Rey is kissed a lot over the next few hours. There are quite a number of different kisses, as it turns out. The long, lingering deep ones, for example, which seem to stretch into infinity as he can't get enough of the inside of her mouth and she revels in the press and slide of his tongue. There are the little, nipping pecks he gives her when he is getting close to orgasm and his control is fraying, and then there are kisses which aren't really kisses, just exchanges of breath between open lips when they come together. Afterwards he nuzzles at her with a closed mouth and this kiss is comfort and companionship and the glow of sated desire.
There isn't a bed on the command shuttle so they have to make do with what they have. He sets the viewscreen to a mirror reflection, so that no one can see in, and she watches him as he exits the pilot's chair, takes up a position behind her and twists her head to capture her mouth. He twitches the loose red bodice away from her breasts and once they are exposed he teases them unmercifully with his gloved hands because he knows what leather does to her. He stops kissing her long enough to tug one glove off with his teeth and puts his bare fingers in her mouth instead. Then, when she has made them wet, he reaches down, pulls up the front of her skirts and slips his hand inside her underwear.
She watches him finger her into a swift climax in the mirror, a flush spreading over her cheeks, a frown of concentration between his brows. It doesn't take long, and when she is done he bends her forward over the console and takes her from behind, his hands clamped around the belt she is still wearing, his cock straining between her thighs. It is impulsive, this coupling, she is fully dressed and he is too, and at any moment they may be discovered by their enemies. The girl she was before she died would not have appreciated this, rough and ready and intense, the grip on her waist which is nearly painful, the way she has to clutch the controls to keep herself still. This is dangerous sex, illicit, badly planned and ill thought through and she shouldn't like it, but she is no longer the girl she was. Something inside her is awake, has been awake since she lost Ben on Exegol and it whispers to her from the shadows – this is who she is now, this is what she was meant to be. He comes with a grunt and a cry and she feels the hot warmth spill down her legs when he pulls out, so she yanks the dress over her head to protect it from stains while he sheds the rest of his clothes. Then he spreads his cloak on the floor and lays her down.
By the time he is thrashing through the last stages of his final orgasm she feels thoroughly used. He has had her in every position she can think of, and some he must have read about in a book. She has come more times than she can count, and her stomach, breasts and chin are carrying the residue of his multiple efforts. He is insatiable today, and every time she thinks he is exhausted he reaches for her again.
The moment he is done she clambers out of his lap, feeling his latest deposit caking her thighs and this time she makes for the fresher. The room is small, basic and it takes some considerable time to repair the damage of the last few hours and appear presentable again. She rolls her eyes at the seductive smile he gives her as she heads towards her pack to retrieve her old clothes and ignores the outstretched hand as he attempts to initiate again – she can still feel the stretch of him inside and it will take a little time before she recovers. His grin turns rueful as she dresses and he heads for the fresher in his turn.
She has already sent the intelligence transmission over to the Resistance when he comes striding back, clad in a fresh change of clothes, which are identical to the ones he was wearing before and she recalls that once again, she has neglected to pack any spare outfits for him and all he has is the contents of this ship. The black still suits him. She hasn't laid in a course and just looks at him with a question, uncertain of the next move. This would be an opportune moment to escape. The First Order has failed to track them, she has paid her debt to the Resistance and they could disappear now with a reasonable chance of success. He rakes his hand through his hair, and reaches out for the navcomp, setting a course for Exegol.
She turns her head to the window as the stars blur into hyperspace and there is a silence between them which lasts for a long time. She doesn't want to go back there. Although Ben is sitting beside her, and they are together as a functioning couple, her antipathy towards the scene of his death remains. She may be part of a couple, but she is no longer part of a dyad, and she isn't sure if that connection will ever be re-established. It isn't his fault, and she has accepted the way he is now, but that doesn't mean that she doesn't miss what she has lost and it doesn't mean she has to enjoy a repeat visit to the place they both died. He seems equally on edge, because he doesn't attempt conversation, and his hand has pushed back his hair so many times if he does it again she may chop it off – hand or hair, she hasn't decided.
