It takes Rey a week more to feel strong enough to start training again. During the day, the rear cargo hold of the Falcon was hers, cleared from all of the sleeping bags that littered it to hold the Resistance during the night. They had more room now, having spent the last two years collecting and rebuilding. They even had a freighter, and a new fleet of X-Wings. Well, a used fleet of X-Wings, but new to them. Still, there wasn't enough room for everyone, for all the new recruits who were showing up every day, none of which Leia turned away.
Leia, especially, is skeptical of her training again so soon, but a lifetime of being a strong willed person has taught her that it is futile to try to change the minds of the strong willed, so she saves her energy on this one.
Poe and Rose tell her to rest more, with Poe basically threatening to withhold BB-8, a necessary component in her training, if she didn't just get back in bed. His threats are ultimately empty, but Rey weirdly appreciates how deeply concerned he is, believing his strong fervor is enough to make up for the fact that no one cared even a fraction of that amount about her for the first 18 years of her life.
But Finn doesn't bother, knowing her well enough to know she won't listen. More selfishly, though, he doesn't try to sway her away because he secretly misses the time they spend together during her training.
Finn is the best close range combat fighter they have in the fleet. A life of Phasma's tutelage had made sure of that. It made sense that they would train together. Rey trusted him more than anyone else in the galaxy, and he had hand-to-hand skills that dwarfed anyone else's on the Falcon. Yes, they were on a ship with career military personnel, but Finn's whole life had been about becoming the ultimate weapon.
When she walks into the training room for the first time after her duel with Kylo, Finn and BB-8 are already waiting for her. It has only been three weeks, but it feels like an eternity. BB-8 wheels past Finn when he sees Rey and she bends down, not totally without pain, to adjust his antenna, completing their not-so-secret greeting.
Finn laughs at the excited droid, "I guess we all know who he loves most."
"Was there really ever a question?" Rey smiles as she bends back up, focusing on not grabbing her side as it burns with her movement.
"Technically I have saved his metal butt from imminent death like three more times than you, but that's cool, I mean, I get it." BB-8 mechanically chuckles before gliding back and brushing himself against Finn's legs, "No, please, I don't need your pity. I'm just the consolation prize."
BB-8 beeps sadly.
Finn laughs before bending down and patting BB's domed head, "I'm just playing buddy." He looks up at Rey from his kneeling position, "You ready?"
"As ever," Rey smiles and pulls her quarterstaff from her back.
"Ah, we're going old school, I like it" Finn responds as BB-8 dances around them. Quarterstaff training is BB's favorite because it means he gets to roll around and act like foreign obstacles, instead of just holo-project like he does when she trains with her saber.
Finn walks to the wall and pulls his own down. They both lean into their positions.
"Ready?" Rey poses.
"Set" Finn affirms.
"GO" all three of them, even BB-8 in his own way, yelp, before the room explodes in movement once again.
They settle back into their routines. Finn is careful with Rey, but not too careful that she resents it. Rey joins Rose back in their shared bunk. Rose is initially scared to cuddle together as they had before Rey's injury, fearing she would hurt Rey, so Rey takes to crawling into Rose's bunk, instead of the vice-versa of how it usually went. Eventually, that returns to normal, too.
Poe and Rey resume their squabbles in the cockpit of the Falcon, but the time Poe spends there is more and more sparse with each passing day. Rey and Chewie find themselves alone in the cockpit most days, as Poe starts to take over many of Leia's tasks as she grows weaker. Honestly, Rey likes Chewie's style a bit more than Poe's, and is grateful he is a Wookie of few words. She feels more at ease around Chewie, and even takes to laying her head against his shoulder during especially long shifts and napping, something she would have never tried with Poe, his sense of duty too strong to allow any semblance of napping from his co-pilot. She and Chewie have an understanding, especially after what he did to save her from Ren. She was indebted to him for life.
A week passes before Leia is unable to hide her condition from the crew. Rey had known for weeks, and Poe for a little less, but the rest of them were blissfully unaware of their General's rapid deterioration.
In the course of four weeks, Rey and Leia's positions switch entirely, with Rey coming to sit on Leia's bed during the night as she convalesces. Except it wasn't truly a convalescence, because Leia was not getting better, would never get better. Rey shutters at the thought.
Rey knows she should be asking Leia about every possible thing. About her past, about the force, about what history she knows. About Ren. But she can't will herself the courage to ask. Somehow, asking these big questions of Leia would make it all real, would solidify, for both of them, that Rey didn't think Leia would pull through. So they talk about the Jedi texts and about the others. They riff and tease lovingly on Poe and Chewie. They laugh at how nervous Threepio becomes seeing Leia in the infirmary bed (even though secretly Rey empathizes heavily with his feelings). They think up names for Rose and Finn's future kids. Anything to avoid talking about what really matters.
Until one night, Rey is talking about something particularly interesting she found in the Jedi texts about healing, when Leia puts her hand over Rey's.
"Rey, you can stop," Leia's voice comes out in a tone Rey has never heard from her before, it is almost sweet.
