Chapter Ten: Days of Rain
It rained the whole day and well into the night, as though the sky had been holding it all in for ages and had finally been able to release it from its arms. The clouds trembled with uneasy thunder, soothing at times, raging at others. Rey would have liked nothing more than to run out into it again, looking up every few minutes from whatever minute task she'd busied herself with to gaze longingly out the window. She didn't like Ben seeing this rare childish side of her, but he'd caught her doing it so many times he wondered why she bothered trying to hide it from him. She'd grown up having to keep things from people in order to survive, but since she'd found a family who didn't care one way or the other, she seemed to have lost her touch. Even if she hadn't, she knew she couldn't conceal anything from him, not while their bond flowed languidly and open between them, and neither of them had any desire to close it again.
The most frequent activity that they engaged in was making the bunker feel less like a prison and more like a place they could bear to live in for the next five years. On more than one occasion they quibbled over the most mundane things, the positioning of the furniture being the most popular subject.
"We sound like my parents," Ben remarked, immediately attempting to stifle the tension that followed with a frail smile.
"Did they, Han and Leia, ever stop fighting?" Rey asked him then, distinctly aware of the whimper of pain her inquiry aroused in the spot where the bolt from Chewie's bowcaster had seared itself into his side.
Ben's throat tightened, and he could only shake his head once. Rey took his hand, feeling the scratch of scars that had appeared long before he became Kylo Ren against her palm. The thin niches where small blades had claimed his young blood were cold, stubborn, refusing to fade, like the darkness that still resided within him.
"Is that why you cut yourself?" she asked, already feeling the answer forming at the bottom of his chest.
"Sometimes they didn't notice how upset I was. Their screaming would drown out my cries. Even when it was about me, it seemed as though I was miles away from them. I knew they both wanted to protect me, my mother especially. My father didn't know what to do with me. They never told me about my grandfather, you see." Ben turned to look at Rey. She blinked back tears that she didn't want him to see. "They never told me that I was always destined for darkness.
"And then that voice. In my head," he lowered his eyes to the floor, suddenly unable to hold her gaze, "The voice that...told me things. Whispering in my ear when I tried to sleep at night, saying I was worth less than nothing to them. That even if they'd wanted me, they didn't deserve someone who would only make things worse for them. It...made me steal the shears from the kitchen and…" his tight chin was trembling now, and Rey squeezed his hand harder. "Let's just say I got more comfort from watching my blood drip onto the floor of my bedroom than I did trying to block out the sounds of my parents fighting."
"The voice," said Rey, desperate to bring some clarity to Ben's clouded thoughts, "It was Snoke, wasn't it? Telling you that you didn't deserve their love. That you were only deserving of pain. Lying to you from the beginning."
"What makes you think that he lied when he said I deserved it? How can you believe that I don't deserve to die after everything I've done?" His jaw was clenched so tightly, Rey feared it might break. His eyes now shot straight through the wall as though he could blow a fist-sized hole into it if he stared hard enough.
"Ben," Rey turned his head toward her, placing her hand firmly on his hot cheek. "After everything Snoke did to you, the only pain you deserve is the pain that comes from healing. The only death you deserve is the death of the monster he forced you to become." Ben shook his head, a single tear sliding down his face. The anger and the sadness in his eyes fought like two armies locked in fierce battle, neither gaining the upper hand.
"Listen to me, Ben. Snoke is dead! He's gone, and he can't hurt you or anyone else anymore."
"Yes, and so is my father." He tried to shrug out of Rey's grasp but no matter how much he twisted himself she wouldn't let go. Her hand tightened around his and her thumb caressed the edges of his lips, almost daring enough to touch them.
"Yes," she said, staring deep into his eyes, "and there will always be places that you can't ever go back to, even if you wish it. Han never understood the pain you were going through, but he always loved you. I know it." She pulled his face closer to hers. "I felt it."
"And I let him down," he said, bitterness burning his voice until it barely rose above a whisper. "I let everyone down." At last he broke away from her stare, dropping his gaze to his shoes, creasing his brow as though seeing something wrong with them. "And I let my mother down."
In spite of herself, Rey was impressed with how well he could have hidden his true feelings from almost anyone else. For her, it was as clear as the tears he didn't even have the strength to wipe away. Everything about him, except for his eyes, spoke of anger, hatred, and bitterness. His deep brown eyes cried out to be seen from the bottomlessness of his soul. Everything else faded away as Rey opened herself up further to him, absorbing the pain that eked from his wounds like poison.
