Chapter Text
“Join me.”
A hand stretched across a room in flames. Falling embers created an ambiance of warmth amidst the carnage of their dueted destruction.
Honeyed eyes burned with a fire hotter than the chaos laid at their feet.
“Please.”
A hitch like a suppressed sob in his voice. Making her hesitate. Making her wither.
Don’t do this, she wanted to scream again. Don’t leave me alone in this. Please, don’t tread where I cannot.
It stilled her hand. The twitching muscles trembling beneath the weight of her refusal. Instinct pleading with her to simply give in, to float across that fiery distance and fall into the exhaustion that plagued her bones.
Yes. Ben, yes.
The hope in his eyes spoke more loudly than any crackling embers or screeching ships, any guttural explosions or igniting lightsabers. The tentative wish that someone might finally choose him. That she might choose him, this stranger who knew his soul.
Outside, more chaos, more debris littering the cosmos. More lives lost.
They’re dying.
Maker, but so am I.
“Ben,” she breathed, those twitching, trembling muscles moving of their own accord. Reaching, reaching, reaching. The weight of his name sitting like regret on her tongue, heavy and coarse. Imbued with the tiny shrapnel spikes of her most secret desires. Speaking it aloud shredded her tongue in recompense for what she felt she must do.
Why must I sacrifice?
Why must I lose, and lose, and lose everything I was never close enough to have?
Power erupted from her core, directed at the saber still in his grasp.
And, larger still than the wave of his own power cresting to meet hers, the betrayal accompanied by his Force hit her in the chest like a fist. Closing around her heart and suffocating its beat, until she could not see through the tears of pain in her eyes.
They might have been there forever. Trapped in that void of pained power, screaming their shared duplicity at one another around a saber who refused to choose a master.
They might have been.
Had the world not exploded around them.
It felt like only seconds had passed before the incessant beeping of a heralded ship jolted her awake.
Rey’s right side screamed in agony as she pulled herself up from the crumpled ball she was on the floor of an unfamiliar escape pod. The blinding search lights of the Falcon greeted her through the transparisteel cockpit window. She toppled when the ships connected, jarring her of the tentative balance she hadn’t quite found and sending her back to her knees.
It was only then that she saw the two halves of her saber, collected and returned to her prone form. Lying beside her as a reminder of her failure.
Chewbacca bombarded her with questions as she walked across the connected gangplanks, but Rey couldn’t bring herself to find answers.
I think, she didn’t say, taking a seat in the Falcon’s captain chair and dislodging the escape pod into the ether of space, that Ben Solo saved my life.
I think that Kylo Ren made my choice.
And all she could bring herself to do with that second opportunity was collect the survivors of the Resistance and run.
It would be the Force, with its cosmic sense of humor she didn’t understand, that pulled Ben back into her orbit as she prepared to depart with their staggeringly low number of survivors. Staring up at her from his knees like he could grovel for her hand if she gave him an opportunity to talk.
Were he to ask once more, Rey would have gone to him.
So, instead, she closed the door.
And only when she was alone, after the ship was docked in a bay at an unassuming port on Bracca, did she allow herself to clutch those saber pieces to her chest and cry.
After that, Kylo Ren became a phantom that haunted her periphery. Marching resolutely down a warship hallway she couldn’t see. His voice, calling out a booming command that made her flinch in the most crowded rooms.
His breath, caressing her neck in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep. Slow and soft, with the faint groans of someone who’d lived their entire life with nightmares and had learned to keep them at bay. The heat of his body, so near to her own it made her spine tingle with anticipation of a touch that would never come, not unless she initiated.
Days grew long; nights grew even longer.
Rey read the tomes she’d lifted from Luke’s isolation. She held the split Kyber crystal of her saber in either fist, listening to its soft whispers as it spilled rivulets of agony and elation in equal drips of energy through her mind. As it reminded her, with soft caresses, that it had never belonged to her.
Nothing truly had ever belonged to her.
But Ben Solo might have.
