On the Millennium Falcon
Jeyna wakes up before Ben, but she lingers in the bunk next to him. It's too cozy next to his side for her to want to move. Her head is resting on his shoulder, and she studies his hand covering hers on his chest. She moves her fingers, nothing how small they look in comparison to his.
This isn't over…You have to find me…Before it's too late.
She lets her eyes fall closed, wishing that she could block the words from her mind. She'd been hoping that the death of Sidious meant the dream wouldn't come true. That the threat against the galaxy had been resolved. She now sees that was a foolish hope. Whoever had reached out to her before is still there, and she fears he won't stop until she finds him. Until she uses the map.
How could it be Revan, after all these years? The thought strikes her as nearly impossible. Where had he been, and how had he preserved his life force for millennia?
She can't stop her brain from getting carried away, and she realizes her thinking might wake Ben up if she stays near him. She pulls her hand from his gently, shifting to slip out of the blankets.
Jeyna pulls her shirt and panties back on, but is reluctant to dress in anything more. She's overheated from the combination of Ben's warmth and the blankets of the bunk. Her skin feels hot, the cool air of the ship a relief. She leaves him to sleep, wandering the ship at random.
She spots the still-sparking remains of HK-47 in the medbay as she passes it. She'll need to recruit Ben's repair skills to fix it, remembering how he'd been able to fix their commlink on Kashyyyk. She keeps walking, slowly, exploring the old smuggler's vessel. She can see where repairs have been made over the years, where newer upgrades have been installed. Someone's retrofitted what looks to be a galley in the crew quarters.
How much time had Leia and Han spent on this ship, she wonders, before their family fell apart? She frowns, continuing on to find another sleeping quarters. It looks well used, and she wonders who had been living there. If Han and Leia's belongings were in the other space, who had slept here?
Jeyna can't help herself, and gives in to the urge to investigate. Her curiosity has always been strong, even when she knows she shouldn't humor it. And as she pulls open the locker, she feels as if she's invading someone's privacy.
There's a holopad on the shelf. She lifts it tentatively, a worm of guilt in her heart suggesting she shouldn't go any further. But she's too intrigued to listen to it. She activates the holopad, and nearly drops it at the sight it projects.
It's a Wookie, she realizes. It startles her at first, as the only experiences she's had with the species were the rather negative ones on Kashyyyk. But when she looks closer, she notices he's holding a child, perhaps only four or five years old.
Her eyes widen as she recognizes the wavy, dark hair, the long nose, the sensitive eyes. Even as small as he is in the picture, she can tell it is Ben. But despite all the similarities, there is one glaring difference. He's smiling, his grin so broad and joyous she can't help but smile too. He looks ecstatic, the way only a child can.
She studies it for as long as she can bear, before forcing herself to turn the holopad off and put it away. Whoever the Wookie was who normally lived in this space, he had clearly saved the image of him and young Ben for a long time. Something about that makes her sad, and she retreats from the quarters.
Eventually Jeyna ends up at the cockpit, settling onto the cool metal floor to examine the maps they've collected. She picks up Ben's datapad before frowning when she realizes it is locked to his prints. She settles her thumb on the screen anyway, stubbornly not wanting to have to wake him. She's surprised when the device unlocks for her.
"I loaded your prints into it, in case something happened to me."
Jeyna nearly drops it in surprise, turning her head to see Ben lingering in the doorway to the cockpit. His hair is disastrously messy, and though he's pulled on pants, he's foregone a shirt. True to his word, the injuries from his fight with the Knights of Ren are nearly gone. She can see it now that he's removed the bacta patches. Only scars remain, still the red of fresh new skin.
Her heart beats faster at the sight of him like that, and she lets her eyes focus on his face instead of roaming his body. Her own body is all too keen to replay the pleasure she'd felt with him if she'd let it.
"How long have you been awake?" she asks curiously.
"Since you climbed out of the bunk," Ben says with a slight shrug.
