adarkergray | Kenoma

Kenoma

Previously:
Escape From Starkiller Base
At the Monuments of Madness
A Living Weapon

To Jacob's surprise, they made it to Ahch-To's system without incident - but then, it was clear now that the Force was on their side. As per his calculations, they'd dropped out of hyperspace a few hundred thousand kilometers away, just beyond its outermost moon's orbit, and as they headed toward the planet at sublight speeds, he tried to ignore the way his protective instincts were going into overdrive.

However, the closer they got to the planet, the more he couldn't help being aware that everyone there, everyone they were going to see, was someone who'd hurt Kylo terribly, and Force, how could Jacob even begin to justify taking him down there? To put him in that level of danger, in the kind of condition he was in--

He made himself take a deep breath, though the fingers of his free hand were clamped tightly around the hilt of one of his lightsabers. The urge was incredibly strong to tell Kylo that he couldn't in good conscience do this, that there had to be another, better way to defeat Snoke, and they would find it - but, deep down, he knew that if there was, the Force would have shown it to Kylo instead. He had to have faith in his master, and in the Force.

Instead, right now, he had more sympathy than ever for why Snoke wanted to destroy the Force's will - not that he had any sympathy for Snoke himself. That thought was enough to settle his nerves slightly by reminding what they were here for, why it was important, why they could all work together just this once.

Snoke had to die. That was the one thing they all could agree on.

Finally, he calmed his mind enough to push his senses outward through the Force, to see whose presence he could detect. Even this close in, he still couldn't pick up Skywalker, but he could sort out Rey and General Organa from the background energy of the planet. He turned to Kylo. "...Your mom's still here. Do you want me to ask her to leave?"

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The center felt best. No, it felt right.

Even with the tarp, the ground was hard and unforgiving. His body protested, but his mind overrode that physical discomfort for now. This would be an open meditation with no real aim in mind except to let their minds explore the depths.

“When we meditate, Jacob and I frequently sit back to back...” he explained softly to Rey. “We open ourselves... to a shared experience. I think that approach would be best here too. This may be too much... for one person to face alone...”

It would not be difficult for three to sit with their backs together. And Rey was far less resistant to the idea than she would have on the surface. In fact, she sat before Jacob had finished straightening the tarp.

“Whatever enters you mind, don’t fight it. Let go... follow it. And let it bring you back.”

Even the thin cushion Jacob had found space for in the pack didn't totally mitigate Kylo's discomfort, and Jacob had to fight the urge to ask if he could take his pain for him. If Kylo needed it, he'd let Jacob know - and besides, the point of being here wasn't to do anything, it was just to accept.

He closed his eyes, reaching out telepathically as Kylo and Rey leaned back against him - not to influence or convey anything, just to put them all in contact mentally to the same degree they were physically; it was important that they started learning how to function as a unit and grow comfortable with each other, because what they would ultimately need to achieve was so far beyond just that. Then, he relaxed again, letting the Force guide him.

If the Force was an ocean, the waters here were invitingly shallow, and Jacob allowed himself to sink. He could sense not only the living beings of the island and the surrounding waters, but half-formed presences within the Force itself - things long dead, things not yet born, yet all of them part of the same entity, the same Living Force. He relaxed his control a little more, letting the Force draw him further in, but he still didn't lose sight of where the "bottom" was, or where Kylo and Rey were for that matter.

The first time Rey meditated on Ahch-To, rocks moved and cracked beneath her hands. She felt an intense connection between every living thing on the island. In her limited understanding, she thought she had felt the Force. As she hovered there, she realized that the connection, as Luke spoke of it, didn't even come close to what she felt now.

She relaxed into the feeling, sinking farther and farther until she eventually fell into a vision that didn't belong to her.

It was dark, cold - so far out of balance that it physically hurt. She saw it first as three small pinpricks of light, and then as searing pain. Before her was a young boy she recognized instantly as Kylo Ren. He was hanging in a strange harness, wired into control panels like a living droid. She gasped, and his head shot up. A moment later, the control panels all shorted out at once. Alarms blared and the boy started to cry.

Rey felt herself spinning around to see the real Kylo Ren standing behind her, arm outstretched, stunned at what had apparently just happened.

