She could still remember it as if it had just happened.

She was on Exegol, staring at what had been Ben's body just moments before. His clothes fell on the ground, in the absence of a physical body, while her fist clenched as her skin became colder, now that there was no hand holding it anymore. What had happened? One moment, they were embracing and she kissed him, then something tore the veil connecting them and pulled Ben to the ground, into nothingness.

Why was he gone when she was the one who had died? Or hadn't she? She couldn't remember anything but the light of the lightsabers rejecting the lightning bolt and that suffocating pain going through her body, wave after wave until she couldn't control herself anymore and let her body fall to the ground. She somehow knew that she had been dead the entire time, but there was actually nothing between the moment she died and the moment he revived her. In fact, she had woken up confused, not understanding when and how he had managed to return by her side. Though, she didn't care anyway, because he was there with her and he was Ben again, the real him. The happiness of being in his arms and feeling at home was greater than that numbing sensation in her head. Yet it was the same numbness that kept her from reacting once his body vanished, from feeling anything else. It was surreal and it made her wonder if she wasn't actually still dead and just experiencing the worst and cruellest afterlife, made entirely of the worst nightmares possible.

However, the noises made by the engines of the remaining Resistance ships, even from far away, were louder than the voices of the Jedi. They were no longer with her, but her friends still were. She could no longer remember it, but she was sure that she had got up on her feet and ran to Master Luke's ship. The journey back to her team was a blur as well, just static noise and the kaleidoscopic space. Then once landed, her body, not her mind, got out and went to embrace her friends. They were there and she was able to touch their living bodies and even feel the vibrations of their beating hearts, but unlike them, she was not truly there .

"After I woke up from the coma, I wasn't myself for a long time," spoke Rose as she held her hand through the medical examination. "The aneurism almost killed me… or maybe it actually did for a moment or two. So don't feel guilty or pressured. Take your time."

Time. She did take her time, but it didn't help. The joy and carefree laughter were only giving her headaches and making her more desperate to find something to make her feel again. Perhaps her body was alive, revived, but everything else was still dead.

"Rey, have you heard any word I just said?"

She jumped startled and looked at Finn and Poe, pretending that she hadn't noticed the worried looks on their faces. She bit her thumb and turned her back on them as she headed towards the hangar.

"Hey, at least take BB with you!"

What could a tiny droid do to protect her? Not that she hadn't relied on him before, but no one could help her in those moments.

"I heard you, BB-8," she snarled after the droid kept asking the same question over and over again as if the buzzing sound in her head was not already frustrating and putting so much pressure on her chest and brain that it felt as if she was about to explode .

She inhaled deeply, then exhaled and cleared her throat, ready to fake a smile and a sweet tone.

"It's not Jakku, BB. It's Tatooine."

Which was equally dreadful. So much sand and that scorching warmth from the twin suns… Actually, it was perfect for whatever she was feeling at that moment. As her body slid down the sand dunes, she laughed, feeling the pain resurface through her memories. Years of hunger, thirst, sunburns, headaches, heat strokes, long freezing nights and lurking dangers. That had been her life and she had willing remained on Jakku just to wait for someone who was long dead. Luke had lived on a similar planet and found his place in the world. There was no progress, no prosperity that could ever come from such a place. The only thing that it could birth was anger, more frustration and a thirst for thriving anywhere else.

"Who are you?"

The lightsabers were now buried as it was the reminder of how even heroes failed. She gazed at the twin suns and her twin masters guarding over her, making sure that she had learnt from their mistakes and that she would make everything right.

"Skywalker," she said proudly. "Rey Skywalker."

As Luke's last apprentice and as per Leia's wish, she was going to carry on the Skywalker legacy. After all, she was the only one capable of doing so, especially considering how there was… there was no one left. The rightful heir was gone.

She was a fraud!

She pulled the ties around her buns and threw them on the sand. She was pathetic! A fraud and a stupid child, still sporting the same buns her mother used to make her to look like her. Was that how was she supposed to honour her mother, the one who had died protecting her? By holding on to her past a fugitive and at the same time by pretending that she was someone else? She should have been on Jakku, looking for items reminding her of her parents, not… replacing the actual Skywalker heir.

Ben , she whispered and BB-8 approached her, asking her whether she was fine or- No! Of course, she wasn't! She had been so focused on her own dead feelings that she had never figured out the source of her pain. It had never been about her death or at least not entirely. She was dead on the inside because he was too. The tear in their dyad damaged her. How could she survive without the other half of her soul?

