Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The fugitive sits in the dunes, his skin burned and his dark hair wrapped under a light scrap of linen he had picked up three years ago on Er’Kit. It keeps the brutal sun from adding heat to the top of his head.

His eyes are trained on the ship. He knows it well, though it is covered in tarps, presumably to protect it from the sand—a Corellian freighter shaped almost like a crescent moon, if that crescent moon were drawn by a child who had only heard the description of one. Although he is sure that there are many ships in the galaxy of this exact model, he does not doubt that this is that ship.

Trust your feelings.

He stopped doing that years ago.

He sits, and sits, and sits. It’s what he’s good at these days, sitting.

Once, he had thought himself made to be a fighter. As a boy, he’d dreamed of being a pilot, and streaking his way through the stars.

Now, he just sits and watches and wonders. He would breathe deeply if he could, but the air is too hot for that. It dries his lips and lungs, and he wishes he hadn’t drunk through his canteen already.

It provides as good an excuse as any to make his way towards the outpost.

He stands, stretching, sand cascading from parts of him he hadn’t realized it had gotten into. He hates the sand. Luke Skywalker grew up in a desert. Ben Kenobi lived like this for as many years. But he shouldn’t think those names. If he does, the nightmares will come back.

Though if they come back, it’ll give him an excuse to leave this waste pit of a planet.

The Republic was born the day that Jakku fell.

What a pile of junk.

As he walks towards the outpost, he flips a coin with himself. If he has a nightmare tonight, he will steal the Falcon and fly out of here. How he will fly the thing without a co-pilot he doesn’t yet know but he will make it work. If there’s one thing he’s good at, it’s surviving against all odds.

Or maybe this time he’ll go out in a blaze of glory. That’d be fitting in the Falcon.

He looks up at the skies as if expecting the clouds to form a face, a godly figure to smite him with. Heads I win, tails you lose, he dares the stars.

Unsurprisingly, he gets no response.

There’s a slight gust of wind, though, cooling against his sweaty skin and he continues out of the dunes and towards the Outpost.

-

He should have known better than to think the name Luke Skywalker by now. It has been six years since that night, but even before then, whenever he thought too much about his uncle, the nightmares would come.

They were roiling nightmares—visions of the future, he feared. Ones where he was angry, a monster in a mask, where he killed without batting an eye and where he was feared. He woke in a cold sweat after those ones, staring up at the ceiling of the room that had become his when his mother sent him away. No wonder they didn’t want me, he thought to himself. They must have sensed what I might become. Those days were followed by brooding, sullenness, hating his mother for loving him enough to send him away, but not enough to spend time with him.

The roiling nightmares were far less dangerous than the silken ones, though. Sweeter nightmares, an almost paternal voice that filled his mind and told him he could be great, the heir to power, the only one in the galaxy who could possibly be as mighty as the greatest Jedi masters, the greatest Sith lords. Mightier, even, with the right training. He woke from those wanting it to be true.

Perhaps, if his uncle had seen the silken dreams rather than the roiling ones…

But he should know better than to think about his uncle. That was twice now in two days, and he knows he will nightmare again tonight if he doesn’t leave Jakku and never come back. I want to see them all, dada, he had told his father during the happy years before memories were his. He only knows he said this because his father had told him so when he’d dropped him off—in the Falcon—with his uncle. You said you wanted to see them all. This is as good a way as any, kid.

It is a silken dream this time, the sensation of strong, supportive fingers curling around his brain. They should have told you, says the voice, more familiar to him now than even his own. That your power comes not from Skywalker but from Vader. But then again, they never loved you enough. You deserve better parents than that, ones who love you rather than fear you, ones who would give all the time and love in the world to be with you. Are they even searching for you now?

I am.

Let me find you. Let me find you. Let me find you. Let me—

Ben wakes and the air is too hot, and the sky is too bright—but he feels cold and dark.

He is staring at a tent ceiling above him, a bed rented for the night with credits he’d stolen on Onderon and which should have been left alone because he should have let the desert parch him. Then the nightmares would be over and the scavengers who live on this planet could pick his bones and pockets dry and whatever it is that he has become can finally die. His life hadn’t been worth much in the end anyway.

Heir to Lord Vader, the silken voice whispers, and Ben hits his forehead.

“Away,” he mutters. He must look like a madman, talking to voices in his head. He certainly feels like one. “Away. I shut it off. You can’t have it.”

He knows that won’t work.

It hasn’t ever worked.

When he’d been five he had thought that if he asked politely, the way Threepio was always advising him to, the voice would go away. When he’d been eight he’d yelled at it. When he’d been thirteen he’d resigned himself to it. When he’d been seventeen he thought he could be stronger than it.

Now, he is waiting to die.

If I were really strong I’d just end it. Take a blaster and put it in my mouth and fire.

“You said out by dawn,” the woman he can’t quite call an innkeep chides him. “You stay longer, more credits.”

She looks at him hungrily. He doesn’t know what exact species she is, but she’s large and strong, and he’s not much of a fighter anymore. “I’m going, I’m going,” he says, raising his hands and scrambling to his feet. He grabs his pack, hefts it across broad shoulders, and steps back out into the hot Jakku air, making his way towards the gates and the tarp-covered Corellian YT-1300 that his father had always loved more than him.

A flash of anger, more scalding than the sun on his skin burns through him.

Loved it and lost it. Just like him.

For one wild moment, he lets himself fantasize about flying it back to his father, about forcing him to see him. But his lips twist and his heart hardens. No. I’ll take her from him. He’ll never have her again. She’s mine now.

And without even bothering to see if anyone’s watching him, he crosses the sands towards the Falcon.

Whoever owns her now must be so confident that no one will steal her that they have left her completely unguarded. She looks like she hasn’t been flown in years. He climbs the ramp and makes his way to the cockpit, depositing in his sack in the seat that he’d once sat in right behind his dad, making zooming noises with his mouth as his father had flown them wherever it was they were off to. He powers her on, following the same pattern he’d seen his father make how many times.

Thrusters, boosters, hyper drive.

In the distance, he thinks he hears blast fire and the TIE fighter sound that Threepio had always made when telling him stories of the Rebellion.

Shields, guns, stealth.

He doesn’t pay it much mind. He had a nightmare last night. He’s used to hearing things after nightmares. He’ll really drive himself mad if he pays attention to it at this point.

Balance, converters, power…

Something’s wrong with the ignition. Some idiot has gone and put a compressor on the ignition line. Snorting to himself, he makes his way towards the main bay of the ship and kicks open the covering to the power rig. He drops himself down in it and he thinks he hears footsteps but doesn’t pay much attention. If it’s the Falcon’s current owner, maybe he’ll put him out of his misery. Fitting way to die, really. All the pain and heartache of just trying to survive only to be blasted to bits while trying to take something that once belonged to his father.

Ben lurches forward. That’s definitely…

He jerks his head up.

The Falcon is most definitely airborne—or trying to be—and he can definitely hear the sounds of TIE fighters firing.

Whoever is flying this thing is not a pilot and he lurches himself out of the power rig—he’ll finish that compressor later, this seems more immediately urgent—and stumbles his way towards the cockpit.

“It’s a bit hard without a co-pilot!” he hears a girl shout and he sits down in the seat that had once been his father’s and without a word takes the controls. The Falcon steadies itself and the girl lets out a yell in surprise.

