Less than a year after her abandonment, a sandstorm devastates Jakku. From space it would have looked like a marble, red and swirling across the planet. From the surface, it had been a wall of destruction, spanning sky to sand, rending everything between into dust.
Rey gets caught in a wreck on the outskirts of the city. She'd been looking at the crashed ship for days, wondering if it might be her family's. If they were waiting to be rescued. If that's why they hadn't come back for her yet. After two days of wondering, Rey escapes the orphanage, risking a beating from the savage rug merchant who keeps her and six other children locked in a basement apartment until they're enough to sell. She will never set foot in that basement again, though she doesn't know it at the time.
It takes a day to climb the dune. If any citizens spotted a lone child trekking up the sand with nothing but a canteen swinging from her neck, they were too busy tying down their belongings and stockpiling food and water to retrieve her. By then the storm is a black underline in the far horizon. Rey glances at it from time to time with mild curiosity, too young to know any better.
The ship's interior is empty and unfamiliar. The cockpit is sealed by a seam of dried blood. Rey realizes she can't clearly remember what the inside of her family's ship had looked like. But she knows it wasn't this.
Just as she goes to leave, the storm hits. Nature slams into the dune, threatening to shove the ship's carcass over the far side and down a crevasse. The winds find a way in, ripping through gashes in the damaged hull. Grit scratches Rey's eyes and clogs her mouth. When she steps outside to make a run for the city, her feet are swept from beneath her and the sand tries to buff the very skin off her bones.
She crawls back into the shipwreck and finds a utility closet. She hides there with her canteen. The storm lasts for three days.
She is six, afraid and alone.
#
The Frost Ball mansion is falling apart. Even the very cliff face its carved from may not last the night. Finn moves as fast as he can while supporting Poe's weight, navigating the crumbling hallways for the group. Poe limps along, blaster primed and ready to shoot if anyone tries to attack.
But in reality, attack is the last of their worries now. All the other guests have fled or are fleeing, like rats from a sinking ship. Those who aren't are already dead.
Right on their heels, Ben runs with Rey in his arms. Now and then, when the rumbling and screaming isn't so loud, Finn catches traces of Ben's voice. He is talking to her, words low and broken up by ragged breathing. Asking her to hold on. Wake up. Promising that he will get her out of this.
Rey's voice never answers.
Finn tries not to think about that. Or about how Rey's head had lolled so lifelessly. How her eyes had stared, open yet unseeing, streaming with the light from the Force. Maybe she does hear Ben murmuring to her.
Maybe Ben just needs to believe she does.
One thing is for certain, Rey is the nexus of destruction. As they carry her through the hallways back toward the ballroom, the walls crack around them, stone and marble crumbling from the energy rippling from Rey's body. It's like standing next to an explosion. Finn does his best to bend the Force into shield to protect his friends, but it is so much stronger than he is, a raw and raging power. He knows he is out of his league.
As they pass through the archway back into the ballroom, a pillar collapses overhead. Finn catches it with the Force and practically hurls Poe across the threshold. Then he sprints across himself and whirls to hold the way open for Ben.
As he does, a second pillar cracks and topples from the opposite side. Finn's hold on the Force finally slips. The archway collapses, closing Rey and Ben off on the other side.
"No!" Poe roars, trying to stand. His injured legs fail him.
Finn sprints to the rock pile, digging his hands into it and thinking of Crait. That time had been like this, trapped with death closing in around them. Only then there had been a miracle waiting on the other side to clear a path to their deliverance. This time there will be no miracle. Their miracle is on the other side, dying. His mentor. His best friend. Finn knows he isn't strong enough to save her like she saved him. He rakes at the rubble anyway, heedless of the blood and the tears slicking his hands. He is too afraid to stop trying.
Then he feels a tremor in the Force.
He halts and steps back, disbelieving as the debris slowly slides forward, pushed by an invisible current. It isn't as elegant as the floating boulders Rey had lifted on Crait. But it's working.
Finn's heart thuds. His thoughts racing in fragments. She's awake. Alive.
