Rey almost couldn't remember how she'd managed to get away from the base. It had something to do with Leia, and that deep, all-knowing light in her eyes. Something in the firm grasp of her time-worn hands, in her motherly embrace before she sent Rey on her way, saying that she understood.

Only Leia, Rose, Finn, and Chewie knew of her departure. But Leia was the only one who knew why Rey had to leave. Rey didn't even have to tell her; one look and she'd sensed the truth radiating from her body, claiming the empty space around her in a vibrating aura of fear and excitement.

Leia had always been good at keeping secrets. But none, save for the truth about who her father really was, had shaken her as deeply as this one. It seemed impossible. Yet there was no doubt in her mind as to what was really going on: Rey was pregnant, and her son, Ben, the Supreme Leader of the First Order, himself somewhere lightyears away from them, was the father.

But although Leia could sense clear as day the essence of a life growing inside of Rey, she could not feel the presence of any physical child or fetus. Granted, it was too soon to be able to sense much of anything, but it baffled her that while a defined Force signature emanated from Rey's body, separate from her own, it seemed to come from nothing in particular. As though it wasn't really a child, so much as it was the ghost of a child.

Not dead.

But not quite...alive.

Chewie fired up the Falcon and they lifted off, escaping the planet's gravitational hold before Rey could think twice about what she was doing.

Before they left, Rey confided in Chewie the real reason for her leaving, and why she wanted him to pilot the Falcon this time. Chewie, ever understanding of Rey's predicaments and all too aware of her complicated connection with Ben, took the strange news in stride, surprising Rey somewhat with his ability to accept what would seem impossible to anyone else.

Enveloped in his huge, warm, scruffy arms, Rey had forsaken for a moment the fear that consumed her, the magic spell of his unconditional friendship and love draining the anxiety from her body.

Rey laid in the coordinates for Ahch-To and sat back in the copilot's chair, trying to steady her breathing. Her fingers twitched with restless electricity, and more than once Chewie felt obliged to place a reassuring paw over her hand. By the time they'd jumped to hyperspace her knuckles had gone white and her clothes, the most comfortable ones that she owned, had begun to suffocate her.

Once the still black of empty space punctured by stars frozen in place gave way to the blinding blue streaks of hyperspace, Chewie gruffly told her to go lie down and try to get some rest. Rey was in no mood to argue.

They would arrive in a few hours and she had nothing to do in the meantime but think. Chewie had nothing to do but worry about her.

Almost as soon as she collapsed onto one of the narrow beds in the lounge area, Rey drowned in the heat of a dream that she'd had countless times before, which she wouldn't remember having when she woke up.

She found herself in darkness, felt it everywhere, pressing against every inch of her body. No breath or sound existed here, but Rey didn't need to breathe or speak. All she knew was that she had to find him. He was close, she knew that, but she couldn't see anything beyond her own glowing hands, her only light in the dark of the dream.

Soon she began to hear things, whispers of long ago and yet to come. Voices from the past and the future in an ever shifting mixture, a constant conjunction of harmony and chaos, balance and discord. Amidst them, one murmured her name, and she knew it was him.

She reached out as though she could feel the depth and softness of his voice wrapped around her name. When she touched his face, she would have let out a gasp of relief if she'd had the breath to do it. He stood right in front of her, and suddenly it was as though her eyes had been closed the whole time and had now opened. His face glowed brighter than her hands, and his eyes saw only her.

Rey woke from the dream, drenched in sweat, shivering from the sudden cold of space that always found a way to squeeze through the kinks in the ship. Immediately, her mind grasped for memories of the images her subconscious had just played out. Only fragments of shattered sensations remained.

She stood up, taking a moment to steady the dizziness that washed over her, and made her way back to the cockpit, still trying to remember anything about the dream she'd just had.

A million light years away, Ben Solo woke from the dream, just barely containing the panic that threatened to bury him alive. After forcing himself to breathe deeply, the walls of the cockpit stopped closing in on him, and his heart started working again. He unhooked his sweat-stained cowl and threw it to the side, staring out the window at the hypnotizing view of hyperspace.

The eerie silence of space only has a moment to invade Ben's mind before the lights of hyperspace suck it out of him the next instant. The silencer had only recently been fitted with a hyperdrive, one that had nothing on the one his father had installed on the Falcon, no doubt illegally. As it was, his ship could only go so fast without being torn apart in the vacuum of space, and it have him plenty of time to think. It was time that he would have given anything not to have.

He'd taken off his gloves and looked down at his empty, naked hands. They looked so lonely, so afraid despite being so strong. Starving. For the first time, he saw them as they were. No longer did they belong to anyone else, not Snoke, not Hux, not the First Order, not even Kylo Ren. They were Ben's hands, his hands. All these years they'd screamed at him to set them free from their black, leather prison. Now they sat as silent as breath in his lap, asking only one thing of him now: that they could hold her, feel her.

This time, he wouldn't deny them.