Her eyes shot open, and she found herself back in the cave, leaning against an very shaken Kylo Ren. The overwhelming fluctuation in his vitals would surely be enough to pull Jacob out of his trance as well - after all, the first time this happened on Xashiri, Kylo nearly died.

"That wasn't a vision." she managed to whisper. "That was real. But how?"

"I don't know how I did it..." Kylo fought to catch his breath. "But I projected myself... my spirit... through the Force..."

"No..." Rey fervently shook her head. "How we just traveled through TIME! You were in two places at once!"

Kylo shivered. "Rey... That was... that was all now. The boy you saw wasn't me."

"Kylo, I know it was you. It felt just like..."

"It wasn't me!" he choked out. It was such a brief encounter, and yet, it took so much out of him. "Give me a second... I'll explain..."

Pleading eyes looked at Jacob.

When he felt the projection begin, it was difficult for Jacob to try not to stop it - to try to focus and direct the energy of that rip current instead of pulling Kylo out of it. Instead, he calmed his mind, and concentrated on channeling energy in two directions, part going to keep Kylo's body alive, and the rest to fuel his journey through the Force. And though Jacob had no physical presence at their destination, he could see what was happening through his master's eyes. In the moment before he realized exactly where they were, he noticed he could see Rey, as well, though he couldn't tell whether it was a genuine projection or just how they perceived her mental presence with them. Then, it didn't matter, because the scene before them was one ripped almost directly from a nightmare Jacob had barely more than a week ago.

The Finalizer's power chamber was a ragged mess of wires and half-disassembled paneling bathed in a ghastly red light; distantly, he recognized that it was because calibration tests needed to be run before everything could be reassembled, and apparently that was what was happening right now. The boy in the harness looked eerily like his father, and Jacob recoiled in horror when he realized he could sense traces of the midichlorian respiration drug affecting his body.

No...

His concentration broke, and he lost the ability to mediate the projection, snapping them all back into their bodies. Instinctively he reached out to try to steady Kylo's heart rate and respiration, but for several long moments, that was all he could manage. He sat, fighting frantically to regain his control, to keep from bursting into tears or demanding they go back and wreck the Finalizer or that they find Snoke now and flay the flesh from his bones.

However, he snapped back to reality immediately when he realized his master needed him. He pulled Kylo into an embrace, and gathered his nerves to try to explain. "Rey, Snoke has done something truly horrific. He knew that he wouldn't be able to destroy the will of the Force by himself, or even with you and Kylo and all the Knights by his side... it would take much more power than that, more Force sensitive beings working in tandem. So he used Kylo as a foundation sire to start creating them. That boy you saw... was one of Kylo's sons. I didn't know how to tell you, but I wish I'd figured out a way to do it sooner, so you didn't have to find out like that." He sighed softly. "...Luke doesn't know, and I'd appreciate it if you didn't tell him. But the truth is that we're not here to save the galaxy - we're only here to find a way to save them."

"And Snoke... will be collateral damage." Kylo hissed under the strain of using such an intensely powerful technique.

The Force wound burned inside his chest, aching to replace the energy that had been expended - and were he absolutely sure it would draw from the environment before his companions, he would have simply let it loose.

"We will kill him. For everything that he's done! I can't just... let them suffer what Snoke did to me. I can't... I won't!"

Rey was shaken, still trying to process what happened along with what she saw and what was now being revealed.

"Children... There are more?"

With Jacob's help, Kylo's vitals were starting to stabilize.

"We don't know how many more."

"And the mother? Your... your wife? Surely you want to find her and get her back too? Unless she's already..."

"Snoke wouldn't dilute the bloodline any farther than he had to. They're clones, I think... At the very least, grown. There is no mother. I... I didn't even know about them until recently. Snoke kept them from me. From everyone... But he lost me. So now he's turning them into his weapons."

The single saving grace in this situation was that they may have set the calibration session back a day. The explosion Kylo caused through the Force fried plenty of circuits. If they were lucky, parts that they didn't immediately have on hand would need to be replaced.

