Dinayru is a dream—a wonderful, Force-infused dream.
Rey was upset about being the one sent out to scout out its old Rebellion base at first—she had so much to do, so much to learn from ancient Jedi texts drier than dust, so little time in which to teach herself whatever it was the old Jedi Order had to teach her, even if it wasn't much—until she realized that she would have an entire ship of space to herself and a solid week away from the tight, cramped quarters of the new bolthole the Resistance has found for itself.
Now, halfway into the automated descent process, Rey finds herself fighting the urge to unbuckle herself from the flight seat and press her nose to the glass to see everything.
Sweeping forested mountains are lit up in vivid strokes of green and blue by the light of Dinayru's three moons, pinpricks of pink and yellow lights dancing among the trees closest to her. She draws in a breath, wondering if they're the mythical ignes fatui she'd read about in the datafile on the planet, but her ship leaves the mountains behind too soon and her attention is arrested by the rolling valley that spreads out before her eyes, dotted with what looks to be the ruins of multiple structures far more ancient than the supposed Rebel base and crisscrossed with wild rivers.
"Beautiful," she murmurs, and she hadn't meant to speak aloud, but she knows she has when there is a soft intake of breath behind her and the world thrums with a familiar silence. Rey closes her eyes for the briefest of moments.
The bond connecting her to Kylo Ren sings, a theremin melody of melancholy and regret resounding in the lightyears between them, a thin cover for the deep wells of emotion that make their homes in him and her.
What are they, really? When it comes to it, aren't they just children, playing at a story that isn't theirs?
He said so himself—she isn't a part of the narrative, the great big galactic narrative that every Somebody has a part in, the narrative that every Nobody can only watch from the sidelines. She still remembers the look on his face and the heat from the burning curtain, raining fire down around them.
You're nothing.
But not to me.
Her heart seizes in her chest. She forces herself to wipe it all away, to search for shapes in the shadows of the grasslands below like she had once sought the light in his tattered soul. Like a scavenger.
In so many ways, she is still Rey of Jakku, Rey from Nowhere, looking for salvage to keep herself alive.
"Rey," Kylo Ren whispers, stricken, and she cannot bring herself to look at him. She is afraid of what she will see, even though his feelings mirror her own, even though everything in the both of them cries out for each other. Rey has loved and she has lost and she has laid awake for far, far too many nights, staring at the darkened crew bunk above hers on the Falcon, wondering if anything will ever soothe the burning in her soul or the creeping feeling that somehow, somewhere, she has made the wrong choice.
There is no joy in Dinayru's ignes fatui , not in this moment.
Kylo knows this, feels this, and his heart recoils from hers like it has been stabbed. But: "Rey," he tries again.
He doesn't come closer. He doesn't know if he's welcome.
"Don't you have Supreme Leader business to attend to?" Rey asks, lips twisting around the words. She nearly has to spit his title out. It brings a fresh spurt of bitterness, and this, at least, is familiar to him.
"It can wait." His voice is as low as she remembers. She turns her seat to face him, to ask him if he has any idea how to run a galaxy or if he's just playing at reclaiming the past he had claimed he was going to kill, but she makes the mistake of meeting his eyes when she does so. They burn into her, rooting her to the spot, because—who's ever looked at her like that, like she could be the one to pull down all his suns and stars from their places in the heavens and he'd still fall at her feet and give her anything she wanted? Like she's the most glorious thing he's ever seen? "For you, it can always wait."
She swallows. This isn't fair, she thinks, fighting back tears. He still dreams of her in stately finery at his arm, meeting him, matching him, building the world they wanted together, and she—
—well, it doesn't matter what she ever wanted, now, does it? It certainly hadn't mattered when she had been balled up in her hammock every night, wanting her family with everything in her. The thought makes her mouth go dry.
"You can still have what you want," he says, pleading. He takes a step forward. The universe is in his eyes. "Rey, it's not too late. You can still let the past die. You can still turn back." You can still come back to me.
"You can still come to me," she cuts in. The effect of her words is like watching a datapad wipe itself clean of everything stored in it; his face goes blank, set in stone for all the difference it makes. Rey watches silently, something in her whispering I told you so, fool girl, why do you keep bothering with hope— but she is something of an expert in self-denial, and so it takes next to no effort to pretend she had never thought it in the first place. "You can. You have the power now. You've always had it. You can choose to come."