“You said you needed a co-pilot,” he mutters. “Now let’s get off this dust bucket, shall we?”

Chapter Text

Rey is not a trusting person.

She doesn’t even have to think about why that might be. She knows full well why she isn’t. Jakku and Plutt are more of a reason than she’s ever needed to give herself about that.

But that doesn’t stop her from following the instinct to shout, “Finn! We’ve got company!” at the man she’s known for less than ten minutes and who seemed incapable of thinking she could run without him holding her hand.

“I’m working on it!” she hears Finn shout. “This blast canon’s rotation is jammed and won’t—”

“I meant in the cockpit!” Rey calls to him, trying not to let on her own frustration. Frustration is for friends, and she wouldn’t exactly say that being hunted by the same First Order soldiers is exactly a basis for immediate friendship. Not that Rey particularly knows what friendship is. “There’s…there’s a co-pilot.”

“What?” Finn shouts, and a moment later she hears an explosion and a cry of delight. “I got him!”

“Nice!” she calls to him before turning back to the stranger. Strange to think of him as the stranger, while Finn’s somehow been elevated by virtue of having run at her side.

He’s sitting there totally at ease with the controls of the ship. He’s tall, she notes on second glance—much taller than she is, and his shoulders are broad. But he’s got the same slim starving look of everyone who ends up on Jakku, and despite his height and breadth, she’s quite sure she could knock him out if necessary. He’s wearing a light headwrap, but from the color of his eyebrows she’d guess he has black hair.

He doesn’t say a word as he helps her fly. Periodically, he casts a glance at her, especially when she does something like—

“You’re crazy,” he grumbles as she steers them into the Star Destroyer.

But Rey doesn’t bother responding. She knows the Ravager like the back of her hand, knows where passageways have collapsed and what’s just wide enough for them to fly through sideways. Crazy, maybe. But not in this instance. She feels her fingers guiding the ship to match her memories, the echoing of her footsteps through the skeleton of the ship, the dappled darkness where light trickles through holes or busted viewports, up there—that’s where there a family of ripper-raptors had screeched at her until she’d found somewhere else to root about.

She hears the sound of Finn whooping as he fires at yet another TIE fighter, they hear an explosion that’s not coming from their ship, and the co-pilot glances her way and lets out a grumbled, “This hunk of junk responds well to crazy pilots.”

Rey shoots him a look, fully prepared to snap at him for calling her crazy—twice—when she’d just saved their necks, but there’s an oddly approving look in his eyes and the words catch in her throat. She turns back to the controls of the ship, turning it up towards the skies. Easier to focus on flying like she’s crazy than the ease with which he’d given her warmth.

Don’t trust it, she tells herself. How many people on Jakku had tried to lure her in with the promise of friendship. She’d learned the lesson young that you don’t share your pile with anyone, no matter how nice they are. They’ll steal it overnight and say it was always there, but oh how much they care about you.

It niggles at her, though, the higher they fly, the darker the sky as it fades into the pitch black expanse of space. And when they’ve made their way out into the darkness, when Jakku recedes behind them, she casts a glance back at the co-pilot. He’s leaning back in the seat now, and avoiding her gaze as though hoping that she’ll forget he’s there. See? He doesn’t want you to trust him.

“Who are you?” she asks him, keeping her voice low and hard because that’s what you do with strangers on Jakku, but before he can answer, she hears footsteps and Finn and BB-8 burst into the cockpit. The triumph that lights up Finn’s face fades almost at once as he takes in the co-pilot.

“What are you doing here?” Finn asks, his eyes on the co-pilot. “Who are you?”

The man makes a sound, then swallows. He looks between them as though suddenly afraid, the easy confidence with which he’d helped her steer the ship completely gone. There’s a look to his eyes that’s oddly familiar to Rey and suddenly she feels guilty. He was trying to get away, she thinks. And he’s frightened now. Rey’s always prided herself on being strong, someone who won’t go down without a fight. But she’s never thought of herself as someone that someone should be afraid of. She’s not Plutt, or Teedo. She’s never wanted to be.

“It’s all right.” Her voice is oddly gentle in her ears. “We won’t hurt you. Were you trying to steal this ship from Plutt?”

The co-pilot nods.

“Where are you headed?” she asks but before the co-pilot can answer, a light flashes and they all turn to it.

“That’ll be the hyper drive,” the co-pilot says.

“What about it?”

“Someone put compressor on the ignition line.”

“What?” and Rey tears off towards the main bay, her heart hammering in her chest. Everything she’s learned about star ships, she’s learned from the skeletons of the Empire that found their graves on Jakku, but those skeletons had a lot to teach her, and if she doesn’t do something about the hyper drive, and fast, the whole ship will explode, and everything she’s fought for, all she’s endured will be for nothing.

She hears BB-8 rolling along behind her, and Finn’s footsteps too as she approaches the power rig. The cover has been removed and has slid a good twenty feet away from where it was supposed to be because of the maneuvering of the ship. The co-pilot must have been down there when they’d burst aboard. He had known there was a compressor after all, and this is where the compressor would be. No wonder she hadn’t noticed him, preoccupied as she had been.

She sinks down into the hole and begins to examine the valves and boosters. Sure enough—

“It’s the motivator,” she calls up. “Grab me a Harris wrench.” A moment later, the co-pilot is placing one in her outstretched hand. It’s like he’d known exactly where it had been. But then again, he’d been trying to fix it before taking off.

“How bad is it?” Finn asks her, crouching down on the ground just over the rig.

“If we want to live, not good,” Rey replies, trying to force a bolt to loosen. It is stubborn, but then again, so is she. And it’s not got years of rust on it so she knows that it’ll give way before she does.

“They’re hunting for us now. We’ve got to get out of this system,” Finn tells her, watching as she grapples with the bolt. That—more than the stubbornness of the bolt—makes her pause. Out.

But if she goes, how will they find her?

She looks up and it’s not Finn whose gaze she finds, but the little orange and white droid, rolling around nervously. It’s frightened, the co-pilot’s frightened—everyone’s frightened. Even Finn’s frightened, though she can’t blame him for that. The First Order is frightening. BB-8 has information for his owner, for the Resistance, she reminds herself. And she did promise BB-8 that she’d help him back to his owner.

She takes a deep breath, a steadying one. “Beebee-ate said that the location of the Resistance base is need-to-know. If I’m taking you there, I need to know.” She’d said it. She’d said it. She wasn’t going straight back to Jakku. She was going to take Finn and BB-8 somewhere.

And then she’d go back. She’d only be gone a little while. Surely if they turned up in Niima looking for her, someone would be able to direct them to her AT-AT. It would be fine. She’d waited for years, they could wait a few days.

But what if they don’t?

Her eyes sting briefly, but she doesn’t have time to dwell on that because the bolt comes loose and Finn tosses her another tool and she ducks back down below. She hears BB-8 beeping, hears Finn muttering low under his breath, undoubtedly conveying important Resistance information to the droid. The co-pilot says something, equally quietly.

They’ll wait for me, she tells herself. It will be all right. They’ll be back, and they’ll wait for me. They won’t leave me behind again.

She disconnects a coupling cable to try and reroute…if she can just bypass it, maybe? That could work. It’s an old enough ship that it probably wouldn’t take too unkindly to that.