Jacob shook his head. "Clones likely would have been a last resort for Snoke. What he wants most is a diverse, robust population, one that's completely under his control but can sustain itself - that's half the reason why he put me to work on Darth Plagueis's research. And we already know he found at least one female with the characteristics he wanted..." Jacob remembered Kira Ren's betrayal of Snoke, after all, and the reasons for it. "He didn't use her to carry them, though. Probably he used an artificial womb for all of them."

And then, something occurred to him that he was shocked he hadn't realized before. "Kylo... when you had Rey as a prisoner on Starkiller Base, did she undergo any kind of medical evaluation before you interrogated her?" He would've asked the question telepathically, but as entangled as their minds still were, she would have heard it anyway. Besides, now that he thought about it, she had every right to know how far things might have gone. Any medical assessment she'd undergone while in the First Order's custody would've been just a pretense to take tissue samples from which stem cells could be extracted and manipulated into... whatever Snoke needed. And if that had happened, the samples had been in Snoke's possession long enough that he might have been able to produce a child from them if the Force wasn't still limiting him.

Which brought him back to the fact that they didn't really know the scale on which Snoke was operating, and they wouldn't until they'd killed him - or maybe long after. And while Jacob had more experience than anyone in the galaxy at pulling incredible quantities of mostly coherent information out of dying minds, Snoke's would be the most difficult to crack that he had ever encountered, particularly because he was prepared for Jacob, and he'd have to do it under conditions he'd never experienced before. He squeezed his eyes shut, pressing his face against Kylo's shoulder; suddenly, everything hurt too much to bear.

Snoke had his reasons for keeping individual knights in the dark from what the others were working on. Although Kylo and Jacob interacted far more than most (and not always with Snoke’s blessing), there was still a lot about his apprentice’s research that he simply did not know or understand.

“That...” it made sense, he started to say, but was caught off guard when Jacob asked about Rey. The implications were certainly not lost - on him or on her.

“I came to in that chair.” She spat, beating out whatever words were still hanging in Kylo’s mouth. “What happened before that...”

“I handed you off to a pair of waiting officers.” Kylo gulped uneasily. “Snoke wanted to speak to me privately before I searched your mind. They may have... it could have...”

He couldn’t bring himself to say it - that she had been violated, in some form, by the First Order and some of the children may have been her’s too. Unfortunately, he didn’t need to.

“You MONSTER!” She screamed, wanting to grab him by the Force and tear him apart. Had the Force not been so strong here, she might have given into impulse and damned all the consequences. “How could you let someone DO that?!”

“I didn’t know!” He tried to argue. He felt her rage, and her tears stung his eyes. “I... I didn’t even know what he was doing... to me! I just learned about them... Jacob and I both just found out...”

“I wanted to learn who my parents are, not who my children are! And whoever they are, they aren’t supposed to be YOURS!”

This time, Jacob couldn't hold back tears as he positioned himself between Rey and Kylo, shielding his master. "Rey, enough! This isn't something we did to you - it's something Snoke did to all of us, and if we turn on each other, he's going to win. He's already doing horrific things to our children--" He choked, and stopped for a moment to collect himself. "There are innocent lives at stake here, and until that changes, we all need to compartmentalize. After Snoke is dead, then we can have it all out. Just, please, Rey - for now, please help us stop him."

Already, Jacob was trying to force back his own helpless rage, fighting it back by trying to line up the facts. "And there's still a chance he hasn't been able to exploit you. The Force limits the rate at which beings sensitive to it are born, so even if he has your genetic material, he may not have been able to get a viable result yet. Darth Plagueis's research is the key to circumventing that limit, and the level of interest he's shown in it, and how little progress he's made, indicate that limit is still hamstringing him. But even if the worst-case scenario really is real... your child wouldn't be one of the ones who's in danger. There's no indication that he's genetically modified any of them to age more rapidly than normal, which makes sense, because doing that would put him in a time crunch that his plans might not survive. Yours would still be a baby, or maybe even still a fetus, so he wouldn't be able to inflict these-- these atrocities on it."

Even though he was still fighting to keep the three of them together as a team and working in the right direction, though, it was obvious how crushed he was by what he'd seen through that Force projection, how deeply it had affected him.

Rey was understandably still livid. “Why should I trust you?!”