"And you've just been letting me snoop around the ship this whole time?" she replies, raising her eyebrows in disbelief.
"Yes," he confirms, stepping forward to lean against the wall of the cockpit. She watches as he slides down slowly, until he's seated against it, his long legs stretched out alongside her. "I'm not hiding anything from you."
She smiles slightly at the sound of that, wondering if she'll eventually get to ask about everything she wants to know. There are so many questions she has for him. Ben's presence grows in her mind, what had once seemed like an intrusion now feeling natural to her. He returns her smile, his eyes sleepy. "You can ask your questions, whenever I can ask mine," he says.
"What questions do you have?" Jeyna replies, confused.
Ben's steady gaze holds her for a moment before he responds. "I want to know as much about your history, as you do about mine. Does that surprise you?"
She bites her bottom lip slightly. It does surprise her, she realizes. Wouldn't her life seem boring, compared to his? And can't he just pull whatever he wants to know from her brain, like he had when they first met?
"I'd rather hear you tell me," Ben says softly, responding to the questions she hasn't even spoken aloud.
Jeyna moves, shifting to sit beside him, resting against his shoulder. "Alright, then," she agrees. Her eyes fall closed as he moves his hand to her bare thigh, his fingers stroking her skin lazily.
She realizes she is still so tired, her body seeming to want to sleep forever now that it appears safe to do so. But before she can relax, the words return to her thoughts. You have to find me. Before it's too late.
She feels Ben's hand stiffen, freezing in place. "I'm sorry," he murmurs.
"For what?"
"I made you find the rest of the holocrons. Now, because of me, you have someone haunting your thoughts. In resolving my own problem, I've created one for you," Ben says slowly. She can feel the guilt shimmering through his words, lingering in the force between them.
Jeyna shakes her head immediately. "I would've gone after those holocrons with or without you. I wouldn't have stopped. Pursuing my studies was all I had."
She falls silent as she realizes her words remind her of Ben's, when she'd questioned how he had embraced the dark side for so long. He's said the darkness was all he had. In a strange way, she can relate to blind devotion to a single cause, in the absence of anything more meaningful. How easy it felt for her, now, to want to turn from her pursuit of Revan. Now that she had something else. She takes Ben's hand in hers.
He's silent for a long moment, but she can feel that she's eased some of his guilt. "But perhaps, without me, you would've been stopped before you got to this point," Ben suggests.
"Perhaps, without you, I would've died trying. I couldn't have handled Freedon Nadd on my own," Jeyna argues back gently. "Or the spiders…" she adds, shivering at the memory of the overgrown arachnids.
She feels his slight laughter in the shake of his shoulder against hers. "You've been tortured by a Sith Lord, possessed by the spirit of thousands of dead force users, and still spiders are your greatest fear," Ben teases.
"Fear doesn't have to be logical," Jeyna argues. "It's fairly illogical, from a philosophical standpoint."
"I forget you are also an amateur philosopher," Ben says, freeing his hand from hers to brush her hair back from her face. She turns to him, her smile falling slowly from her features at the heat in his gaze. Her nerves dance, deep in her belly, excitement flaring on its own.
She shifts, intent on kissing him, only to feel the datapad slide in her lap. She'd sat it there and forgotten about it during their conversation. Ben's eyes slide from hers, down towards the device.
"I was going to examine the star map…" she admits.
"We'll have to follow it," Ben concedes. "Though I'm still not sure that dream was real…"
"But if it was real…" Jeyna trails off, remembering the terrible feeling of energy being drained from the web made of life. The fate of the entire galaxy could be hanging on this, and she feels the tightness of anxiety forming in her chest.
"Regardless, I can't rest until we deal with it," Ben says, voice turning more agitated. "He can affect your mind too strongly, and I can't seem to block it. All it would take is another slip up, and you could end up back in a coma, or…"
She notes the way his voice drops off, refusing to say the word. Is he remembering when he'd nearly lost her, not that long ago? When he'd nearly, as Luke put it, drained himself trying to bring her back?
