12/17/35

The Falcon landing on her plain is getting to be a familiar sight. Rey puts down her wrench, and smiles at it. She could probably finish this if she worked straight through, but…

Visitors are more fun than plumbing.

And she's got a feeling, quickly confirmed when the Falcon's ramp drops and three familiar faces meet her gaze, that she's going to especially enjoy this visit.

She runs up to meet them, and greets Chewie with a hug, and Finn with an even bigger, more enthusiastic one, it's been too long since she saw him last, and then hugs Rose, gently, just because she doesn't officially know doesn't mean she doesn't know. She certainly can't see any sign of Baby Tico under Rose's coveralls, but she can feel the glow of another life along for the ride.

"Where did you find them?" she asks Chewie. She leads them toward her settlement. Her own cottage is still in process, but she's got three of the basic ones set up and ready to go. "Are you staying?"

Found 'em round Tyccho IV. Chewie looks at them. Are you staying?

Finn's got his arm around Rose's shoulders, and they're both looking around. "This is starting to look a little bit like a town."

Rey laughs at that. "It looks a bit like a… prefab cottage showroom maybe."

Rose sniggers at that. "It looks like a new settlement. Which is what it is, so that makes sense. And staying… I think that depends on if you've got a place for us—"

Rey points to the cottages. "Pick one. Pick two." She points to the unopened boxes. Chewie brought her eight of them, and five are currently in production or put together. "I'm working on getting two of them cobbled together for me." She points to her "cottage." The outside is done, and watertight, but the inside is still rough, missing most of the internal walls, and unfurnished. "We can do it for you, too."

"And… if Chewie was serious about that job offer back when we first met up," Finn finishes, looking up at Chewie.

Chewie nods. An extra set of hands, or better yet, two, especially since one of those sets is a good mechanic would be more than useful. Chewie's a good mechanic, but he's also a Wookie, and some things are just easier for those little, tiny human hands to do.

"We've got stuff to talk about, don't we?" Rey says. "Come on, I've got… Well, not much, but you're welcome to share it," and she leads them to the cottage she's been storing her stuff in, and hopes they don't notice that there's no bed in there.

"I can make tea, and I've got some… well…" protein bars from the Supremacy that she can't dare to offer them. "fish. I have to go catch the fish first, but…"

"Tea's great," Rose says.

Rey turns to the cooker, and ladles water from her cistern into her pot. "I'm working on the plumbing. I've got the sink in my main cottage up, but the rest of this is just sort of haphazard. So… how'd you get here? Last I heard, you were teaching what was left of the PsyOps department how to infiltrate the First Order and you were just slightly tweaking design specs."

"And we were," Rose says, a smile forming on her lips, and Finn is grinning, wide and steady. "But… things changed or… well… I guess you can say I noticed a change and… We don't want to be apart anymore so…"

"We're having a BABY, Rey!" Finn almost shouts, so excited and happy and just bubbling over with it. He jumps up and spins his friend around. "I've been DYING to tell EVERYONE that!" He kisses his wife. "We're having a BABY!"

Chewie roars his congratulations as Finn hugs him, too.

Rey feels herself grinning and laughing with them.

"And we don't want to be lightyears apart, and Leia's fine with us going underground for a while, so…" Rose continues.

Finn looks to Chewie, "Do you still need someone to help out and watch your back?"

Chewie's affirmative yowl echoes through the tiny room.

"Good, because we need a job with each other."

"And a place to land when the baby comes, right?" Rey says.

"That's the hope," Rose replies. "I mean… We're not… Intruding, right? This isn't just a spot for Jedi, right?"

Rey shakes her head. "I don't know a lot about what this is going to be, not yet, but I do know this won't be a place for Jedi, period. W—I'm changing things. It's… about balance, and the Jedi don't balance. Not the way we need to be. So… Anyway, yes. Please, come. It'd be nice to have neighbors."

After tea, and catching the fish, (which Chewie takes over on the preparation of. He's a much better camping chef than the other three of them, and it's possible he knows that Rey doesn't really look like she knows what she's doing when it comes to cooking the fish. Not the way she should if it were a main part of her diet.) they start unloading the new goodies Chewie's brought for her.