But you won't hangs in the air between them. Alone, she has no need to conceal her location. He's seen it in her mind. He knows exactly where she is, knows which valley she's headed toward, knows exactly where he left her.
"I'm the Supreme Leader now," he says, dully, like it's the end of the argument.
Rey lifts her chin. "And I suppose that it can't wait," she says, cool. "Can it?"
He flinches. Their connection splinters; he vanishes with it. The humming of the ship floods back into her ears, twice as loud as it had been before.
Rey sags in her seat. You did this to me, she cries bitterly in her heart, knowing that it is equal parts true and not, fair and unfair. I tried, I tried so hard for you—
But men are not droids. They're not salvage. Picking and choosing with sentient beings doesn't work, not in the same way. She hasn't a clue how she was meant to know beforehand that the man she'd seen in Kylo Ren had to want to be there. That he had to pull himself back to the Light. Oh, there is good in him even now, but— but—
Why wasn't I—
Her heart clenches again before she can finish the thought and she swallows the truth back down the way she had grown used to doing back on Jakku, where the sands tore everything from her and put it all back in the wrong order. Because she is alone once more and there is no one watching her, not even in the back of her mind, Rey puts her head in her hands and allows the tears to trickle down her face, the silence broken only by her shaky breath and the ship gliding on toward the far side of the valley.
The things they do to each other, even now. The things they will continue to do to each other.
Rey knows in her bones that there will be no end between them until they meet face-to-face—they'd never be able to do it any other way, really, never would be able to bear it.
Something in her that is selfish and young and afraid, something that has only begun to accept that she still cannot envision a future without the man who now calls himself the Supreme Leader, hopes that the day will never come.
Rey only remembers that Dinayru is prone to vicious, long-lasting thunderstorms when she hears the first rolling claps of thunder upon disembarking from her ship. She curses under her breath, glaring at the mossy ceiling of the ancient hangar her ship landed itself in, and stalks back into the ship to send off a comm to the General. Sure, Rey has her tracker bracelet on her wrist, just in case the Resistance suddenly needs to move again, but her orders are to check in once every three days until she's learned everything she can about this old base, and there's no telling how long the oncoming storm will make sending transmissions a difficult venture at best.
When she is done and the comm blinks green to signal that the message sent, she sits back in her seat and considers the sacred Jedi texts spread across the desk in the captain's quarters. The thickest book is open where she'd left off trying to decipher it. On a whim, she leans forward and turns the page, mindful of the fragility of the paper. Rare thing in this age, to have any sort of information on something as easily exhaustible and inefficient as paper.
She really ought to get back to re-scanning every page, uploading the contents onto the datapad she'd brought with her for the purpose, but more and more she's lost the motivation to do so. They might be rare, these physical books, but they are also mind-numbing. The only good sleep aid she's ever found.
Balance does not lie in extremes, some dead scholar is saying, speaking over the millennia to a half-starved scavenger who fancies herself a Jedi. It is perhaps a truth that will have me branded a heretic, but in the Force our delineations do not exist. We are all one, moving in circles, separated by perspectives. The heart, the crystal, the blade, the Jedi: if these things are one, then how much more are we a part of one another, just as these four are all part of the Force? The Dark must never win, no. It is a perversion, and that I do not deny. But what danger lies in assuming the Light to be with us always! A Jedi never ceases learning. Therefore, seeker, remain vigilant and hold your candle aloft...
Rey blinks and looks to the note affixed to the bottom of the passage on a separate piece of paper, written in handwriting so neat it could almost be script. Most probably the words of Jedi Master Fay Solduga, thought to have been a wandering Jedi in the last days of the Old Republic. One of the lone voices from the era who thought this way. Must research further.
For a moment, the words are so familiar she finds herself wondering when she'd developed any semblance of good handwriting—or, before that, a calligraphy set with which to write in the first place. Then her eyes fall on the initials at the end of the note: BOS.
She knows instinctively what each letter means, what they represent. Ben Organa-Solo.
Oh. Oh.
