Ben presses Rey against the window, not hard but just hard enough that she, already breathless from their kissing, feels a pressure building in her body. She breaks the kiss for air, arms rising to encircle Ben's shoulders and keep him close while she breathes.

She needn't have bothered. Ben has no intention of being anywhere but close. While Rey recovers, he bends to find new places to kiss.

Rey lets her head loll back, hands sifting through Ben's black hair, skating the spinal notches down the back of his neck, until she hits the damp neckline of his shirt. She tugs half-thinkingly. In a single motion, Ben straightens and pulls it over his head, a flash of flexing arms and chest, and then he is back pressing up on her again. Her nerves frissons at the new, bare contact. Ben's skin is rough and crystaled with salt. Ocean-dipped, she tastes it on his shoulder, and Rey's head is swimming.

She is happy for strength of him, the heat of him, pinning her to the wall. She breathes in a thick smell. Marine and masculine and something that's of the two of them. She steals half lidded glimpses in the dim, dashboard lighting. The impossible breadth of his shoulders, bare and domed in her hands. The splay of his fingers by her face as he half-props his weight against the wall. The planes and dips of his chest, flush against her own. She wants to be even closer to him. To be kissing him again.

Before she can find Ben's lips, Ben finds her cheek, her jaw, the curve of her neck. He brands each spot with the heat of his mouth. He goes behind her ear, inhaling deep and making Rey arch against him, surprising them both. The sound he makes when her hipbones dig into his. The way he whisper-swears her name into her ear. It winds her whole body up like a chord ready to snap.

She can't remember which of them started down this path. Can't remember much of anything, because Ben's touch is some obliterating force that blots out everything else. All thought. All cold. A lifetime of loneliness. Until there is nothing but the taste and touch and smell of him.

"Ben," Rey breathes, twisting fingers in his hair now, pressing him down so his kisses are even harder against her. She feels the graze of teeth and it's like being brushed with a live wire.

Ben's forehead rests on the wall beside her, freeing both his hands to slide around Rey's waist and over the notches of her hipbones. His left stops there, anchoring her. His right glides down to her thigh. Rey opens like a flower, and Ben's palm tracks the curve of her inner thigh. Just beside his knuckles there is a node of heat, aching for contact. For him. Rey's face crumples when it doesn't come. She is overwhelmed.

"Ben… Ben."

"Yes?" he answers, a bit raggedly. A bit belatedly, as if it takes him a moment to register his name on her lips.

"I just…" Rey shakes her head. "I just feel..." But how to begin? How to say what she feels when thoughts won't move in straight lines anymore, let alone words?

"I know." Ben kisses the corner of her mouth. "I feel it too."

Yes. He does. She knows by the perfect pressure of his touch. The raw edge in his voice. He knows her. And she knows him. Their mutual perception of each other is something she can almost feel, skating at the corners of her reach. They are close to coming together. So close finding each other gain.

I feel it too.

Comprehension slaps Rey in the face, cold and rude as an ocean wave. Her eyes fly open. Her hands jerk on Ben's shoulders, suddenly white knuckled. "Wait," she rasps. "Stop."

Ben stops immediately. He pulls back and goes absolutely still. "What is it?" His lips are kiss swollen, dark eyes dilated with want, but he's pushing past all that to search her for any signs of pain. When she doesn't answer right away, the hand that had been skating her thigh leaves to brace against the wall. At the absence, Rey nearly throws her comprehension out the window and slams his mouth back onto hers.

"What's wrong?" he breathes. "Does something hurt? Did I-"

"No," Rey squeezes her eyes shut. She can't believe she's doing this. "It's not that."

"Then… what?"

"I think we need to stop."

Ben straightens, putting another inch of space between them. "You want me to stop?"

No. A very loud part of her screams. I want you to never stop. I want you to keep going forever until there isn't any difference between the start of you and the end of me and we're just one thing, like we were always meant to be. She forces those words down her throat, like swallowing stones. She manages to rake up a, "Yes."

Ben backs away completely, so that no part of them is touching. He is still breathless, still shirtless and glossed in the dim dashboard light. The want in his eyes is a visible thing, as is his struggle to regain control over it, because she's asked him to. And, Force help her, watching him wage that war is kind of a turn on in itself. Rey has to look away.