She pops back up to see the co-pilot and Finn crouching down, talking to the droid. “Pilex driver. Hurry.” Finn scrambles towards the toolkit and the co-pilot’s watching her, an appraising look on his face. “So where’s your base?”

“Go on, Beebee-ate. Tell her,” Finn says.

BB-8 wiggles its head, then beeps out,

“The Ileenium system?” Rey repeats. It’s so far away. More than a few days there and back. She might be gone for weeks.

“Yeah, the Ileenium system,” Finn says breezily. “Can you get us there as fast as you can.”

Rey looks down at her hands, her stomach lurching, her mind whirring as she traces over routes she’d gotten off an old, half-dead map that she’d nicked off one of Plutt’s clients on one of those rare instances when they actually came to Jakku.

“I'll drop you two at Ponemah Terminal. I need the bonding tape, hurry!” That’ll be far enough away so that the First Order can’t find Finn and BB-8, and they’ll be able to make the rest of their trip back to the Resistance, but not so far that she can’t make it back to Jakku and they might still be waiting for her. She can imagine it now, landing in Niima, hurrying back to her AT-AT and finding them sitting there, tears in their eyes because she came back for them, she hadn’t given up hope, hadn’t given up at all.

“What about you?” Finn asks her, jerking her out of her reverie. She still hasn’t fixed the hyperdrive, she really doesn’t have time for this right now. She’ll get them to Ponemah Terminal, once she’s fixed the hyperdrive.

“I have to get back to Jakku,” she tells him firmly. “Please. The tape, or else this whole chamber will get filled with poisonous gas!”

“Back to Jakku? Why does everyone want to get back to Jakku?”

“The scenery,” the co-pilot says dryly and he bends down and grabs the bonding tape that Rey needs, tossing it to her.

Rey gives him a dirty look before bending down to the compressor again.

“It’s none of your business,” she tells both of them angrily. They don’t need to know. They’d never understand, either. And it’s not like she trusts them with it either. They don’t know her. She’s only just met them.

“You still haven’t told us your name,” she hears Finn point out to the co-pilot. But it’s like some incomprehensible force is preventing him from introducing himself to them, because a moment later the power in the ship goes out.

“That can’t be good,” Finn says. “What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything!” she hisses at him.

“This isn’t her,” she hears the co-pilot say slowly, and a moment later, the ship starts to move—

“Backwards?”

Rey leaps out of the pit and sprints towards the cockpit, pressing buttons and flipping switches. Nothing happens. The ship doesn’t power up, or power down. Nothing. “Someone’s locked onto us. The controls are all overridden.”

The co-pilot bangs a fist against the wall, and Finn groans. “It’s the First Order. That’s it. We’re done.”

“There has to be something we can do,” Rey says, refusing to believe that this is the end. She’s too stubborn to be so easily defeated, and she needs to get back to her family.

The co-pilot and Finn share a look and Finn says, “You said…poisonous gas?”

The co-pilot leaves the cockpit even as Rey says, “I fixed it.”

“Can you unfix it?”

A moment later, the co-pilot has returned to the cockpit handing them each a gas mask. How he’d known where they were is beyond Rey’s guess. Maybe there are standard locations for gas masks on ships like this.

“It will work against stormtroopers?” she asks Finn.

“Their masks filter out gas, not toxins.”

“Come on,” she says and pelts back out towards the power rig that she’d just fixed. She rips off the bonding tape then climbs back up and pushes the covering over the rig. The co-pilot and Finn—both masked—have already moved one of the floorboards to reveal a cargo load. The co-pilot is already dropping BB-8 down into it before hopping down himself, Finn on his heels. Rey squeezes down next to them and he pulls the covering overhead. It’s a tight fit, but they manage as he moves the platform back in place over them.

They sit, waiting, masks in place.

Above them, they hear footsteps, voices. Then the platform is being removed and there are blasters pointed at their faces and Rey’s hands fly to the air.

“Where are the others?” The speaker is an old man, not quite old enough to be stooped with age, but definitely getting there. “Where’s the pilot?”

“I’m the pilot,” Rey says automatically. “It’s just us.”

The old man gives her a surprised look. “You?” His eyes narrow and he looks around, and the Wookiee—there’s a Wookiee right next to him—moans out “Something’s not right. They’re lying. There’s got to be more of them.”

“It’s true. We’re the only ones on board.”

“You can understand that thing?” Finn asks her.

“That thing,” the old man says, “can understand you too, so watch it. Come on outta there.”

They climb up, Rey helping BB-8 up and the co-pilot, though the tallest of the three, skulks behind them. If he was frightened of me, why wouldn’t he be frightened of this?

Except Rey’s not afraid, for some reason. She knows brutality, can recognize it instantly and the old man standing before her isn’t brutal. He seems more annoyed than anything else.

“Where’d you get this ship?” the old man asks.

“Niima Outpost,” Rey replies. Better not to give out too much information, she decides. She doesn’t think the old man and the Wookiee are going to shoot them, but she’s still not going to tell them everything just like that. Just what they need to know.

“Jakku? That junkyard?”

“Junkyard. Thank you,” Finn says, waving his hands in the air and Rey resists giving him a dirty look.

The old man turns to the Wookiee. “Told you we should have double checked the Western Reaches.” He turns back to Rey. “Who had it? Ducain?”

“We stole it from Unkar Plutt. He stole it from the Irving Boys, who stole it from Ducain.” So much for need to know information.

“Who stole it from me!” He sounds thoroughly offended by the simple fact of that. “Well, you tell him Han Solo just stole back the Millennium Falcon for good.”

Rey can’t breathe. This can’t be real. “This is the Millennium Falcon? You're Han Solo?”

There aren’t a lot of stories on Jakku. Mostly the same five told over and over again in different ways—each telling more boring than the last. The stories from offworld had always been Rey’s favorites and there wasn’t a scavenger within a hundred miles of Niima who didn’t know about Han Solo. I thought he was a legend. But here he is, standing right in front of her—shorter than she is, and his hair greying, his face wrinkled. He looks nothing at all like the dashing rogue who had starred in the stories that Unkar Plutt had hated so vehemently. That Han Solo was young, and suave, and clever, and brave. This one is old and grumpy, and Rey finds that almost makes it better.

“The Rebellion general?” Finn asks her.

“The smuggler,” Rey corrects him.

“I used to be.” He seems to sag. He looks at both of them for a moment, appraisingly. “Chewie—throw them on a pod and we’ll drop them off at the first habitable—”

“No!” Rey cries out fiercely. “We need your help, we need to get this droid to the Resistance as soon as possible. It’s carrying a map to—” she freezes. She had barely registered it when BB-8 had beeped it out on Jakku, hadn’t had time, really because then there’d been the TIE fighters and then they’d been stealing the ship and there’d been a co-pilot and everything has happened so quickly in the last hour. But if Han Solo is real, then BB-8 might not have been speaking in code when he’d said, “to Luke Skywalker.”

Luke Skywalker might be real too.

Han Solo freezes where he stands and turns to look at them again.

“Who are you?” The question sounds almost begrudging, almost sad.

“I’m Finn,” Finn says.

“He’s with the Resistance,” Rey adds.

“Resistance, huh?” Han’s voice is distant, but his eyes as he looks at Finn are calculating.

“Yes,” Finn says. “I’m sort of a big deal. With the Resistance.”

“Sure,” Han says. He points at Finn. “Finn.” He points at Rey.