Abruptly, Rey closes the book and stands up. Outside, another clap of thunder sounds and lightning illuminates the insanely tall grass hiding most of the entrance. She hurries out of the ship.
I have a job to do, she tells herself, ignoring the ache in her heart with the ease of many years of practice. I'd better get started.
She dreams that night, curled up in the captain's bunk, her blankets behaving almost more like a nest in a bid to make herself comfortable that only works in that she drowses off before seeing the entirety of the ocean the way she had on Jakku.
In the dream world, he takes her hand.
"Ben," she whispers in her sleep, raw and yearning, but if she has tears to shed, none make their way down her cheeks.
Kylo, hopelessly awake, watches from across the galaxy and less than a foot away. He takes a breath. Touches his gloved fingers to the open palm of her hand.
She flexes her fingers, like she is grasping for something, but even here her hand slackens. She does not take what he has to offer, in this lifetime or the next, in the real or the imaginary. He never had a chance—never even a glimmer of one.
Except he had.
Rey. His one shooting star.
"Ben," she says again, curling into him like she's searching for his presence. She's only responding to the heat his body offers, he knows, but his heart clenches anyways.
"I'm here," he murmurs helplessly, in the moment forgetting all his hurt and anger. Not desperation, though. He will always be desperate when it comes to her. This will be what is important to him until the end of his days and probably even beyond: Rey of Jakku, scavenger girl, last hope of the Resistance, the last Jedi in the galaxy. Important in so many different ways. "Always in your shadow."
Rey hums when she nestles her head in the juncture between his neck and his chest. He feels the sound of it resonate in his chest cavity.
Kylo Ren stares at the ceiling of her ship. Did I ever have a chance? he asks it, already knowing the answer, and the ceiling glares back in a shade of cool grey that sends a lance right through the part of him that remembers the rare afternoon naps in a ship that was always moving.
The Force keeps them connected for far too long. Long enough that he ends up with her leg slung across one of his and her arm draped over the broad expanse of his chest, like she's trying to melt into him and through her sheer strength of will become what he could never be.
He keeps telling himself to move, to break away from her and give her the privacy and space she deserves, but he has never been strong enough to deny the truth.
He wants this. He wants to be with her like this every day of his miserable life and every day he deals with the weight of wresting a galaxy into submission without her only pulls at him and stretches him thinner and thinner.
I feel it again. The call to the Light.
By the grace of your training—
Without thinking, the hand not clasping Rey's clenches into a fist.
No more, he reminds himself. That is a dead thing now. It belongs to the past. And that's where it'll stay.
He is the one who holds power over himself, now.
She throws herself into investigating the base. It feels good to finally do something for the Resistance other than lifting rocks, even if it is just a routine scouting mission, and doing a job like this by herself is almost nice when she knows that she has people to return to.
Rey pauses on the large staircase in the center of the base, smiling to herself.
People to come home to. As feelings go, the warmth suffusing her chest at the thought isn't half-bad.
Several days have passed by the time she's made herself a working map of the base. It's far, far larger than she had expected based on Leia's oral recollection of the Rebellion's brief stay in it—an impressive feat given that all the walls, though cracked and overrun by greenery in many places, had clearly been hewn out of the rocky cavern walls by sentient hands. The floor is more hard-packed earth than anything, coupled with raised metal platforms housing ancient, abandoned tech that Rey hadn't been able to fix up.
Out of habit, she'd salvaged parts from nonfunctional data terminals and old wall panels just in case her ship blew a fuse or something; in the process, she'd discovered Old Republic insignias stamped onto the particularly fiddly bits, like the burnt-out caseinator that had been housed in the heart of the main data terminal in what looked to have once been the war room.
She'd taken it apart to get at the guts, particularly the wiring and the metal holding it in place. Old Republic tech may be severely outdated, but most of it is made with impeccable craftsmanship and excellent materials—it would have been remiss of her not to take advantage of that, especially since the larger part of the facilities don't even work any more.
Rey bounces one of her spools of wire in her hand and tucks it into her pouch. For now, she's going to give the living quarters the thorough inspection they deserve.