Jeyna opens the datapad's display, navigating them to the star map. Ben is silent, peering over her shoulder as they examine the navigation charts together. She can make sense of them now, all together. But that is the end of the good news.
"Even if we use the most remote hyperspace route to get past the outer rim, this path puts us straight through the unknown territories," Ben says quietly, reaching past her to adjust the map.
"It's not even in the unknown regions," Jeyna agrees, seeing where his eyes must have already focused. "It's passed them. Has anyone ever gone that far?"
She looks to him in time to see him shake his head. "Even with the Knights of Ren, I haven't gone that far." He gestures to a planet on the screen, unlabeled, brow furrowed in thought. "This is where we found Sidious. It's as far as I've been."
Jeyna studies that last planet, a whitish blue dot in the darkness of the map. Their path, traced out for them, goes past it. And keeps going. The anxiety only grows, and Jeyna takes a deep breath to try to steady herself. "There's dangers in the unknown regions, aren't there?"
Ben's eyes turn dark as he nods slightly. "Yes…"
She sits the datapad down, needing a break from studying the black void of uncharted space they are supposed to traverse. She can't begin to fathom where it ends, fear of the unknown making her hands tremble. Where had Revan gone, when he'd left known space? What had he been searching for? She remembers the holorecording of him she had viewed as a child. He'd referred to some threat, greater than anything the galaxy had ever seen. What threat could be greater than a Sith Lord? Great enough to destroy the entire galaxy?
She realizes she's shaking when Ben pulls her to him, his arms locking her into his hold. She focuses on calming her breathing, willing herself to be stronger. She's tired of being afraid, of feeling weak. Perhaps she isn't strong with the force like Ben, or trained to fight like a Jedi or Sith. But she finds, deep down, a strange determination. Jeyna needs to see this through, to resolve the puzzle that's entrapped her mind since she was a small child.
The ship rocks suddenly, a violent jarring motion that threatens to toss her across the cockpit. She only stays put because of Ben's reflexes, stabilizing her against his body.
Alarms instantly blare in the space, a control panel flashing red before the pilot's seat. Ben releases her when the shuddering of the ship slows, throwing himself forward to examine the instrument panel. She feels his dread through their bond at the same time he swears, a low expletive that she's never heard him utter before.
"What is it?"
"Buckle up, now," he orders, throwing himself down in the pilot's seat. "This is going to get rough."
Jeyna obeys, hurrying to the navigation seat and locking the restraints over her shoulders. "What's happening, Ben?" she asks, before being interrupted by a second jarring. The whole ship is thrown sideways, and her head throbs with the loud noise of impact. "Are we under attack?!"
"It's the Finalizer. It's firing on us," Ben explains tersely. She hangs on as he throws the ship forward, as fast as the sub-lightspeed engines can manage. "Another shot like that, and our shields will go down," he adds.
"Can we jump to hyperspace?" she asks. How has the Finalizer found them? Why are they attacking? Jeyna realizes the ship is under the control of General Hux now, without Ben to act as Supreme Leader. Could he know they are the ones piloting the Millennium Falcon? Or does he simply think it is a Resistance vessel?
"Not without getting enough of a lead on them," Ben grits out, turning the ship in a sharp bank. "They've pioneered lightspeed tracking, and they'll just follow if we are too close."
Jeyna's eyes widen as she sees what Ben is steering them towards. Out past the cockpit window, she can make out the approaching asteroid field. Does he mean to fly them right into it?
"The Finalizer is much larger, so it's less maneuverable than the Falcon," he tells her. "If I can gain distance while they try to avoid hitting the asteroids, I can jump to hyperspace once we clear the field."
Jeyna nods, mostly to herself since Ben is too preoccupied to see. She can't bring herself to answer him aloud, fearful as the asteroids loom ever larger ahead of their ship. She closes her eyes, silently hoping that she hasn't overestimated his piloting skills. Their lives are depending on it.
