"The internal damage is immense. We had to reopen the wound and remove part of her reproductive system. We were able to prevent septicemia, but..."
Leia winces as Dr. Kalonia's report trails off. Her eyes move past the doctor to Rey's prone body, her hand being held by Finn, his face wet and glossy as he stares at the subject of the conversation's face.
"Leia, we will do everything we can to make her comfortable, but it is still very touch and go." Dr. Kalonia's voice drops low at the end of her sentence. Finn's head jerks in the direction of the two women.
"Is there any hope?" Finn's voice breaks as he stares open mouthed at Dr. Kalonia's words. It was exhausted, a mix of despair and anger.
Leia moves past Dr. Kalonia as if she is floating. She looks deeply into Finn's eyes, assuring him quietly.
"There is always hope" Leia replies, and with that, she takes Rey's free hand, and Finn's as well, into hers. They share a sad smile before both turning their gazes to Rey's peaceful face.
A week passes with not much change. They all take shifts, Rose, Poe, Finn, and Chewie. Leia becomes the unofficial night watchman, her own insomniatic tendencies perfectly suited to the position. Dr. Kalonia's tests always reveal something different, but her general consensus is that the worst of it is over, and now they just need to wait and see.
It is Poe there when she wakes. As she blinks away the coma, her eyes focus on his body which lays sleeping in the chair next to her, having taken over from Leia in the very early morning hours. She hears BB-8 quietly whirring next to him as well. A small smile graces her heavily medicated lips as she realizes they are alright, the mission had not failed totally, even if she had. She is terrified to use her muscles, but she wants to catch a glimpse of the sleeping droid on the floor, to make sure that all his parts are accounted for after the battle. As she engages her abs, a dull pain shoots through her, but it isn't the inferno it was when she last was last conscious. She uses her elbows to prop her up and slowly edges her vision towards the corner of the bed when the darkened corner behind Poe and BB-8 starts to move.
She stiffens.
The black mass moves forward into the dim lighting of the medical bay.
The medications make it hard for her to focus, hard for her to find an internal locus, hard for her to contact the force, to reach out to it to steady her. She blinks a few times to ensure it is not her groggy mind playing tricks on her. When the shape doesn't disappear, but instead, moves closer to her, fear courses through her body. She reaches wildly for the force but it doesn't yield to her in her fear. She grips the handrails on either side of her, bracing, her soft, tan face lifting to catch Kylo's pale, angular one as he steps into the fluorescent lights of the infirmary.
Her scream, which feels detached from her, reveals a fear she had forgotten in the moments since her consciousness returned to her. The forest floods back to her. The reality of her true situation slams back down.
Kylo's eyes soften in...is it pity? Confusion? Despair? Rey feels the sharp pricks of IVs loosening from her veins as she recoils her body away from the figure, drawing herself into the wall behind her.
Then, BB-8 high pitched wail is in the air, startled by Rey, and just as quickly, Poe's arms are around her ball of a body, his chin on her shoulder, lips next to her ear whispering something she can't hear in the confusion.
She squeezes her eyes shut and focuses solely on Poe's careful grip on her back, the sound ceasing out of her, but her mouth not closing. She opens her eyes again and Kylo is gone.
"Rey….Falcon….Okay….We're here" is all she manages to hear between the sobs that come as she buries herself in his shoulder.
Leia comes to her often in the night, when everyone else is asleep. Their routine is the same, with Leia's shaky hand smoothing Rey's unkempt hair before sitting next to her on the bed. Sometimes Rey wakes and they talk about the day's events on the Falcon, about strategy, about Luke. Sometimes they just sit together as they both read the Jedi texts, as has been their ritual for the last two years. Leia is often as confused as Rey by them, but offers invaluable grains of knowledge where she can, and gets C-3PO to translate where needed.
Sometimes, Rey is asleep, the cycle of her medicine leaving her groggy and unaware. Leia still comes, but the talk is different when Rey is asleep. Leia apologizes too much, apologizes for sending her out alone with only a few days of any real, formal training. Apologizes for thinking, after what Rey had told her happened on the Supremacy , that maybe, maybe this young woman could do what no one else had done and bring her son back. Leia chastises herself, for being foolish to send her, for being foolish in the face of the Supreme Leader.
Most of all, she apologizes for him. For what used to be her son.
Even deep in her sleep, Rey can hear Leia's words. Leia's force sensitivity bleeds in to the static of her sleep. Rey notices, with not an immeasurable amount of concern, that now more than ever, Leia's presence looms large in the force. Her stomach turns at the theory of why this is, and Rey tries to calm it, by rationalizing that after using the force so totally to save herself after the bridge of her ship had been destroyed, she was now more deeply rooted in it than ever.
A part of her knew this wasn't true. The same part of her that always knew her parents would never reclaim her. The truth was that Leia was dying. She buries it deep within her and squeezes Leia's hand more tightly with each passing night.
