Chapter 13: Recovery

They didn't talk for a few days. Ben made himself scarce, often holing up for hours with Luke or Jessika, sometimes Chewbacca, or otherwise disappearing into the depths of the city. He refused to see his mother at all, according to Poe. Rey felt Ben's absence acutely. They had once spent the better part of most days together, training, eating, creating their own entertainment when their friends were too busy preparing for battle. Little things would pop up in her mind, a joke that he would appreciate or a sliver of gossip that she had overheard in the hallways, and Rey would reflexively turn to tell Ben—only to see Finn or Poe beside her instead.

She distracted herself by training alone or helping repair the remaining starfighters and freighters, with Finn assisting as best as he could with only one good arm. The Resistance had moved to a new building with an attached hangar not too far from the courthouse. They followed the First Order trials on the HoloNet, noticing the increasingly dark circles under General Organa's eyes as she testified against Hux and Phasma. There was rarely any mention of Kylo Ren. That probably shouldn't have bothered Rey, but it did. It felt wrong to have Kylo erased, like he had never existed at all, the good and bad of him wiped away like footprints after a sandstorm.

Jess stayed away, too, and Rey couldn't blame her. Finn did talk to Connix a couple of times, enough to know that Jess was healing well but still upset about Ben. Perhaps this was how it was meant to be, two tight-knit but separate groups of three rather than that messy sextet that they had become.

Time passed, and as could be expected, things got better—eventually. By the time Ben sought Rey out, one hundred and ten days after Carrivar, Jess was speaking to Poe and Finn again at least.

He started coming to her at night, too, when the hallways of the living quarters were empty. It reminded her of their trysts on Lasan, before everything went to hell. Except all they ever did was sit side by side on the floor of her room, talking and not touching at all.

"Why do you think you have his memories?" Ben was on the floor of the hangar playing with one of the astromech droids, trying to fix its holoprojector. Rey watched his hands move deftly through the wiring to find a fray.

"Probably the bond," she said. He snorted and she rolled her eyes. "Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it's not true!"

"I've had a bond with the General since birth. Beat that," Ben retorted, squinting into the droid's control panel. It must have passed muster, because he was closing up the droid and turning it back on. "There, how's that for you?"

The R2 unit beeped its gratitude and projected a test recording that Ben had made earlier that day. It was a short holo of Ben, head tilted, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand, a look of bemusement on his face as he gazed into the droid's recording device. Rey couldn't help but smile at his slight pout. The holo ended and, after another few chirps, the droid rolled off, leaving them alone.

"Do you think I could access the memories? With your permission, I mean." He still didn't look at her, glancing around instead to see if he had misplaced any tools. Rey was grateful for the pretense, because otherwise he would have seen how stricken she had felt in that instant, as if she'd been punched. It took her a minute to school her expression and speak with any measure of calm.

"Ben, it's not that I don't think you deserve to know what Kylo Ren went through, what he did. But I don't think anyone should experience it like that."

"But you experience it, don't you?" His eyes flitted to hers briefly before flickering away again.

"It's not really the same." Rey had learned to avoid the memories that she knew to be painful, only searching out specific information that she needed or moments of pleasure, like their time together. "So much of it is just—it was awful, Ben. The things that he was made to do—you don't need to bear the weight of that."

"And you do?"

"I don't. I know that I didn't do those things. Could you say the same, if you were to see it?"

He didn't answer her, choosing instead to run a rag over the grease-stained tool cabinet in front of him.

"If what he did was so terrible, how could you be with him?"

Now it was her turn to deflect. Rey ran a hand over the X-Wing she had been working on, feeling the chips in the ferrosphere paint.

"I wondered that myself, sometimes. But there was good in him, even after everything he had been through." It wasn't a lie, but there was a lot she still couldn't bring herself to say.

Eventually, Ben and Rey started training together with Luke again. After a few days, they even graduated to sitting at the same table in the cafeteria, all six of them. Stilted small talk dominated meal times, everyone carefully avoiding sensitive topics. It was strange being so close in proximity, yet feeling a million parsecs away. Every time she looked in Ben's direction, she saw Jessika's fiercely protective glare and felt a new wave of guilt.

It was definitely easier to stick with Finn and Poe. Their companionship was so much simpler, uncomplicated. Finn, her first and closest friend, was especially easy to talk to. He didn't push too much, never wanted more than she could give. But she tried not to infringe on his time with Poe. They deserved to be happy together, without all the drama or the dark cloud of regret that seemed to follow her everywhere. Rey never really thought that her life would ever be so theatrical, but here she was, in the midst of the Skywalker family's secrets and lies, like one of those trashy holos that Poe devoured in his off-time.

