Murderer, Traitor, Thief
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I
He's a cruel man, a boy lost and afraid of the dark, a trouble-maker fleeing from the light. Running is the only thing he knows how to do; it's the only thing he's ever really done.
The price on Ben's head goes up with each passing year. Between the targets he's killed and the crimes that have been attributed to him, he can count on the galaxy's best bounty hunters to be riding his coattails at any given time. Not that this bothers him. Shooting blaster bolts through politicians' hearts is easy work, and he'll welcome anything to break the boredom. That's why he still smuggles spice and steals from businessmen; those jobs aren't half as lucrative as high-paying hits, but they keep things interesting.
Still, staying ahead of Republic law, the Jedi, and a small army of bounty hunters requires speed. He needs a fast, dependable ship, something one-of-a-kind that can facilitate his work and still get him out of tight spots.
That's why, when he hears that his father's freighter might be on Jakku, he leaves for the Western Reaches immediately. Maybe it's petty or sentimental, but he's always felt that the Millennium Falcon should be his.
II
She counts up, counts down, counts on. Her endless days scratched into unforgiving metal, carrying a little girl's dreams in a lonely woman's heart.
It takes weeks of deliberation for Rey to make her choice, but once she's decided, she knows that it's the only option left to her. It's a number that makes the answer clear: three thousand eight hundred-nineteen. She counted the tally marks on her wall for the first time, and it isn't until then that the weight of them hits her. Ten standard years, and then some. That's how much time she's spent in this broken imperial walker, scavenging and starving.
And that doesn't even encompass the years she spent in Unkar Plutt's cruel care, before she had any freedom at all, any wall of her own to mark upon. To leave her here for so long, her parents are either dead or uninterested in her survival, and Rey is tired of waiting.
III
"It will be better this way," his mother says, but all he can think is: better for me, or better for you? It's a hard question to ask, but an easy one to answer, and he can't stay where he isn't wanted. He won't.
Jakku is a dump the likes of which Ben rarely seen—and that's saying something, since he's killed targets on more worlds than most people have even heard of. It's insulting that the Falcon ended up here, of all places. Dad would be horrified, he thinks, before he remembers that he'll never see his father again.
His parents threw him away. Handed him over to Luke like a fish thrown back into a river, something unnecessary that it was easier to get rid of than to keep. So it isn't very hard for Ben to keep to his most important principle: never go home.
He stops a local alien, some ruddy, spindle-necked creature, and says, "Where can I find the owner of that ship?"
When he gestures at the Falcon, the alien says, "Just about everything around here belongs to Unkar Plutt. That's his blockhouse, right over there."
Ben gives the alien a diatium cell, the kind that used to power lightsabers. Salvage should be better payment than credits, if he's heard right about this junkyard world.
The alien thanks him profusely, then hurries over to the blockhouse to trade with Plutt. Ben sees him leave a few minutes later with a net full of vile-looking emergency rations, hauling a generator behind his new-used speeder.
Ben doesn't have to pay Plutt anything, of course. All it takes is a simple mind-trick, the kind of thing he mastered long before his parents sent him off to train with Luke.
"You'll give me the ship of my choice for free," he says.
Plutt nods, his eyes glazed over. "I'll give you the ship of your choice for free."
And just because the junk-boss rubs him the wrong way, Ben tells him to hand out every portion he has to the scavengers. With a little luck, oversaturating the Niima market with its primary commodity will put Plutt out of business.
IV
Her hope beats to the rhythm of, "Wait here. We'll come back for you." So she stays, and stays, and stays, until the day she can't. Until her hope turns to stone, like the rest of her.
Rey is halfway through hotwiring Unkar Plutt's garbage freighter when she hears someone coming up behind her. She reaches for her quarterstaff, but it's too late, he's already there, and—she's frozen, not from fear or lack of nerve, yet truly well and caught, her body held rigid by some terrifying energy. She feels like a fly in a cactus spider's web, hopelessly immobile, waiting to be preyed upon. No matter how she struggles, she's stuck, trapped, helpless.
"Stop panicking." She hears him before she sees him. With her back to the body of the ship, Rey can only look out the viewport at the Jakku sands, at the grotty business of Niima Outpost.
She feels him take her quarterstaff, hears the clunk and rattle of it hitting the floor. Then his hold on her body melts away, and Rey spins around, unsteady but still standing.
The Force, Rey thinks. A mystery out of legends, one she only half-believed in.
The stranger is tall and well-built, large enough to tower over her, dressed all in black. He's soft-featured, with warm eyes and a generous mouth, his fair skin dotted with beauty marks. He'd look almost pretty if not for his too-big nose and the off-kilter angles of his face. There's something handsome but strange about him, yet familiar too, and then she recognizes him.
"You're Ben Solo," Rey says.
He smirks. "I'm surprised that you get enough news out here to know who I am."
Rey almost laughs. "Everyone knows who you are."
Rumor has it that he abandoned his uncle's Jedi school when he was fourteen, then lived everywhere from the streets of Coruscant to the palaces of Ulon, picking up the mercenary work that's made him infamous. He's killed diplomats, Senators, business moguls, and kings. Stolen from the Hutts and spice syndicates and Revika Di. Ben Solo is wanted across half the galaxy for assassinations, treason, and grand larceny—and now she's gotten on his bad side.
