Meet Me in the Grey (Reylo fanfiction) (COMPLETED)

Chapter 2: The Prey

She was still on Starkiller. It was dark and snow, cold and unfamiliar, fell heavy from the sky. She was running. She could feel her heart beating frantically in her chest. Her lungs ached as she gasped for air. She was a small thing, a white thing, insignificant and frightened. She was a hare. A small white hare, barely noticeable against the snow, but she was noticed, she was hunted.

She could feel the dark presence chasing her through the snowbound woods. She could hear it howl in the night, she could almost feel its breath upon her. Faster and faster she ran. Bounding over fallen trees and through snow banks and the gnarled limbs of trees, and still the beast chased her. It was a black beast, with teeth like knives and jaws hungry to snare. It knew her scent, no matter how she tried to dodge the beast, it always stayed on her tail.

Finally cornered, trapped! Nowhere to run, nowhere to escape. She turned, terrified, and looked into the eyes of the beast as it sprang for the kill.

---

She woke up screaming again. She had been on this planet for over six months now. And in that time the dreams never stopped, never let up.

Her master rushed through her door without knocking. He too, was used to this nightly ritual. He sat next to her and put an arm around her as she cries.

"He won't stop! He won't stop!" She cried between sobs as her mentor patted her gently with a robotic hand.

"The harder I ignore him in the day the worse the dreams get at night," she continued.

"Come, you need meditation," he offered. It wasn't much, but for the time being it was one of the few things he could do to help her. Helping her sooth her mind and block out the fear, the dangerous fear that could so easily seduce to the darkness. She was already walking a rocky path. He could feel it in her so strongly when she arrived - the hatred.

She had not always hated, but she had learned it, she had learned it from him, from her master's former pupil. She had watched a man she admired, a man who had offered her a place, a sense of belonging, for the first time in many long lonely years, be ruthlessly cut down before her eyes. She watched her first true friend be maimed and left for dead in the snow, falling to protect her, a sacrifice so noble. No one had ever done so much for her before. He had murdered and he had hurt, he had taken all that she cared for, and thrown away all that she would have given anything to have, and she hated him for it.

He had warned her against such hate, warned her that if she did not forgive or let go, that she would not be able to stay on the path to become a Jedi. He had already lost one student to the darkness; he could not bear to lose another. But it is hard to let go of hate and fear when every day, and every night, she faces the same demon.

At first she had not been sure what she was feeling. She had felt rage, anger, pain, such horrible pain and suffering that it sent her to her knees; soon the truth was undeniable - it was him. He was inside her head, and she was probably inside of his as well. Sometimes when all was well, when she was finally getting a grasp on a moment of peace, she would feel his terrible rage and hatred burn her like an invisible sun. But what troubled her most was the sadness, the loneliness; she resented how in those moments he could almost pass for human. Her master and General Organa believed there was still good in him; even after all the unspeakable evil he had done. She knew she felt it even as she watched him take the life of his own father. Even though she felt that deep down they were right about him, she still could not forgive, she still could not let go her hatred of him for what he had done.

She did not hide the bond from her master, he was the only help she had, but she feared him rejecting her for it. She feared that such a bond made her impure, unworthy, and she wanted so desperately for Luke to accept her - to understand.