed on Jakku to wait for her family, but she doesn't know the shape of that family, and her fantasies of them are just fantasies. Han Solo was a friend, a good friend for all that she knew him so briefly, and chattering away with his shadow stabs her in places she's still sore.

She wonders if Luke has these same conversations with the dead, walking the paths of his lonely island beside the footsteps of those he's loved until his heart cracks all over again.

Han fades, and Kylo remains, a broken mirror unable to bury his own demons.

Rey wakes up in the darkness of another Ahch-To night.

"Teach me, then," she says, opening her dream eyes to see him waiting there.

"Teach you what?"

"You know how to fight. You think you're better at it than I am. Show me."

Ren's mouth moves into a smirk. "I am far better at this than you are." Her lightsaber is in his hand and his body is instantly in the first ready position Luke taught her. Rey thinks, and an identical lightsaber is in her own hand. She enjoys his sudden scowl and the reminder that Vader's blade is not and never will be his.

He walks her through the same basic exercises Rey knows from her waking world, then spins into an attack, forcing her to parry with the movements she's still learning from Luke. Exercise in a dream doesn't tax her muscles or steal her breath. They spar for hours, the island giving way to a plain room with a wooden floor and simple walls. "Jedi trained here," Ren tells her, and with a cast of his hand she sees decorations crawl over the walls to tell her stories. The Temple. The Order. The War. The Fall. Luke told her these tales and must have told the same ones to his last protégé, though Luke's stories were not so filled with blood and he has never told them with the moral that the Jedi deserved to die.

Seeing her distraction, Ren attacks harder. Rey falls back on her own knowledge, using the lightsaber as a staff. Ren takes a step backwards.

"Wrong. You'll wind up dead. Hold it correctly."

She changes her hold and he attacks again. "You want me dead. You should encourage me to fail."

They clash, two blue lights matching as their faces glow. "I don't want you dead," he says, and she knows he's telling her the truth. "You're more useful as an ally," he says, and she can feel his half-deception, squirming into other thoughts he doesn't share.

They fight, and she copies his stances, and they fight, and she improvises new ones, and they fight.

Rey wakes to the sound of Chewbacca calling her for breakfast. It's past dawn.

"You're getting better," Luke tells her as Rey moves through her forms gracefully.

"I'm learning from the best," she quips and the words are ash on her tongue.

The Dark Side promises power. Rey senses it like a living presence inside Kylo Ren, feels it like a lover whispering behind her ear. Just reach out, it purrs, and seize your destiny. Rey turns her head, and she focuses on her natural abilities. Inside the dream, she can move planets. Outside, she's still working on pebbles.

Ren would like to touch her mind, but they are already sharing their dreams and that's more than enough closeness. Instead he directs her meditations, knowing Rey will shy away from the paths of vengeance and fear. It's a challenge, one that grows her mental abilities as quickly as her physical ones.

"You are the best student I've ever had," Luke tells her one night as they are watching his campfire. "You have a lot still to learn, but you're pick things up faster than anyone I've ever known."

Pride flickers in her the same as the flames before her jump in joy. Jedi do not indulge in those sorts of emotions, Luke has warned her and Kylo has sneered.

She's not a Jedi. Not now. Not yet.

Rey is dressed in the night sky, running barefoot from rock to rock, sparring and dancing with her second teacher as they move together. She is learning his ways, rejecting the dark power he's offering beside them. When they meet again face to face, there is a good chance she will best him in battle, and she does not know why he's helping her.

"You know if I become powerful enough, I can strike you down." If this were real, she would be out of breath, but Rey is alight with her own abilities here.

"If you become powerful enough, you might be a sufficient challenge not to bore me to death before I kill you."

She strikes at him, slashing and pushing. Kylo does not react well when she takes the offensive, preferring to teach her defense. His own defenses are weaker, less practiced. He steps back under her onslaught until the blue blade is at his throat.

"Tell me the truth," Rey demands.

Kylo closes his eyes, and she feels him wake up, wherever he is.

She is alone in her dream, wearing a starfield and wielding a lightsaber.

She's afraid of what his answer would have been.

"We should rejoin Leia and the others," Luke says over breakfast. "She's anxious for us to return."

Rey takes some bread. "She called the ship?" Artoo whistles a negative.

"No. I can sense her. I can usually sense what she's feeling. I've tried shielding away my own emotions from her to protect her." His face breaks into a kind, sad smile. "Mostly I just manage to irritate her."

Chewbacca growls his agreement, and tells Luke it's about time he heads home.

"It's not home. Home is long gone. But it's where I should be."

Rey eats the rest of her meal in a few bites. "When do we leave?"

"It will take me a few hours to finish packing. I want to bring the books with me." Luke had discovered mouldering tomes with real writing stored here in the ruins. If he's the last Jedi, Rey guesses he has the right to them.

Rey loves her lessons, but she loves flying far more. Her hands caress the controls of the Millennium Falcon like a long-lost lover, and she sees the same adoration on Luke's face as he sits in the cockpit. He spent the best parts of his youth here with his dearest friends. Rey rather hopes for the same chance.

When they're in hyperspace, Luke takes the opportunity to train her in zero-G, turning off the artificial gravity over Artoo's protesting whines. Chewbacca buckles himself in his seat and refuses to budge while Rey floats and dodges and flies.