Mostly furniture for her cottage. A bed and table and chairs. A cooker and cooler. Bedding and sheets and towels and all the things that Rey didn't really think about, but would certainly miss if they weren't there. Stupid little bits, like spoons and cups.

She's unpacking them and putting them in the cottage with a sense of wonder, really.

Her downed AT-AT had things she could grab and scavenge and repurpose, and she made do with what she had or could find, but this is… different. It feels like a treasure hunt, opening each box and finding places for things and…

"You look like it's HihLo Feast, and your birthday, and the New Year all at once," Rose says to her as Finn's inflating her mattress, and she's unpacking her sheets.

Rey doesn't exactly know what that means. And it looks like Finn doesn't really, either.

Rose has a smile, but it's a little sad, as she looks at the windows, and says, "Curtains. It'll be too bright otherwise." She takes one of the sheets, and starts cutting, and then says, "Holidays. HihLo… That was the day we'd honor our dead. Get together, tell stories of the people we loved, and have a big party. Before the First Order came… feast days were easier then. We were still poor but not barely scraping by. The hunters could take a day or two off from the mines and go find young, plum frathens, and we'd build pits and fill them with wood, burn it down to embers, and then put the frathens on spikes and turn them over the coals for hours. They'd be crispy and brown and succulent, smokey and delicious. We'd put uccas and omlents into the coals, let them roast slow. My grandmother would spend all day, for three days, cooking, and my mom and sister and I would help. And when it was ready… Everyone in our town would gather for the party. New Year's… We'd give each other little presents." She nods to Rey sitting in front of a box, pulling out towels and pillow cases, appreciating each one as she unwraps it. "That's probably what got me thinking of this. And New Year's was in the cold part of the year, so everyone would stay close to the hearth. There'd be a huge cauldron of soup going on the cooker, so thick with grains and meat it was practically a porridge and…" Rose's voice cracks. "Oh…" She blinks, hard, sniffing, putting the scissors and sheet down, sitting on Rey's mattress, and wipes her eyes. "Sorry, everything gets to me now."

Finn sits next to her rubbing her back gently. He and Rey share a look, neither of them grew up in a world with holidays.

"We could do that, here," Rey says. "Something to honor the people we've lost but not forgotten."

Rose sniffs again. "It was always a party. A celebration. The first HihLo to pass after you'd lost someone could be sad, but all the ones after that were meant to be fun."

"When was it?" Finn asks, and Rey can feel him understanding that Rose didn't get a HihLo for her sister, and that he's damn well going to do everything in his power to fix that.

"The shortest day of the year. We'd start the celebration when the sun went down and party until it came up again."

"It'll take a while to figure out when that is here, but we could do that," Rey says.

"We will do that," Finn adds.

What are you four conspiring about? Chewie asks, bringing another box in.

"I think little one is a tad young to be conspiring," Finn says, huge grin on his face at the fact that Chewie counted their child as one of them here, now.

"Holidays. Did you have any special celebrations on Kashyyyk?" Rose asks.

He sets the box down, and decides to "test out" the chair Rey's tucked into what will be the corner of her main room, once she gets the wall to divide it from her bedroom up. It's wider than any chair she's ever seen before, but not quite a sofa. It holds Chewie just fine, so it should have no problem with her and Kylo. A few. Most of them won't work here. Can't celebrate your home tree in a place with no trees. He smiles at Rose and Finn. Got one you might like. Might come in handy in eight or nine months. When our children were born we'd have a naming ceremony for them. Sort of a 'welcome to life' party. The child's parents were assumed to be tired and busy, so the rest of the town would put together a party for them, usually about a month or two after the child was born. And that's when they'd show the child off to everyone and tell everyone outside of their immediate family its name.

"Good food and drink and music?" Finn asks.

Absolutely. Presents, too. Nappies and bum salve at the bare minimum, and usually promises of lessons in whatever that person specialized in. Apprenticeship offers. Make sure the newest member of your forest had options for life outside of the nursery.