It left her bereft, this realization that she may have disregarded the one person in the galaxy who understood her. Who treated her as an equal. Without judgment, without pity, as so many around her deemed necessary. The allegedly supportive squeezes of her shoulder while she worked on her lightsaber, as though the halved crystal was the equivalent of a broken limb, grated against her nerves and made her teeth grind within her mouth.
She felt like nothing more than a weapon to them. Her worth equated to her ability to wield it, this finicky thing that denied her ownership. Every offer she made to assist with rebuilding an engine or tracking down supplies met with a response of, “Oh, don’t worry, Rey, we’ve got it, you keep trying to fix the sword.”
Days grew longer; nights grew unrelenting.
And the emptiness in her chest expanded. A hole to a pit to a well to a cavern, with no end to the erosion in sight.
The inconsistent constant in her life was the disruption of life caused by the Force’s vacuum. Random, sparse periods where the world faded away, and Kylo Ren stalked through the Resistance’s new base on Ajan Kloss, or the weight of Ben Solo suddenly dipped her mattress.
Her resolve faltered.
Tipped.
Shattered.
He would not break, so she must.
“What would we have become, had I taken your hand?”
Though his breathing had been even, she knew he was awake. Listening, awaiting the moment where the knife-sharp point of the Force’s connection would finally be met with words flung into the scant space between them.
A breath.
Two.
“What would you want to be?”
“My answer wouldn’t satisfy you,” she replied, her voice a whisper. Hanging in the air like a physical thing, waiting for one of them to reach out and grasp it.
“Are you so sure mine will satisfy you?”
It was too dark to see him, but Rey rolled over. Her hard, flat bed mat had grown softer beneath her, the Force bridging and combining all that they touched.
“I’m not looking for satisfaction,” she said. “Only honesty.”
The heaviness between them only expanded, though not suffocatingly. Instead, it was as though nothing and no one else existed. Like the rest of the galaxy ceased, leaving behind two souls connected by stars and fate.
“We would have been equals,” he stated, like he’d rehearsed this monologue in his head a thousand times past. “You’d have stood by my side as my partner, my––”
A pause.
“Your…?” The sentence hung in the air. A jumbled, interrupted thing, too conscious of its reality to find a moment to remember its own hypothetical nature. Her breath hitched, stuck to the lining of her lungs like it feared breaking the moment.
“As mine,” he finally murmured. Her entire body suddenly flickered to life. “You would be mine. Half of me, ruling by my side as my Empress.”
She said nothing.
“But you do not want that.”
I only want you.
As sudden a realization as it was, it dawned across her flesh like a warm embrace. A slow sinking into a steamy bath, submerging her in the endlessness of soft longing. If she closed her eyes, she wondered if she might float away completely.
“What do you want, Rey?”
You.
Just you.
“Stop hunting the Resistance,” she stated. Ben said nothing, his silhouette mostly lost in the night. The mattress shifted, his body rolling to face hers, and she wondered what he might see. If she had any illumination, any shape. Or if, like her, he was only able to face her when she was cast in darkness.
“What do you want, Rey?”
She was no closer to an answer by the time the Force ripped him away.
What do you want, Rey?
The question plagued her. Playing on repeat in her mind as she waltzed through the monotony of her newfound routine. Rising with Ajara and setting with Ajan Kloss’s twin moons, it dripped from a broken pipe, plink-plink-plinking into the basin of her brain and filling it with more questions and few answers.
What do you want, Rey?
She wanted peace. But did she want peace for the galaxy, or only for her? What must she sacrifice to attain such peace? Who would be hurt in the process? Herself? The Resistance?
Ben?
She wanted a home. But what would a home entail, for someone who came from and was nothing? What was a home, if not a place to shove the belongings she did not have? Or was it a collection of people; those here, who looked at her with equal parts fear and reverence and refused to truly know her?
Or was it one person? The admittance made in her mind that she would not speak aloud?