"I felt something," she says, clearing her throat and blinking herself back to focus. "I think it was there the whole time. I just didn't realize-" She turns and Ben is staring at her. And by the Force he's so fucking attractive, her fingers twitch to —

"Can you…" Rey averts her gaze to the crumpled long-sleeved shadow on the floor.

He doesn't move for it. "Rey. If you don't want to, you can tell me."

"It isn't that I don't want to. Believe me, I want to."

"…But?"

"But didn't you feel the dyad?"

Ben frowns. "What about it?"

"You didn't feel it?"

"I was… a little preoccupied."

He glances up and down her, and she feels the cooling spots on her body where his mouth and hands had been. She does her best to shove them from her mind. "I could nearly feel you in the Force. The way you used to be. If we keep going, we'll reforge the dyad. I know it. I felt it almost happen."

Ben stares at her in silence, his expression unreadable.

Could he really not have felt it at all? Then a thought steals across her mind. A dark, horrible thought. "Two mutual desires," Rey murmurs a little bitterly. "I guess you finally found a way to get me there. Nicely done."

And the look in Ben's face, the sharp hurt as if she'd slapped him, makes Rey immediately regret her words. If he'd pulled away from her physically before, now he is completely out of her emotional reach. His reaction tells her she'd been wrong. He hadn't just been seducing her as a trick to reforge the bond.

"I'm sorry," Rey says. "I didn't mean -"

"Yes you did."

Rey swallows, unable to deny that she'd had the thought. She'd even spoken it aloud. And now that it's out there between them, there's no way to take it back.

"I know I've been manipulative," Ben says, his voice as cold as it had ever been from behind the mask of Kylo Ren. "But I'd hoped you understood me better than that."

"Ben, I'm sorry. I'm just… frustrated."

"And I'm not?"

"I'm sorry," Rey stresses, hating the insufficiency of those words. "It was a horrible thought. I didn't mean to have it, I just… I know you think reforging the bond is the only way to fix everything. And sometimes you get… so determined."

"Yeah." Ben sits down in the pilot seat, pulling his shirt back over his head. "I get it."

"Ben-"

"I want to save you, Rey." Ben says sharply. "And you're right. There's almost nothing I wouldn't do to achieve that. So, I see it. I see why you thought I might've had… ulterior motives."

But his bitterness says something different. And the words sound awful coming from his mouth. Even more awful than they'd sounded inside her head.

"But believe me when I tell you that I didn't." Ben looks at her and she can see the heat still burning beneath the ice of his anger. "The only thing on my mind was you."

Rey swallows. It's difficult around the knot in her throat. "I know," she says. "I know that now."

Ben nods, putting his hands on the joystick and starting up the engine. He doesn't even look at her for the rest of the way home.

#

Finn and Poe are waiting in the hangar. When Ben pulls in to dock, Poe's mouth falls open and his brows slam together. It's his first time seeing the ship. He starts striding for it before the engine has even shut down, ignoring Finn who tries to reel him back. His dark curls blow wildly in the ship's wake.

"What is this?" he demands as soon as the ship's hatch unseals. "And why haven't I seen her before?"

"He means to ask 'how did it go?'" Finn says.

Ben leaps out of the ship strides wordlessly past the two men. Rey emerges scowling.

"That good, huh?"

"Bindu's dead," Rey says. "And we didn't get any information out of him. Poe, please try not to have a stroke, alright?"

"Are you wet?" Finn asks.

Rey twitches. "I jumped into an ocean."

"I thought you didn't swim."

"She doesn't," Ben barks tersely, like a knife lobbed over his shoulder. "Not that she'd let that small detail stop her."

Finn's face creases in concern. "Force, Rey. Are you alright? Any injuries? Should we get you to the-"

"If she were injured," Ben says loudly, over half way to the exit by now, "she'd have told you."

His harsh tone halts Finn mid-reach for Rey's arm. He throws an irritated look at Ben's storming back and then raises a questioning brow at Rey.