She adjusts the co-ordinates slightly and the command shuttle lands itself next to the wreckage of a TIE fighter on the planet's surface. There is none of the aerial chaos which reigned last time she was here; the place has become a graveyard. The corpses of ships are everywhere. Crashed Resistance and Final Order vessels litter the surface of the planet, their bodies broken and empty - the rebels will have made sure that no organic remains have been left, but it is too early for scavengers to have moved in to pick over the rest. Exegol has no defences other than its own natural barriers and it is not being guarded by any system that Rey can detect, either in the atmosphere or on the surface and their landing appears to go unnoticed.
She is first off the shuttle and she hesitates beside the stricken TIE. This is the ship that he arrived in. This is the vessel that carried him from Kef Bir to her side and she passed it during her flight to Luke's X-wing at the end of the last battle, cramming the rush of sorrow into a small, hidden hole inside her heart. Something has landed on it during the intervening time and it is just a mangle of metal now, engines scattered into a smear of parts across the dusty floor, cockpit ripped open, vulnerable to the lash of the storms which mar the surface of the planet. Behind her, Ben exits the shuttle carrying the helmet, she hears the familiar tramp of his boots down the ramp, but there is a disconnect as she faces him, something not quite right in his features, something too relaxed about the way he moves that has never bothered her before. He takes her hand and doesn't spare a glance for the ruined body of the ship. He doesn't recognise it. It means nothing to him, just one amongst a jumble of other man-made bones, although she is inclined to mourn its passing.
He glances around, looks at her with a question in his eyes and she nods towards a cleft in the rock. Most of the overhanging monolith that made up the Emperor's lair has collapsed into the hole beneath, but Rey knows there must be a way through as the Resistance have been in and out on a number of occasions to clear the vaults of whatever secrets Palpatine might have been concealing. Sure enough, the hole in the rock is wide and rather than a yawning gap, a slew of rubble bridges the drop down to the throneroom. Marks in the rubble indicate that this path has been used regularly, gouges showing the weight of the items which have been hauled either into or out of the cavern beneath.
Ben drops her hand and heads carefully down the slope and she follows at a distance, her steps slowed by her memories of the last time she was here. This location should have no negative connotations, it was the scene of her greatest victory, and even though she lost Ben here, he is back at her side, so there is no logical reason for the sorrow she feels, the sense of tragedy which blights her recollections of the place. She doesn't want to go any further than she already has, but he stops and waits for her to lead the way and she reluctantly complies.
Past the remains of the throne and out into the wide hall with the ruined seating they go, and Rey finds each step more difficult than the last. He says nothing, content to follow until she stops just short of the place she died, not far from the pit, where the floor bears no hint of the events that unfolded here. The place is seared into her memory. This is where she was lying when she felt the rush of warmth that woke her up, the jumble of emotion pouring into her empty shell from the man with his hand on her stomach. She can feel it again now as she stands in the shadows, the torrent of energy passing from one body to another, the energy, and everything that came with it. Ben hadn't just given her his life force, he hadn't just transferred a bit of his power, he had given her everything he had, everything he was, cored himself and shoved all of it into her to fill the gap her own life had left. She hadn't wanted him to do it, hadn't asked for that kind of sacrifice but he had made it anyway and now as she stands in the place where he died what she feels is not anger, but grief.
This is why she didn't want to come back, because she was not ready to face this loss. She feels the tears springing to her eyes, but they are only the outward manifestation of the flood of sorrow inside. This was where she died, where she loved, where she lost, where she became alone. Standing here, it is only now she understands what being alone truly is. All her life she told herself that there was no one and nothing in the galaxy to which she was connected, but some small part of her, however distant, something sleeping so deep in her consciousness she was never really aware of it, knew that wasn't the case. She had always been part of a pair, part of two that were one, part of a dyad linked by a thread so strong it endured over time and distance, across two sides of a war, winding tighter and tighter until here, in this place, Ben gave his life to save hers and that connection snapped.