She can still hear the storm raging outside, but this far in, it's a distant backdrop rather than a pressing concern. She'd worry more if she hadn't thought to move the ship next to the entrance to this central atrium—something she imagines Finn would do, or at least insist on if he were here. The thought brings a smile to her face. Her first friend, always on the lookout, always thinking about how to keep his friends safe. It feels like a precious gift to know that about a person, to know their quirks with certainty.
The world goes silent.
"This is exactly how I expected this to go," Kylo Ren says, sounding at once both glum and darkly amused. Rey whirls as he straightens from a battle stance and disengages his lightsaber. "Of all the times—"
He cuts himself off, face twisting with rage as he looks at whatever it is he's been fighting. She can't see his surroundings, a realization that makes her lips thin.
"What's going on?" she asks, deciding not to point out the lunacy of him deactivating his lightsaber in the middle of a battle—or maybe he's finished the fight, whatever it is. She can't see any injuries on him. Admittedly, the all-black ensemble makes that a difficult task at best.
Kylo pauses. "Are you concerned for me?" he asks, eyes fixed on the same spot. His jaw quivers for a moment, then tightens against the force of some internal thought.
"Don't be stupid," she snaps nearly before he finishes the sentence, because of course she is, why won't he look at her, but his shoulders slump at her response.
"Of course," he murmurs. "Foolish of me to ask."
"That wasn't— argh!" Rey throws her hands up and marches the remaining distance to the top of the stairs. She can't deal with him right now, can't deal with the way he's so easily offended, like every part of him is a wide open canvas for her to trod all over and cut open with her rough, unfinished edges.
You know that about him, a traitorous voice in the back of her mind whispers, and she stops. Just like you know that Finn is cautious. You know him, even now.
Kylo lifts his eyes to her and watches her in silence, thoughts and emotions flickering past his face before she can read them with certainty. He's upset about something, the tense line of his shoulders tells her that, but... it doesn't seem to be directed at her. Not right now, at least.
"I know my place in all this," she tells him, conscious of the broken lightsaber in her bag on the ship.
His eyes are dark and deep and she could still get lost in them if she isn't careful. Could still find herself drawn to make half-mad, impulsive decisions, make them on a burning hope that had failed her once and will fail her again. He brings it out in her, that fire, that drive to be something. "You've made that very clear."
"But you don't get it, do you? This is what I have to do to be who I am. But that—even with that—" She swallows, her throat suddenly feeling too tight, her eyes burning. He brings her to tears so easily, makes her feel with vicious intensity, and it's terrifying, the depths between the two of them.
Where she has moved, he has stayed. To her eyes, he's standing at the bottom of the stairs, hands folded together, cape surrounding him like a dark shroud—he looks up at her, watches her, sees her, always. He doesn't say anything. He waits.
She knows what he is saying without words. Tell me.
He is so patient with her, even now, even with hurt bleeding through their cracks and mixing until they forget whose is whose.
"I wanted you with me," Rey admits for the first time since she had realized he wouldn't join her on Snoke's flagship. Had it only been weeks ago? It feels like a lifetime has passed already. "I still do."
Kylo is silent for so long that she looks up, her heart in her mouth.
He's gone.
Rey curses under her breath and sits down on the top step, tempted again to put her head in her hands, but instead she leans against the banister and stares sightlessly at the far wall.
The storm has worn on for five standard days and Rey still hasn't found the end of the base when she hears an exceptionally loud clap of thunder. She jumps as the walls shake. Another, quieter noise, though still very loud in comparison to the beating of her heart, sounds from the direction of the hangar—a strange sort of bshhhhnk-boom, like an RF-3212 Imperial blaster with a malfunctioning muffler colliding with a wall, except on a significantly larger scale, then the distant sound of a droid whirring in high-pitched Binary that she can't pick up on the specifics of.
With only half a thought given to what dangers might lie ahead, Rey takes the steps down the grand staircase two at a time and makes a beeline for the hangar. The run both feels like it lasts forever and takes no time at all. When she arrives at the hangar, she stops and sucks in a breath.
A LN-4430 series TIE space superiority fighter has crashed into the wall and made a sizable crater in it. And a BB-series droid—T7, if she isn't mistaken—is screeching profanities next to the cockpit, to her ears vastly offended about everything from the pilot's method of exiting his origin point to his obtuse manner of dress.