"How was Snoke controlling him?" His questions about Kylo always seemed to come out of nowhere. Rey picked at a loose thread coming off of her tunic.

"Snoke was always saying things in Kylo's mind. Giving him orders, manipulating his emotions, egging him on. And the trainings—they were really bad. It was like torture, physical and psychological."

Ben became very still and Rey had to resist the urge to touch him. She let her head roll back onto her mattress. The frame of the bed dug into her back.

"It was like that for me, before," he finally said, and she didn't have to ask before what. Before Carrivar, before Dantooine, before Kylo Ren.

"When did it start?" she asked. He stayed quiet for so long that she thought maybe Ben hadn't heard her after all. At last, he gave a heavy sigh.

"I'm not even sure. When I was little, I remember feeling like someone was with me, especially when I was alone. Someone was watching and judging and—just, there. It was this sense of disquiet and wrongness that I could feel in my gut. I used tell my mother I had a stomach ache and she would hold me and it would go away. But then the older I got, the more I felt it. The medical droids couldn't find anything wrong and I think eventually she just figured I was playing sick for the attention." He shook his head ruefully. "She was right, in a way."

They lapsed into silence again. Rey chewed on her lower lip, trying to find the words she needed.

"Did he ever speak to you, before?"

Ben drew his legs up to his chest. "Sort of. I didn't know it at the time. It started when I was around nine. I would get these weird surges of emotion, sometimes, and thoughts that came out of nowhere." He paled, clearly remembering, and Rey knew exactly what thoughts he was referring to. They had plagued Kylo as well, even on Dagobah. Violent images and threats and insidious little whispers of self-doubt. "I started having nightmares almost every time I went to sleep. After nearly a year of that, I was sent to Uncle Luke."

Rey knew that Luke hadn't trained him in anything except meditation at first. Ben had spent most of the first few years at a local school. Then something terrible had happened and Luke decided that Ben needed to learn how to gain better control of his Force abilities.

"It made so much sense, when we all found out about Darth Vader," he said. The scandal had occurred a few months before his trip to Dantooine. "I spent so many years thinking that I was some kind of anomaly. How could the son of Leia Organa, the nephew of Luke Skywalker, the grandson of Anakin Skywalker turn out like me? Drawn to the Dark Side? But my grandfather had been like me after all. And I was angry that they kept it from me. All that time, I thought I was alone."

She wanted to comfort him and take his hand. He was so close to her, so clearly in pain. But Rey remembered the last time she had reached out toward him, just a few days ago in the cafeteria, and how he had jerked away from her touch, as if revolted. And just yesterday, he had flinched when she reached past him for a training saber. Who could blame him, considering what she had done? So Rey could only clench her fingers into fists.

"I'm sorry, Ben. I didn't know. If I had known—I am so sorry that we kept the truth from you."

He peeked at her from behind his knees, looking like the lonely little boy he used to be.

"I know."

She couldn't really admit it until weeks later, when they had finally gotten back to some semblance of normal for their group of six. It was one-hundred and thirty-two days after Carrivar and she had been on her way to morning training when she overheard a trio of techs walking through the hallway ahead of her.

"Did you see him? Bad enough he goes around shirtless after hitting the 'fresher, now his hair is long enough to braid!"

"I bet he does it himself. Have you seen the General's old holos? Clearly gorgeous hair runs in the family."

"We totally made eye contact in the cafeteria yesterday and I think he winked at me. I could have died!"

Something roiled in her stomach and she had to take an unnecessary left turn to get away from the giggling young women. Ben was already meditating with Luke when she got to the training room. Just as they had said, the top half of his hair was braided into four neat rows, a small bun at the back. Kylo had worn his hair tied back sometimes on Dagobah, but this particular look was new to Rey. Her pulse stuttered in response.

"Saved you a spot," Ben said, nodding to the empty place next to him. The sunlight made his eyes sparkle and a smile stretched lazily across his face. She felt a heaviness in her chest, crushing her lungs and preventing her from taking a breath.

A crush. That's what Finn had called it, when he was swooning over Poe Dameron ages ago, before he knew that Poe felt the same way. Rey had a crush on Ben Solo.

"Why was his lightsaber such a mess?" Ben didn't even look up from his datapad, the blueprint of some new ship that the Corellian Engineering Corporation was building. "I've seen better work from children. Hell, I made a better saber when I was fourteen." He looked a little wistful, like he missed his old blade.

