Notes: For Ring in the New Year With Reylo. I'd like to thank my beta agirlfromniima on AO3, whose thoughtful critique was a great help.
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Home Is...
The first step of making a home together was, quite literally, making a home.
"But we're not going back to Jakku," Kylo said preemptively one evening as they sat on the couch of their quarters on base. He was tinkering with the green lightsaber he had grudgingly built to put his new allies at ease, but still didn't feel the level of comfort with as he had with his crossguard saber, while Rey was working on a new sensor array for BB-8.
The Resistance base had been growing lonelier with every day. Snoke was defeated, the war was over, and people were going home. Kylo and Rey hadn't even realized they had nowhere to return to until everybody else spoke of returning to the life they had left behind. This place with its military-grey hallways and standard quarters was the closest to a real, welcoming home they'd had for a very long time, and now the people who made it a home were leaving, scattering all over the galaxy.
For Rey, it was dismaying, for she had grown used to having all her new friends living next door, but she knew that Kylo would also feel some relief. He might have earned his redemption in the eyes of most and gotten his official pardon, but here with the Resistance everybody remembered being enemies.
Rey raised her head and met Kylo's eyes, her brows knit into a tiny frown. "I don't think I want to go back anymore," she said, her voice quiet and pensive. She'd never thought about going back, with Kylo, with a family of her own, until he'd brought it up. "Maz was right. I didn't find my belonging on Jakku, it was still ahead of me." She let another moment pass, before adding, "though I think I would like to go back for a visit… one day. I want to show you where I used to live."
He twirled his fingers around a strand of her hair that had come loose from the buns. His dark eyes were warm, as they only ever were when it was just the two of them.
"I'd like to see it. Your little AT-AT…"
"…and my speeder. I built it myself, I'd like to bring it home with us." A moment later she faltered, when the realization sank in that, "but everything will be gone by now. Nothing remains unclaimed for long on Jakku. I'm not upset, I just…" She gave a tiny, unhappy shrug.
She just couldn't stand the idea that someone had broken into the only home she'd ever had and torn it apart for scrap metal, discarding as trash the few beloved possessions of her old life. Her plant, her pilot helmet, the little doll, the flight simulator that had prepared her for flying the Millennium Falcon, and thus saved her life. They had been few objects, but incredibly precious to her, and now forever lost.
He kept petting her hair till the tension seeped out of her again. "We won't be able to rescue everything, but I don't think they would've ripped apart the speeder. It's more valuable than its parts." He smiled when Rey's eyes lit up with hope. "What do you say to a rescue mission?"
And so, building a home did start with their return to Jakku.
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Although Rey had dreaded her welcome at Niima Outpost, they didn't run into a single problem with her old compatriots. It certainly helped that Unkar Plutt hadn't made it back from pursuing her to Takodana, or else her return would have been far more eventful. While everybody remembered her dramatic theft of the Millennium Falcon, people on Jakku didn't care unless their own property was threatened.
With a speeder rented from the Blobfish's lucky successor, they made it to Rey's old home in the Goazon Badlands well before Jakku's unforgiving sun reached its highest point in the sky.
"Here it is…"
Her breath hitched in her throat as she climbed from the speeder and walked towards the fallen AT-AT, or what remained of it.
"I've lived here for most of my life," she said as she approached the gutted structure, bare metal spines pointed towards the sky like skeletal fingers. The thick metal plating of her home had been neatly cut apart and salvaged, opening her old refuge to Jakku's sandstorms.
Rey stopped by what had once been the entrance to her home, a sturdy door which protected her from sandstorms and dangers which lurked in the Goazon Badlands at night.
She looked over her shoulder, finally remembering that she wasn't alone anymore. Her gaze settled on Kylo. He had lingered in indecision by the speeder, and she felt a twinge of guilt for having ignored him.
Kylo approached her, he placed his hand on her shoulder. In its awkward clumsiness, the gesture reminded her that they were both still learning to be social creatures.