The cockpit's suction seals let out a high-pitched whine of displeasure as it is forced from within to disengage and open up; smoke spills from the engines (twin ions, Rey thinks mournfully, could've gotten three portions) and spreads across the floor of the hangar as a dark shape rises from the remains of the cockpit.
BB-T7 falls silent.
"No," Rey says, because he couldn't have.
Her only response is a wet, hacking cough.
Rey rushes forward as Kylo very nearly trips out of the cockpit; she catches him in her arms with a grunt, and really, this man, so large, so full of warmth fresh out of a trip through hyperspace that couldn't have been anything but just barely too cold to be comfortable, and—
"You moron," she's saying while the universe sings in the back of her head, one hand tangling in his hair and the other coming 'round his massive shoulders to help keep him upright as he works his way back to stability and solid ground, and she forgets all her anger in the space between their heartbeats. "You idiot. It's storming—these lightning storms last forever, I read about it—"
"I know," Kylo says, his hands resting loosely on her waist, bent over her because she hasn't let go of him yet. For a ringing moment in infinity, she wants to stay here forever with the heat of his palms on her sides, the pads of his thumbs resting against the spur of her hips, his hair between her fingers, her arms holding him close, their heads together, breathing in the same air.
And then she remembers.
Her hands fall away. She takes a step back, watching as he straightens. Then, because she can't breathe, she takes another step back.
His face flickers from dazed relief to confusion to alarm to defeated understanding within the space of a few seconds, and she hates that she knows what all the minute twitches and tics of his expressions mean, hates the way he swallows before he speaks like he is choking down the hope he'd been denied by everyone for so long. "Rey?"
"You're injured," she says, feeling cold inside. "This isn't your fighter. You don't own a droid. When I last spoke to you, you had just finished up a battle. You wouldn't use your lightsaber for just anything. Not unless—"
Her jaw snaps shut and she lowers her gaze. Nobody had ever told her that caring about people would be like carrying a wound beneath your breastbone, a constant, throbbing ache beating in time with your heart. There had been no lessons, no rulebook, no guide: this is how you give, this is how you take, this is how you expect something in return.
She hadn't had anyone to tell her. There had only been the silence of the desert at high noon, the hot, dry wind, the dreams of an ocean that now seems indistinct and blurry and hopelessly naive when she stands before the man who had seen into her soul and offered her the galaxy because of it.
There had been more, beneath that. Things neither of them realized. Worlds they dream of instead of the ocean.
"You think I came here because I had nowhere else to go," Kylo says, quietly. She follows the way his lips form the words and she wants to drown in them.
But Rey remembers the desert, even now. She is still the desert. So she lifts her chin and dares to meet his gaze. "Didn't you?"
BB-T7 rolls between them. Danger, it screeches, rolling back and forth, absolutely frantic. Behind Kylo, the fighter sparks.
"Ben," she breathes, and then she is moving, faster than she has ever pushed herself to go, yanking him back and away and forcing him to run with her in the direction of the atrium.
The TIE silencer explodes by the time they're through the hangar doorway with a great big boom that sends shockwaves rippling through them and propels BB-T7 in their direction; something makes a crunching noise fifteen feet away from their heads and Rey goes white, then red. In the Force, she is a confused mass of tangled emotions. Speaking seems counterintuitive to assuring his physical safety, at least if the glare she shoots at the smoking remains behind them is any indication.
Kylo follows her to the broken-down medbay, though he doesn't have much choice with the vise grip she's got his wrist in.
Seeing her in person had shocked his system back into awareness, but he can feel a numbing fatigue beginning to creep up on him. Whether it's the fact that she doesn't want him here, the fact that he's here anyways, or the more eminently alarming fact that he'd done a hack job with patching himself up from his previous engagement and he's pretty sure that at least one of his tibias has been fractured by his botched landing, he's tired. Of, well, pretty much everything.
"Stop that," Rey commands without looking at him, and his patience only goes so far, because regrets or no, she had almost been there. Almost said yes.
"Stop what?" he demands, halting next to the stairs; his vision is starting to blink with little spots, a sure sign that he's begun to push his limits, but nobody ever accused him of making healthy life choices. Rey jerks comically at the end of the reach of his arm and whips around to glare at him, white-hot, and he could die like this, her tawny eyes boring into his with a righteous fire. He hopes to die like this, really. What else is there?