Rey stepped in front of him, reaching up to hold his darkening face. "Leia isn't dead," she said. "Your mother is alive." Tears began to pool in her eyes, and she found it harder and harder to hold them back.
"Yes," he replied, glancing back up at her, "but for how much longer?"
Rey opened her mouth, but no words of comfort or wisdom would come out. She found that she didn't have anything to say to this. His rhetorical statement crushed her to the bone, and she felt as though she might crumble into dust the moment he said it. Despite everything she knew of life and death, it had never occurred to her just how near Leia was to the end of her own life. The only thing she knew how to say now was, "What are you saying?"
"I'm saying I almost killed her, Rey!" he shouted, the look of sheer rage burning in his eyes shocking her more than she'd thought it would. Rey had heard of General Organa's miraculous survival when two tie fighters blasted the command bridge of the Raddus during the Resistance's flight from the First Order, killing all the other commanding officers on board. Somehow, Leia had been able to pull herself out of the vacuum of space to safety, though she'd been near death when she was rescued.
The rise in the temperature of Ben's words seemed to burn him too, and he visibly flinched the moment he'd articulated them.
Rey kept her eyes locked on his, the strain in her face hardly managing to convey to him what she really wanted to say. "So you did that," she said, the words barely escaping her contracting throat intact.
"No," said Ben, "Not me. My wingmen." His voice overflowed with unadulterated contempt for the ones who nearly killed his mother that day. "Those pigs who wouldn't have followed me into the fires of Hell even if I'd thrown them into it myself. Not like my knights."
"The Knights of Ren," said Rey, seething with clairvoyance.
"Yes," said Ben, "my true comrades. The only ones who would have truly followed me anywhere."
"No," said Rey, cutting him off entirely with one look. "They weren't the only ones."
"They were all I had, Rey, the only ones I could've considered friends. The only ones in the Order, besides Snoke, who knew who I was, where I'd come from, what I'd done. And now they're gone." He was almost childlike in his petulance, and Rey began to wonder how many hits it would take to punch his lights out.
"And now you have me," she said, stabbing him with the tenderness of her statement, cleverly hidden beneath a wall of pure annoyance. "I'd follow you anywhere, Ben. And so would Leia. You haven't let her down."
"I could have murdered her that day. Just like I murdered my father." His voice was so cold now, and a shiver of rage passed through Rey's body.
"You didn't!" she shouted.
"I might as well have!" he shouted back, instantly making himself seem twice as big as her instead of just a head. "My arrogance and my cowardice have been killing her for twenty years. Don't you realize that? I destroyed everything she loved, including Han Solo. And with every bit of innocence I snuffed out," he thrust his hand out to the side, as though gesturing to a room filled with the ghosts of those he'd ruthlessly murdered, "I crushed her heart, and she cursed my name, the name of someone who was no longer her son, the name of the monster I'd become."
Shaking with the heat of unexpressed anger like a volcano on the verge of eruption, Rey pushed herself to her full height. She still only came up to his nose, and yet she seemed to tower over him nonetheless. She wasn't angry at Ben; her anger was directed towards the foul stench of the memory of Kylo Ren. "You," she spat into his face, "are not a monster." Her voice was deep and hard, trembling with resolve, unused to conveying the strength of her conviction. "Leia never once cursed you, in all the time I've been with her."
"And in all that time did she ever once mention me?" said Ben, retaliating with his usual
indignance.
"She never had to," said Rey with much more confidence than she knew she was capable of. "I saw it in her every day, felt it in the ache of her bones every time she woke up to face another day without her son. Your mother loved you more than anyone could ever understand. She loved you so much it hurt her to even think of you. She died a little each time she wondered where you were, what unspeakable things you'd seen, if you were dead or alive, or if you even remembered her anymore!
"Everyone thought she was living for the Resistance, but she was living for you, for the day when you would come home, when you'd come back to her and never leave again. You kept her alive, Ben. Do you understand? Your mother is alive because of you, not in spite of you. You inspire her to fight for what she loved from the moment she first felt you in her womb, and although her body may not be as strong as it was, her heart has grown tenfold. Don't you see, Ben? You mean everything to her."