"We are definitely doing that!" Rey says.

A bit later, when it's just Rey and Chewie, she quietly says to him, "Next time you come, can you bring me more packaged food?"

Chewie glances at her, and she's suddenly very aware of the fact that she's gained a little weight. Not much, she stops eating when she's full, but some of the hollow and sharp edges from years of just, barely, not quite enough, are fading away.

I know he's not letting you go hungry.

"No! Of course not. But… I can't exactly offer you guys protein bars stamped with the First Order logo, can I?"

Protein bars? There's withering derision in Chewie's expression. Tell me he's doing better by you than that. If he's not, I'm going to shoot him in the other side.

Rey laughs at that. She knows enough about Wookie culture to know that not feeding your mate is a gross dereliction of husbandly duties, and if said husband doesn't provide, his wife has the right to not just divorce him, but to shave his head, too. She's never much contemplated what a bald Wookie looks like, but Chewie was so appalled at the idea that it's got to be horrible. (She also hasn't much contemplated if this means Chewie's divorced. As best she knows, he hasn't seen his wife in decades.)

"That's just what I have here. Breakfast and dinner is on his ship, and yes, it's real food."

Chewie nods, slowly. Apparently, satisfied that Kylo's doing at least the bare minimum job he's supposed to do. Good. What do you want?

"I don't know. What's… appropriate to feed people who just happen to stop by?"

I'll get more of what I keep in the Falcon for you.

"Thanks."

By the time they've got everything into her cottage, and put together, it's getting late, and it's hot.

And the lake is cold.

"I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm getting a swim!" Finn says.

"It's going to be cold!" Rey calls out.

"That's the point!" he says back, stripping out of his shirt and trousers.

"Really cold!" Rey adds, smirking, enjoying how she knows this is going to go.

"How cold?" Rose asks.

Chewie starts to laugh.

"I'd take my boots off and—" And that gets cut off as a naked Finn goes streaking across the stone beach, diving into the water, and screams as soon as he hits it.

"Oh FUCK it's COLD!" he yells, more or less bouncing out of the water a bare second after he hits it.

"put a toe in," Rey finishes. Both she and Rose start to laugh as Finn comes tearing back out of the water to rub himself down as fast as he can. Chewie's all but rolling around in the grass, he's laughing so hard at this.

"Oh… it's liquid ice." He's shivering. "How can water be that cold on a day this hot?"

Rey shrugs. "All I know is I don't swim in it."

Finn turns his back on them as he pulls his shorts on, and Rey sees the scar down his back, long, jagged. Faded to a dull pink, but not the white of an old scar, not yet. Though, it occurs to her that she's never seen an old scar on a dark-skinned person before, and she doesn't know if it'll go white or brown or… whatever.

Unlike the scars she left on Kylo with her lightsaber, Finn's scar isn't a thin line. She wonders if that's because of his jagged blade, or the different medical services available.

Or… the scar bisects is spine. Or it's likely they had significantly more important parts of Finn to fix than his skin, so his skin got a lot less attention than his spine.

She reaches a hand toward his back, and then says, "Can I try something?"

He looks over his shoulder, and Rose who's been watching the way Rey's looking at Finn says, "What sort of something."

"Healing is supposed to be a Force skill. I probably can't make it go away, but… maybe I can make it better?"

"How does it work?" Finn asks.

"Uh…" Rey rubs her lips together. "I can… feel… your energy. Everyone sort of flows, and in places that aren't healed right, the flow gets sluggish or tangled and… maybe I can untangle it some?"

"You don't sound very certain," Rose says.

"I've… only read about it," Rey can see the level of interest Chewie's got in this, likely thinking of another scarred man he knows who has access to Rey. "And… I think it only works if the person you're working on wants it to. But… maybe… I mean, if you don't want to, I completely understand. I wouldn't be volunteering to hand my body over to someone who's never actually done anything like this before, so…"

"Sure. Just, stop if I say stop, okay?" Finn replies.

