My Love, My Bonded

Chapter Thirty Five

"Sir?" Orio asked, shifting on hs little knees. "May you remove the gag from Rose's mouth? She's going to continue to cry and we both know it would be much easier to hear if the cloth wasn't about to choke her to death."

"Shut up! Stay still and look straight ahead! If she wants the cloth off, she'll shut up." The trooper bit back with cruelty.

The room got quiet and the young Jedi zoned everyone out. Rey's senses were overwhelmed as she kneeled in shock.

The thick layer of anixety of the near future had settled over each of them but it wasn't the uncertainty of what came of the supposed interview between the Supreme Leader and their lieutenatnt that caused shivers to itch up Rey's spin. It was what he planned to do with her friends that frightened her. She already knew that he didn't have the strength in him to kill her but her friends were different. One of them was an employee of his that abandoned his post because he was afraid, marking him an utter traitor to the First Order. Although she didn't know it he could kill them considering how much he valued Rey, there was still a whole slew of things he could do.

She frowned a little bit when she thought about that. Rey thought it obvious that she didn't want any possible harm to come of her friends, she would be roaring with anger with him if such a thing happened. But, the Resistance was the First Order's enemy. The Supreme Leader's enemy.

What would the Resistance do if they caught a group of First Order soldiers? Wouldn't they not be very kind and potentially torture information out of them? Was that one of the costs of war or did kindness have no end? What is the differenece between war actions done with good or bad intentions?

Sometimes Rey wished she never had a brain as it traveled so deeply in this direction. Before she had meet her bonded, her view of the world was black and white. There was good and evil. Kind people, mean people, kind actions, mean actions. There was light and dark and everyone had to fit into her own interpretation of what those words meant.

Now, she understood the muddled gray that lay in between the two as Kylo was the prime example of her new way of thinking. She couldn't categorize him as evil because, out of anyone in the galaxy, she understood the pain that he endured, the pain that lead him to the dark in the first place. If there was little to no pain to guide his decision, would he have ended up the same? Rey truly didn't think so.

Her deep dive in the Force had guided her to a multitude of philosophical questions and she grew increasingly frustrated as the Light had no answers that she needed. She didn't think the Dark did either and was frankly too terrified to try. Another question to ask Ben, she thought.

As most of her thoughts did, she found herself thinking of Kylo once more. They had been angry with each other for weeks and, besides their most recent interaction, they had not been particularly nice. She hated that. Rey fought so hard to show him that choosing the Light side would be meant with love and care and she had shown him none of that within the past month or so. He had stated how deeply he cared about her and she still actively chose to ignore him.

Looking back at it now, Rey had a sneaking suspicion why she didn't trust him. She didn't trust herself. Throughout the day, constant slander of the First Order and the Dark side and Kylo Ren filled her ears. The Resistance was unchanging in their firm belief that the First Order was pure and utter evil and that anyone who was associated with them was just as bad. She was told over and over how terrible he was. At night, or sporadically throughout the day if the Force decided to be snarky, she would notice the sweet side of him that he never showed anyone else. She was falling madly for him and she was uttered terrified of it. Those feelings of rejection and abandonment she had known all her life swirled around this new positive source of happiness until it squeezed the soul out of it. And Rey lost him.