"Are you mad?" she snaps, tugging on his arm. "We need to get you treated—"
"Stop what?" he asks again.
Rey scowls at him. "Stop imagining that I'll kill you," she says. "Just—stop. You put those images into my head when you do that, and I can't take them out, and I don't want them there. I don't want to do that. Ever . Now come along, unless you'd like to bleed out right here."
Stunned into silence, Kylo follows her lead.
It takes six minutes and forty-seven seconds of silence while she forces him into a Rebellion-era medical bed with a creaky frame that groans under his weight and rummages around in the spare bins stacked up next to it for Kylo to find his voice again. "You look tired."
"So do you," she mutters, stealing a quick, furtive glance at him. Even if he hadn't been in terrible shape from his untimely landing, he would've looked awful; there are tired circles under his eyes and he sags into the bed despite his best attempts to hold himself upright. She could probably reach over and tip him over with a finger. "Have you been sleeping?"
His gaze flickers away from hers. It's answer enough.
She stands with the ancient roll of bandages she'd managed to find and tosses it to him. He catches it with one hand. They both pause. Their eyes meet.
Ben!
A flash of blue—
"Rey—"
"If you can bandage your chest up, do it," she interrupts, stubborn. "I'm going to see if my ship is damaged. There might be supplies we can use."
He should look absolutely ridiculous with his torn cape curled about himself and his too-large legs huddled up against his chest, but somehow, somehow—when he looks at her and takes a breath, she finds herself pausing.
"Rey," he starts again, doing that thing with his lips, trying to set them in stone, "Rey, you can't run forever."
Watch me, she thinks, closing her eyes, but in half a heartbeat discards the thought in favor of giving him the most neutral expression she can manage. "We're both here, aren't we?"
She goes then, conscious of the way he stares after her. Just at the edge of her hearing, BB-T7 asks Kylo if the way he's watching her means that she's an angel. He doesn't seem to hear it.
The ship isn't—well, it's not totaled, thankfully, but it will take a bit of work to repair the hull and do a full diagnostics check. The hull is scored black where bits of wreckage from Kylo's ship must've been propelled into it. Rey takes a breath as the entryway slides down and she walks up the ramp; only when she is in the cockpit and nothing inside looks to have been significantly damaged does she let the air out.
"Right," she says to herself. "Supplies. First aid kit. It's not all ruined."
Her search ends up taking her through every nook and cranny of the ship. By the time she finds the box marked with the old symbol of the Rebel Alliance holed up in a corner drawer in the captain's quarters, something harsh and hard-set in her has quieted. She sets the box down on the desk, eyes resting on the way the cool light from the overheads reflects against the groove between the two metal panels joined together to create the wall.
What am I supposed to do? she asks the jagged, diagonal patterns that sit there, unchanging.
She knows what she should do—what Poe Dameron and Finn would probably want her to do, if they knew what was happening to her right now. Take Kylo hostage, declare him a prisoner of the Resistance, keep him unconscious until she can get back to the Resistance base—use him as leverage. Use his name. His position. His power.
That mighty Skywalker blood, Luke Skywalker is saying on an island in the past, regret and the dying sun painting his face in vivid orange-reds and yellows, his eyes boring into hers. I thought I could control it. I was wrong.
Rey swallows down the bile rising in her throat at the thought.
"No," she says to the empty room and the silence. "I won't. Ever."
He may call himself Kylo Ren, but he is still that boy underneath the mask, unveiling himself for her, so young she'd thought for a half-second that he was her age or even younger. He is still the man who told her that she wasn't alone. Still the key to the future she'd seen when their fingers met.
He's still Ben Solo. Even now, with so much of the galaxy under his thumb.
She will not make their mistakes, she decides. Whether it's because she already knows that she could never destroy him or because she had never really wanted to after he'd told her he was a monster, she will not turn Ben Solo over to his enemies.
She comes back hours later with dark smudges on her face and something resembling calm about her. A watchful calm, Kylo thinks, but a calm nonetheless.
And oh, he wants to submerge himself in it.