She wanted. And wasn’t that a danger in itself? On Jakku, her wants had been so simple – to scavenge enough for food and water, for her parents to come back, to not accidentally hurt herself beyond repair. But here, the vastness of this newly-opened galaxy made her wants just as vast. Just as limitless.
It was terrifying. How could one person be expected to entertain all these different desires? And perhaps that was the worst part; the longer she stood with that ache resting in her chest, the more wants she seemed to find.
What do you want, Rey?
And worse still was the realization that so many of her wants could be attained, if only she gave into the basest one.
What do I want?
Ben Solo.
No matter the question that roared up from the deep valleys of her mind, volcanic rage erupting into the sky, the answer always haunted the shadows it cast in ghostly letters that spelled his name. She wanted peace and a home and belonging and family, and each of those things could be felt in the tether that connected his body to hers. This stranger across a galaxy and no more than a hair’s breadth away, giving light to all that which she could not vocalize.
She grew ragged. Angry. Indecision and unknowing howled new sonnets of pain in her chest. Until she was snapping at anyone who approached her, words minced and shaped into fine points that had hands raising and flushes of shame coating cheeks.
After sacrificing the one decision she could have made for herself to benefit these people, she was growing to despise their very existence.
“You’re where you do not belong,” Ben said to her one night a few weeks later. Her lamp was still lit, the curling tendrils of upset refusing to give quarter and allow her to rest. Giving her more energy than she could burn, so she paced back and forth across the cramped quarters of her room.
He sat on her mat, eyes heavy and hair curling messily around his ears. Freshly washed. He looked exhausted, the weight of the galaxy a heavy cape on his shoulders. “Subconsciously, you feel like an interloper.”
“And where else might I be?” she snapped back. “On Jakku? Living out my nothing existence?”
“I never meant it that way.”
Rey scoffed in disbelief. “Or would I be with you? Wearing black and stalking the halls of some huge, cold ship like a predator surrounded by prey? Using rage and anger and–– and violence to maintain my power?”
For a moment, only quiet existed between them. The impregnable silence of harsh words spoken in anger, but too honest to be taken back.
“I never envisioned you in black,” Ben said before the quiet could grow unbearable. Before the Force could decide their conversation was over. “I don’t think it would compliment your skin.”
Rey whirled toward him, completely caught off guard. And though his expression remained dispassionate, there was something hidden in his cool gaze. Something alarmingly similar to mirth.
“Was that–– Was that a joke?”
“If you find humor in my assumptions,” Ben responded, “then whether it’s a joke relies entirely on your opinion.”
The laugh had only just been startled from her chest when the bond closed and Ben slipped through her fingers.
“Do you ever wonder if you made a mistake?”
She awoke in the middle of the night to find Ben beside her, scrolling through a datapad. The circles that had been steadily growing larger beneath his eyes were deepened in the harsh blue light of the device, exacerbated by the heavy set of his brow.
He only glanced at her. As though the sight of her in his bed was as familiar as his next breath.
“Do you?” he asked, stepping beyond the bounds of her question. He did that a lot. Avoided that which he did not want to answer. That which he himself was not prepared to admit.
Rey rolled onto her back, looking up at the pocked ceiling of her bunk. She’d moved from the Resistance base, preferring to spend her nights in the captain’s quarters of the Falcon.
Separated of her own volition from those who dared not approach her any longer, save for the bravest few. Leia, Chewie, Finn. Rose and Poe, at times, though they seemed far more wrapped up in their own conquests and failures.
She had hoped to find peace. Instead, she just found a deeper well of loneliness. One only extinguished in these moments, when Ben infiltrated her space by will of their bond. A choice neither of them made, but both of them welcomed more as days passed.
“I wouldn’t have been any more content there,” she finally admitted. Soft, slow words, each carefully mulled over before tossed into the realm of existence. Before they became something for another’s ears. This was a conversation she’d rehearsed many times in her head. A practice in conflict for which she still did not feel prepared.
“I know,” Ben replied. His voice even. Like he’d decided the same long enough ago that her answer came as no surprise. “I’ve stopped trying to convince myself otherwise.”