"Okay." She sits down and pats the grass in front of her, and Finn sits in front of her, back to her.

She trails a finger down the scar. "That doesn't hurt, does it?"

"No. I've got no feeling there, at all. The scar, and a lot of what's under it, is numb. And when it's not numb, it's itchy, but the kind you can't scratch. Deep inside itchy."

Rose has come to sit next to Rey, watching this with interest.

Rey lays her palm in the center of Finn's back, and just feels it. Then she puts Rose's hand on top of hers, and Rose gasps a little at it.

"Oh… That's…" A wide grins spreads across her face. She's hooking into what Rey's feeling, going along through the flows and whorls and… "That's amazing. It's all blue and glow-y and…" She kisses Finn's shoulder. "So pretty, love, so pretty."

Rey keeps feeling, and finds the slow, dark, thick and sluggish spots.

"It's like an electric current trying to get through a bad conductor. Like it's been zipping through hasmian smelt and suddenly finds itself in a cheap copper compound. It's all diffuse."

Rey has no idea if that's right or not, but she doesn't see any reason to argue with it. She's also not entirely sure what to do with it. It's not tangled, just slow.

"If you were a ship, or a machine, I'd know how to fix this just by holding it. I can feel the problem, but… I don't know what to do with it." She lifts her hand off of Finn's back. He turns to look at her. "Everything is going where it's supposed to go, it's just slow. If it were knotted up or tangled… I'd be able to get it moving right."

"I guess it was worth a try," Finn says, reaching for his shirt, and then shaking his head. It really is too damn hot for it, and no one here cares if he's naked or not.

Looks like it was patched up right. You can't fix it because there's nothing to fix, Chewie adds. It just needs time.

They're eating yet another meal of tea, and fish, seasoned and perked up with some freeze dried supplies that Chewie had in the Falcon. The blue sun has set, the green one is hovering over the horizon, and they'll break up for the night soon, but right now, sitting on the grass near the lake, a small fire keeping the bugs away, it's really pleasant.

Rey wishes that Kylo could be here for this. Actually, she doesn't. Because she knows how that would work. Chewie's made it clear he won't hurt Kylo, but he also won't voluntarily be anywhere near him, so he'd stalk off to the Falcon. Finn would have his blaster in hand and firing before he could think. Rose would be up, back to back with him, fighting, too. Kylo would stop the bolts and have his saber out and… These days she's sure Kylo wouldn't start a fight with her friends, but she's not at all certain he wouldn't end one.

So, she doesn't wish Kylo were here. That's a disaster.

She wishes for a time when he could be here, peacefully.

And her heart aches at that, because she doesn't feel it coming anytime soon. He can talk about killing the past all he likes. He can change the present. But that doesn't mean everyone else's past is going anywhere anytime soon.

And thinking of that makes something else come to mind… She should, probably, because she's technically part of it, ask how the Resistance is resisting, or something like that.

She and Chewie don't talk about it. He knows who she sleeps with and understands that she's significantly happier not knowing because she doesn't feel like she has to tell anyone anything about what's going on. But…

"How's Poe doing?" that seems like a safe way to nudge the topic.

Finn rolls his eyes and shakes his head. "Bored. So bored. He's technically Admiral Poe now, but he thinks that's worthless. 'Can't be an Admiral without a fleet.'"

"He's not wrong," Rose replies. "And there's no fleet. They're up to…"

"Four ships. Three fighters. One cruiser. He tells me he's on the verge of sweet talking a baronet in Canto Bight out of enough credits to buy another fighter."

"Didn't Leia get a pile of money out of the Ygrines?" Rey was there for that, so…

"Yes, but…" Rose says.

Chewie adds the rest. When your force is small, you only buy the things you need. She doesn't know what the next attack is, so she's not buying anything until she knows what she needs for it. Mostly she's paying off her debts, making sure that when the time comes, people will be willing to loan her money again.

Finn nods. "PsyOps is talking about putting people into the First Order. He's—" She hears it, knowing that Kylo and the First Order are synonyms in Finn's mind. "got those recruiting stations, so fake a few slaves, send them in, and then sabotage from there. That just needs people, not ships."