But when the rubble clears to waist height, it is Ben kneeling on the other side. His face is white and fierce, twisted in a snarl. One arm supports Rey on his bent knee and chest. The other is outstretched and reaching, pushing the Force through the arch. Finn stumbles through the debris to help Ben up. Together they limp into the ballroom.
"The Force," Finn pants, once they're safely on the other side. "You're connected again?"
"No." Ben shakes his head. "I can only store a little at a time. That was borrowed power."
"Borrowed?" Finn glances down at a Rey.
"Not from her. I can't reforge the dyad until she lets me. She has to decide she wants it."
"I don't think she's in a state to decide anything right now," Poe says darkly.
"Who then?" Finn asks, wondering if there's someone else in the Force who could help them.
"…Virya."
"Virya?" Poe asks. "She's here?"
"She was. I don't know if -"
A crack ruptures the air, deafening them. Beyond the glass dome walls, a huge section of the cliff face breaks free and plummets into the canyon below.
"We have to get out of here. Before the whole mountain comes down." Finn glances around. "The elevator shafts are completely caved in. I'm not strong enough in the Force to clear it. Can you?"
Ben hesitates, then shakes his head. "That was the last of what she gave me. I'm dry."
Poe swears, swiveling to take in the room as best he can. "Is there another way into the hangar? Any way at all?"
Grim silence is Ben's only answer.
Another deep rumble ruptures the air. Only this time, it is louder. Closer. Reverberations thud in their chests. The mansion's foundation rocks. It's in the foundation, Finn realizes, looking down to see a dark shadow looming beneath the glass dance floor.
"Back! Back! Back!" He hauls Poe by the collar.
Ben scrambles, keeping Rey tight to his chest.
The shadow meets the frosted glass and presses against it. The floor buckles, then shatters, birthing a monster up from below. Not a monster, Finn realizes. A ship. Flown directly up from the hanger into the ballroom above. The ramp drops, revealing a small woman with crimson hair and a powder blue gown. Her blaster is aimed straight at them.
Upon seeing them, she blinks and lowers her weapon. "Finn?"
Her voice helps him see past the wig and the dress. "Rose!?"
"Hey," she says, a bit raggedly. "Thought you could use a ride."
#
Let me in.
The storm howls for her.
The wrecked ship flexes and moans. Six year old Rey stays as small as she can, as tight as she can. For if the storm should find her, it will devour and subsume her into dust.
It wouldn't be so bad, she thinks. As dust, she wouldn't be so frightened. As dust, she wouldn't be alone. She'd be part of the storm, her body and her mind worn down into a cloud of molecules, unburdened by pain or fear.
But, as dust, she wouldn't be here for them when they came back.
Them. Her loved ones. It has already been months since Rey realized, despairingly, she no longer recalls their faces. Their names. In her memory, there is attachment. A bond so strong it threads her through with ache. But identity has become a nebulous thing. A phantom. All she knows is that she's been separated from something. A missing part of herself. A part she yearns for. A part she must be with again. That thought, that need, is the only thing that keeps her from giving herself over to the storm.
Let me in.
In the screaming wind, she hears a phantom calling for her. Her lost ones. The storm. Rey can no longer tell. She shudders in her shelter, tear tracks dry and tacky with sand on her cheeks.
Rey.
The wind says her name. Rey jerks. Not the storm, she recognizes.
The missing.
Him.
"Ben?"
#
"She's up!" Poe shouts from the front passenger chair of the four-seat ship. "Did you hear that? She said his name!"
"She's not up." Finn braces, using the Force to keep the ship from splitting apart from Rey's power.
In the pilot's seat, Rose steers with gritted teeth. Her evening gown has been slashed off at the thighs for better mobility. Her brow is streaked with grease. Poe sits beside her supervising the flight, his legs hang useless in the foot well.
"What do you mean she's not?" Poe demands, twisting over his shoulder to look back. "She just said 'Ben'. Clear as day!"
In the backseat, Ben sits with his eyes closed and Rey folded in his lap. A frown line creases when Poe snaps his name. Otherwise, his expression is perfectly blank.