Rey pulled herself up into a sitting position. Keeping a half-foot of distance between them as she leaned against the wall beside him. She said nothing, waiting for the sentence she could feel crackling like lightning on the tip of his tongue.
“But you are not content where you are, either,” he finally stated. Not a question. And she shouldn’t have been surprised that he acknowledged it – she wore her declining mood like a second skin. Yet it was as though, now that the statement was alive and real between them, she would finally have to face it.
“And you?” she said in lieu of an affirmative. He knew. “Your content?”
“I never expected to be content in this position,” he said. “I seized power knowing exactly what it would entail and what I would be subjected to.”
“Then answer my original question,” Rey responded after a moment. “Do you regret it?”
He was quiet for so long, attention on that kriffing datapad, that Rey assumed he’d ignore her until the bond closed. Entire minutes ticked by in silence, the Force stretching between them, growing restless in his reticence. Rey was nearly ready to rip it from his hands if only to force him to look at her.
Finally, he sighed, that single action giving light to the weight he’d taken when Snoke was killed and Kylo Ren took the helm of the First Order.
“Should I regret a choice I made for myself?” The question was rhetorical. “I did what I believed was necessary, after our combined actions left the galaxy’s most powerful Navy without a leader.”
“I had no hand in killing Snoke,” Rey shot back.
“Maybe not,” Ben said, setting the datapad aside and turning the full force of his gaze on her. Suddenly, she wished he hadn’t. She wished he’d pick up the datapad again. The boiling whiskey of his eyes melted her, easing all of that anger and frustration she held so closely toward a cliff’s edge, on the verge of toppling away completely. Fading into the obscurity of darkness. And who might she be without that anger holding her aloft? “But he threatened you, Rey. Faced with the probability of your death or Snoke’s?” He shook his head, staring at her. Drowning her. She might never find oxygen again. “That was not a choice. I can survive without him. Not––”
Without you, she hoped he meant to say.
But she wouldn’t know. Not with the way the bond suddenly detached. Leaving a void in her bed, in her body, in her heart.
One she wasn’t sure would be filled until he was with her again.
The next day, Rey awoke before the rest of the base and took her severed saber, trekking through the thick forest of Ajan Kloss.
When they’d first arrived, Rey couldn’t believe how green it all was. The foliage was far thicker than Takodana, stretching miles upon miles of trees interspersed with various bodies of water. It reflected Ajara in bright emeralds and jades, creating a lushness Rey couldn’t have envisioned in her wildest dreams.
While everyone else commented on how well-hidden they might be, the warm humidity of the forest providing ample coverage from heat-seeking drones, Rey marveled over the beauty. The impossible grandiose.
“If I ever have somewhere to call home,” she’d told Chewie, “I hope it looks like this.”
Chewie had laughed, a rumbling growl that came from deep within his chest, before telling her that nowhere in the galaxy was as impossibly beautiful as Kashyyyk. And it wasn’t simply bias. He would know, he stressed. He’d visited everywhere with Han.
When you decide to settle, Chewie had said, I hope you’ll consider Kashyyyk. Ben always loved it, too.
At the time, Rey had ignored the pang in her chest as Chewie’s casual admittance. Pretending hearing that Ben had held preferences in his childhood didn’t hurt.
Now, as she waded through the large-leafed plants and over rocky terrain, Rey wondered if she might ask him about it. If Kashyyyk remained in the back of his mind, as unforgotten and irreplaceable as his former home.
If he longed for the belonging of the past as much as she longed for its future.
If he’d ever truly known such a belonging to begin with, or if that, too, had been stolen away with his childhood.
Once she felt nestled and invisible in the safety of the trees, Rey pulled the saber pieces from her pack, holding one in each hand as she sat in the plush undergrowth and crossed her legs.
It took a while. This was the part she hadn’t yet grown accustomed to – the disconnect of her surroundings. Giving herself fully over to the Force and allowing it to transport her from see and feel and touch to submerge her completely in its intangible depths. Setting aside all that had sustained her and kept her alive for nineteen years on Jakku and plunging herself into the unknown. The logic of reality subsumed by the network of energy that existed between.