Rey reached up, she tugged down the scraps of cloth she had helped him wrap around his face, and revealed his lips and mouth.
"Better," she said, a hint of a smile on her lips. Melancholy lingered at the corner of her eyes despite her best attempt at cheer.
"I had hoped someone had moved in. It would have been odd knowing someone else lives here now, but that's better than having my home salvaged like it's just another piece of junk." She was proud of the lack of wobble to her voice.
There was a burning, tight feeling in her throat, and she just lifted her chin a little bit higher in response. She would not stand around in front of her old home and cry over scavengers doing what scavengers did, not when she had gotten through a war with barely a tear shed.
Kylo's long, strong arms wrapped around her from behind and pulled her back against his chest. With her protectively wrapped up in grey cloth, he couldn't nuzzle her hair or her ear as he normally would, but he could hold her close, and Rey permitted herself to take strength from it. She placed her hands over his.
"Are you ready to go inside?" Kylo asked after a while.
Rey nodded. "I am."
There wasn't really any going inside as such, there was nothing left to separate the inside from the outside. But the main struts of the AT-AT remained, and Rey would have known this place even if everything had been buried by sand.
As it was, it was half-buried in sand.
"The dunes are constantly shifting," Rey explained as she took a first cautious look around, "We are lucky we got here now. It could as well have been buried under a dune. Maybe it was, just a week ago."
Kylo released her and Rey took tentative steps into her old home. She found the spot where she had slept for so many years, and knelt by it, running her fingers through the sand. The back wall on which she had counted the days was gone, of her cot itself only a few scraps of fabric remained.
Even with Kylo's help, freeing her home of layers of sand was slow, tiresome work under Jakku's unforgiving sun. Worse yet, it was disheartening. Just like Rey had known, everything of value had been taken. She had known to expect it, but it hurt anyway to find proof that her life had been salvaged, chopped up and carried away in pieces.
It was two hours in, when she felt about ready to give up, that Kylo approached her.
"I have an errand of my own," he announced without another word.
"But now?" she asked him, frowning, while she knelt in the sands of her home.
His hand found hers and squeezed it. "I won't be long," he said curtly, and Rey nodded.
He pulled up the cloth until only his eyes remained exposed behind the thick protective goggles she had insisted he wear, and took off back in the direction of Niima Outpost.
Rey's eyes followed the speeder until he was only a tiny speck on the horizon. It was odd that he wanted to return on his own to the place they had just come from, but she made the conscious decision not to wonder. Everybody else doubted and second-guessed him already, she refused to do the same, or let herself dwell on the twinge of discomfort at being left behind.
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If it weren't for the sorry state of her home, it could have been as if she had never left Jakku at all, Rey mused much later. She sat leaning against one of the metal struts, legs stretched out in front of her while she chewed on the portion bread acquired in town and watched the sun sink lower, just like she had on so many other evenings before.
She wasn't worried for Kylo, there was still time before dark. Nevertheless she found herself hoping he would return soon, and they could make it back to the spaceport at Niima Outpost before nightfall. All that speeder driving was a hassle, it would have been easier to fly out right to the AT-AT, but she'd wanted to show Kylo as much of her old life as she could.
No, she wasn't worried, not yet. But… While Jakku hadn't changed, she had. Sitting here alone at the end of a long day didn't bring her the feeling of accomplishment it once had, it just left more time for her thoughts to stray back to her friends, to Kylo, and to the new home they would build on another world.
The familiar sound of a speeder pulled her out of her wistful thoughts. It wasn't approaching from Niima Outpost, but rather from the direction of the Starship Graveyard.
Rey leaped to her feet and reached for the lightsaber at her waist. Yet another small but meaningful change.
She squinted. The speeder approaching her didn't just sound familiar, it looked familiar as well, she realized as it came closer.
By the time Kylo brought it to a standstill, she was already rushing towards him.
Half off the speeder, he caught her.