"I've heard you, BB-8!" she yelled at the poor droid, who rolled back frightened and hurt. She was behaving like him. Like Kylo Ren. The same anger and frustration boiling inside her from her loneliness. They were supposed to bring balance together and somehow, everyone had decided to put all the responsibility on her. They were all deciding who she was meant to be. She had escaped from the terrifying fate of becoming Empress Palpatine only to become Rey Skywalker, the new Chosen One, the new hero from the desert planet, the new princess, the new heir who defeated the darkness inside her. No, she was not a Skywalker. Not by blood, nor by choice. She was just Rey and she was only half alive.

"I'll take you back to Poe, BB," she sighed. "I need to go somewhere else and I'm not sure I'm ever coming back."

The droid beeped alarmed by her confession, but as he left her side, trying to divert her from her plans, anger overwhelmed her once again.

"Listen to me! I'm leaving with or without you. If you want to stay on Tatooine and rust in the sand, then so be it!"

BB-8 returned, leaving a cloud of dust behind him. He barely gazed at Rey as he rushed aboard. She let out a whimper full of guilt, then shook her head and laughed. Kyla Rey was a funny name for her new personality. Adolescence sure was a difficult time in one's life, especially after experiencing so much pain and inner turmoil.

"Right, Ben?" she whispered seeing Exegol once again after weeks pointlessly wasted on trying to forget everything and covering up her past and what had happened there. She jumped out of her ship and dragged her feet to Ben's silencer. Tears were slowly escaping her eyes and she pulled her hand back right before touching the cold steel. The ship was unimportant in those moments. She had more important things to do.

Running desperately, she reached the hidden quarters. The Knights of Ren were now just smelly masses of gelatinous flesh, barely hidden by their uniforms and helmets. Nameless, faceless and forgotten, unlike their leader, who had a name and whose face and memory were still living inside her mind and heart. But only inside hers. His family was dead and most people never knew or barely remembered that there was once a Ben Solo. Instead, they were still cursing Kylo Ren and celebrating his presumed death until he would be nothing but a bad memory in the archives of history. Part of her knew that it was not a bad thing to hate Kylo Ren, especially his mad reign as the Supreme Leader, but she knew him, the real him, who was pushed into the clenching claws of darkness since before birth, who was vulnerable and who would have turned to the light sooner, had he had the chance.

Rey let herself fall to the ground, next to Ben's clothes, still lying there, all dusty. If only she had taken his hand pack them and carefully made him turn…

She punched the ground, sobbing. She had been so arrogant in judging him until she faced Palpatine and got to learn the hard way how easy it was for the darkness to suck every ounce of joy out of one's body and to corrupt one's mind.

Wiping her snot, she gently took his black sweater and embraced it as if he was still there, embracing her back. Despite the weeks it had been lying there, it did not carry the smell of death or filth. It still carried his smell.

Oh ! she sniffed. He smelled so good. It was how she had always imagined her home to smell like. But it was not a usual scent for a space to live in, but the actual aroma of his body. The force had always made it sure that she knew how her other half smelled like. Maybe in another life, they would have the chance to meet again and be together, but she couldn't help wondering how it would have been like in that world she was still living in, even without him. When they kissed, she could have sworn that she saw once again the same glimpses at their future she had seen when they had touched hands through the force bond. Him coming back with her and being together on a planet with a lot of water and many green forests and flower. Oh, yes. The memory of that vision was resurfacing as she buried her face in the sweater. They were together, smiling, laughing… Ben carrying a laughing boy on his shoulder and she caressing her growing bump. They had always been supposed to be together… to be the family they never got to have because of Palpatine's darkness pulling them closer into oblivion.

So why did he have to die? Rey asked herself, weeping, while her finger got caught in a hole. A hole? she furrowed. The rest of the fabric was almost intact, so why was there such a big hole from one side to the other?

Then it came to her. The sweet vision of them together was sucked with the fog that had been clouding her mind, pushing forward the memory of them fighting together on the ruins. She had attacked him and kept attacking him despite his poor attempts of making her reason because he liked their banter and he enjoyed provoking her and testing her limits. But once the fight had stopped, she carried on, too blind to sense Leia's death and his pain. She had stabbed him with the lightsaber. She had killed him.

No! She shook her head. He was not dead. Upon finally feeling Leia's death, she had awoken from the trance and healed him and confessed her… regrets. She had saved him! But then he saved her back and she had been truly dead, unlike him. She had taken back what she had given, leaving Ben empty and drained. She had indeed killed him.