“I’m Rey,” Rey says at once. She’s introducing herself to Han Solo. And he’s going to help them. Just like in all the stories because what she’d always loved about Han Solo stories was how he always helped people in need, even when he lost his profit in doing so.

She’d all but forgotten the co-pilot until Han points a finger at him and she realizes that finally, finally, they’re going to learn who he is.

The expression on the co-pilot’s face is something unlike anything she’s ever seen before. It’s an angry look, a pained look as he stares into Han Solo’s face. He doesn’t say a word, he just stares and the longer he stares, the brighter his eyes seem to get, as though he is trying very, very hard not to cry.

Rey glances back at Han’s face and watches as what can only be comprehension dawns across his face.

“Ben?”

Chapter Text

His father is looking at him as though he’s afraid and Ben turns away. He doesn’t know where he’s going to go, the ship is small—smaller now than it was when he’d been a child—but he feels cold all over, as though he had not woken up in the middle of a desert this morning. He’d said his name, he’d said his name, and he’d had a silken nightmare the night before. The nightmares are always worse when he says his name and now his father is there.

“Kid—don’t—don’t be like that,” his father calls after him and he’s surprised when he hears footsteps. No telling him to behave, or demand that he return and be polite. Just his dad, following him through the Falcon.

“We thought you were dead,” his father says and he feels a hand on his back. Ben stiffens at the touch and his father withdraws the hand. “Sorry,” he mutters. Ben misses the contact the moment it’s gone, but doesn’t know how to say that. He doesn’t know how to say anything at all. If he starts talking, he doesn’t know what to say. He’s trembling.

Once, when he’d started trembling like this, the whole ship would have started shaking. That was why they’d sent him away, wasn’t it? Because he couldn’t control it?

“Ben?”

He keeps saying his name. He keeps saying his name and the voices are going to be back tonight. They’ll follow him across the stars.

“What happened?”

“Ask Luke,” he bites out. Luke, who his mother has been hunting for enough to send Resistance after. Had she sent men after Ben too? Or had she, like his father, assumed that her son was dead? It wouldn’t surprise him—placing all of her hope on his uncle the way she always has, and keeping her son out of mind. All the more reason he’d been right not to go home, right not to try and seek comfort from them when his uncle had—

“I would, but we don’t know where he is.”

That catches Ben off guard. Why wouldn’t they know where Luke is? Surely he’s still on Yavin IV. Just as suddenly, he decides he doesn’t want to know. He never wants to know, wants to be lightyears away from the answer. “Good.”

“Do you know why he—”

“Why he what?” Ben rounds on his father. He’s trembling with anger now. Even thinking about Luke still hurt like a knife twisting in his gut. Bad enough that he hadn’t believed him for years, but then to go and look? He didn’t need more hands on his brain.

“You—you’ve got control now,” his father remarks slowly, clearly seeing the throbbing nerve and trying to avoid it. “That’s good.”

“I shut it off.”

“Shut what off?”

“The Force.”

“You can do that?” Han frowns.

Ben doesn’t respond. Han looks him up and down before saying, quietly, “It’s good to see you, kid.”

Ben stares into his father’s face, willing himself to feel something.

But there is only emptiness.

Something bangs outside of the ship, and he watches his father’s face fall. “Oh no,” he mutters turning on his heel and running for the main door.

“Rathtar?” Finn shouts after him. “Did you just say rathtar?” Finn, Rey, and the droid take off after his father and Ben thinks it’s habit that takes him after them too. Come back, Dada! “You’re not hauling rathtars on this freighter, are you?” Finn sounds horrified. Ben could laugh.

Because of course he is. He’s Han Solo. Of course he’s smuggling dangerous creatures across the stars. What else would he be doing with his time? Finding his son?

Not that it would have changed anything. He didn’t want to be found. He hadn’t let himself think about Han Solo, Leia Organa—any of them. It’s reckless to think about them, it always leads to silken dreams. But he had a silken dream last night, his father is here and keeps calling him Ben, and Han Solo’s smuggling rathtars. Ben supposes that he comes by his recklessness naturally.

With the Falcon in Plutt’s possession, his father had deigned to use a different ship—and much larger one—for his smuggling. It’s positively spacious, with a ceiling so high that the lighting gets lost overhead on its way down to the ground. As Ben descends the gangplank, he sees his father standing in front of a command console with Finn and Rey. He’s talking quietly to them. “Oh great. It’s the Guavian Death Gang. They must have tracked us from Nantoon.” Han leads them to a safety hatch and opens it, pointing them down to it. “Get below deck and stay down there till I say so.” He casts a glance at Ben. “You too.”

Trying to keep me safe? Or trying to keep me out of the way?

He’d never been sure with his parents.

He doesn’t say a word as he follows Finn and Rey down below decks and Chewie slams the door shut.

“Wait!” Rey calls even as the door locks into place. “What about Beebee-ate?”

The droid hadn’t been put down with them.

“And where’s he keeping those rathtars?” Finn demands. Almost immediately they hear a bang and Rey yelps.

“That’s probably one,” Ben says dryly.

“What’s he going to do with Beebee-ate?” Rey demands, rounding on Ben in the darkness. There’s a ferocity to her that almost makes Ben smile.

“He’ll keep it safe,” he says. “He’ll be careful with it. He’d be careful with anything that’s trying to get back to the Resistance.” The stories say he has a black heart with a streak of gold, or something like that. He’d loved those stories growing up, the ones Chewie or Lando had told him, the ones that his mother’s aides had asked after. The stories don’t know the half of it.

“What’s he going to do?” Finn demands.

“Make it up as he goes,” Ben shrugs. He sits down. His head is starting to hurt and he presses at his temples with his fingers, closing his eyes. “And probably get out of it alive, though not for lack of trying.”

“How do you know him? Solo?” Finn asks, crouching down in front of him. The younger man’s got a jut to his jaw and a determination to his gaze that Ben trusts far more than kindness. “Who are you, Ben?”

Ben’s head splits open hearing Finn call him that. Anger bubbles at the pain of the headache and when he opens his eyes, Finn seems to startle back away from him. Ben closes his eyes again and tilts his head back against the wall.

“Ben Solo,” he says. “My name’s Ben Solo. He’s my dad.”

His head is on fire, and he’s sure that there’s a stunned silence from the other two but he can’t hear it. He can’t. Let me in, the fire seems to say but Ben grits his teeth, his hands balling into fists. Let me out.

Breathe, Ben, his uncle had told him when teaching him to meditate, his voice so calm, so soothing. Be aware of everything and be aware of nothing. Just breathe. Settle yourself. Settle it all.

All of it a lie.

His head is going to split open if he doesn’t do something. He’s had headaches like this before. It’s why he was always so good in a fight. If he fought, he kept the pain at bay. A path to the dark side, his uncle had warned.

“Ben?” Rey’s voice is gentle and he can feel her breath on his skin she’s so close. “Are you all right?” she asks.

“Headache,” he manages through gritted teeth. That’s not the half of it. That’s not even close. Monster, he thinks. Worse than the rathtars that Finn’s so nervous about. You would bring destruction, and pain, and death and the end of everything I love.

Ben, I’m sorry—

No. No. Leave me alone, Uncle Luke.

Ben.

You were never Skywalker’s heir. Only Vader’s.