When she goes back to her bunk, hours later and with the gravity back on, she doesn't expect to see Kylo in her dreams. Part of her believed he was part of the planet's strange pull, but here he is, dressed in shimmery starlight. In her dream, she can fly again, feet lifting off pleasantly from the deck as Kylo watches her in amusement.

"Flying dreams? Aren't you too old for this?"

"Fight me up here."

He ignites the lightsaber, and she knows it must mean something that his dream self always chooses the same blue she does, never his red menacing nightmare. They spar in space, the ship fading away around them until there is nothing but the star-flecked void.

He twists, bringing himself up beside her suddenly with a quick kick, and to her surprise, he kisses her.

Rey startles awake.

It's ship's night, and she wanders to the small galley for a drink of water and a furtive look around for the alcohol she knows Han stored here somewhere. But the ship was stripped bare long ago, and the only things aboard are what she, Chewie, Luke, and Artoo each brought with them. Rey owns the clothes she's wearing, and she's got a lightsaber on what she considers an extended loan. If Luke won't take it back from her, perhaps his sister will when they rendezvous.

"You could give it to me," Kylo says, standing beside her.

Her jaw trembles. "I'm awake. You can't be here."

Kylo rolls his eyes at her, reaches out, and draws a smiling face in the air with his finger. "You're not awake. You woke up inside your dream. Haven't you done that before?" He pokes around the galley and finds a bottle she knows wasn't there a minute ago. "Drink?"

"Why did you kiss me?"

"Drink," he says, and removes the lid himself, throat taking deep swallows. When he tips the bottle back, he drains it, only for a full one to remain in his hand when he's finished.

"You hate me," Rey says. "I hate you. This is not going to change."

"I can work with hate," he says. "Channel that, and the next thing you know, you'll be ruling the galaxy."

"I don't want to rule the galaxy!"

"Then what do you want?!"

They're staring at each other, angry and unreal. Somewhere on a First Order ship, Kylo Ren is turning and muttering in his sleep. On the real Falcon, Rey is deep inside a dream in her own bunk. Nothing they do here matters.

She kisses him back.

Kylo's eyes get bigger. He wasn't expecting this. "Not my first guess."

She shakes her head. "This is not what I want. You are vile." She follows the word with another kiss, enjoying the dip of his head as he moves with her this time. Their teeth bump, and she drags her mouth back to bite his lip.

"Want doesn't have anything to do with anything else," he says, trying to sound wise and failing miserably. They've fought dozens of times and this is the first time he's ever been out of breath.

She wants starlight. She wants to fly. The small galley vanishes, leaving them surrounded by space, wearing the night clinging to their skin. Her lips find a cluster of nebulae on his collar, and chase comets down his stomach. The stars glittering on her shimmer inside her, tingling as Kylo nuzzles the constellation covering her breasts.

Rey is swimming in the stars, and her own stars surround them. Bare, her skin against his, they are warm in the dead cold vacuum, because the dream allows it so. Kylo's mouth explores her lips, and his hands touch her waist. Rey's hands glide past firm, muscled skin to take a tight grasp on his backside. He growls into her mouth, his right hand sliding between her legs.

In their dream, his fingers find her sensitive places with ease, stroking one steady thumb back and forth across the aching nerves of her clit exactly the way Rey's own hand moves when she pleasures herself.

There's a delight in his eyes and on his face, pulling that knowledge from her easily, watching the many nights she's spent alone, rapturous against her own touch. Some of the nights are quite recent. "You've been thinking about me."

"No."

"You have."

"Yes," Rey says with a gasp as two fingers dive inside her. Her own fingers have work to do, guided by her glimpses into Kylo's nights alone. Her index finger finds the tight pucker of his entrance and pokes inside to the first knuckle.

He swears into her mouth, and she feels his body shudder and convulse, feels the warmth of his peak echo against her, but this is a dream, and he doesn't make a mess against her stomach, and he's still hard for her as his eyes blink back to see her again after the whiteout of his vision.

"You like that," Rey says, smirking around more kisses.

"The Sith were fools but they knew passion was a virtue, not a vice." She is floating and Kylo's mouth is no longer kissing her but instead is between her thighs, replacing the work of his hand with the quick, hot licks of his tongue. Rey squirms and pants, unused to this intensity of sensation, and her own peak hits her, and she is wet for him as he laps her again and again.

The stars are everywhere, and his prick is sudden and thick within her, filling her as she's boneless from her climax. His eyes are dark, urging her on. Rey feels another peak building as her fingers find her own clit again. She is created of starlight, and so is he, merging in the distant light of suns that blazed and died a million years ago. They are the only two in their private galaxy, pushing into one another with deeper strokes, touching the places within each had thought long dark and dead, pouring light inside as they churn with the wheel of the galaxy.

When they finish, they rest against each other, back in her bunk, touching with weak kisses while they recover. Then they go again and again. This is want. It doesn't have to mean anything when they wake up.

She knows it will. Kylo agrees, bringing her hand to his mouth and kissing each finger. They will someday grasp the lightsaber that will strike him down. He has trained her to best him because it is the only way he will be free. He has allowed her to love him because they both know she will try to find a different ending to the destiny they both sense drawing them together.

"We'll think of something," Rey says, sealing the promise with words. She draws Kylo to her, and makes love to him again, her heart full of stars.

Rey knows that she must be dreaming. She is happy and content.

end