Takes place during Star Wars: The Last Jedi. My submission for the tumblr two-halves-of-reylo week 2 challenge: sand.

The first time, Kylo Ren thinks it might be a fluke. Speculative, correlative, a moment of weakness. But by the second time, he knows for sure.

She comes to him when he is at his lowest.

For their second force bond, its the first moment in hours that he's had to himself. While the constant stream of people talking and reporting and needing something from him makes him grit his teeth against the desire to fling everyone against a wall, the moment he is alone is its own sort of torture. He's supposed to be surveying one of the factories on the Supremecy but all he can think of, as he stares at the swinging robot arms and the shower of blue incandescent sparks, is the height of the drop to the factory floor. Of how long it would take to watch something tumble from here into the darkness. And to contemplate the nature of bonds and chains, how broken ones give way to new, heavier ones when the victory that broke them is hollow.

So, of course, she comes to him.

He feels the force shift, placid waves disturbed by a vortex that is at once luminous and violent, a cascade of colors from blue to violet that even in their darkest hue still burn him in their brightness. With it comes the scent of salt and sand, though he cannot say if it belongs to the driest desert or the deepest ocean, and also the slight smell of charred carbon that could be firewood but in this combination he will always associate with the green burning of Takodana.

It is her. Galaxies separate them, but even faced away he recognizes the feel of her from that time—what felt like so long ago—when he captured her in the forest, and again on Starkiller. The incongruity of her force signature like a perfect storm howling around that slight form that tumbled unconsciously into his arms. That same storm buffeting him as she swung her blade with nothing but traces of his own experience—the parts she took from him in that interrogation room—his own training used against him. How it seared him, body and force, when her aim struck true.

That she was the first person—girl—woman—he had ever held in his arms is not lost to him. His mouth drags downward, resentment curling sharp in his gut. This scavenger, this nobody, becoming unique to him in any capacity...

He turns, latching on to that ember of anger as a weapon. By the magnitude of agitation in the force, he expects to find her already waiting for him, dark eyes fierce and teeth bared, the barrel of a gun pointed at his temple.

What he actually sees makes him pause.

She is not looking at him. She is standing, hand outstretched to some invisible thing, droplets of water on her upturned face and a smile curving her chapped lips.

Like usual, he can't see her surroundings. Just her.

The fire in him banks. He would be angry at how she defies him, even his expectations, but there is something about the unguarded way she looks that tells him she will hate him more for this moment then any other, past or future.

He watches in silence as her awareness of him steals over her body like a ripple on a smooth surface. Her shoulders tense, the smile on her face fades into something impassive. She does not acknowledge him, at first. Like if she holds her silence, the moment is not real. He will fade to nothing and she will remain unmoved.

Among other things, he is a spiteful person.

"It is called rain," he breaks the silence, almost gently.

Her eyes flicker to his, and the resentment he finds there swallows his own paltry emotions and spits them at his feet. The force swirling around her is alive and it fills this barren observation room like a feral creature. It is almost amusing, how much ferocity is contained in such a small vessel. Despite himself, the corner of his mouth tugs upward just a little.

Her dark eyes stare into his, unforgiving, and that too amuses him. She thinks she knows so much.

"It's just water," she tells him coldly.

He knows what she means. The X'us'R'iia, raging storms on Jakku, spinning cyclones of towering sand and cloud and lightning that could wear away flesh to bone within an hour of being caught. A hundred memories of ramshackle cover float into his mind—the durasteel sheet of an X-wing, the door of a fallen cargo rig, the scratched walls of an AT-AT. He can almost feel her tallies, the mark of her days, under his fingertips as he is reminded yet again: hers was a limited existence.

She has only ever known rain as a torrent of sand.

Pity flashes through him, catching him by surprise. It burns in his gut, this flagrant reminder of the Supreme Leader's warning—he feels empathy for this girl, this random, inconsequential person, when so many hundreds of more important people have meant nothing to him.

His emotion must have passed through the bond, because he sees her face tighten, her eyes flash. Ah, there it is. Her anger, a whirlpool in the force, heightening in ferocity even as his own cools, replaced with fathomless calm. And deeper, a sense of irony.

There is no emotion, there is peace.

The words float up to him as if by grace, even as Rey takes a step toward him, poison on her tongue.

There is no passion, there is serenity.

Later, after she has accused him of being a monster, he wipes the rain water from his face and stares at his glove with growing certainty. One time, a fluke. But twice? No. Someone—maybe the force itself—must be toying with him.

The rain droplets glimmer against his hand, defiant motes of light even as he clenches his fist.

There are more stars in the sky, he thinks, then sand grains on a beach. A billion worlds, a billion lives. And yet, it is not they that he sees, that come to him in his darkest days.

Just her.