"Shut up!" Finn hisses. "Shut up and leave them alone. Tell Rose how to drive but don't say their names and don't do anything to distract them. He's trying to reach her. But she's deep in the Force. Break his concentration now and it could be all over."
"Define all over," Rose demands. "She dies?"
Finn glances across the seat where Rey lays folded in Ben's arms.
"Her. Him. Us too. If he can't reach her now, we all go out together."
#
Rey.
His presence brushes along the edge of the ship. Her shelter. Her mind.
The voice is not of the storm. It is Ben's. Out there in the desert, waiting for her to let him in. Rey can feel him just on the other side, his palms and forehead pressed to the wreck's exterior.
"How?" she asks, astonished. "How are you surviving? How have you not been torn apart?"
He doesn't answer her question, but she can feel the pain and what the storm is costing him. He is being torn apart, slowly but surely, out there by the Force.
"I'm here, Rey. I came for you. But you have to let me in. Let me in, Rey. Let me be with you."
Rey stumbles from the closet and finds her way to the door. Even inside the ship, the storm blinds her. Robs her breath. Scratches blood from beneath her flesh. If she opens the door to him now, it will surely destroy them both.
"I'm afraid," she tells him.
"Don't be. The storm is savage but we can weather it. As long as we do it together."
Rey lays her fingers on the locks that sit between them. Yet something stops her. Some memory. Some dread. Her hand falls back down to her side. "Once the storm is over," she says, "you'll have to leave again."
Ben's silence is louder than the howling wind.
Fresh tears prick Rey's eyes. She is six and waiting in a sandstorm. She is twenty and waiting in the Force.
She steps back from the door. "If I never let you in, you can't go away."
"Rey."
"I won't."
"Sweetheart-"
"I can't."
"You must. This is the way it's supposed to be. You know it."
"I don't care how it's supposed to be!"
"You do," he says gently. "I know you do."
Rey hugs herself. Her arms are a spoor substitute for his. She burrows her face into her shoulder, hiding from him and the world. "If I can wait this out alone, you can stay there where you are."
"You can't wait it out. Until you let me in, the storm will never stop. And even if it did, I'd still be out here and you'd be in there. We'd be next to each other but separated forever. You don't want that. Do you?"
"No," she gasps. "But it's better than you going back to the Dark."
"Rey, you'll die in there. Waiting for the storm to end."
She curls more tightly. She knows it to be true but doesn't care.
"Just like I'll die out here," he says softly, "waiting for you."
Those words rock her, shooting her up to her feet. Through fear, she hadn't seen it before. Ben is on the other side, waiting for her. And every second he waits, the Force tears more of him apart. His dying is unthinkable. Yet it's happened before, hasn't it? Once. Somehow. It could happen again. Unless Rey refuses to let it. Unless she lets him in and saves him.
She throws the door open. She falls into his waiting arms.
#
Rey wakes in the lunar pool.
She is naked. Warm. Her body lays half-submerged on the shallowest step of the pool. Her breathing echoes steady against the temple walls. Other than that, there is only silence. Perfect and still. Rey stirs. The water laps gently. Her limbs feel thick and sluggish with disuse. Slowly, she sits, sliding herself down a step lower so the water envelopes her chest. The water wraps around her, alien and ever so faintly… wrong. She'd thought that feeling would go away once she was balanced again. But even now, though the storm has passed inside her, some sense of wrongness has lingered.
She looks around the empty temple, confirming what she already feels.
She is alone.
Then, she isn't.
Ben stands at the edge of the pool. His back to her, fully dressed in a black pilot's jacket and boots. He stills, chin turning slightly toward his shoulder, as if he's just heard the faint sound of water lapping behind him. When he turns around to face her, she can't see his surroundings. Only him.
She says softly to him, "Hi."
Ben swallows some emotion, then responds. "Hi."
For a moment they just look at each other, together but apart, separated by space but connected through it by their bond. If Rey had doubted when she saw him suddenly standing at the edge of the pool, she knows for certain now. The dyad has been reforged.