"This is my ship," he says. "And you were about to steal it."
"Well. I was going to steal it from Unkar Plutt, not from you," Rey says. "I was just trying to get off-world."
Solo frowns, points at the doorway behind him, and says, "Not today. Get out."
And just like that, Rey's fear disappears. This man can't do much worse to her than has already been done.
She steps forward, edging closer, and says, "Just take me with you. Drop me at the nearest inhabited planet, or let me ride along to wherever you're going. I don't care, anywhere has to be better than here."
"Anywhere?" he asks. "What if I want to take you to Tatooine and put you on an auction block?"
Rey can't help but laugh. "A slave on a desert planet? At least it would be a different desert."
"What, you think I won't do it?" He takes her by the hair, not ungently, tilts her head back, and makes her look up at him. At his face, still soft, still sensitive, and it doesn't seem right that a creature like this should be so beautiful. "I've handed over thieves like you to slavers before. Your courage won't do you any good when you're scrubbing floors for a slumlord."
His gaze flickers, dropping from her eyes to her throat, then lower, down over the rest of her body. There's something more tender, almost yearning, in his resonant voice when he whispers, "Of course, I don't have to punish you. We could make a trade instead: I take you off this backwater planet, and you give me something I want."
"I don't have anything," Rey says, even though she does. She's not an idiot, and she can guess what he means.
The portion between your legs, that's what one of the working girls at Niima Outpost told Rey when she was thirteen and bleeding for the first time. If you're smart, you can trade it for whatever you want.
What could it hurt? One tumble for a life away from Jakku forever. She's done harder, dirtier work under the desert sun for far less reward. Besides, she's been on her back before, for free, and it wasn't painful.
But Ben Solo is cruel, and he could make it painful if he wanted to. He's killed and stolen and committed treason against the New Republic. What would one girl's suffering mean to a murderer, a traitor, a thief?
"It means quite a lot." Ben's grip on her hair loosens, and he slides his hand down to cup the nape of her neck. "Hurting women in bed is one crime even I don't commit."
She shivers. He peeked right behind her eyes and read the thoughts in her head, but it's his strong hand on her neck that's keeping her attention. He's warm, so much warmer than a man so cold has any right to be.
"All right," Rey says. "You have a deal, but I want to leave now."
"Done." He releases her, steps back, and says, "I take it you know how to fly?"
It's jarring, the sudden loss of his touch. "What?"
"Unless you were planning to will this ship into the sky, I assume you're a pilot," he says sharply. "So take the co-pilot's seat."
They leave Jakku together. When the viewport blurs, the points of stars bleeding into hyperspace, he says, "You can call me Ben."
V
Touch is a precious thing, a luxury rarely afforded to men with blood on their hands. He's found that a creature like him can never stumble across intimacy; it has to be bought.
Rey takes off her boots, drops her belt and wrap to the floor, then shimmies out of her pants and underwear. She climbs onto the cabin bed, then lies on her back, still dressed from the waist up, and opens her legs.
This is a transaction, one that Ben has partaken in often enough, but it feels different with this girl. Rey, she said her name was. She's a scavenger, not a courtesan, and she shouldn't be treating sex like business unless someone already made her think of it that way. Besides, he's only ever fucked men and women who seemed happy with their work—or, at least, happy with the generous pay-off for their labor—and if anything, Rey simply seems bored.
"Have you done this before?" he asks.
She sits up on her elbows, rolls her eyes, and says, "I've had sex a couple of times, but I've never bargained with it, if that's what you mean."
He tries to keep his gaze on her face, but she's lying there with her slender legs bare and parted, putting the softness between them on display.
Ben undresses and climbs on top of her, barely fitting himself over her on the narrow bed. She doesn't seem quite so disinterested now, if her short breaths and the color in her cheeks mean anything. He kisses her chin, her throat, the hard line of her collarbone. Slides his hand under her shirt and cups her breast, palming the modest weight of her. She's small, her nipple peaking under his touch, and he wants to kiss her there, to suck, to take as much of her little breast into his mouth as he can—
Rey makes a whimpering noise, and Ben leans back to get a better look at her. Her face is turned to the side, her eyes squeezed shut.
He slides his hand away from her and says, "Look, if you don't want to do this, just say so. I won't hurt you, and we're already halfway out of the Western Reaches. I'm not about to turn around just to take you all the way back to Jakku."
"No!" Rey says, then pulls at her hair. "It's not—I mean, I want to. It was just surprising. No one's ever… touched me there before."
It's so ludicrous that Ben nearly laughs, but he thinks she might hate him if he does. Instead, he asks, "You've had sex, but no one ever bothered to touch your breasts? Is that right?"
Rey scowls, then slides her foot along his calf. "So what?"
Ben bites his lip to keep from groaning, wraps his arms around her back, and clasps the whole of her shoulders in his hands. He just wants to be close, to feel every inch of her body against every inch of his. It's been so long, and she's such a raw, pretty thing.