They survey each other in silence, the bond rippling about them, the waters of the Force quiet even as the storm rages on outside. It had been a damned fool thing to do, flying a TIE through a lightning storm, but the boy inside remembers the weightless buoyancy of a father gliding a hair's breadth away from the Maw's gravity well and stubbornly thinks: I can do better. Rey's lips thin in response, but she comes closer, puts her hand on the bandage around his torso. For a moment, he forgets to breathe.
"This is a lightsaber wound," she says.
Despite himself, he leans closer. "Is it?"
Oh, excellent job, Solo. Say the first thing that comes to mind. That's never gotten you in trouble before—
Hush, he tells the voice that is now his and his alone. Rey is touching him. Clinically, but he'll take what he can get.
She sits beside him with the beginnings of a scowl somewhere in the way her brows are knit together. "Don't—whatever. What happened?"
"It's not important."
"You wouldn't be here if it wasn't important." Thunder crashes as she says it, and the overhead lights flicker as if in response. She glances up, biting her lip, but she returns her attention to him when he leans into her shoulder and fights the half-mad impulse to rest his chin on it.
"Maybe I'm here to kidnap you. Take you away. Force you to be with me. Did you ever think of that?" he asks, lowly, and for a moment she lowers her gaze. Her lashes flutter. She wants.
But she is Rey of Jakku, and she gives as good as she gets. Her eyes fly back up to his, a magnificent spark in them. Her hands land on his shoulders. One little push backward and he is breathless—but she holds on, her thumbs pressing light indents into his clavicle, and he hadn't realized that this would be what it felt like to burn, but he invites it with gladness. Even like this—or perhaps especially—he'd do whatever she wanted, and they both know it. "You crashed your ship into the side of the hangar."
The part of him that feels dark and wild and wicked deflates. I'm a perfectly fine pilot under normal circumstances, thank you, is the snippy response that leaps to mind, but what comes out is pure petulance as he falls back onto the bed and out of her grasp: "Can't a man crash his ship wherever he damn well pleases?"
"Ben." Her eyes reflect the overheads and bring back sharp flashes of memory: Crait at high noon, strike me down and I'll always be with you, transcendent calm and a high melody in the Force.
He swallows past the scream building in his throat and closes his eyes. "...Don't look at me like that."
Maybe she senses the thoughts swirling in his veins. Maybe she doesn't. Either way, they both know the truth before she speaks it. "Are you still a part of the First Order?"
He keeps his silence. He has that, at least.
"Oh, Ben."
And he's never dealt well with pity, smuggler's son, Leia Organa's son, the morose shadow of a boy who was never enough. Sliding with his temper is easy, like falling, or maybe drowning. Kylo sits up to glare at Rey, ignoring the way his body protests and his heart pulsates in time with his left tibia. Pain taught him to endure. It is pain that will sustain him now. "Are you happy?"
"What?" Her eyes are wide. That distant, detached part of him that always stays amidst the storm silently catalogues the way her shoulders tense and she shifts to put both feet on the ground, to run if she has to, but he is already running his mouth—and if that isn't the story of Ben Solo's ignominious life, he isn't sure what is.
"I've lived up to all expectations. Which is to say, I botched the whole thing. I'm on the run. Are you happy?"
The Force swirls as she stands to regard him, a stubborn godlet in a girl's frame, towering over him like she's the one that's ridiculously, monstrously tall. He is unused to craning his neck to look up, but he hardly even notices the strain when a full-blown scowl has made its way to her face. "I'm glad you're alive. Don't act like I'm against you. I am not your enemy."
It hits them both at the same moment: two separate bright surges of emotion tear into each other over the bond, and they reel back, staring at each other with wide, angry eyes. Children inheriting a portentous destiny that never ought to have been theirs.
This time, Kylo Ren does raise his voice—against the fear, the terror, her, the galaxy, any of it and all of it, he isn't sure it matters, really. There are sharp knives in his chest and the tightest knot he's ever felt in his throat; his eyes burn hot with the familiar beginnings of a breakdown. "Aren't you my enemy? You left!"