"What do you mean?" Rey closes the book and looks deeply at Leia.
"You're not going to find anything in those books that will save me. Or him."
"You don't know that."
"I do." Rey's face falls into a frown at Leia's certainty, "Listen to me, before you came back from the Supremacy, I knew my son was gone. I knew I needed to cut off all hope from him to do what needed to be done. But after you came back, after you told me what he had done, what he had said to you, all that hope came rushing back."
Rey squeezes her hand a little more tightly.
"Now I think that hope was wrong. It led me to put you in harm's way when I wasn't one hundred percent sure. I should have never risked you like that. I was blinded by my hope, and it made me put someone I love very dearly in peril. I am so sorry for that, Rey."
"I wanted it too, Leia. I knew the risks and I went. It's not your fault. He is not your fault."
"Ah, that's where you're wrong. He is my fault. He is all mine. He insured that by killing Han. Everything that is in Kylo Ren is there because I put it there, or wasn't paying enough attention when someone else did."
"You can't do that to yourself…"
"I am done hoping I will see his face walk through the door every time it opens, Rey. I am done believing he will come back to me and weep in my arms so I can hold him just one more time. I'm done scanning comms just to see if I can hear his voice again. I can't do this anymore."
"You have to keep fighting," Rey words rasp out, her throat burning from trying to hold back tears.
"My sweet girl," Leia reaches up and tucks Rey's hair behind her ear before using her thumb to dry her first falling tear, "I've been fighting my whole life. It's time for me to join Han and my brother. It's time for peace."
"Please," Rey's sobs come out messy and desperate. Leia keeps holding her face, allowing Rey to lean into her grasp.
"Shhh…" They sit like that until Rey calms herself.
Rey can't look into Leia's eyes anymore. They're too much. Too much Leia, too much Kylo, too much.
"Go get Poe and Chewie for me, please" Leia withdraws her grasp from Rey's face and instantly Rey misses it.
Rey obeys, wanting to stay forever, but also not feeling strong enough to stay another second. Before she leaves Leia calls out, "And the droids, too." Rey doesn't need to question which droids.
She gathers them all and stands outside the door in silence with Chewie, R2, and C-3PO, as Poe walks in. When he walks out minutes later, his face is more pale than Rey has ever seen, and they hug for a long time.
R2 and C-3PO are next, they stay only a little while, but when they come out both are totally silent. Rey didn't think they were programmed to be that quiet, based on her previous interactions with them, but here they were.
Chewie is last, and the loud groans and growls that make their way from the room as he and Leia talk cause her tears to start again. Poe reaches his hand out and grabs her knee when he notices, letting her know she's not alone. She smiles weakly back at him before placing her hand over his, sending the same message back to him.
Chewie comes out and ushers them all into the room. Leia looks smaller than she did even 30 minutes ago when Rey last saw her.
Leia smiles weakly at them all, before holding out her hands for Rey and Chewie to take. Poe kneels down close to Chewie, while Threepio and R2 gather close in with Rey.
"I want you all to know how much I love you" Leia's voice feels small and far away, even though Rey is only inches from her. "May the force be with you, until we meet again."
Chewie lets out a soul shattering roar the second Leia slips away. Rey can feel the exact moment Leia reunites with the force, and her heart weeps and triumphs simultaneously.
In that moment she feels something else in the force, too. From far away, she feels a man in black stumble. Grief is everywhere and she can't tell whose it is.
They bury her a week later, and it takes Rey a day or two past Leia's funeral to be able to face the idea of meditation again. She knows it will help her, but she is also so afraid of what she may see there.
She enters into the force plane, her tears drying and evaporating off her cheeks. Briefly, a thought that she might feel Leia here makes her stomach turn in hope. Sometimes she felt others in this plane, others besides him . In life, Leia's whispers were there, guiding her through her coma, watching her through her training. All others felt different than Kylo, though. Kylo was a mass in the field, and all others were just spectres, floating past.
In her first attempts in this place she would try to listen to all of them, like she had in Maz Kanata's cellar when the saber called to her. They would flood her soul and make her nauseous. But now she had learned to accept their deluge freely, to wade through the stream with them, not against them. Some of the ghosts she would feel were just that, ghosts. Long gone force users, both Sith and Jedi, dark and light.
Once, in a particularly wrought period of her training, where nothing was making sense and she just wanted to give up, she thought she heard Luke's faint, faint voice whisper from miles and inches away at the same time say, "Keep going, kid."
Now, she looks here for some absolution of her pain. If she had just controlled her emotions, if she had just focused more, if the blade had never hit her, Leia's last link to her son would never have been broken. Leia's heart might not have been broken. Leia might still be here.
The plane is static when she steadies herself enough to accept the force. She is alone. She allows the tendrils of the force to wash her of emotion.
A stuttered breath from behind her whips her around, but her focus and center do not break. In the distance, a crumpled black figure decomposes into a mess of a man. It is as if she is looking over the top of a fire at him, but no flame separates them. The heat shimmer between their two bodies makes him appear waving, faltering in and out of the force.