From the silently stunned expression of his face, Rey thought that his heart had somehow stopped. Fearing that he might keel over dead, she grasped his arms, attempting to squeeze the strength back into them that had begun to drain out of him. Her eyes wavered desperately over his face, searching for the boy she knew he still tried to hide from her. Silence wrapped itself around them, quivering with the unevenness of her breath. Without thinking, she took his face in her hands, pulling herself up to his lips. The kiss was soft, nothing like the intoxicated one they'd shared only the night before, a night which now seemed like weeks ago. His lips were surprisingly tender, and Rey felt all the weakness he wished he could kill trembling within them.
All the love she could give him filled hers with the kind of heat that doesn't go away anytime soon. It seemed like an eternity before Ben had been revived enough to return the kiss in kind. And when he did, it was like nothing Rey had ever felt before; deeper than physical, higher than emotional, somewhere between a light caress and a fathomless touch. Ben wrapped his arms around her body, dispelling all the pent up anger within her that had waited to be born. He crushed it as he held her tighter, and it died in her stomach before she had a chance to breathe a single breath of fire into it.
The kiss wasn't desperate and heated by passion like before. The kiss was kind, daring, brave, soulful, nothing more or less than what it was: everything Rey had ever wanted but never knew she needed until that moment. Even through the bond, she couldn't conceive of just how desperately Ben wanted her then, had always wanted her, even long before he knew her.
When at last their lips parted, open and wet with desire, they looked at each other, breathing slowly into the static left behind by the kiss that seemed to have passed as quickly as it had come over them. The glow of the raindrops falling outside the window shone on Rey's face, the reflection of water replacing the tears that had all but disappeared from her eyes.
"What should we do now?" said Ben, evaporating the silence that had settled within them. Although Rey's face changed bit by bit, the constant, ever-growing look of longing remained in her eyes.
Licking her lips and lazily smiling, she said, "Let's have lunch. I'm starving."
Ben grinned back. "I don't recall us having worked up any kind of appetite."
"If you don't let me eat, Ben, I might have to kill you. And it won't be because of anything naughty you've done in the past." She was only joking, but Ben knew that standing between Rey and her appetite when she was really hungry could mean vengeful annoyance on her part and certain death on his. So he released her from his arms to rummage through the kitchen for something edible, staring after her and feeling like his entire body had stopped working and he was locked into place in the middle of the floor.
Hardly a word was said between them as they sat at the cold, metal kitchen table quietly munching their modest stewed veal.
For all the mouth-watering seasoning Rey had coated their meal with, every flavor was dry in Ben's mouth as he struggled physically not to say something that would either get him killed or make him look like a fool.
All Rey wanted to do was forget the kiss entirely, but as she knew all too well, that would be utterly impossible; it had been ingrained in her memory, imprinted on her skin, it's essence seeping into the cracks that had begun to form on her lips, which she licked nervously every now and then.
He'd come to her in the night, a sprinkle of distant words falling over her eyes, lulling her into a place much deeper and much darker than sleep; a voice that whispered beneath all the thick layers of skin she'd grown throughout her life.
He'd come to her, moving through their bond like a mist of shadows pierced by shafts of light, sometimes firm and fierce like a lion, other times crawling on all fours like the wounded creature she knew he was.
They'd talk about things that wouldn't have made any sense to either of them in their waking lives, things that tingled in her soul, at once drawing new blood and healing old scars. The secrets he revealed to her would have shattered his bones and crushed his lungs had he been forced to tell them to anyone else.
No one was powerful enough to pry into his mind anymore, so he spent his days intoxicated, not in the darkness he surrounded himself with, but in the thoughts of those who milled so far beneath him he could have crushed them with a flick of his finger if he so wished. Even though the invasive hobby always left him feeling sick when he managed to stop, it was all he could do to distract himself from everything else.
But if he was honest with himself, which he hardly ever was, only one individual's thoughts truly made him feel weak enough to drift off to sleep while standing up. The thoughts were those of the one person who could make him give his burnt heart and charred soul away willingly; the only one in his universe powerful enough to not only open up his mind, but also his body, search through him to find whatever was left of his heart, small and alone as always. That one person was her, and his weak, unsteady heart beat so fast each time she touched it that he feared it would burst, killing all of him.
Each night that he felt weak enough to sleep, as more and more of him died, he clung to the fading image of the woman who was, as far as he was concerned, the last living light in his dead existence of darkness.