There were a hundred answers to that question. Because the Force wills it. Because we made it here alive by trusting each other. Because when it came to Darth Plagueis’ research, only Plagueis himself knew more than Jacob. Because Snoke had almost a a ten year head start with my genetic material and pretty close to that with Jacob’s. Because even monsters have limits.

“Because...” Kylo answered shakily. He was crying as well. “Rey, we’re the only ones in the galaxy strong enough to stop Snoke. Once they’re free... what happens after that... I don’t care...”

For the first time in his life, he understood why Han Solo stepped out on that bridge.

“Please... I can’t do it alone. We can’t do it alone.”

Rey fumed, but after a few long deep breaths, the intensity of her rage began to subside. When it did, she felt the ripples in the Force that their tears had made. She realized just how much the two Knights of Ren actually cared about their enslaved offspring. She also saw more of Han in Kylo Ren than she ever wanted to admit.

“I’m sorry...” she whispered.

Jacob figured none of the children were genetically his - as a sire, he was unproven, so Snoke wasn't going to waste resources on him, and Jacob didn't know whether the technology to produce offspring from two males had made it out of the scientific journals and into implementation. Most of the traits Snoke would use him for were ones Kira Ren also possessed, anyway, though Jacob was more even-tempered and obedient. But it didn't matter if any of the children were biologically Jacob's or not - he was the one who would be raising them, and that made them his. "You don't need to apologize, Rey. Believe me, I know how difficult all of this is." He raked a hand back through his hair. "But we're not going to lie to you or try to keep things from you just because they're difficult."

Which was another reason for her to trust them - unlike Luke, they had freely shared everything they knew with her, and though Jacob could have avoided trouble by keeping the possibility that Snoke had done something terrible to Rey to himself, he had decided that she had a right to know. Jacob and Kylo had been making every effort to act like the three of them were the team that they needed to be if they were going to defeat Snoke, and now she knew exactly why. She understood how personal their stake in this was, and that it meant they would do whatever was necessary to win.

Rey nodded, unable to deny that she did, in fact, appreciate them both for that honesty. She grew up angry at the galaxy from hiding her past from her and Luke Skywalker’s reluctance to teach her anything worthwhile hadn’t helped. Ironically, if Snoke found her now, she might have been easily swayed.

“What I did just then... projecting myself through the Force... we believe that’s key to fighting Snoke without having to actually find him.” Kylo continued. “But it’s taxing. Very physically demanding... And I don’t know how it happens or where I will go when it does. But I do know now... that I can bring someone with me. And that I can affect things where I am.”

Essentially, they needed to be ready to fight at any time.

“Which means you should be able to do it too, Jacob. An assassination....” he nodded to his apprentice to fill in the details.

And if that wasn’t difficult enough, Jacob had also been splitting his concentration to keep Kylo alive during these projections - something he couldn’t do if he were locked in a mental battle with Snoke. This was where Rey came in - and where their trust in each other was absolutely necessary.

"I'm not going to be able to focus on keeping you stable at the same time as I'm trying to use my usual methods on Snoke. Especially since he's going to be a much more difficult target than any I've come up against before..." Even his unparalleled finesse might not be enough to get past the defenses of one of the most powerful Force sensitive beings in the galaxy. And he wasn't about to ask Rey to help Kylo for him - he'd trusted her with a lot else, but he wasn't sure he could put the most important thing in the galaxy to him into her hands.

To his surprise, she was the one who asked. "I can do it, if you teach me how." She paused for a moment. "Trust is a two-way street, after all."

"Then all three of us will need to fully open our minds to each other during the rest of our preparations. That's how my master and I are able to work together so seamlessly, and it's the only way you'll be able to do the same." Not to mention it would give him warning if Rey was compromised by Snoke, or if she was planning to turn on them once all this was over. He held her gaze for a moment before looking over at Kylo again. "And I think we might have our own use for Thuban's research. He was studying how to use Force wounds over a distance to affect targets as vast as an entire world, or as small as a single individual. If you can use the Force wound within you to weaken Snoke, or block his access to the Force - assuming we can't find another way to do it - then that will give me exactly the advantage I need to strike."