She puts aside the complexity of emotions that surges at that thought. Instead she asks, "How long was I out?"
He glances at something, checking some control panel wherever he is that she cannot see. "Nearly three days. I stayed beside you for the first two. Once I felt that you would wake up again, I thought it would be easier if…" he doesn't finish the sentence but his dark eyes communicate the rest. If I was already gone.
Rey glances down at the opaque water to process the information. Then she looks up again sharply as her memories coalesce. "The others? Base ship?"
"They made it," Ben says. "Once we reforged the dyad, Rose, Finn and Dameron got us to base. I thought Virya might have destroyed it but… it was still there. Just as we left it. She must have used the Force to slip away without detection. They hadn't even realized she had gone."
Rey exhales a relieved sigh. "So Leia?"
Ben's gaze softens. "My mother is fine. She and the others are waiting for you on the ship. I told them to let you rest here to help you recover. Finn wasn't crazy about the idea but… well, it looks like he listened."
Rey sits back a fraction into the water, numb relief swelling in her. "And the Inner Circle? The ball?"
"Dead and destroyed, respectively."
"What happened?"
"You did. When you lost control, you brought down the entire mansion. Few could have survived. For certain, Doran at least is dead."
At the mention of Doran, Rey's memories come into sharper focus. She remembers the tower. She and Ben walking into a trap. Doran revealing himself as their enemy. And Virya. Virya betraying them for her father, and then betraying her father for Ben. Virya as the last thing holding Rey together in the Force before everything went dark…
"Virya?" Rey murmurs. "Is she…?"
Ben's expression darkens. "I don't know. When you fell, half the tower was destroyed in an instant. I felt Virya for a second, just long enough to pass some of her power. Since then, I haven't sensed so much as a hint of her. Maybe she perished in the explosion. Maybe she survived and is concealing herself. I can't know for sure."
Rey probes gently at the Force with her own awareness, searching for any impressions of the Vorian heiress. She's surprised how smooth the Force feels to her. Natural. Balanced. Right. The dyad has realigned her, restoring Rey to her former state. But even restored she finds no traces of Virya. Not even a flickering of her presence.
Despite everything, guilt tugs faintly at Rey's chest. "If she's dead, then I killed her."
Ben moves for her then, coming around the perimeter of the pool to stand close to the steps. His shin is an inch from her spine. If she leaned back on it, would he feel solid?
"If she's dead," Ben says, "it isn't your fault."
Rey knows he believes it. She just wishes she did too. "She helped us in the end. She held me together as long as she could."
"Or she was looking out for herself. Keeping you together was the only way to save her own skin."
"She killed her father to save you. Maybe she was only acting on instinct, but still. You're alive because of it. Both of us are."
Ben doesn't have a rebuttal for that, only grim silence.
"If she is still out there," Rey says, "I hope she comes back."
"She won't. Not if she knows what's good for her."
Rey looks up. "And you?" she asks. "Are you coming back to me from wherever you are?"
Emotions war in Ben's face. The victors are solemness and sorrow. "You know I can't."
"According to who?"
"The entire fucking universe. The Force itself. We're a dyad again now. Destined to fall on opposite sides. That's how we bring balance to the -"
"I read the texts," Rey reminds him. "I know what they say. What I want to know is, are you coming back?"
Ben looks down at her, lost. She feels him walling himself off from her, protecting against heartbreak. Her own heart aches to see it.
Swallowing, Rey stands on the steps and turns around to him. Not caring that she is naked and he is clothed. Not caring that he's likely already put countless galaxies between them.
She reaches out to take his hands in hers. He feels solid and real.
"Come." Gently, she pulls.
Ben blinks at her and then at the milky water. Slowly, like a man dividing himself in half, he shrugs off his jacket, kicks off his boots, and steps down into the water. Rey leads him out to chest depth, until there is nothing but the water and her and him.
She holds his hands beneath the surface. "You don't have to go."