There is a man standing in front of her, frowning, his fingers reaching out, but he is not the man she loved. She is sure of that now, with the clarity of grief to sharpen her senses. This person looks like Ben, but he is different underneath. It was never the outward appearance of the man that attracted her, but the beating heart within, the tortured soul inside she wanted to save, to hold in her arms while he made the empty part of her complete.
She can't do this. She can't be here again, the pain is too intense. She runs.
She leaves him behind and takes off, breaking for the opposite side of the cave, where tunnels in the rock promise shelter from the storm of weeping she knows is coming. She doesn't hear his footsteps chasing her, he must realise she needs to be alone. She flails blindly through rock-cut rooms, crashing into pieces of abandoned equipment without care, sliding on the remains of walls and stumbling through collapsed corridors until something stops her in her tracks.
It is the face of her father.
He stares at her through the side of a transparisteel tank, and it takes her a while to realise that he isn't moving. She hasn't seen him since she was small, but it was only a few days ago that Ren was busy crushing these memories from the kernel of her past and her father's features are familiar from that moment of farewell. He is suspended in some kind of viscous liquid, simply hanging inside a large box, completely naked and appearing no older than she is now. She bites her lip, steps closer, as her brain pulls her emotions back into line and she begins to think.
The man in the tank cannot be her father, her father is dead and has been dead for a long time, which means that this is someone, or something else. The tank is supported on a metal base, and Rey kneels in front of it, brushing off the panel fixed to the front which bears a number in the high three thousands. The tank has controls, a rudimentary datacore which is not operational, and the power cell which once supported it is dead. She stands, looking past the tank to a line of others which stretch on into the distance and she doesn't need a computer to tell her what has been happening here.
The resemblance is too close to be co-incidence. Her father was a clone, one of Palpatine's experiments, grown here in the depths of Exegol and escaped somehow, released into the wider galaxy to meet Rey's mother and have a daughter. But this clone has not been destroyed. Unlike those she saw on a holo once back on Ajan Kloss, these tanks all contain preserved specimens which have been kept, and not allowed to rot away over time. For what possible reason could her grandfather have wanted to keep these clones intact, while those he had grown from Ben's template had been allowed to decay? She can think of an answer, but she doesn't like it.
Perhaps these experiments have been retained because they were still useful, perhaps there was something in their makeup that might still have value, perhaps they were being stored for a greater purpose. She recalls what Poe said to her on the jungle moon, during that moment of discovery when she realised Ben had survived. Poe had said there were more things hidden on Exegol than genetic copies of the Supreme Leader, there were things here he didn't want to tell her about. As she passes through the cloning facility she begins to wonder what other clones might be hiding in the next room, or the next. Perhaps there will be clones of her mother, perhaps there will be clones of Rey herself. Perhaps she is a clone, stolen from her birthplace here in this dark nursery, spirited away to be raised as if she were a real person, with her own identity, her own face. Lando had told her that clones could be imprinted with memories which were not their own – perhaps all that Rey remembers is a lie.
Her footsteps quicken as she passes from one room to the next, hurrying now to find the truth. She has had so many versions of her history in her short life – Rey of no family, Rey Palpatine, Rey Skywalker – she isn't sure who she is any more. She is so caught up in her quest that she misses sounds from the outside, sounds to which she really should have been paying attention.
'Rey!'
It is a familiar shout. This voice has called her name frequently and she stops short at the sound of it, so warm, so full of friendship and camaraderie, so unthreatening. She turns to see him standing in the corridor behind her. Finn, whose presence she can now feel in the Force loud and clear, although she has been too absorbed in her own emotions to notice up till now.
'Rey!'
This time the word is not so friendly. Poe emerges from a doorway behind her, flanked by a dozen or more Resistance soldiers, all armed, and although their weapons are raised, they are not pointing in her direction. The expression on his face is closed, as if he is reserving judgement, but he does not order the troops to stand down.
'Rey!'
This last voice is the one she doesn't want to hear. Ben steps out of the door she has just left, his black cloak swinging around his ankles, still carrying Kylo Ren's distinctive helmet, and he casts only a cursory glance at the Resistance, whose weapons instantly swivel to aim at his head. His focus is all on her and he holds out a placatory hand.
Rey's own hand drops to her lightsaber.