His eyes snap open and he focuses on Rey’s face. She’s young—barely more than a girl but she’s stubborn and fierce and she reminds him of his mom, sort of. She’s like Finn with that determined gaze and a jut to her jaw. He stares at her and she doesn’t balk away, the way everyone has for years whenever they catch sight of the mad-looking vagabond he’s become. There is a strange texture to the color of her eyes. In the darkness, he can’t make out the colors, but if they make it out of this he’ll try to. Her eyes are a pretty hazel color—that much he’d noticed on the Falcon. He wonders what they’re flecked with. She breathes deeply, and Ben matches her breath, the way he’d matched his mother’s when he’d woken up screaming as a child.

Then voices start to come through the ductwork.

“Can you see them?” Rey hisses at Finn.

“No,” he replies. Ben lurches himself onto his knees and the three of them begin crawling along under the walkway, Finn and Rey in front and Ben behind. He keeps his eyes up on the walkway. Better the walkway than Rey’s rear, which is right in his face and though his mother might disagree, she did raise him right—not that that had stopped him from noticing the way her hips flare out as she moves in front of him. The lights passing through the grille make him wince but at least he’s moving. That’s something.

Ahead of him, Finn and Rey stop. “They have blasters,” Rey whispers, peering upwards.

“A lot of them,” Finn replies.

“You think hunting rathtars is cheap?” his father demands loudly and it’s all Ben can do not to roll his eyes. “I spent that money.”

“Of course you did,” Ben mutters. Probably on the wrong things, and now it’s coming to bite Han Solo on the ass—just like it always does. And he’ll get out of it, just like he always does.

Ben reaches for his belt. His saber is clipped there, more out of habit than anything else—a reminder of what he’s not and what he’ll never be. It’ll never light again—at least not by his hand, since he gives it no Force to feed it. He hadn’t even finished making the thing when he’d left, and it’s probably not stable. All the better that it’ll never be useable. But there’s also a blaster on his hip, smooth and small and chrome, because if there’s one useful thing he’d learned from his dad, it’s that you always carry a trusty blaster with you, no matter what.

Trying to keep me safe? Or trying to keep me out of the way?

And then, his uncle’s voice again. You would bring destruction, and pain, and death and the end of everything I love.

“Kanjiklub wants their investment back too.”

“I never made a deal with Kanjiklub!” his father protests.

“Tell that to Kanjiklub.”

Because of course it’s an ambush.

Ben lets out a groan that he can’t tell if he hopes is quiet enough to fly under the radar or if he wants to be heard so that maybe he can fight or something. He wants to fight, the pain goes away when he fights. His head is throbbing, his dad is here, and Finn and Rey…they don’t know what it’s like constantly getting caught in the crossfire of Han Solo’s misadventures. For some reason, he feels oddly protective of them. Perhaps it’s vestigial of the other younglings at Luke’s praxeum. The ones who’d all looked up at him because he was Luke Skywalker’s nephew.

Rey probably does that now because he’s Han Solo’s son.

“Tasu Leech,” he hears his father say. “Good to see you.”

“Get ready for this all to go belly up,” Ben mutters to Finn and Rey. They both look back at him. He’s suddenly, sharply, aware of how much older he is than both of them. They look like children, frightened, desperate to know what will happen next, that everything will be all right.

I got bad news for you, he can’t bring himself to say.

Ben jerks his head and the three of them begin crawling back along the underside of the walkway as his father promises that he’ll deliver.

“That Beebee unit,” one of the voices says. “The First Order is looking for one just like it. And two fugitives.” Rey and Finn freeze. Ben bites back another groan. Of course they would have heard about the droid, the scum his father runs with. They learn about every bounty in the galaxy disgustingly quickly.

“First I’ve heard of it,” his father says, but even Ben can hear the lie, so the others on the ship must too.

He keeps going. There’ll be a hatch up behind at least one of the gangs—he should be able to be of some help or something.

“Wait,” Rey hisses behind him and he turns. She’s staring at some wiring. “If we close the blast doors, we might be able to trap both gangs.”

“You can close the blast doors from here?” Finn asks her.

The intensity on Rey’s face fills Ben with confidence as she reaches forward and says, “Resetting the fuses should do it.”

They hear the sound of doors moving and then—

Those are definitely rathtar growls.

“Oh no,” Rey says.

“Oh no what?” Finn asks.

“Wrong fuses,” Ben groans.

“Kill them!” they hear one of the men up above shout, “And take the droid!” But no shots ring out through the bay of the ship—only rathtar screeches and men screaming in horror.

They begin crawling as fast as they can.

“This was a mistake!” Finn shouts, not bothering to keep his voice down anymore.

“Huge!” Rey replies a little shrilly in her panic.

“We need to get up there,” Ben shouts.

“Are you crazy?” Finn calls back at him.

“We have to help!” Rey replies. “We can’t do that from down here.”

“We don’t have weapons!” Finn yells.

“You don’t,” Ben says, tugging his blaster from its holster.

That’s his dad up there. With rathtars. Sure, he’d survived the Hutts, but he’s older now, and everyone knows it was Uncle Luke and his mom who had gotten him out of that situation. Now it’s just him and rathtars and Ben feels something he does he does he does and it sure feels a lot like panic. Fear leads to anger, Ben. Don’t let your fear win. Always his uncle’s voice, always, always. That alone was enough to get him angrier than his fear.

Rey finds a hatch and the three of them climb up and begin running through the ship, Ben’s blaster at the ready. They stole a ship, but don’t have any weapons? Braver than I thought.

“What do they look like?” Rey asks Finn before the three of them stop short, because that’s definitely a rathtar, big and round and scaly with lots of arms and lots of very, very sharp teeth. Eating is the wrong word to describe what the rathtar is doing to the man.

“They look like that,” Finn says, grabbing one of her hands as she covers her mouth in horror and turning on his heel, the two of them brushing past Ben.

He follows them, glancing back over his shoulder. None of those men is his father. He raises his blaster and fires, putting the man out of his misery right before the rathtar rips him apart.

“This way!” Rey calls up ahead.

“Are you sure?” Finn asks. Ben’s catching up—his legs are long, and he hasn’t had to run like this in a while. He feels oddly alive.

Rey, it turns out, wasn’t sure because there’s a rathtar right there. They yell and turn back towards Ben but the rathtar grabs Finn with one of its long tentacles and pulls Finn towards the ground, tugging him towards that gaping, toothy maw.

“No no no no no!” Finn’s yelling, Rey calling his name in abject horror as the rathtar makes off with him, a prize for eating later.

Ben sprints after, firing his blaster, hoping to surprise the creature into letting Finn go, but that doesn’t work. The rathtar is fast for something so huge, and Ben’s long legs are screaming at him as he takes off, quickly outpacing Rey—though she’s also quick on her feet—and following Finn’s panicked screams of “Rey! Ben! Help me!”

It’s not long before Rey is too far behind Ben for him to even hear her footsteps. It makes him nervous. There are two other rathtars about, and she’s just as squishy and tasty to them as Finn. But Finn’s the one in more immediate danger, and she’d survived Jakku, so Ben keeps going. He sees Finn up ahead, sees the rathtar and starts firing again, aiming for the rathtar’s side as best he can, but his aim is bad, his hand is shaking, this isn’t as easy, isn’t as smooth as it used to be.