But when she fell–– Maker.
It was like a freefall through space itself.
She disregarded mass and reality to find herself afloat in the broad nothing of everything. And, as touch and sight, taste and smell and sound faded, she felt the stretch of her other sense broaden exponentially. Until all of that everything was at her fingertips, thrumming a familiar pulse that had always beat on the edges of her awareness. It was only now that she could give it a name. Give it a purpose.
The Force.
Descending into that expanse gave new life to the pieces of crystal in her hands, still encased in their metal coffin. She’d attempted to remove them from the ignition chamber in the lightsaber multiple times. And each attempt had been met with screaming refusal.
Home, the crystal screeched, buzzing and sparking as she used a multitool to attempt to dig it out. Home. Home. Home.
She’d stopped trying. Every time, her actions ended with a headache that bloomed like the sunrise behind her eyes. An impossible burst of pain chasing away her ability to focus.
The crystal halves calmed when she stopped trying to exhume them. And in the calm, they spoke to her.
Master, they whispered, longing for a man who’d been dead longer than Rey had been alive. Master.
She no longer tried to force them into bending toward her as their new keeper. Instead, she imbued tiny little shards of her energy into them. Acquainting them with her power. So that, next time, if the saber was ever caught between her and another, it would choose her without hesitation.
Hours passed before she made it back to base.
Only to be met with utter chaos.
Pandemonium rushed back and forth across the grounds, their limited numbers carrying armloads of supplies as orders were shouted from commanding officers. The telltale screech of an X-wing broke atmosphere. Poe’s familiar refurbished Rebel-era ship limped back toward the ground with a half-busted engine and obvious blaster scars marring a wing.
Rey pushed herself into the fray, running to the ship just as the hatch popped open. Poe hopped out, shaken but mostly unharmed, as a few other ships screamed back toward the ground.
“It was an ambush,” he explained to Leia as she held his elbows. Keeping him from teetering after jumping in and out of hyperspace so quickly. “No casualties, but I think someone on Tatooine tipped them off.”
“We should’ve expected as much,” Leia sighed. “Even if it can be classified as formerly, it’s still Hutt Space. The cartel only gains from throwing us to the sarlacc.” Giving Poe a moment to find his footing, Leia turned toward the other soldiers who were descending from their own aircrafts. “All right. We’re cutting contact with Tatooine. I’ll be opening up communication with my support on Batuu instead. Did we attain anything useful while planetside?”
“There was some intel we uncovered––” The conversation fell to Kaydel Co Connix’s shoulders then, and Rey moved to follow the herd as they headed inside. Until Poe suddenly rounded on her, his eyes alight with frustration.
“Where the hell were you?” he spat. Rey’s shock writ itself obviously across her face.
“Excuse me?”
“We needed you out there, and, what, you were here? Communing with ‘The Force’?”
“Poe, man, c’mon,” Finn interjected, trying to grab his friend’s shoulder.
“Yes, I was,” Rey replied defensively as Poe shook Finn off. “Because that was what we agreed on when we docked.”
“If you’d been there, your precious Force could’ve saved us from nearly losing more soldiers!”
“If I’d been there, the First Order would’ve been tipped off that much more quickly!” Rey shot back, hands fisting at her sides. “I am a walking target, that was the consensus! You think I prefer being stuck here? The Falcon was grounded after Crait; Leia’s orders, not mine.”
“If you actually cared about this movement,” Poe hissed as Finn bodily hauled him backward, “you’d have found a way up there with us. You’d have found a way to protect us from them!”
“Oh, kriff off, you––”
“Rey,” Finn interrupted, his eyes pleading. “Please.”
Lips caught in a snarl, Rey swallowed her retort back down, letting the blades of her barb slice open her throat. Her friendship with Finn superseded the desire to stand up for herself. She should want her friendship to come first, no matter the cause.