"Because it wasn't the galaxy I wanted!" Rey yells, her hands curling into shaking fists. "I couldn't care less about the karking galaxy—I wanted you, you impossible man! I wanted whatever it was the Force was leading us to—"
His hands catch hers. She cuts herself off and stares at him, thunderstruck, but his heart is beating in his mouth and neither of them know what to do with their faces, how to look at each other, how to be human. All he knows in the moment is the heat between them. "You would've had me. Every day. Every moment. Forever."
"At what cost? What was I supposed to do, Ben, turn on my friends? Turn on the cause I've chosen to fight for? I would've died inside, every day, every moment!" She pulls her hands away to wipe the angry tears from her face.
After everything, he thinks, his chest heaving with each painful breath, you still don't understand? "We would've made something new together, something better, and you're still choosing to hold on to the past—"
"I choose to hold on to hope, Ben Solo."
He shoots up onto his feet, rocking unsteadily for a moment, and glares right back at her lifted chin, her defiant, hurt face. "You dare."
"You dare!" she shouts back over his lowered voice, taking hold of his upper arms with strong fingers he's half-convinced are bruising him, any fear or hesitation that had been present in her before vanishing like it'd been a momentary illusion on the desert winds. Yes, this girl, this shooting star, she is on fire—she is like him in every way that matters, the heart facing his, right down to the bone-deep hurt and the lifetime full of aching. "You called me nothing!"
"But not to me!" Kylo yells, stepping closer, hardly thinking about how close it puts her to him. Stars, this girl, does he have to shake her to make her understand—
She shakes her head, two sharp jerks left and right, the line of her neck stiff with tension. "What kind of a proposal was that, calling a girl nothing—"
"—What else was I supposed to say? What would you have me say?"
They must look ridiculous, the two of them, their hands burning brands of fire into each other's arms under the flickering overheads of an ancient, broken-down medbay, completely alone save for BB-T7's uneasy whirring to itself, but the only things left to see them are the ghosts and the shadows, the husks of machinery that had been on shaky legs even when the Rebellion had been in its prime.
Her eyes are dark wells like they'd been in the forest, in the rain, when she had looked at him and seen only what everyone else saw. But it's a different kind of anger that drives her now, something soul-deep, something that reverberates in the Force and bowls into him like a sweeping ocean tide and makes all the rusted-out medical instruments creak ominously. "Not that!"
"Oh, well, that's helpful," he sneers.
"Then I'll show you," she hisses, and then it is tongue and teeth, and Kylo Ren's world dissolves in bright fire.
Three days later, they are sitting together at the edge of the hangar, watching the steady rainfall pour onto the forest below. He has spread what remains of his cape beneath them and their legs dangle off the broken dehumidifier ring that had once glowed green and kept the inside of the Rebel base from decaying in Dinayru's hot months. His hair is frazzled and hers is pulled to one side, draped over one shoulder to ward off the limpness that comes only with days of moisture in the air so thick one could reach out and taste it.
"You could come with me, you know," Kylo says, eyes fixed on the lightning bolts dancing in the mountains like angry gods and goddesses.
Rey pulls one knee to her chest and drapes her arm across it. "But I couldn't," she rebuffs, gently, without rancor. "This is what I have to do to be who I am."
"And it's more difficult to hide two than it is one. I know." He glances at her and finds the barest hint of a smile on her face. "But still—"
"You had to try," she finishes.
"There are oceans between us," Kylo murmurs, looking down at the mossy ground, and she thinks she sees the shadow of a morose scholar that must've waited eons to be reborn into his strange, dark soul.
Rey reaches for his hand and clasps it between hers. His eyes meet hers as she shifts to face him fully, tucking her legs under her, knees bumping into his thigh.
"Oceans can be crossed," she says, and presses her lips to a circular scar on his third knuckle. "I carry you with me, Ben Solo. No matter how long it takes, I will come back for you. I promise."
Kylo and Rey both know the weight of promises like that, the two of them, drenched in age-old blood come from a thousand broken oaths.
"I'll be waiting," he says, pulling her hands to his chest, cupping the two holding his other hand with his free hand. After a moment, he settles for keeping one hand joined with hers, resting on his thigh. She leans her head on his broad shoulder.
They watch the storm drum on.
Across a thousand universes, Rey thinks, I will be with you.