But for once in his life, his wild shot goes lucky and hits one of the panels on the wall and the blast doors slam shut, severing the tentacles and Finn collapses to the floor. As soon as he lands, he starts to scramble out of the tentacles, still yelling and Ben pushes forward, helping him up. He recognizes Rey’s footsteps as she sprints towards them, calling out, “Finn.”

“Let’s go,” Ben grunts at both of them and they take off running back in the direction they’d come.

When they reach the hangar with the Millennium Falcon again, they find his father and Chewie together, BB-8 rolling around frantically at their feet. Chewie is hunched over a blast wound. “You,” Han barks at Rey, “Close the door behind us. You,” he points at Finn, “take care of Chewie.”

He doesn’t need to bark a command at Ben. Ben knows what he needs to do and the two of them take off towards the cockpit together, powering the Falcon up together as he’d done on his own only hours before. Strange now as he reaches over his father’s head to reach the converter switches he’d once had to stand on a seat to reach since the panels are high up. He hadn’t noticed it on Jakku, but it’s different, moving in tandem with his dad.

Rey pelts into the cockpit settling into the co-pilot’s seat before Ben could lay claim to it.

“Hey,” Han growls at her, “What are you doing?”

“Unkar Plutt installed a fuel pump too. If we don’t prime that, we’re not going anywhere.”

“I hate that guy,” Han says, giving Ben a glance. Ben understands. His dad hates anyone tinkering with his old girl except him. In this moment, Ben hates Plutt too. His teeth are on edge, his stomach is twisted in knots and his head is splitting open again now that he’s not moving again. How fast the headache had gone away. How fast it had returned.

Rey glances back at Ben and he sees something cross her face. “I thought I’d fly since your head’s hurting. You could rest.” Warmth rushes through Ben as he looks down at her. Gold and brown, flecked with the hazel, and concern there too.

“I have a co-pilot,” Han tells her, “He’s back there.” They hear Chewie moaning.

Ben feels dizzy, everything has been happening so fast, and now that he’s not running, his heart feels like it won’t stop pounding, and with every lurch of it, his head throbs and he feels like he’s going to sick up food he hadn’t even eaten. He sinks into the chair he’d always liked as a kid and closes his eyes.

Distantly, he’s aware of his father saying something about getting out of here at light speed, Rey questioning the sheer madness of the move, and then the ship is off into space, leaving rathtars and death in their wake.

Ben fades.

He loses the sound of his father’s voice, and of Rey’s—even of Chewie and Finn, grappling in the bay.

His head hurts, his head hurts, and pounding in time with his heart—

There you are.

Chapter Text

When they are squarely in hyperspace, Rey casts a glance at Ben. He has passed out, his long legs extended awkwardly in front of him, and he is sliding down the seat a little bit. When she’d first seen him, he’d been a ragged, scraggly, frightened stranger. She would never have dreamed that he could be Han Solo’s son.

And yet he is.

And, as they’d been in the bowels of his father’s freighter—well, he’d been almost like Han in some of her favorite stories, saving them in just the nick of time, knowing what was happening quickly enough to intercede. Except it hadn’t felt like a story. It had felt like everything that could have gone wrong was going wrong, and they’d only just managed to make it out of there. Which, Rey supposes, always made for the best stories. Did that make Ben a hero, then? Heroes don’t run away, and yet Ben was clearly on the run from something.

“Let’s leave him be,” Han says gruffly. “The kid never slept well.”

He has that look about him, his face drawn, dark circles under his eyes. Even now, it doesn’t look as though he’s sleeping restfully.

She swallows as she stares at him because it’s only with that thought that she realizes that she doesn’t think—she doesn’t—she—

She doesn’t feel lonely.

Escaping those rathtars with Ben and Finn—Rey had never felt alone, not even once.

She blinks back tears as she stares at Ben. Why is she crying?

Finn staggers into the cockpit, the Wookie behind him. He wrapped Chewie up in a bandage and looks worse for wear because of it.

“New one for the record book,” Chewie says to Han, who gives him a half-smile. He jerks his head towards the main cabin and they leave Ben to his sleep.

“So. Fugitives, huh?” Han asks Finn.

“Where are we going?” Finn asks at once. “Where are you taking us?”

“Relax, Big Deal.   I’ll get you to the Resistance.” He gives Chewie a look, and Chewie’s eyes turn towards the cockpit.

“Is he even going to go that far?”

“What does that mean?” Rey asks at once. Chewie and Han know Ben far better than she does, far better than she could, but something about the way the Wookiee says it sets her on edge. What’s it to you? You’re going back to Jakku, she berates herself. Not feeling lonely is one thing, but turning her back on her parents is quite another. She can’t let herself get attached. Especially when she hasn’t even known her companions for a full standard day.

Han tilts his head slightly, scratching his neck. “We’ll make a pitstop at Takodana. Maz’ll help us get word out to the Resistance. From there…well I can’t make him stay, but he may want to.” Han sounds almost hopeful, but doesn’t elaborate. “Anyway, we’ll be able to get a chance to breathe for a moment. Unless one of our friends back there already reached out to the First Order.”

“They won’t know where we’ve gone, though,” Rey says, frowning at Han. No one can track a ship through hyperspace.

“True,” Han agrees. “But they’ll have their networks out. Already on high alert if you’ve had that droid for—how long anyway?”

“Two days,” Rey says.

Han huffs. “Yeah. High alert. They must be real scared of Luke coming back.”

“Why did he go?” Rey asks. She tries to keep the question calm. If Han Solo is real, if he’d just thrown her into danger and then flown her right back out, then Luke Skywalker has always been more than a legend, and if the stories were true, then he and Han were the best of friends—closer than brothers.

“I thought…” Han begins before cutting himself off. “Well, there’s a lot of rumors. Never know what to believe.” Almost unconsciously, he turns and glances over his shoulder towards the cockpit.

“You think Ben will know?” Chewie asks. Rey’s mouth goes dry. But of course, if Han Solo is real, and has a son named Ben, why wouldn’t Ben also know Luke Skywalker. His life is like a legend.

So why had he been fleeing it?

“Ben’ll know more than me,” Han says slowly. “He saw Luke more recently.”

“How so?” Finn asks. He glances at Rey for a moment, her own burning curiosity mirrored in his eyes.

“Ben…well, he went to train with Luke for a while. Then he disappeared around the same time as Luke.”

“He’s a Jedi? They’re real?” This is all starting to be too much—so much more than she could have ever have dreamed, ever have allowed herself to dream. Rey had been like any child, or at least she thinks that’s the case, where she would tell herself stories to try and ease her mind towards sleep. But she’d never actually thought that any of them might be true. The Jedi.

Ben’s a Jedi.

“No,” Han says. “I don’t think he got that far. But he’s—he was—always strong with the Force. It doesn’t matter though. He says he shut it off. I don’t know what he means. All that’s a lot of mumbo-jumbo to me—I never understood it.”

Rey turns and looks back towards the cockpit. Suddenly the ship seems that much smaller. So much smaller, and yet the whole galaxy seems so much bigger than she’d ever imagined. The Jedi are real. Ben was going to be a Jedi. And now he’s sleeping in the cockpit after having helped save their skins from the sorts of ruffians that Rey had always done her best to avoid whenever they’d shown up at the Niima Outpost.

“Anyway, between the kid—if he doesn’t ditch us—and that map you got in there,” Han points towards BB-8, “We might finally get some answers.”