So why did she taste the blood of her shame every time she moved her tongue after stalking back onto the Falcon?
Subsisting off rations for the rest of the evening, Rey only emerged from her hovel after lights out had been called. Sneaking her way through base and slipping into the mess hall near the rear of the cave.
The room wasn’t large, but every available square inch not designated for walking had been stuffed to the brim with tables and chairs. Making it appear that much smaller, narrow pathways where knocking a hip into the back of someone’s seat was inevitable when the room was full. It was a resting place for the haggard and weary; a safety where their numbers could relax and smile and remind themselves why they were fighting to begin with.
Rey hardly made it into this room when it was so busy anymore. The dark well her presence had become seemed to suck the joy from the faces of every other member of the Resistance. Smiles slipping from sunburnt cheeks and exuberance fading, replaced with a tentative sort of caution. Like she was an ion cannon with a faultline crack, at risk of exploding with that perfect nudge of pressure. Still useful in most ways, but it was better to let her sit in the dark until she could be repaired.
Expecting to be alone, Rey was caught off-guard when the ceramic tap of a cup on one of the high-backed tables broke the room’s silence as she attempted to slip out. And perhaps it shouldn’t have been quite so startling to find Leia there, sipping tea from a cracked mug.
“Come to raid for a late-night snack?” the General asked. “Didn’t see you at dinner, so I figured you’d find your way in here eventually.”
“Were you waiting for me?” Rey asked, sitting across from their leader with her hands full of leftover sandwiches and barabel fruit. Having grabbed three for herself, because fruit was a commodity in which she seldom had opportunity to indulge.
“I was waiting for something,” Leia acknowledged around a slight shrug of her thin shoulders. “I never exactly know what. Which is something you can relate to, I’m sure.”
“The Force never really tells me why, no,” Rey agreed around a slight smile. A pause, a hesitation, before she asked, “Does it speak to you often?”
“I don’t let it,” Leia answered. “The Force made Luke a great leader and protector. My qualities lie more with my other senses. With science and planning.” A soft, muted chuckle. “We took so much after our parents, Luke and I. And neither of us knew it for decades.”
Rey leaned in, enraptured with this thin trail of information awarded to her from Leia’s vault of knowledge. These were the roots of the stories on which she’d grown up. Told through various scrappers and smugglers who made their way on and off Jakku, calling attention to themselves around the communal campfire to wax poetic about the Rebel fighters who saved the galaxy from the Empire’s tyranny.
What must it be like, she wondered, to have history so thoroughly repeat itself in her lifetime? To be facing the same trials and tribulations of her younger self, only rebranded to be shiny and new?
What must it be like to have her son standing at the helm, dictating the loss of everything she’d spent his life building for him?
“Our mother – that is, our birthmother, not my adoptive mother – was a Senator. I knew I wasn’t of my parents, but they raised me, and I only had a few moments where I wondered about the alternative.” Leia’s gaze grew distant, looking at some point over Rey’s shoulder that no one else could see. “I learned about her when I got older, after they’d died. She was headstrong and fierce. The youngest elected Queen on Naboo, and the reason they tried to change law so she could remain their leader for a third term.
“Our father, on the other hand, was a Jedi Knight.” A chuckle, forced and raw, like Leia had to convince it from her throat. “A Force-wielder who did much good in the galaxy, before…”
She trailed off, but Rey knew the rest of that story. Before he became corrupt. Before he took up the mantle of Darth Vader, the most feared villain in the galaxy. The right-hand of the Emperor, he brought entire planets to their knees with his strength.
The vein of her thoughts seemed in line with Leia’s for a time, until the former princess snapped back to reality with a deep breath and another sip of her tea.
“The truth of what happened between them – why my father fell to Darkness and my mother died – remains shrouded in mystery to me. I have an inkling of an idea that Luke knew, but he never told me, and I never asked.”
“But you’re part of her anyway,” Rey mused after swallowing down a bite of her sandwich.