"I think that answers my question if I got the right one?" He sounded puzzled by her exuberance, but Rey picked up on the note of satisfaction beneath it.
Rey held on tightly, eyes squeezed shut.
When she pulled back, her eyes flashed with determination. "I'm ready to go. Let me just…" She dashed back to fetch the single item of value she had found.
"My doll," she explained as she held it up for Kylo's curious eyes, and then quickly tugged it into a pocket of her Jedi robes, overcome by embarrassment. "She's all I had." She looked down at the tips of her shoes. "I bet they had nicer dolls where you grew up. But Ræh was a Starfighter pilot and helped me explore, I bet none of the fancy dolls on the Core worlds could have done that."
She took the controls from Kylo and drove them back to Niima Outpost in a race against the sinking sun.
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"The base is going to be left as is and shut down, to be reactivated if we ever need it. Do you have anything you want to take when you move out?" Leia asked over dinner two days later.
These family mealtimes had become a favorite of Rey's, and she knew Kylo loved them, too, even though conversations were sometimes still tense between him and his mother. There were too many silences, too many pauses. They were relearning to trust another, and confide, but when Rey watched them she was full of hope these days. She may not have known a lot about family, but she could not have wished for a better family than this one, broken as it was. That one empty chair at the table would alwys hurt, but they were healing.
"We found my speeder!" Rey piped up proudly. She looked from Leia to Kylo, and back to Leia again. "That's important for starting your household, isn't it? Transportation?" Insecurity crept back into her voice as she spoke. It was just a speeder, now that she thought about it, it seemed depressingly little to start a new life with.
Leia's smile was warm, maybe even fondly amused. "Of course. It is very important."
She peered at Kylo out of the corner of her eyes. He was cutting his meat systematically into tiny pieces. Rey nudged his leg with her foot. He had been very quiet tonight, and Leia had been looking concerned earlier. Everybody was concerned when Kylo was even the slightest bit off. She knew it annoyed him and she sympathized, but she could understand Leia's fears as well. It was hard to have faith that the people you loved would always return to you. Rey was still working on it herself.
"We haven't chosen a system yet, Mother," Kylo said tightly.
Under the table, she brushed her fingers against the back of his hand. He didn't react, but she could see some of the tension seep out of the taut lines of his shoulders.
"Well, I suppose you could stay a little longer…"
"We'll be fine," Rey interjected before Leia could make the offer she knew she truly wanted to make.
Leia Organa would be going wherever the government went, but they wouldn't be going with her. They had talked about it before, but knew it wouldn't work. Kylo's relationship with his mother was still fragile, even here in the relative isolation of their base, it wasn't ready to be tested by the demands and condemnation of the public. Rey herself wasn't eager either to make herself into a public spectacle either, and the thought of living on a metropolis of a world populated by billions frightened her.
Rey's eyes found Kylo's, she held his gaze even while speaking to Leia. "I know we won't be home much, what with helping Master Luke rebuild, but we want a place of our own. We just have to figure out where."
"Did you ever consider New Alderaan?" asked Leia, the former senator of the Alderaan Sector, still looking fondly amused, but also oddly hopeful.
Rey shifted uncomfortably. "We did not?" she said as the same time as Kylo echoed an equally discomfited, "no?"
Of course the planet had been considered, but they had both felt hesitant to even speak of it in depth. With Kylo's history in the First Order, it had felt almost like sacrilege to consider New Alderaan.
Their eyes met, and they made another a silent promise to speak of it again, without fear.
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When they arrived it was fall on the southern hemisphere of New Alderaan.
"The leaves will turn from yellow to brown yet, and then they'll fall," Kylo explained as they walked hand in hand down the little path in the woods.
"And then it will snow!" Rey added excitedly. Her nose and ears were red from the cold. She loved it.