"If I stay it will be harder for both of us. The Force will push us to different sides. You, the Light. I, the Dark. Maybe it won't happen for days. Months. But eventually, it will. And when that happens, I won't have the strength to leave you again."
"So don't."
"Rey-"
She kisses him. Long, slow, and deep.
Ben gives into it in a moment. His arms wrap around her, pulling her into him as if she is a sun, warming the coldness of an empty void. His hands on her bare skin set currents in her veins.
When they break apart, foreheads and nose tips still touching, breath melding, Rey whispers what she thinks. "I need you closer than this."
Her fingertips dig faintly into the nape of his neck. Ben dips forward, kissing her again without any more encouragement. He lifts her easily off her feet, her weight halved by the water, until she is resting on him like she had beneath the pier on the night she'd nearly drowned.
She's drowning now, too. Only in different ways.
Ben's tongue in her mouth and the heat his body herds Rey past the point of clear thought. She unravels into something oceanic, a moving constellation of desires. Her body is the tide and he is the cosmic force, calling up the waves to break against the shore. She want him there too, with her in that place. Acting solely on want and desire. If she can get him there, she thinks, she knows that he will stay.
"Rey," he whispers her name like worship between kisses. "Rey."
His voice and the warm wetness of the pool set her head spinning.
It must affect him too because Ben backs them up to the steps, folding his knees without breaking their kisses. Sitting on the deepest step, he pulls her into his lap. And Rey feels him then. A line of want pressed against her. She breaks their kiss to gasp.
Ben's forehead drops to her collarbone. He breathes deeply, as if breathing can keep him from falling apart.
Only Rey doesn't want him to do that. She wants him completely undone.
She plants kisses to his temple while her fingers hunt the hem of his shirt. Then she sits back just enough to pull it over his head, ignoring his shudder when her weight shifts in his lap. His shirt slaps wet on the side of the pool. Before Rey can reach under the water for his belt, Ben catches her hands in his.
"Are you sure?" he whispers, strong fingers sliding over her knuckles, enfolding wrists, and then gliding up her arms, until he's framing her neck with his palms and her jaw with his thumbs. "You're sure?"
She looks straight into his eyes, and shudders at the glimpse she catches of herself inside them. A glimpse of herself the way he sees her, reflected in his gaze.
"Yes," is all she can manage, hoping he understands how deeply she means it. "Yes."
After that, there is no more speaking. There are only fragments of words. Whispers. Gasps. Murmurs and broken pieces of yes and there and please. They explore each other until there is nothing left untouched. And when they crest, the ecstasy is amplified by their bond. Him feeling hers, her feeling his, as together they become a singularity. Balanced. One. Around them the water swirls. It feels right for the first time.
Rey comes down slowly, folding around him, clinging to his frame for support. Breathless and dizzy and knowing now that there is no way she can ever let this go.
"Don't leave." She crosses her forearms at the nape of his neck. "Help me rebuild. Stay."
Ben buries his face in her neck. Enclosed in her, his whole body tremors. His breathing is ragged. "Rey. We've been through this," he whispers. "The Light… it doesn't want me."
She takes his face in her hands, guiding it up to meet her gaze. "But I do."
The vulnerability he shows her then makes Rey hold to him more tightly. He is afraid. His fingers are laid on the locks that sits between them. This time, she will be the one catch him when he falls to the side where she waits.
"Ben. I do."
A/N: - Epilogue: yes, there is one, though I haven't written it yet. I expect it will take a few weeks to be ready for upload. I'll keep my Twitter ( Nanirain1) updated w/ the latest. - Sequel: a few of you asked if there will be one. I'm not currently planning on that, however, I do have some bonus material (Ben POV chapters etc.) drafted that I may revisit and decide to upload. - More Reylo?: a few of you have also asked if I plan to write other Reylo fics. I have a couple ideas (some of which I've teased on my Twitter) but I'm planning to take a break for a little while. YLID was a beast (beloved, but a beast nonetheless) and I need a lil vacation. If you have any questions feel free to comment here or head over to my Twitter ( Nanirain1). Thanks again for all your love and support. May the Force be With You!