“I am,” Leia agreed with a smile. “I used to think I was much like my adoptive mother, but Padmé’s cunning and mischief lives on in me.”
“What was his name?”
“Whose?”
“Your father’s. The Knight’s.”
The silence stretched so long, Rey wondered if she’d made a mistake in asking. She nearly retracted the question, but Leia’s voice broke the tension at the same moment she opened her mouth.
“Anakin,” she said. “His name was Anakin.”
Something about hearing it aloud stole the breath from her lungs. It sounded vaguely familiar. A cry she’d heard over and over again, coming from a voice so small, it couldn’t truly speak.
The saber, she realized with a start. It was his. He is who it longs for.
“You remind me of her, as well, you know.”
Snatching Rey back from her brief reverie, Rey looked up, meeting Leia’s steady gaze with the rest of her sandwich half-raised toward her mouth.
“Who?” she asked dumbly.
“Padmé,” Leia clarified with a small smirk. Like she knew Rey’s thoughts had run off, and she was making a small show of wrangling them back in. As though this, all along, had been the point of the conversation. “As I get older, running through this life as quickly as it seems I have, I find myself tallying more and more questions that remain unanswered. They sit with me like silent shadows, waiting for the first moment I find myself alone to envelop me. Most, of course, center around my husband and my son.” The glimmer in her eye faded some as her fingertips tapped against the side of her mug. “But some about her, as well. Who she might’ve been, if given the chance. If the Emperor hadn’t found a way to rise to power, or if she’d stepped out of the fray of war, as so many other Senators chose to do at the time. If she had simply watched the downfall of the Jedi Order with a heavy heart, or if her involvement played part in why it fell at all.”
“Do you truly think she had a choice?” Rey asked.
“I believe we always have a choice, Rey,” Leia answered.
“And you don’t think she would have regretted it?”
“Regret lives in all our choices.” The distance was back. Leia’s presence in the conversation fading faster than she could cling to it. Those distant shadows rushing up all at once. “It pulls us under at every opportunity, finding new ways to torment us in the privacy of our thoughts. But happiness can grow around that regret, if you allow it. If you nurture it, let it bloom, so the regret becomes nothing more than a ghost that haunts the gardens in your mind. Something that only creeps out in the quiet of night.”
“You know Poe didn’t mean it, right?”
Rey had made the trek to her workstation, attempting to construct the saber back into some semblance of its former glory. It would not allow her to build anew, so she needed to find a temporary solution until she had the opportunity to search out the crystal that might cry for her as this one cried for Anakin.
Is this, she wondered, why Jedi were always depicted as being burned with their lightsabers? So the Kyber within might know the peace of death as opposed to the solitude of existing without the soul that once brought them life?
Her welding musings were interrupted by the soft, careful voice of Rose Tico. Rey pressed her light-resistant goggles up her forehead, giving her full attention to the mechanic Rey only wished she knew better.
Though perhaps not in this context.
“I think Poe meant it entirely,” Rey responded as she tugged her gloves off.
Rose made a face, then closed her eyes around a deep breath. “Yeah. You’re probably right. He can be kind of an asshole, can’t he?”
That surprised a chuckle from Rey’s throat. One she quickly swallowed back down.
“Did Finn send you here?”
“I’m here because I want to be,” Rose argued, leaning her small frame on the desk across from Rey’s bench. “I just, y’know, heard what he said to you the other day, and it didn’t feel very fair.”
Swallowing, Rey gave a bare shrug.
“I know that what you’re doing here is important,” Rose continued. “And I know that having you running reconnaissance would probably bite us in the ass, what with the bounty the ‘Supreme Leader’ on your head.” Her fingers came up, miming air quotes.
Carefully concealing the emotion that washed through her chest, Rey only nodded.
“But I can understand his perspective, to an extent.” A deep sigh, like Rose wasn’t entirely comfortable talking this much. Finn had told her, after he’d introduced the two of them, that Rose spent most of her time surrounded by machinery. Investigating and fixing the ins and outs of their mechanical heart. Socialization, he’d confessed, wasn’t exactly Rose’s strong suit.