Kylo pulled her closer into his arms as she wrapped an arm around his waist and snuggled into him. They could have gone straight to the house from the outpost's little spaceport, but instead they had gone exploring its surroundings first. Houses were of functional value to Rey, but she would never grow tired of lush vegetation, even if it wasn't particularly lush this time of the year.
"Maybe? I'm not sure if it gets cold enough for snow here, but it snows in the main colony. I remember playing in the snow when we visited New Alderaan."
Rey laughed brightly. "I'd never seen snow before Starkiller, I didn't think it was real!" It didn't hurt so much anymore to think of that terrible day, or at least she could think of the good without the bad tainting it.
He joined in her laughter, though it died quickly.
"Is it hard for you, being here?" she asked him quietly when she realized that Kylo had quickly grown solemn again. Maybe it had been a mistake to mention Starkiller. She certainly hoped it was the only problem.
Kylo thought for a while before speaking, for which she was grateful. It meant he wouldn't brush her off with a comfortable lie. "A little bit. It reminds me of my childhood." There was no need to say more. Memories of his childhood would include memories of his father.
Rey got on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek. That innocent kiss turned to one far less innocent, one that left her breathless, her hair ruffled and her cheeks as red as the tip of her nose.
Kylo's fingers tangled into her hair. "We should find that house."
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The house, it turned out, was one of the ugly metal boxes that were to be found on new colonies all over the galaxy.
It had been one among many such houses when the outpost had been founded, and somehow ended up in the hands of the Organa family, but never used by them before the revelation of Leia being Darth Vader's daughter had ruined her senatorial career. She had started the Resistance soon after, and no time left to take care of real estate. Rey had never dared ask if there was more to Leia avoiding New Alderaan.
Thus, when the other occupants of the outpost replaced their boxy metal monstrosities with buildings which held the beauty and grace of Alderaan of old, this one house had remained forever an ugly duckling.
Rey took in the battered metal walls, rusted in more places than you could count, with a roof that looked like it must sport at least a dozen holes, and windows so grimy they might as well have been permanently grey. It was the kind of house that would take much love, and elbow grease, to become a home.
She turned to Kylo with a dazzling smile and declared, "it's perfect!"
Kylo looked wistful again as he took in the rusty building. "It's a piece of junk," he said, but he said it with such pained longing that Rey could easily hear like the Millennium Falcon .
The expression on Kylo's face only confirmed for Rey what she had already felt in her gut. She nodded eagerly. "I know! It's garbage – like I said, it's perfect !"
She grabbed his hand and tugged him along through the overrun garden, making her own way through grass that came up to her thighs. It had long become impossible to find the path if there had ever been one.
From up close the house made for an even sorrier sight than from afar. Rey immediately began fussing over the control panel, fiddling with the wires until the rusted old door opened agonizingly slowly and with a worrisome grinding noise… only to get stuck halfway open. "Oh." She shrugged. "Now we know what to fix first."
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It was Rey's enthusiasm which carried them through the first days, when Kylo remained so quiet and sullen that she started to doubt their decision. He'd seemed enthusiastic about New Alderaan, but maybe he was having second thoughts, she fretted, and then fretted if spending all day tinkering reminded him too much of the father he had lost through his own hand.
The change came slowly in Kylo, and she couldn't tell if he had simply needed time to come to terms with his demons on his own, or if something meaningful had taken place during Leia's visit. Whatever the reason, he changed in little ways she barely noticed at first.
It was in the way he started making suggestions of his own instead of just helping her make the best of her ideas, and how he would offer to go on supply runs before she even brought up that they'd soon be running out of this or that.
It was in how she woke up late one morning after working late on the sorely needed radiator to find a small part of their jungle of a garden flattened and protected by durasteel coverings, finally providing a proper place to park her speeder.
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Soon, snow covered the mountaintops and warned them that they had to speed up their repairs.
One evening they sat on the floor of their living room, spooning pureed rations since they were in the process of replacing all the electrical wiring in the kitchen.
"I've almost got it," Kylo declared and wagged his spoon for emphasis, "Give me another hour and I think I can reconnect the main conduit without blowing the generator again."