The conversation fades. Chewie and Finn set themselves to a round of Dejarik while BB-8 watches, and Han goes back to the cockpit. Rey hovers for a little while, watching as the Wookiee sorely roasts Finn before she notices that she’s a little chilly.

Space is cold. She’d never thought of that in all of her nighttime imaginations, when she was traveling the stars with her parents, perhaps a Jedi herself, but never as horribly alone as she was in that AT-AT. It’s not the same kind of cold that desert nights could have depending on the season—too hot or too cold depending on which way the planet was tilted. It wasn’t bone cold. But she has prickles across her skin.

“There are blankets in there,” Chewie tells her not unkindly, noticing the way she’s clutching her arms over her chest.   She goes to the drawer that he is pointing to and grabs one and then—remembering how uncomfortable it is to sleep while too cold, brings one to the cockpit for Ben.

She tucks it around him as gently as she can, not wanting to disturb him before sitting down in the pilot’s seat next to Han.

He’s staring out at the bright blue lights. Only the mad don’t get affected by hyperspace, she remembers someone having told her. The lights could make your brain burn if you stared at them for too long. Ben had said that this ship had an affinity for mad pilots. He must have meant his father.

Han glances her way when she sits down and raises his eyebrows.

She doesn’t say a word—she just tucks her knees up to her chest and stares at the old, dirty piloting console in front of her. It’s not long before she, too, is asleep.

-

When Rey opens her eyes, the first thing she sees is green.

Green everywhere, green as far as the eye can see—except where there’s water reflecting the blue of the sky back up at her. Rey had tried to keep tiny plants alive in her AT-AT. They’d never lasted very long, had quickly become dried out shells of themselves like everything else that tried to survive on Jakku. That there were places where life survived—thrived like this…

“I didn’t know there was this much green in the whole galaxy,” Rey whispers.

She can feel their eyes on her, watching her. She can feel their pity, but it’s a long way off. She can’t waste a moment of this, of looking out over every tree and flower and bush that she can see sweeping across the surface of the planet below them.

She is the first one off the Falcon when they land, BB-8 rolling along behind her and beeping happily, and Rey feels a warmth unlike anything she’s ever felt before. Her skin is not dried out immediately, nor does she feel as though she will break from the weight of the sun’s heat. No—it is gentle, and soft, and when she breathes she can smell all sorts of things—wet earth by the lake, the fragrance of plants, and so much more than she knows how to identify.

Her feet take her to the lake and she stares out over the water. So much green, so much water. Rey can’t stop staring. She feels a lightness she doesn’t know how to describe. She almost feels as though she, too, is a plant, growing gently in the sunlight.

This is what should be like—green and pleasant and gentle.

Her throat thickens.

They’ll be back for her, she knows it. She knows it. She’s always known she wasn’t destined to be alone, that she would, one day, have her family again. And when they’ve come back for her, when she does have a family, they’ll all go together to a place like this, gentle and warm and beautiful.

A breeze tickles her cheek—tickles rather than whips her face dry and raw, a punishment for daring to exist. That thickness in her throat just won’t go away.

She hears footsteps behind her, and she refuses to cry in front of Han Solo. So she takes a deep breath, as she has always done when she needs to get a grip on herself and turns to face him. He has a small blaster in his hand that he hands to her as he approaches. “You might need this.”

“I think I can handle myself.” She’s always had to, after all.

“I know you do,” Han grunts. “That’s why I’m giving it to you. Take it.”

Her hand trembles as she takes it from him. No one has ever given her anything before, and Han’s just giving her a blaster. And she doesn’t even think it’s meaningless—it’s a thank you for helping him, or his son; it’s because he might even care for her. She bites her lip as she looks down at it. It’s light in her hand—lighter than she’d expected and lighter than the staff she’d used on Jakku which is lying somewhere on the Falcon. It’s sleek and chrome and, because she doesn’t know what else to do, because you always test out a weapon to make sure you know what the proper motions of it are, she extends her hand, aiming across the water.

“You know how to use one of those?” Han asks her.

“Yeah. You pull the trigger.” Can’t be that hard. Learning how to use her staff—that had been hard. But this is just pointing and shooting and Rey thinks she can do that.

“Bit more to it than that. You’ve got a lot to learn.” He glances back towards the ship. Chewie and Finn and Ben have all descended. Ben is wincing at the sunlight as though it is hurting his eyes to be in a place so bright, and his skin has a waxen quality to it that definitely hadn’t been there before. His headache must not have gone away.

“Check out the ship—see what needs fixing,” Han tells Chewie. “And you,” he says, pointing to BB-8, “stay here. Don’t want you to get recognized in Maz’s place.” Then he gestures to the three of them and leading them towards off around the lake. There’s what can only be described a castle sitting on the edge of the water—large and made of stone and draped in flags of all colors and sizes. Finn lengthens his stride to pull even with Han, and Rey falls back to walk with Ben.

“How are you feeling?” she asks him. He looks at her out of the corner of his eye. “Your head? Is it still hurting?”

Ben flinches and rubs his hand through his hair. At some point, Rey hadn’t even noticed when, the head covering he’d worn on Jakku had fallen away. His hair is thick and dark and greasy from want of washing—not that Rey is anyone to judge. She can’t remember the last time she washed her hair either.

“I’ll get some water,” he says quietly. His voice is raspy, sounding as though he’d been yelling. “That should help.”

“I didn’t get a chance,” she says, “Earlier. To say thanks for helping us get away from the First Order, helping us get off Jakku. I know you were leaving too, but…”

Even as she says it she feels an odd chill.

Get off Jakku.

Why does it feel as though she’s never going back? She’d decided she would, once they’d gotten Finn and BB-8 back to the Resistance, she was going to go back to her AT-AT and—and—

Life is supposed to thrive.

I’ll never see them again. Not ever.

Her heart twists in her chest and she blinks back tears and looks away from Ben. He’s still watching her, his eyes narrowed against the light.

“No problem,” he says slowly. “It’s good to be out of there. Too dry for anyone to think straight.”

Rey bites back a bitter sob, and for a moment, she thinks Ben doesn’t notice, until he adds,

“It’ll be ok. I know it’s scary—leaving home.” There’s a break in his voice and he swallows. “But it’ll be ok.”

She clings to his words, needs to believe them. Because she doesn’t want to think about what it means if she doesn’t. She looks up at Ben and he looks so tired but there’s something about the way that he looks at her that sends a shiver down her spine—like she matters to him.  Rey’s never mattered to anyone before.

“Maz is a bit of an acquired taste,” Han is saying to Finn, and Rey brings her focus back to the here and now. The here and now is so much easier than what she’s left behind. “So let me do the talking and whatever you do don’t stare.”

“At what?”

“Any of it,” Ben supplies gruffly. He gives Rey a tired half-smile. Of course he might know his father’s old friend too.

When they get inside, it’s harder than Rey would like to admit—not to stare. The room that they find themselves in is full of creatures of all shapes and sizes and provenances. Some are playing games that Rey has never seen while others are drinking or eating things that Rey could never have found on Jakku. Somewhere in the room, someone is singing an almost lazy sounding song, and Rey looks around, trying to find the singer.

“Maz always liked jizz,” Ben comments in her ear. Rey had never heard jizz live before—had only ever maybe heard a recording of a jizz-wailer over some half-broken transmitter before. It sounds so different live, richer and smoother.