"Why did you even bring me back? What for?" she whispered hoping that he would hear her. Leia and Luke had shown themselves to her and Luke had been more active as a force ghost than during their short time as master and apprentice. Maybe Ben would come back too… but if so, then why hadn't he done it by now? Was it because she had so soon forgotten about him and returned to her friends?

Still hugging his sweater, she tried to imagine his body taking shape and filling with her presence the empty void left in the world and in her heart.

"Be with me." She inhaled, concentrating more. In her mind, she could already see his eyes glimmering with hope, his trembling bottom lip and chin, his beautiful hair she had long so much to touch it and his massive body. She knew that Ben had carried her once, but back then, he was just a creature in a mask and she was a mere scavenger. Yet fate brought them together once and it had to bring them again.

"Be with me," she insisted, "Ben, please," she begged as her tears reached her chin, leaving a hot trail that was soon chilled by the cold air in the catacombs. Her lips thinned in a firm line and she opened her eyes. Nothing. Perhaps just more emptiness than before and the cold dragging her body in the exact spot where her half had died. How was it possible for someone like Palpatine to survive for so long and after what had occurred on and with the Death Star, yet someone so young and strong like Ben simply vanished? There must have been an explanation, a reason, a way…

Her eyes lingered on a falling star.

When she came there for the first time, she saw something. Deformed bodies, some shapeless, just masses of flesh and goo with a limb showing here and there. Some were more evolved, though still not bearing any familiar traits that would have reminded her of any species she had ever encountered. However… She had heard people talking about the previous wars. Undoubtedly, many were mere stories as she had learnt herself upon meeting the heroes. But some must have been true and the bodies in the tanks and Palpatine's return…

"Clones," she whispered to herself. The dark side of the force had its mysterious ways and it had succeeded in bringing him back, but not actually reviving him. Without clones, there would have been no Palpatine and everyone's lives would have been so much better. She would have had her parents and Ben would have had the chance of deciding his own fate and… He would have been alive and fate would have brought them together because they were meant to be so.

She blinked nervously with her jaw clenched and grabbed a fistful of dust and dirt off the ground. What satisfaction had the light side given her other than meaningless pride and that belief in goodness? The light side had nothing, but that idiotic sense of self-importance. They had no clones and no force tricks that could help her bring him back.

She snorted, before bursting again into tears, this time feeling the pressure inside her finally explode under the lid forced upon her by the state of shock and the lies she had told to the other members of the Resistance. Wailing and hugging Ben's sweater, she finally concluded. All the force ghosts had been there the entire time and not one of them had approached him, lent him a hand or at least helped him revive her. He had been all alone the entire time. They all had used her as a pawn and then left her for dead, making sure that the still surviving Ben Solo would finally give up on his last breath of air for her sake.

He had always been right. Both sides were equally wrong and deceitful. That had never been their war and they were now left with nothing.

"I'm sorry," she cried with tears streaming down her burning face. "I should have taken your hand and none of this would have happened. But please come back."

Nothing.

As if not even his spirit was still existing somewhere beyond the veil separating the living from the other side of the force. Or as if something was holding him from reaching to her, although... well... now she was the one being held from finding him, but if the sacred Jedi texts and the cave on Ahch-To had brought her in that strange new world, maybe it was only a matter of time until he would find her in that place.

She had promised herself to never again waste time on waiting for those that would never come back. But this time could wait.

Lifting her head, she looked into the mirror.

She was already feeling his presence.

/|\

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"She's been here for almost two weeks now. We've tried to locate her family, but she kept mumbling about space and droids and some sacred texts and a world behind the world, I think," said the man shaking his head miserably. "Also, not to mention her aggressivity, so we've decided to keep her here until someone would come for her. We found this sketch in her satchel, but we weren't able to identify the alphabet. She told us that it is your name."

Taking one last sip out of his Starbucks cup as he checked his last text message before he put away his phone in the pocket of his jacket, the man lifted his gaze. The resemblance was uncanny, though his nose was rather cartoonish and bigger than in real life. With an amused smile, he then looked at the girl behind the glass screen. She was pretty even with that messy hair and the boring clothes, but she was obviously rather unwell given that despite chewing nervously on her bottom lip, her gaze was rather calm and pensive.

"I'm sorry," he shrugged. "I wish I could help you, but I honestly do not know her. I've never met this girl before."

He touched the weird letters handwritten on the paper as his tongue touched the tip of his front teeth. And neither that type of paper nor alphabet was something he had ever seen before.

"I would say that perhaps it's about another Ben Solo, but even though I don't know her-" he stopped for a moment, holding his breath as the girl lifted her head and her eyes met his, although she had no actual chance of seeing him through the fake mirror, "-this girl seems to know me."