He looked so personally offended that Rey couldn't help giggling. She moved from her crouch onto her knees, and rubbed away streak of grease on his cheek. "We're lucky they won't let us access the town's grid till we have everything fixed, or we would have caused two dozen blackouts already."
They exchanged a look that was all gleeful inventor's pride and very little chagrin.
Rey licked her spoon clean and stuck her finger into the container to swoop out even the last vestiges of the doughy mass. After she'd licked it clean she discarded the remains of her meal and scooted over. Kylo pulled her into his arms without a need for words.
Her eyes found the little pilot doll, which had a place of honor on their only piece of furniture in the living room, a table made of wood from Yavin 4. It had been sent by a scandalized Poe after Rey proudly told him that they had now acquired a mattress to sleep on. Finn, meanwhile, trained for ruthless pragmatism, had thought it sensible that they wouldn't buy furniture till they were done tearing the house apart.
She had brought that little piece of her old life, but what did Kylo have left of his old life, other than nightmares?
"That helmet you mentioned, your grandfather's," she asked as she twisted around in his arms, "do you ever miss it?" She could read conflict in Kylo's eyes. It had become such a familiar sight, Rey had long since learned to name all these little flickers of pain, regret and fury. But today was supposed to be a nice and happy day for them, she refused to let him lose himself in bad memories. "Because I've been thinking, and provided it didn't all get destroyed in the explosions…"
He frowned. "Searching a giant wreckage for a single memento? That's…"
"A task for the best scavenger Jakku ever had." Rey's smile turned mischievous. "Who happens to be your girlfriend and loves you, even if the things you like are a little bit weird."
Kylo's incredulous look told her that even he knew talking to a molten helmet was more than a little bit weird, and had been far more than a simple like. But they'd both clung to whatever made their lonely lives more bearable, Rey would never judge him for it. "If you want to," he said cautiously, and she grinned in triumph. He could pretend to be aloof all he wanted, if he truly didn't want her to go he would have protested it.
The lights in the living room flickered, and Rey heard an ominous electrical sizzling from the hallway, where they had jury-rigged some new conduits just last week.
Their eyes met, wide with alarm.
"Uh-oh," Rey said, just in time for the room to go dark.
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There was a Jedi Order to rebuild on another world and they couldn't skirt duty forever. It was spring when they could next visit their little house on New Alderaan.
"Look at how wet the soil is, Kylo!" Rey exclaimed in wonder as she dug her fingers into the soil behind their house. Together with Kylo, she had cleaned a patch right by the bedroom window of all grass and shrubbery. It held nothing but bare dark, moist soil now, unblemished except for the very neat hole she was scooping out.
Kylo looked nervous as he grabbed a large brown bag, whose contents she hadn't been allowed to see yet. "It's not a spinebarrel," he cautioned, "They wouldn't grow here. It's too cold and wet. But…"
He fought a bit with the bag before coming up with an unassuming little green plant. He held it in both hands as he offered it to Rey. "It's a T'iil, a plant from old Alderaan." She reached for it gently, let her fingers brush over the delicate little leaves, which were a bit wilted now from its stay in the bag, and slid them along its long roots. "On Alderaan it wasn't anything special, it grew wild and was eaten by the Shaaks, but now it's one of the few of its kind left." His lips twitched into an awkward smile. "It's a useful plant. You can use both the roots and the leaves, and even its single drop of nectar. I thought you would like that."
She took the plant from him as gingerly as if it were a baby, and settled it just as gently into the hole she had made. "Help me?" she prompted, and Kylo must have waited for that, for he eagerly helped her fill the hole till her T'iil sat snugly in its place of honor.
"It will grow yellow flowers. Mother said they're shaped like trumpets, and smell very nice."
She tangled their soil-covered fingers together, and leaned into him. Rey looked at the little house and the man she loved standing next to her, and knew she was home.