For once, Rey already knew the answer without having to dip into Kylo's memories. She'd been curious about it herself. "His crystal cracked, for one thing. And Snoke didn't let him use any existing schematics. He was supposed to put it together using the Dark Side of the Force, which I don't think anybody had done since Vader's time. It was a bit of a rushed job, to be honest. He was in a hurry to challenge the previous master of the Knights of Ren."

He had moved on to a different blueprint, one that caught her attention. "Do you ever think about changing yours?" he asked. Ben tilted the screen toward her and she reached out to scroll through the design.

"A saberstaff?" It wasn't as if she hadn't thought about it before. Ultimately, she had decided to stick with the traditional saber, since that's what Luke had been training her with on Ahch-To.

Ben shrugged and took the datapad back. "Just a thought. You look more natural with a staff. Had one on Jakku, didn't you? Finn said you hit him with it."

She didn't answer and he didn't press the issue. It shouldn't have made her feel warm inside, the idea that he'd remembered such a detail. He remembered a lot of things, after all, always had. Ben used to save her some muffins for breakfast if he got to the mess hall first. And it wasn't just with her. He had always been thoughtful like that, bringing extras of people's favorites to the table. Ben would have denied it if asked, would have insisted that it was just a coincidence he had returned with so many meiloorun slices or d'il pyykkles. Even the flint he'd found for BB-8's lighter had been passed off as a happy accident.

She was nobody special to him, Rey told herself. He was treating her like he treated all of his friends, because that's all they were. That's all they could ever be.

She needed to get ahold of herself. It wasn't like before, when Rey had been lusting after Ben's body, although her physical attraction to him was still painfully present. Instead she found herself thinking about the breadth of his fingers, how they had felt on her hips, how they would engulf her own if they ever held hands. Rey was always hyperaware of Ben's presence now, alternately basking in the warmth of his attention or despondent in the coldness of his indifference. She spent an inordinate amount of time listening for the low rumble of his voice when she was supposed to be paying attention to Poe's bad puns or Finn's complaints about Chewbacca cheating at sabacc.

Jessika caught her staring once. They had been gathered around the holoprojector for some kind of variety show that Rey didn't completely understand, but Ben had grinned widely the entire time, and she found herself unable to take her eyes off him, entranced by the way a laugh transformed his whole face so he looked years younger, the crinkles around his eyes and the deep furrows around his mouth and the little gaps between his teeth making him all the more endearing. But Jess had seen it all, and Rey felt stripped bare in the middle of the rec room. She had to excuse herself, half convinced that the entire floor could hear the pounding of her heart.

"What did you think of me when we first met?" The question tumbled out before she had a chance to overthink it. They were alone in the library. She was supposed to be researching kyber crystals. Ben put down the holobook he was reading and Rey could only hope that her cheeks were not as red as she suspected they might be.

"I was curious about you. You had the Force, obviously. But I got the sense that you didn't like me." He smirked a little at that, as if to soften the blow, and Rey's traitorous stomach did a somersault. "Why was that, anyway?"

She hadn't meant to open that can of bladderworms. But they had promised not to lie to each other anymore. "It wasn't really you. I was still upset about Kylo."

He considered her with an expression that she couldn't decipher. "You blamed me, for not remembering."

Had she? It seemed like so long ago. "I don't anymore, obviously. But at the time—it just felt so unfair, you know? Kylo and I went through so much together and then it was just—gone."

"You didn't think I deserved to be here." How could he be so matter-of-fact about something that had torn her up? Ben's calm demeanor was rivaling Luke's, at this point, something Rey never thought she'd see. She tried to tamp down her own emotions.

"I didn't think I deserved to be here, Ben." But there was something fierce in his gaze, some spark.

"What if there was a way to bring Kylo Ren back?"

Her blood ran cold. Surely he couldn't mean—

"Rey, I've been reading more about mental manipulation. The fact that you have his memories—I think we could transfer them to me. It might not bring the bond back, not right away. But I think this could work."

Ben moved toward her, almost as if he meant to touch her hand, but then he withdrew just as quickly. For the first time in weeks, Rey was glad for the lack of contact. She wasn't sure if she could handle it.

"Why would you want that?" she asked. "Your mother and your uncle—"

He let out a frustrated growl. "It's not their decision, Rey. It's yours."

"But they are your family. It affects them, too. You need to talk to them about this."

