"Rey, wait!" Ben struggled to keep up with her as she trudged up a seemingly unending hill that felt more like a mountain.
Rey was too busy consuming cold ocean air to respond. Her lungs worked overtime and her heart beat furiously, but she felt strangely calm, almost as though she were having an out-of-body experience. Nothing made sense, but she knew she'd have to make sense of everything sooner or later.
When he reached the peak, Rey had already sat down and commenced holding her legs together in a tight ball, one of her many subtle ways of coping with stressful situations.
"Rey," he said, crouching down beside her.
"I can't." Her voice was tear stained, words muffled by the damp air.
Resting a hand on her shoulder, he breathed a bit of his energy into her shivering body.
More to herself than to him, she said, "I'm fine. I just...I don't know."
"I know," he replied, trying to feel more confident for her sake, as though she couldn't sense everything else he was feeling as sharply as he.
"No," she said, "you don't. You think you do, and I'm sure you want to, but bond or no bond, you're not the one living in my skin."
"You're right. I'm not the one who's pregnant with a ghost child."
"I'm sorry, but aren't you supposed to make me feel better?" Rey sighed and stood up. Ben stood with her. He could feel the tears rising to the brim of her eyes, begging to be set free. "Why did we…" she began, unsure if she could bring herself to finish the thought. All things happen for a reason, she thought to herself. There is no why or how. But that didn't keep her from wondering.
"I don't know," Ben admitted, and it dampened Rey's inner frustration somewhat. "All I know is that you shouldn't have to face this alone." Straightening up, Ben began to walk back down the hill.
"Where are you going?" Rey said.
Ben turned to look back up at her, not even attempting to disguise his amusement at her expression. "I'm going to look for a place to stay for the night. You wouldn't happen to know a place like that, would you?"
Rey scoffed playfully at him. "You know the small village near the base of the island, the one we passed through to get to the temple stairs?"
"Yes."
"Well the huts are usually unoccupied, and I'm sure the island natives wouldn't mind if you used one for a night or two."
The light of the fire cast a warm glow over Ben's face as he sat alone inside one of the abandoned huts that night. The cocooned space was bathed in the heat of the meager flame he'd been able to conjure up, and he wondered if the builders of this temple village had known some secret method for containing warmth even though the weather outside blew as cold as the snow on Starkiller Base.
Rey had not joined him. He wasn't surprised. Nor did she come to join his lonely post the next night, or the next. He didn't blame her in the slightest. He could only imagine how uncomfortable her situation must be. All he knew was that he longed to hold her in his arms, to kiss her lips and her face and her body until neither of them could feel any more pain.
Rey's thoughts were locked in an ongoing battle between the difficult choice at hand and Ben. Usually each time she thought of the former, the latter would follow hot on it's tails, demanding to be known, drawing her gaze towards the hut where he was staying. Rey longed to feel the softness of his battle scarred skin against hers, to look into his eyes and know, for the first time in her life, that she belonged somewhere with someone. But she wouldn't go to him. She couldn't, though she had no idea why.
During the day they practiced their fighting with each other and conversed further with the Force, who often appeared to them in the form of the Grand Master Yoda, who was always more than happy to answer their questions. Apart from these things, they also found time to perform more mundane tasks such as fishing, shooing porgs away from their food, and pretending not to notice one another. They failed miserably at each of these tasks, resulting in no small measure of torment for both of them. However, it was no small relief for both of them that Chewie, the centuries-old wookie, Ben's closest and dearest friend and uncle long ago, and Rey's surrogate father-figure more recently, was there to help them stay sane.
When they bathed, using one of the small waterfalls spilling rainwater off the sides of the island as a makeshift 'fresher, they either took turns or, if they were greedy, washed together, subconsciously averting their gazes from one another once the clothes had come off.
When they went to sleep, they dreamt of their could-be child and of the galaxy to come, the galaxy that it would live in, grow up in, thrive in, a galaxy of peace and hope and peoples who learned to trust and to love one another instead of hate and fight amongst themselves. A galaxy freed from the chains of war.
They also dreamt about each other, and when they did, they talked as though they were awake. It was the only way that they could reach each other it seemed; their waking selves were too stubborn and confused. Their subconscious selves found other ways of conversing.
In Rey's dreams, she remembered the first time he touched her, in the forest on Takodana, his gloved hand caressing her face, his arms carrying her to his ship and then to his room on Starkiller Base. She remembered his fingers reaching into her mind and finding more than he could have ever imagined, but taking nothing without her permission.
She remembered seeing him for the first time through the Bond, feeling the pain of his past mingle with that of hers, reaching out her hand for him to take it and feeling for the first time that she wasn't alone in the galaxy. She remembered how they fought together, back to back against Snoke's red guards after he killed him to save her life, remembered the heat of his passion flowing through her veins. She remembered the light in his eyes when he begged her to join him, and the shards of his broken heart piercing her soul when she refused. She remembered the way he knelt on the ground before her, so far below her, so far away that she was the only one who could see him, the way his eyes pleaded once more, and how she promised herself that she would wait for him before closing the door, shutting off the Bond for at least a month.
The Bond remained closed until the cold, lonely night that seemed even colder and lonelier than all the rest. The night she realized that she needed him more than she'd ever needed anything in her life. She wanted him that night, just as she wanted him now, and came to her, wanting her just as badly, and made her feel beautiful for the first time in her life. She wasn't just wanted that night. No, she was needed, and she needed him. After that night, she became pregnant with a living essence of Force energy, and now she had no idea what she would do with it - what they would do.
They were together, wrapped in a blanket of ocean and stars, no sound but the whisper of his breath upon her skin. His hands traced the pattern of her spine, a touch so cold and yet so warm all at once. Her fingers were laced in his soft hair, and when he kissed her lips, he kissed her soul as well, pulling her closer to him, pulling himself deeper inside her. Holding him close, her legs and arms wound tightly around him, murmuring the essence of his name, feeling it dissolve deliciously inside her. The universe stood still around them, while feelings of passion and peace cascaded within her, an endless dance of emotions churning in her chest.
Then something new ignited within her, a light that she could feel burning in her belly; it was their light, their shared glow rippling and radiating inside her. As they fused deeper together, the light began to take shape, and she could feel innocent, strong hands reaching out through the darkness to find her.