Even Poe, who looks like he's considering climbing into the pilot seat and making a run for it with the ship, frowns faintly in Ben's direction. "What's got him worked up?"

"He's fine," Rey says, not knowing if that's actually true. "Look, can we debrief later? I need to change. And then maybe run the obstacle course or hit something in the wreck room to blow off some steam."

"Actually, we have bad news of our own," Finn says.

Rey groans. "What?"

"While you were gone, Senator Marcus took his stealth bombers to the X-16 System."

Ben halts at the door, listening without turning around.

"And then?" Rey asks, hoping the sudden dread in her stomach will be an overreaction.

"And then nothing," Poe says, hopping down from his self-guided tour of the cockpit. "We think they're all dead."

#

Rey gets to shower and change before going to Leia's quarters. When she arrives she's surprised to find the General there and no one else. Leia sits behind her desk on the other side of the room, pouring over a tablet. She rolls back when she sees Rey in the doorway.

"Where is everyone?" Rey asks, closing the door behind her.

"Cleaning up various messes. I sent Finn and Pie to hold off the Senators. Ben is questioning Virya."

Something in Rey twinges. "Virya?"

"If anyone could guess whose behind this it would be her. Ben still doesn't want her in the council meetings, but he's going to see if she'll tell him anything directly. She trusts him more than any of the rest of us."

"Right," Rey says. And then, because that twinging has turned into a full on twist, she asks, "Is Rose with them? For body guarding?"

"I didn't think Virya would try anything with Ben around."

Rey forces a smile. "You might be surprised..."

"You can join them when we're done here. But first I need you to tell me exactly what happened today."

Rey recounts their disastrous mission at the restaurant, providing as much detail as she can. Leia asks a few questions but mostly she just listens. As Rey tells the story, she get more disheartened at her own lack of information to show for it.

"We didn't even get a chance to figure out who the soldiers were working for," Rey confesses. "Or why Bindu was shot by his own sniper. I'm sorry, Leia. I'm a terrible spy."

"No," Leia sighs. "Anyone else would have been killed four over times already. You heard about Senator Marcus?"

"Finn and Poe told me. What happened? I thought Kiran told him to run a stealth mission."

"He did. Which means whatever was in that system was waiting for him. The only thing we know for certain is that X-16 was a trap. It probably wasn't even meant for Marcus, the poor, bull-headed fool."

"Do you think it was meant for me?"

Leia glances at her questioningly.

"I mean for Virya?" Rey explains. "Maybe Bindu, or someone he as working for, had him pass that along to her at the auction in the hopes that she'd go investigate for herself." Guilt knifes through her, sharp and unexpected. She hadn't liked Senator Marcus. In fact, she'd actively disliked him in their first and final meeting. But she also didn't like the idea of him catching a bullet meant for her.

"It's possible," Leia says. "But at the restaurant you said Bindu seemed afraid Virya would make an attempt on his life. Not that he was trying to kill her."

"That is what I thought at the time," Rey admits. "But what if he was actually afraid of someone else? He was ready to make a deal with me for protection. What if whoever he was really working for was the one he was worried about? When he kept looking at the door, I thought he was worried about getting out. But what if he was actually worried about who was coming in? Maybe he was sent to that restaurant as bait for the real target."

"Virya," Leia finishes, her brow creasing in thought. "If this is true, it would mean she's been the target since..."

"Maybe since the beginning," Rey says. "The Vorian's ship was the first thing to be bombed, before I even started this mission. Then it was quiet until the auction, when a bomb went off in the Vorian box. Rosshel could have just been collateral damage. And then Virya sets up a one-on-one dinner with Bindu and an entire squadron attacks? Whoever is taking out the Inner Circle, maybe they want her gone first. And even the initial explosion, the one that killed her family, we assumed her father Doran was the target of the attack. But what if whoever blew up the Vorian ship was trying to get to her?"

Grave alarm crosses Leia's face. Her finger presses a button in the armrest of her hover chair.

"Yes, Leia?" 3PO's voice crackles through a speaker.

"3PO, I need you to get everyone in here. Finn, Poe, and Ben. Tell Rose to resume her post at Virya's room when Ben leaves. Tell them Rey and I need to speak with everyone now."