He bites at her lips, then kisses her properly—or tries to, but Rey only opens her mouth with her head tilted back, breath held, waiting. No one's kissed her either, and that's more criminal than anything he's ever done.
"Oh, sweetheart," he whispers against her lips. "Somebody did you wrong."
He teaches Rey how to kiss, and in return she runs her fingernails down his back, whimpers and licks into his mouth with great earnestness and no grace. Ben waits until she's pulling him closer, asking for more, begging to be fucked, that he works his way down her body, mouthing at her soft places and nipping at the sharp. There's not enough room to kiss very far below her ribs, not in this tiny cot, so Ben tells her to turn over and get on her hands and knees.
Rey hurries to do as she's told, but she stiffens when he kisses the sweet crease where her thigh meets her ass.
"Can I?" he asks.
She buries her head in the pillow, and suddenly her hips are angled higher, her legs opened wider. "Yeah," she says. "Do it."
Ben licks at her, long, heavy swipes that run from the crest of her sex to her lips, until Rey is muffling her moans in the bedding. She tastes like earth and salt, smells of sand, sweat, and wet girl, and Ben loves it. He loves all of it: that she carries the desert on her skin, that it only takes a few minutes of attention to make her tremble and gasp, that she's brave enough to tell him what she wants. More, she says, when he's too gentle, then not so much, when he's too rough. Rey cries don't stop as she gets close, then his name, again and again, while he works her through her climax.
He's nearly undone himself, so he keeps licking and sucking at her, until Rey can only sob into the pillow, but she keeps bucking against him. Then she shouts, a bright, broken cry that sends heat coiling in his belly. All he can see, smell, taste, hear is this girl, this girl who's finding her first real pleasure under his mouth, and he can't—it's too much—
Ben reaches down to rub his hand against his cock, but he doesn't need to, he's already spilling, undone just from tasting Rey while she came.
VI
Her hands and her desires have been worn down, desert-roughened. Her love left to wither under the sun, gone so long that she can't even remember what it feels like. It takes ages, years, seconds of darkness to bring her back to life.
Rey wakes up half-naked and alone.
She lies on her back for a long while, staring up at the low ceiling, considering what she's just done. She fell into bed with one of the most infamous criminals in the galaxy. As a trade, it seemed fair, understandable even, but he took that farce off the table before they'd gone far at all. She didn't do it for money, or safety, or to get away from Jakku. Rey fell into bed with Ben Solo purely because she wanted to, and she loved every moment of it.
Maybe he didn't, though. She hadn't done much for him—anything, really—and now he's gone. He left her in this cot, messy and exposed, without so much as a kiss.
Rey cleans herself up in the 'fresher, dresses, and finds Ben landing the ship. The world she sees through the viewport is so green that she rushes to the co-pilot's seat to get a better look. It's full of life, all rolling hills and forests with clear blue rivers winding around them. The farthest thing from Jakku that Rey could ever have imagined, and she almost can't believe it's real. Could there truly be this much green in one place?
"Where are we?" she asks.
Ben doesn't look at her. "Takodana." Then he says, more carefully, "Maz Kanata's castle is a good place to find your way to somewhere else. There are always people looking to take on extra hands."
"Oh. Thank you." Rey fidgets with her belt, tugging at the leather. "What are you going to do next?"
He sets the ship down near a river, then says, "I've got a job next week in the Unknown Regions."
"That's awfully vague," Rey says.
The look Ben gives her is sharp, and it hits her, perhaps for the first time, just how dangerous he is. "You know what I do. Did you really expect me to share the details of my work with you just because we—?" He doesn't say the rest, not that he needs to.
Her throat hurts, and there's heat behind her eyes, the kind of burn that promises tears, but she can't cry in front of him. She can't.
Rey turns away, swallows down the sob that's trying to climb out of her, and says, "I guess this is goodbye. Thank you for—for your help. I can figure out things from here."
Ben stands, puts his hand on her shoulder, his touch and his voice suddenly soft again when he says, "Don't be stupid. I can introduce you to some people at Maz's. Find you a trustworthy ticket to wherever you want to go."
Rey jerks out of his grasp, then looks up at him, at his lush mouth and searching eyes. "You know trustworthy people?"
"A few. Not that they trust me back." His smile is small but arresting, and he's never looked both more and less like a rogue when he flashes it at her.
She has to leave, now, before she says something stupid. "I don't need you to come with me. I can find my own way."
Ben nods, but his lovely, kiss-bruised lips are parted, like he wants to speak. So she waits, watching and wishing for something that she isn't brave enough to name.
Then he grabs her by the shoulders and bends so low that she can feel his breath on her cheek. "Stay with me," he says. "Please."
Rey looks at the dusty floor, knowing her answer already. If she does this, if she goes on the run with a wanted criminal she met today, she'll only be jumping from one lonely life to another. She only freed herself from Jakku a few hours ago, and it would be stupid, so stupid, to yoke herself to a man like Ben Solo—
"Yes," she says. "All right. I'll stay."
Ben grins, wide and bright, and picks her up like a bride.
"What are you doing?" Rey asks, laughing.
"Taking you back to bed," he says. "And this time, I'm getting all of your clothes off."
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fin