"You don't like that plan," Rey can feel how disgusted the idea makes him.

"I don't. Unless he's completely revamped the training process that's just…" he shakes his head. "I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. I wouldn't make Ren go through First Order training. I wouldn't make Phasma go through First Order training. There's no one in the universe I hate that much."

"The PsyOps guys are fairly sure that Finn's a one of a kind." Rose says. Proud of her man, dismaying of this plan. "Most people aren't that stubborn, and unless they can find the right people, and even with them, putting them through First Order training is likely to just make more First Order soldiers."

"Leia likes your plans," Finn says to Rose. "She's been moving through the First Order suppliers, just, slightly tweaking the alloy mixes of a few of the components."

Rose grins. "Those Citykillers he's building." She laughs. "They'll make big explosions all right, just not where he wants them. It's amazing, just up the amount of carbon in a mix by a few milligrams per kilo and suddenly… boom! Too much heat and the metal shatters. I break in, find the specs, and then just barely change the numbers. Usually just find the lowest 3 on a decimal and shift it to a 6. That way if someone is really checking the numbers they'll think it's a typo. But once someone fires one of those puppies…" She smiles, imaging the destruction that will happen when the superheated laser of a Citykiller come in contact with the wrong alloy.

Rey grins, too, but it's only on her face. She's feeling a gnawing sensation inside, not sure what to do with this. "How's Leia?" she asks, trying to get away from sabotaged Citykillers.

Rose and Finn both start off on how amazing Leia is, and how she's keeping everything together, and how she's working hard and planning away and—

Tired. Chewie cuts them off. He looks at the other two who are, honestly, more than a bit star struck by Leia. She's tired. Too much job, not enough money or people, no idea what to do next, and Ren's not making it easy for her because he's not attacking anything so her he nods to Rose sabotages aren't doing anything.

Both Finn and Rose look horrified at that. "She's doing the best she possibly can!" Rose says, indignant.

Yes, she is. It's not enough.

"Chewie!" Finn is horrified.

Chewie smirks at him. She's Han's mate, so I'll help out and fly her around to the end of time if necessary, but that doesn't mean I've got to pretend she's on the verge of winning anything or that the Resistance is in any sort of decent shape. I am not required to lie about the nature of reality for her. That was never part of the deal.

He looks to Rey, and she understands what he's saying to her.

Ren's doing okay.

Finn's so horrified by that he can't speak.

He's not worth resisting right now, and I think that's a lot of why she doesn't know what to do. It'd be easy if she could sweep in and sabotage an attack on a civilian population, or shut down a raid to steal children for the First Order, or destroy a weapon's test before he fired it, but… He's not doing anything like that, so she doesn't have anything to do to him.

Rey doesn't know if Chewie can feel her thoughts. But she tries message received. As long as Kylo plays by 'the rules' he's not going to have any active trouble from the Resistance. At least, not trouble from his mother, not when she's got barely two ships to rub together.

"Chewie again?" Kylo asks when she shifts through to his rooms, quite a bit later than usual.

She nods, watching him. He's already in is bed, reading. His tunic's hung up, but he's still in his black shirt and trousers. Bare feet, though. And he hasn't pulled his hair out of the knot he's been wearing it in recently. She knows her balance spiral is around his throat today, though tucked under his shirt, she can only catch a bit of reflection on it when he shifts in the light.

"Trouble?" he can feel her thinking, hating what she knows, and that she's got to do something with it.

She slowly closes her eyes, and then opens them, looking at him, taking the leap of faith. She already trusts him with her life, now she's trusting him with everyone else's. Trusting that if he's going to use his weapons it'll be for a good reason. He can feel her do it, and for a moment looks really pleased, if a little concerned, and then she says, "Your next spot check. I don't know where exactly the problem is, but… The alloys on your Citykillers are off. They won't fire properly now, and… You can't make a big deal about knowing they don't fire properly. Fix it, but silently."

He realizes what she's telling him, and how she must know, and nods, slowly. "I can do that."