If they could pull it off, then the attack would be incredibly quick and precise, with minimal odds of collateral damage, just the way Jacob liked to operate. And there were other places on the planet where they could practice the kind of utilization of the Force wound that they would need without risking the kind of feedback loop that might develop on this island, or whatever energies lingered around the Jedi temple that might interfere with the process.

While Kylo had intimately profound knowledge of some of Thuban’s work, Jacob had delved into almost all of it. “I know how to weaponize it on a very large scale. But that may not be exactly the same... we can discuss it more tonight... but in the meantime, Rey will need something she can practice on...”

She had more to catch up on, but unbeknownst to Rey, she already had a head start. The same techniques Jacob used on Kylo were merely variations of those he used on himself. She’d gotten a taste of that on the way down, and would undoubtedly have more practice on their way back out.

Letting Rey practice on Jacob was infinitely preferable to letting her do anything to Kylo yet, at least. "How do you want to proceed for now, master? Do you have the strength to risk trying to Force project one more time, to see if we can learn more about the process or maybe find a way to control it?" He already knew the answer to that would almost certainly be no, but he was upset enough about what he'd seen that he had to at least ask.

Either way, they'd stay down here a little longer - the energy of the Force was calming, here, drawing them back into balance already, and Jacob would rather have Rey practice manipulating his vitals down here than back on the surface. He reached out telepathically to her, and finally he could feel her mental defenses grudgingly begin to drop. That was definitely progress, and he spoke into her mind, Thank you for doing this - not for us, but for our children. You don't know how much it means that you're willing to help.

Kylo wished that he did. Part of him wanted to go to every single Star Destroyer in the fleet and make sure they weren't mass-producing this barbaric weapons array. Part of him wanted to take Snoke on and Force choke him to death the way his grandfather would have. But part of him also knew how counterproductive, if not downright deadly, either of those things could be.

He didn't have the strength at the moment to repeat the technique. Not without running a very real risk of dying.

"I... I can't right now. I need to rest first." The Force wound could draw on the cave itself for energy, so he might not need as long to recuperate between attempts. "But I want to try again before we leave."

"That gives me time to learn how to keep him stable." Rey interjected.

She was, however, startled when Jacob spoke only in her mind. It took conscious effort not to unconsciously shut him out.

I'm doing it for them. But I'm also doing it for the galaxy. For my friends. For the Resistance. she thought to herself, not realizing that she was broadcasting back over an open channel - as evidenced by, I'd better not let them know that part.

Kylo glanced at them both, but said nothing. He really did need to rest if he hoped to attempt it a second time.

As Jacob had said, he wasn't going to keep anything from her, and it was better that she understood all the factors that were in play here a little more fully. We already know that you're only our ally while we're on this world. Jacob sighed softly. When this is over... we're all going back to our respective corners, because Lord Kylo Ren still believes in the vision behind the First Order, and I don't care about anything except being there to keep him and our children safe. I spent too many years destroying myself for what I thought was the greater good, and I'm through with it - my family is the only thing that matters to me now. But as long as I live, I will never allow our children to be turned into weapons or killers or monsters the way Kylo and I were, and I know he feels the same. Maybe once Snoke is gone, we can make the First Order's methods into something less reprehensible, too. Something you could get onboard with, one day.

Speaking of Kylo, Jacob needed to make sure he was taken care of before he started practicing with Rey. He pulled the bottle of water and the thermos of thala siren milk from his bag, pouring a cup of the milk and diluting it before giving it to Kylo. "You might recover a little better with some nutrients and fluids in you. Let me know if there's anything else you need from me in the meantime, okay?" Slowly, so as not to shock his system, he decoupled his vitals from Kylo's, and created the equivalent of a small insulating gap in the Force between them - so that when he tanked his heart rate, or ratcheted it up to near tachycardia, to teach Rey how to correct for both, her lesson wouldn't suddenly get a little too real.

Rey jumped, hands covering her mouth when she realized that Jacob (and likely Kylo as well) had heard everything she just thought. It was a futile gesture, unable to even hide her surprise. She consciously clamped down on her mental defenses for a moment.

She highly doubted anything they could do to improve her opinion of the First Order. Finn had more than enough horror stories about the current regime as Leia did the previous one. What happened after they bought down Snoke would depend on a lot of things - things she would need to carefully consider.