Rey, at the time, admitted her relation to such a concept. It never helped to bridge the gap between them, though.
“I mean,” Rose continued after a moment, wringing her hands together, “it would be nice to have a built-in danger radar making sure our friends came home, you know? Someone who can anticipate when the plan is about to blow up in our faces.”
“That’s not really how it works.”
“I know that, too,” Rose replied, hands thoroughly wrung and instead coming up to fiddle with the metal charm dangling from her neck. “And I think Poe knows that, but what Poe knows and what Poe believes are often two different things.” An eye roll to inform Rey that Rose, too, thought this was ridiculous.
“You saved our lives,” Rose began after a few moments of silence. The kind of quiet that could only exist between two people who did not know each other well – awkward, but not necessarily uncomfortable. “I think maybe Poe just wishes you could be there to save our lives all the time. I think maybe we’re just tired of losing people.”
“This was never my fight to begin with,” Rey responded, her voice quiet and contemplative. “I hardly know any of you. Everything I’ve done has been because I believed it was the right thing at the time.”
“It is the right thing.” Rose smiled, reaching a tentative hand between them. Rey took it, shaking firmly, and Rose took that as her cue that she’d accomplished whatever she’d set out to in her quest for conversation with the Resistance pariah.
Rey didn’t speak again until she was tucked away in the safety of the Falcon.
“Did you really put a bounty on my head?” she asked as she unlaced her boots.
Ben was wearing a loose-fitting tunic and trousers, running a towel through his damp hair. He turned toward her, wetness making his dark hair entirely black against his scalp, and Rey only let her eyes linger on his broad frame for a moment. A half-second. Hardly more than a blink.
Any longer and she would come undone. Unravel entirely, until nothing but bones and sinew remained.
“It was necessary,” Ben said. An admittance without remorse. “There would be questions from my generals if I did not call for your capture, as you killed the Supreme Leader.”
“You killed the Supreme Leader.”
“Semantics.”
Rey scoffed, turning away from him to grab her nightclothes. Glancing over her shoulder, once more giving herself a half-blink’s moment to look at him.
“Do you mind?” she asked. “I’d like to dress for bed.”
“I’m not exactly in control of our circumstances.”
“But you are in control of whether or not you’re facing me.”
Ben said nothing more, but the swish of fabric told her that he’d turned his back. Rey looked, just to be certain, and this time, her gaze lingered for longer than a blink. Longer than two. Tracing the shape of his broad shoulders, his lean back. Before she remembered herself, ripping off her day’s outfit and exchanging it for something more comfortable.
She remained quiet as she climbed into bed. Curling up as close to the wall as physically possible and keeping her back to Ben before informing him that she was decent.
He didn’t reply. For a long stretch of time, only silence existed between them, heavier than the humidity Ajara brought in the morning. The kind of embrace that turned sinister and suffocating, intent to crush the life from her chest and the light from her eyes.
“I imagine our tentative truce must be over.”
“There was never a truce,” Rey informed the wall. “You are my enemy, Kylo Ren.”
As though the Force itself felt Ben’s stab of pain, an echo of it punctured her chest. Briefly collapsing her lungs and making oxygen impossible to find.
The silence grew heavier still. Until she was drowning. Until she considered what it would mean to reach through time and take all that she said back.
“If you truly believe that,” Ben finally said, as breathless as Rey felt. “If you truly believe that our fates will forever lie on opposite sides, then this bond wouldn’t persist.”
“The Force dictates the existence of this bond.” Rey’s voice shook with her desperate need to keep it level. To keep herself from tearing her own heart out, if only to give it to him in apology. “I have nothing to do with it.”
“You have the power to close it,” Ben replied. “You’ve done it before.”
“So do you,” Rey shot back.
“Yes,” Ben agreed as the lights extinguished. The briefest, most painful brush of fingertips against her bare shoulder as he said, “But I never wanted to,” before the Force ripped him away.