She can feel his despondency, but it is different. He doesn't become an inexplicable mass. His signature is almost weightless as it flickers.
Compassion gets the best of her and she does something she has not done willingly in the force since Ahch-To: she begins to walk towards him. She had been forced to him in this design before, his weight sucking her in, but she had never done so of her own accord.
It takes longer than she expects to reach him. She wants to stop, to turn away, his gloom rising like bile in her, but she never does.
When the stuttering dark haze lays directly in front of her, she bends her knees to crouch near him. Her hand rises up, but she stills before she touches him.
She grazes his cloaked back with the lightest of touches and shuts her eyes. When she reopens them, she is no longer in the force.
But she is not back on the Falcon either.
A huge, expansive room engulfs her. Her pupils shift with the light change, struggling to expand to take in the dim glow. She shoots up as the fuzzy mass in front of her becomes a crisp Kylo Ren. He is almost in a prayer, his knees tucked under his body, his forehead touching the floor. But this isn't a prayer. He doesn't notice her. Rey slowly backs away from him. All her cleansed emotions rush back and dizzy her.
This was a mistake. This was a mistake. I want to go back.
She continues her trajectory backwards until she thuds, hard, into a wall behind her.
At the sound, Kylo's face flashes towards her, white against the darkness of everything around him. It is shining. She can't tell if it is just a trick her mind is playing or if his face is actually wet from tears. His expression shifts too quickly for her to notice any one emotion. He stares at her now with something between a snarl and disbelief.
She slides down the wall until she sitting flush against it, cradling her knees to her body.
Kylo turns his face away from her to stare at the wall behind him.
"Why are you here?" he asks into the wall, still not looking back at her.
"I told you that you weren't alone once. I meant it." The words leave her mouth on autopilot. They sting the air and she wishes she could shove them back in.
He tries a menacing scoff, but it comes out sounding sad and exhausted.
"Is that why you left the Supremacy? Is that why you walled up our bond? Is that why you have fought me every chance you've had? To make me feel less alone?"
He turns and looks directly at her as he poses the last question.
Her face reddens and his eyes become too much, she exhales as she shuts her eyes, a tear streaming down her cheek as she does.
"And now what? Your beloved General is dead and you think what? I needed you? I wanted you?"
She stops breathing. She was so fucking stupid. She starts to claw back at the force plane, but she finds it inaccessible. Her emotions are too volatile now to accept meditation.
He feels her like a wild animal trying to flee from him and the familiar panic of losing her stirs in his gut.
"Wait." It is small when it escapes him.
She starts breathing again, and opens her eyes to meet his.
She feels him stall. Neither of them know what to say to one another after all this, after these last years, these hits and misses. They sit in silence for minutes, and their breathing synchronizes.
Finally, he opens his mouth to ask her something, but thinks better of it, after the way his last questions made her skittish.
She catches it in his thoughts anyway.
"Its healed completely. You missed most of my internal organs."
"Most?"
"Yes, most." She repeats, not wanting to give him the detailed medical records, or talk about her womb with him.
He catches it in her thoughts anyway.
"Oh." It comes out as a wince. Kylo's eyes droop and Rey knows that he heard which organ it was.
They both exhale in unison. An awkward silence descends on them, full of the timelines of possible futures lost in this war. He shifts so his full body is open to her.
She is the one to break the silence, shrugging.
"It's not a great loss. It is not like that was ever an option for me. Not with this war that will never end." She can't look at him when she says this. Instead, she angles her chin up and focuses her now adjusted eyes to the ceiling above, draped in black and red cloth.
He looks at her neck as it trembles, giving way to the blood pumping aggressively behind it, betraying her external calm facade.
He doesn't know why he asks, but something inside him urges it out of him. It may be his only time, ever, to talk to her like this, to be this open, so he risks it.
"What about her?" Rey's head snaps back to watch Kylo as he questions. "She didn't make you believe it could be an option?"
"Her?" Rey asks, confused, her head tilting to the left and her eyes narrowing, scrutinizing.
Ren grows angry at her insolence in the face of his vulnerability, but clarifies through clenched teeth anyway, "The child. In the forest where we last fought."
Kylo could see Rey's whole body seize. Every muscle tightened at the mention of that vision. Rey's eyes widen, opening up her whole face. Her face is not full of incredulity, though, as Kylo expected. Instead, she looks fully bewildered.
"Her?" Rey repeats again, her genuine confusion unmistakeable through the bond. She really has no idea what Kylo is talking about.
It was Kylo's turn to seize. Rey hadn't seen her, the little girl in the forest. In the weeks since, Kylo had thought so much about that girl with his eyes and her everything, the things that they shared in that one tiny vessel. But their visions had done this before. Shown them two drastically different things. How could she not have seen her? What had she seen? What future did the force present to Rey? She hadn't seen the child?
"No" Rey replies to his thoughts.
Kylo's heart drops.
"No, I mean, it was a boy that I saw."