But joining them? Beyond this uneasy alliance? That wouldn’t ever be in the cards.

She had a lot to learn about all of this. Kylo added when he felt her mind disappear. She is a fast learner, though. From what I observed on Starkiller...

He accepted the cup, sipping on it slowly.

And thank you. For everything. A single thought encompassed many ideas. From working with Rey and his dedication to his craft to unwavering loyalty, care and concern for both master and progeny. No one else in the galaxy had ever cared this much.

By the time Jacob was done seeing to his master, Rey had opened her mind up again.

“We will cross those bridges when we come to them. You have my trust until you betray it.” She announced aloud, turning to Jacob. “Let’s get started.”

The first question on her mind, besides how he actually did it, was what made the technique itself so deadly.

Jacob had to blink back tears when Kylo thanked him, at the feelings behind it. I love you more than anything. And I am so, so proud of you. Don't ever forget that.

He tucked the excess of emotion away as he felt Rey beginning to open her mind again, settling back into a state of calm and balance; then, he returned his gaze from Kylo to Rey - from the irresistible force, to the immovable object. "Don't make it sound like I have any desire to betray your trust." He returned to sit back to back with her again. "Now, the first and easiest part of this is to bring our heart rates and respiration into synchronization."

He brought their minds back into synchronization as well, so that he could instruct her without speaking, and help her feel what he was talking about. For slow changes, it's more like a guided meditation than anything. We'll start by lowering our heart rates. He let her feel what he was doing to lower his own, and her body began to follow along automatically. After a moment, he brought them back to baseline. Now, you try. Raise our heart rate a little. After a moment, she succeeded, and they went back and forth until Rey had gotten the hang of the basics.

It gets more difficult when you're trying to counteract changes in your partner's vitals. Raise your heart rate again and I'll show you. As soon as her heart rate started to climb, he sank back into a state of absolute calm and focus, one that acted just as much on her pulse as his own, using their telepathic connection to keep them linked together, and anchored at their baseline. Do it again as many times as it takes for you to understand the technique, and then we'll switch roles.

Once he showed her how difficult it would be to contain even small fluctuations, let alone major ones, he was sure she'd understand why a technique that required this much focus couldn't safely be executed while he was already trying to rupture one or more of Snoke's major blood vessels, a delicate task even in targets that weren't Force sensitive.

It took the better part of an hour for Rey to fully grasp the concept well enough to respond to minor fluctuations in Jacob's heart rate. But she was indeed a fast learner and thanks to their earlier work diving in, she was catching on quicker.

Every few attempts, she found herself glancing back at Kylo Ren. She knew that Jacob had been doing the same.

Kylo finished off the Thala siren milk and was meditating, but the look of exhaustion never left his face. It was about that point when Rey noticed that Jacob was having her correct drops in heart rate more often than the other way around. And that with each successful attempt, it was dropping just a little bit farther and a little bit faster.

Is that what projecting does to him? she finally asked what had likely already been through their shared mental link several times already. Makes his heart rate drop?

Little did she know how far and how fast it had plummeted the first time he accidentally performed the technique.

Jacob was starting to feel a little better, as quick as Rey was getting at reacting to the changes in his vitals, and how well she was anchoring them both against them. Still, he didn't feel good enough about her abilities to readily put Kylo's life into her hands - but he was starting to realize that he never might. The most important thing was to be able to objectively recognize when she was skilled enough.

At the question, he nodded. And makes him stop breathing. The first time it happened, I almost lost him. He tried, but he couldn't keep the emotions from bleeding over - how much not only the memory upset him, but how unfair it was, that Kylo had to bear this burden on top of everything else. Instead of trying to deny how he felt, though, he acknowledged it. ...I hope that one day, you find someone you care about this much - and when you do, that you never have to watch them suffer like this.

He took a moment to re-focus, to center himself in the Force. Anyway, let me show you how bad this can be. Once he was certain that she was paying attention, he dropped his heart rate, hard, down to almost what it was in his sensory deprivation tank's deep meditation mode. How she reacted to that would help him gauge where Rey's abilities really were.