"Fine, I'll talk to them," he snapped. "But you have to promise me that you'll consider it."

As if the ever-diminishing possibility of Kylo's return hadn't been on her mind since Carrivar. Of course she would consider it. Rey had already spent months missing Kylo and fervently hoping that he would come back to her.

"Okay. I promise."

It was evening, one-hundred and forty-seven days after Carrivar. Rey had been trying to avoid Jessika all week, but somehow they ended up sitting side by side at dinner. Jess was perfectly pleasant the entire time, but the moment that Ben left the table to get another serving of dessert, her smile became a little too mischievous.

"We need to talk. Meet me in my quarters after you finish meditation." Jess seemed to sense the excuse on the tip of Rey's tongue. "You can tell the boys that you're too tired to watch the grav-ball finals."

And that was how Rey found herself standing in Jessika's doorway. She could see Connix sitting primly in an armchair at the foot of their bed, her long blonde hair draped over one shoulder. Jess ushered Rey inside.

"Would you like some tea?" Connix offered. Rey glanced at the tumbler of amber liquid in Jessika's hand. "Or whiskey, I guess. Jess already got started." Rey declined with a shake of her head.

"Let's get straight to the point then," Jess said bluntly. "We know you and Ben slept together on Lasan."

"What?" Rey sputtered. "He told you?"

"He didn't have to," Connix replied, with a hint of apology.

"You two were a lot less subtle than you thought you were." Jess grinned at her, but it quickly faded. Her soft brown eyes turned serious. "Ben told us about the whole Kylo Ren mess."

Rey looked away. "I'm sorry we didn't tell you. The General—"

"Look, you don't have to explain yourself to us. That's not what this is about." But the pinched look on Jessika's face seemed to say differently. "I mean, yeah, it would have been nice if you'd trusted him enough to tell him the truth, but what's done is done." Jess regarded Rey carefully and, with surprisingly soft hands, led her to a small sofa across from where Connix was sitting. "You clearly care about Ben a great deal, but I have to ask. Is it him that you have feelings for, or is it the person that he used to be?"

"What?" Rey hadn't been prepared for this line of questioning at all. Shakily, she lowered herself into the seat that Jess had offered. Her eyes darted between the two women, trying to understand, and it took a minute for Rey to find her voice again. "They're so different, Jess. I could never confuse one for the other."

Jess and Connix exchanged a look.

"Of course they're different," Connix said sympathetically. "That's kind of the problem."

Jess sank down next to Rey and took her hand. "Ben's going to kill us for telling you this, but we think you need to know." She took a breath, as if to steady herself. "He's crazy about you, Rey. He has been ever since you two first met."

Rey would never forget the feeling that welled up in her chest at that moment. A heady mix of wonder and affection and pure joy, it flooded her entire body, rushed to her head, pricked her eyes until she had to blink back tears of relief.

"Even now? After all this time? How can he—but he said—" Rey's mind was reeling. "But he was so indifferent to me, before all this. I had to practically throw myself at him."

"The kid has a serious self-esteem problem," Jess explained, rolling her eyes. "He's not the best with social cues either. It was pretty obvious to everyone else that you liked each other. We even had a pool going."

"What?" Rey looked at her sharply, but Jess just waved her hand in dismissal.

"That's not important. The thing is that Ben is convinced he doesn't have a chance with you because you're still in love with Kylo Ren. The whole memory transfer thing—I think he's pursuing it because he thinks that's what you want." Jess put her hand on Rey's shoulder. "Is it?"

A few months ago, there would have been no question. She had missed Kylo so desperately then, and Ben had only been a stranger with a familiar face. But now, Ben was a real person to her, completely independent of Kylo Ren. He was a friend, a partner, and perhaps even someone she could fall in love with. He was entrenched in her life, in all of their lives. She knew her answer.

"No, it's not." Jess and Connix beamed. Rey felt her own lips curling as well. "I want Ben the way he is."

Jess hugged her tightly, catching Rey by surprise. "Thank you! Kay and I were a little worried, but I knew you'd come through." She pulled back, eyes shining. "Rey, this is great. We didn't want to lose him either."

"I'll talk to him tomorrow," Rey promised. She felt so light, as if an immense burden had been lifted from her shoulders. Only a small tendril of anxiety remained at the prospect of baring her heart to someone she had so recently wronged. "I'm going to tell Ben how I feel."

A/N: Thank you all for reading, commenting, and subscribing! Come find me on Tumblr (I'm teaguewrites) for more content, including an outtake from this chapter.