"Thank you."

"I take it you didn't just have Chewie visit, then?"

She sits on the side of the bed. "Rose and Finn, too, with good news," she thinks about it, trying to remember if she already told him this as she takes off her boots before kneeling a little in front of him. She's known since the wedding, but… "I haven't told you she's pregnant, yet, have I?"

"No, and yet?" he puts his datapad down, wrapping an arm around her, kissing her forehead.

"I could feel it at their wedding. Tiny little life glowing away." She smiles at that. "They're ecstatic."

She watches Kylo feeling that, not entirely sure what's going through his head, which is odd, because she usually has a very good read on him, and then comes to the conclusion that he likely also doesn't know what's going through his head right now.

Eventually he comes up with, "Congratulations?"

Rey laughs a little, snuggling up close to him. "I'm going to be Aunt Rey."

"When?"

She thinks about it. "Seven or so months, I think."

"Are they… staying?"

"Eventually. They're flying with Chewie now, and… Oh."

He nods slowly. Part of why he didn't know what was going on in his mind is rapidly clearing for him. If she's suddenly got Finn and Rose living next door, will he still be able to visit? Will it still be a space for them? He's been aware of the idea that new students would be moving in, but both of them had been thinking of children who… actually… well…

Fuck. I'm the most recognizable man in the galaxy.

"You're thinking loudly," she says, voice gentle, hoping maybe he'd talk about what he's thinking.

"I remember you saying that you were fairly sure Chewie wouldn't kill me on sight."

"He won't." She shakes her head a little. "He thinks you're my Han, which is… I don't know, probably more than I needed to know about how he feels about your Dad, but…"

Kylo thinks about that for a good ten seconds before deciding that he is neither physically or mentally capable of even attempting to untangle the emotional complexities of that sentence, and goes back to Finn and Rose, who he thinks he can parse.

"I don't remember you ever getting close to suggesting that Finn or Rose would have any reservations about that."

She inclines her head a little, not exactly wanting to say that he's dead right about that, but not going to lie, either. "They might decide that trying to capture you is a better plan. Hand you over to-"

"My mother." He nods. His voice is achingly dry as he says, "My opinion of being drugged into a truth spewing mass, tortured, and then executed for war crimes hasn't improved since we last talked about this."

She strokes his hand. "That's not happening." She's thinking that right now Leia's keeping things at detente, but… if she had Kylo… Even if she wanted to…

But Kylo's moving on from there, not following her thoughts because he's deep in his. "Only because I can literally teleport my body away from a fight with them. And you can, too."

"Me?" She's not understanding why she'd need to port away.

"You think they wouldn't try a move against you if they thought it would bring me out of hiding?"

"Finn and Rose? Kylo," she shakes her head, "just… No. That's not how the game is played. Not on this side."

He rolls his eyes, expression sharp. "Spoken like someone who's never actually seen them play the game. A hopeless, dangerous, near-impossible, suicide mission in which an inordinately stupid number of the Rebellion and then Resistance troops get killed to take out one big target is the only play in their book. That's how they took down both Death Stars, and Starkiller, and the Fulminatrix, and got the plans for both Death Stars, and… I spent most of my childhood hearing stories about how my parents and their friends died or almost died in daring attacks against some big target. Rey, I'm the biggest target left in the game, and yes, they prefer volunteers for the hopeless, dangerous, near-impossible, suicide mission, but to take someone like me out they may decide to not be too picky about volunteers." Left unspoken is how if they go against her, he's going to personally kill every single member of the Resistance, making sure that an attempt on her is the biggest, stupidest, highest costing mistake they ever make. She can feel his dark flaring, both in protection of her, and wanting that sort of fight. Him against everything else in the service of protecting her. His skin, his Force, his mind are all singing at the idea of it.

Rey licks her lips, and makes the gamble. She's betting on Kylo to be good, now she's laying those same odds on her friends. It's based on nothing but feelings, hope, and the memory of a few moments on a beach when two people she adored knelt in front of each other and promised to build a life, together, for the rest of their days.