It only takes a few days for Rey to start meditating again. In her heavily medicated state the force felt like water slipping through her fingers, something she desperately wanted, but would flee from her the more she grasped at it. She had blamed her inability to harness the force for Kylo being able to come through, in the way their bond used to present him, that night in the infirmary. After Crait, the bond tried to reopen, impossibly after Snoke's death. The first thing she looked for in the old Jedi books was force bonds, and she quickly walled herself in. Since then, she had only seen him in her meditations, a blurry black mark, and even that was too much, but she could never figure out how to erase him completely.
She knew she needed to keep her own balance if she wanted the force to stop showing her him, to stop presenting him as some sort of antidote to her own confusion on this path she never asked to walk.
She takes time to reflect, on the edge of meditation. The Jedi and the Sith, they were just stories, just legends, to her. Even as a child on Jakku, she scoffed at traders who would wax poetic on the Galactic Civil War. She had no delusions of grandeur. Sure, she fantasized about being a Y-Wing pilot after her billionth time practicing on her flight simulator, but never about being a force user. It was just a silly story made up by silly people who had time to think about silly things. She never was afforded that luxury. Survival, water, trade, that was her life. Until BB-8 showed up. Until Finn ran into her.
And now she was caught up in this space opera with the rest of them. She was a part of it. The propaganda sent out to children now included her face, and her story of triumph against Ren was repeated as far as the Outer Rim. The scar on his face, the one the First Order tried to hide in their own propaganda, was her trophy, and everyone knew it was her who had marked him.
She grimaces at the thought of them being so tied. But more, she grimaces at the thought that some other little girl was at this very moment hearing Rey's story and romanticizing war, dreaming that one day her own little droid would save her from a life of labor.
Rey's eyes well with tears. She brings her hands down to her own wound, ripping off the bandage. She traces the jagged scab as it dips from the top of her hip bone inwards. A sob she wasn't expecting escapes, and the hand not on her lesion shoots up to her mouth to quiet it. How much would she lose in this war? How many of her possible futures had been killed already?
She spent her whole life trying to survive and thought once she found a place to belong she would get to stop fighting. The truth was that she had to fight even harder to keep what she had found.
She gathers herself, reapplies a fresh bandage, and wipes her tears.
What would life be like after this war? If there was an after for any of them. Rose and Finn might settle somewhere warm, and bind together. They might start a family, and Rey might be called Aunt by the little Ticos. Poe might travel the galaxy, this time not for war, but for the adventure of it. Rey imagines BB-8's wonderous "ooohhs" as they pass by her vision's gas giants and through glittering ice fields together.
And what would become of Rey?
She didn't have a fantasy for that, no happy package she could play in her mind for herself.
A darker question loomed. What if this war was never truly over? She grew up in the boneyard of the Imperial fleet. Her home had been the death knell of the Empire. The shadows of this struggle between light and dark drenched her scavenging youth. She survived off the scraps of it. She was only now beginning to realize how a part of her this war has always been.
Could this truly be called a war? War's end.* This struggle between light and dark seemed to be eternal.
In the days since she had awoken, she had taken to studying Leia's face during briefings she attended when she was well enough to walk again. Rey's strength seemed to grow, while Leia's weakened. Rey tried to memorize the lines that traversed Leia's face, trying to read her life like a map. This was a woman who had been fighting since 19, just like Rey. This was a woman whose whole life had been a struggle to survive. There was beauty in it. Her love for her brother, her love for Han, her love for Chewie (though they could (still) get on each other's nerves). But more than just her compassion, she was strong. She was the one who held the rebellion together when Luke disappeared. She was the one who held her head high and soldiered on when her son left, and then her husband. She is the one STILL here after that son murdered her husband. Her own flesh killing her deepest ally, the man she loved for 34 years. Leia is still fighting, through all the victories and deep, deep losses.
There were worse things than to grow to be Leia, that wasn't the question. But the fact that her life unfolded this way because of how the galaxy manipulated the force, because of how people pushed and pulled and exploited it, that haunted Rey. This wasn't new, it was accepted, that there was dark and light and those two would always be at odds with each other. It was the status quo and no one thought they could change it, they were resigned to always fight in this never-ending conflict.
Kylo thought he could change it. Kylo wanted to break the cycle. And she had thrown it in his face. More than once.
Her thoughts betray her, wandering back to the throne room. Back to his hand, timid and waiting for her to take it. Back to the way he said, "Please", so desperate, so genuine, and the bloom of hope it had spurned deep in her belly.
He had wanted to change it all. He had wanted to try something else, to forget the Jedi and the Sith, and she had rejected him, to perpetrate it.
No, not perpetrate. She corrects herself. His idea was right, but his methods were wrong. The Resistance had saved so many in the years since then. None of that would have happened if she had taken his hand and allowed him to destroy them. She had made the right choice, the only choice.
But, nonetheless, she had made the choice that extended the war. The thought haunts her as she enters into meditation.