It was an unusual Force technique, lost mostly to time. Kylo had performed it several times, and he was hardly any closer to understanding exactly how and why it worked. They’d theorized that it mimicked part of the dying process. With Kylo’s health as poor as it was, it would be all to easy for hs body to simply shut down.

And that was something Rey was about to get a small taste of.

all right. I’m ready. She braced herself. The shockwave she felt through the Force was harder, faster and deeper than she’d expected.

For a moment, she panicked. Her hands shot out, as though she could catch his falling vitals telekinetically, and she swore she could feel them slip right through her fingers. She gasped, trying to focus on what they’d been practicing over and over. Synchronize? No... could she still do that? Or would he bring her vitals down with him instead of the other way around? She knew she needed to anchor him, but his heart rate just wasn’t coming back up fast enough.

“I’m not ready!” She shouted aloud as she fumbled in the Force. “I’m trying! I’m sorry!”

Jacob took a few deep breaths to stave off the dizziness as he pushed his heart rate back up. "...Yeah, that's kind of how I felt the first time, too. The most useful thing to do under circumstances like that is to deepen the connection, so you're directly manipulating not only your own heart rate, but mine as well." It would be a challenge for him, too, placing that much trust in someone he barely knew - it had taken years for him and Kylo to develop the kind of bond they had, and they'd been through so much together along the way. They knew they could rely on each other, and Jacob didn't place that kind of faith in people readily. However, neither did Kylo, and if he believed Rey was the best person for this...

He went back to speaking into her mind. For now, just synchronize your heart rate and breathing with mine. Let me know when you're ready to try again, and I'll try to give you a little better guidance. A lot of this is completely instinctive for me, because I'm so attuned to Kylo that it's natural for me to just... do whatever he needs.

Deepen the connection, he said - as though that was the most natural thing in the world. And again, she found her gaze drifting to the medittaing Kylo Ren. She couldn’t quite put the bond the two knights shared into words, but she felt it. For a brief moment, she even envied it, but she immediately turned her mind back to the task at hand.

If I synchronize with yours as they plummet, what keeps mine from falling too? Couldn’t we both die?

Jacob sighed softly as they both settled back into the meditation, relaxing at the feeling Rey's breathing and pulse against his back, and helping to bring his own into line with them. Because you have nature on your side. It will be a little bit more difficult than normal for you to stop me from crashing, because I'm doing it deliberately and my body is somewhat adjusted to that process, so my reflexes are a little different. However, in general, from the most primitive level, the bodies of living things view death as a profoundly unnatural process and are wired to prevent it in any way possible - that's why this technique works at all. If you had a serious health condition, you would have to worry about being dragged under, but otherwise it's almost impossible for this to kill you.

Just to be absolutely certain she didn't have reason to be concerned, though, he very carefully, delicately examined her heart through the Force. He knew what electrical and valve abnormalities felt like - he'd used used them more than once before to kill targets - and he detected no sign of either. You should be perfectly fine. If you're ready to try again, I'll see if I can do it in a way that's a little easier for you to correct.

Edited 2018-09-24 22:45 (UTC)

Jacob’s touch on her body was so gentle, so delicate, that she didn’t even know he was there. Indeed, she wouldn’t have even suspected it had their minds not been connected and had he not confirmed her physical fitness.

In an instant, she understood why Jacob would be the one to attack Snoke. Kylo was the only one who could bridge the gap between them, and that left her to keep them both alive. It reaffirmed her place in all this.

All right. I’m ready to try again.

This time, she was better prepared for the drop, and after a bit of struggling, did manage to synchronize the rhythm and hold him steady. She could feel him testing her, pushing her to hold it longer - becsuse while he could pull himself out of this at any time, Kylo couldn’t. And she had to be able to hold his vitals for an entire battle, if necesssry.

After several long minutes, though, she felt her control slipping.

“I can’t hold it any longer...” she squeaked.

Kylo’s voice replied, “Yes, you can. You have a galaxy’s worth of energy to draw on... you’re fighting it. Don’t fight it.”

That energy was not just in the cave, but also within Kylo. He was actively meditating on the Force wound and giving them something to tap into. With his help, Rey held Jacob’s vitals steady for another three minutes before she completely lost her grip.

“Good...”

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