She takes his hand in hers, laying her light against his dark. I'm here. I'm safe. His fight doesn't exactly retreat at that, but it does calm, some.

"I didn't see it. I was in the Falcon, with Chewie drawing your fighters away. And I don't know if you saw it, because you were focused on running the attack, but… When you brought the battering ram canon in on Crait, Poe, and Finn, and Rose, and a half dozen other members of the Resistance, anyone who had any chance of keeping one of the little fliers they had going in a fairly straight line, all lined up to go on a big, stupid, let's get us all killed on the off chance one of us can take out the big target run against the battering ram canon."

"Your men shot down most of them, and Poe, having finally learned that the big, stupid, let's all get killed to take down a massive target style of attack likely wasn't a good plan, called off the attack. Do you remember that?"

He blinks, thinking back, but… "Not really. I'd given the order to get the little fighters out of the way, and was paying attention to the Falcon. I could feel you up there, and half of me wanted to see everything burn, all of it, all of us, all at once, let it all die in fire, and half was begging you to fly fast and hard and get away."

"Did you hate me then?"

"Very much."

She nods. She felt it then, too. "It was killing me when you didn't stop the attack. You killed Snoke, and I just…" She swallows at the memory of her hope freezing, withering, cracking, breaking with her heart. "And then it all fell apart."

"Because you wanted Ben." There's a lot of heat in that word, a lot of disgust, and shame, and a history of not ever being what people wanted him to be, of never being good enough as he was, as Kylo. "Wanted a wayward Jedi you could take home to Luke. Wanted him to suddenly just pop up and end the attack and…" The aching disappointment, both of theirs is still raw, and that's not a moment either of them want to spend to long thinking about. Kylo takes them away from that moment. "Anyway… you were saying…"

"Finn was the lead fighter. He was the one with the good straight shot, right at the battering ram canon, and he had it. Fly right into the beam, ram the ram, and blow it up." She smacks her fist into her palm. "And he was going to do it, resigned, ready, and then Rose crossed the beam and knocked him out of the way, crashed both of them."

Kylo blinks. He snorts a quick laugh. "That's the most sensible thing I think I've ever heard of a member of the Resistance doing. Flying into the ram would have burnt Finn to ash long before he could have hit the condensing crystal."

Rey smiles a little at that. "She told him that they weren't going to win by killing the things they hate, but by saving the things they loved." She strokes his hand again. "We're building. Homes, and lives, and loves. And we're going to win, all of it, the future, our families, your Order, all of it, we're getting it by dedicating ourselves to cherishing and enriching what we love."

He lays his hand on her thigh, and kisses the top of her head, then pulls back to look her in the eye. "And would you have me there, in the open, your lover, for all to see."

She winces, hating what she's going to say, but saying it anyway, because she knows her balance is tenuous, and Kylo Ren, Supreme Leader of the First Order will tip it out of alignment. "Not yet. Three years. Let them see that you're not—"

"Me?" his voice is sharp, and she's not sure how much of the cut is directed at her or at himself.

"Snoke. Let me have enough time, so when I say, 'he's not The First Order' they'll believe it."

"They'll never believe it. Some things cannot be forgiven."

She strokes his face. "Am I sitting here next to you?"

He rests his forehead against hers, eyes closing, like he can't stand to look at her right now. She can feel his anger, both at him, for being Kylo Ren, and at her and her friends. She touches it with her calm, flooding him with how much she wants and values him, and for a moment they both breathe. And in another moment, she feels him relax and believe her feelings. This is a pause, not a rejection.

She gently squeezes the back of his neck, and says, "We ripped each other's hearts out and we're here now. Give me time, Kylo. Time to let anger cool and memories fade. And yes, there will be a day when I kiss you in front of everyone in the galaxy who ever mattered to me. There will be a day when you are in my home, in my town, in my life and everyone will know." She rests her hand on his chest. "And there will be a day when it will be our home, our town, and our life."

He inhales, hard, shaky, eyes hot and intense on her, and then nods, slowly, before saying, voice tight, "Three years."

"Three years."