“Han Solo!” a little yellow alien not even half of Rey’s height calls out and the music and conversation die down at once. Everyone turns to stare at them.

“Oh boy,” Han says under his breath before raising a hand in greeting and calling out. “Hey Maz!”

The tiny creature weaves her way through the crowd as the jizz starts up again and she asks, very seriously, “Where’s my boyfriend?”

Han looks like he’s resisting rolling his eyes. “Chewie’s working on the Falcon.” The very idea that this tiny alien might be involved with seven-foot-tall Chewie is delightful on every conceivable plane, and it’s all Rey can do not to squeal in delight as she shares a glance with a surprised looking Finn.

“I like that Wookie,” Maz tells Han. “I assume you need something. Desperately.” Her tone makes Rey wonder how many times Han Solo has shown up on her doorstep begging for help. “Let’s get to it.”

She leads them through her packed watering hole to a small table in the corner, cramming them all on the benches so that Rey is squished between Ben and Finn. If Finn had looked in awe when they had first made their way into Maz’s, he looks wary now, and his eyes dart around the room as though he’s looking for something.

“Everything all right?” Rey asks him.

“Just keeping an eye on the people keeping an eye on us. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

That makes Rey frown. “What do you mean?” She does her best to keep her voice low.

But Finn only gives her a significant look.

Food and drink are brought to them, and Han dives into the explanation for why they’re there.

“A map? To Luke Skywalker?” Ben shifts uncomfortably next to Rey, and she glances at him. He looks pale—no, pallid. He still looks ill, those dark circles under his eyes standing out and a sheen of sweat covering his face. “You’re right back in the mess.”

“Can you get word to Leia?” Han asks her. “There are some repairs Chewie and I need to take care of, and she’ll want this droid sooner rather than later.”

Ben shifts again.

“The droid?” Maz asks, her big eyes, magnified behind her spectacles, landing on Ben. “Yes, I’m sure it is the droid that your wife will want to see.”

Rey feels Ben’s hand tighten on the bench next to her, gripping the wood beneath them. He’s breathing hard.

“Him too,” Han says testily, glancing at his son. Then, a little more earnestly to Ben, “She’s missed you, kid. A lot.”

Ben’s eyes are closed again, and he looks even more sick than before. “Headache?” Rey asks him, nudging his hand with hers. His eyes snap open and for a moment he looks wild. “Ben?”

“I’m fine,” he grits out.

“Kid—you ok?” his father asks, and there’s a history to that question that Rey doesn’t understand at all.

“I’m fine,” Ben bites out again, louder this time. He jerks himself off the bench and stands. “I’m—I’m gonna get some air.”

“Ben—” Han calls after him but he’s already gone.

“He’s been running from this fight for too long,” Maz sighs.

“What fight?” Finn asks. His eyes are still on Ben’s retreating figure. He looks as concerned as Rey feels.

Maz gives him an appraising look and there’s something eerie and knowing about it that makes Rey hope that Maz never looks at her like that.

“The only fight,” Maz says, her voice very somber, “against the Dark Side. Through the ages, I've seen evil take many forms—the Sith, the Empire. Today, it is the First Order. Their shadow is spreading across the galaxy. We must face them. Fight them. All of us.”

As she speaks, Finn’s concern melts into an expression of horror. “There is no fight against the First Order! Not one we can win. Look around. There's no chance we haven't been recognized already. I bet you the First Order is on their way right—”

But he cuts himself off as Maz hoists herself up on the table scrambling across it to give Finn an appraising look with her magnified gaze.

“If you live long enough,” Maz says to Finn, “you see the same eyes in different people. I'm looking at the eyes of a man who wants to run.”

Finn gulps. Wants to run? Rey stares at him. Not Finn. Finn’s with the Resistance, he’s brave and kind and for some reason she trusts him and she doesn’t trust easily at all. Him and Ben both. He’s been running from this fight for too long. Why were they both fleeing? What were they both fleeing? What was so dark?

“You don't know a thing about me,” Finn says fiercely to Maz who is still crouched on the table. “Where I'm from, what I've seen. You don't know the First Order like I do. They'll slaughter us. We all need to run.”

But if he is planning to go on, he stops short when Maz crawls back to her chair and glances over her shoulder. She points to a table in a far off corner. “You see those two? They'll trade work for transportation to the Outer Rim. There, you can disappear.” Her eyes are back on Finn and Rey’s throat closes.

“Finn,” she gulps out.

She doesn’t want him to go. She doesn’t want him to leave her. She doesn’t think she could bear it—being left behind again.

He turns to her, and it’s as though he heard her despair when she’d said his name. “Come with me.”

“What about Beebee-ate? We're not done yet. We have to get him back to your base.” The members of the Resistance are all supposed to be hearty and brave. Why was Finn running?

“I can't.”

Finn stands to leave. He takes a blaster out of a holster at his hip and hands it to Han.

“Keep it, kid,” Han tells him. “You’re gonna need it out there.”

Then he goes. Rey leaps to her feet trailing after him, trying not to cry like a child.

But she’s not a child anymore. She’s older, and wiser, and stronger, and the first time she’d met Finn, she’d knocked him into the sand because she’d thought he’d stolen that jacket he’s wearing from BB-8’s owner.

“You can't just go. I won't let you,” she says, grabbing his arm.

Finn heaves a sigh, and says through gritted teeth. “I'm not who you think I am.”

“Finn, what are you talking about?”

“I'm not Resistance. I'm not a hero. I'm a Stormtrooper.” Her eyes widen. He’d known about their masks, had known about TIE Fighters, but it would make sense for someone in the Resistance to know that. It can’t be true. Except his eyes are telling her that it is. She can see a burning honesty there, a desperation that she know everything. “Like all of them, I was taken from a family I'll never know. And raised to do one thing...” He pauses, his voice thick with emotion. “But my first battle, I made a choice. I wasn't going to kill for them. So I ran. Right into you. And you looked at me like no one ever had. I was ashamed of what I was. But I'm done with the First Order. I'm never going back. Rey, come with me.”

“Don’t go,” Rey pleads. They always make her plead. Everyone who always leaves her.

But he shakes his head. He reaches a hand out to pat her shoulder. “Take care of yourself. Please.”

He continues on to the table with the two who will take him to the Outer Rim.

Rey stands there.

He’s gone. Finn’s gone.

It doesn’t matter, she tries to tell herself. You only barely knew him. Barely cared about him. You’ll be going home soon anyhow. That feeling that you were never going back. That’s just—that’s just—

She turns away from Finn, unable to bear watching him go. But she can’t go back to the table, not when she thinks she’s about to cry.

Ben’s outside, she thinks. She could go find him. Go sit with him.

But then again, his father looks at him like he’s a flight risk, seems unsure whether or not to message his wife and say he’d found their son. Maybe Ben will leave too and she’ll be left with no one again. No one and nothing, and worlds away from Jakku where her parents might…they might…

Her feet are carrying her down a set of stairs and Rey doesn’t know why. It’s quieter down below—darker and emptier. Her footsteps echo.

And her head.

Someone’s crying, a child. Rey frowns.

“Hello?” she calls. “It’s all right!”

But the child keeps sobbing. Rey walks slowly, her hand trailing along the wall. At the end of the hallway, a door seems to unlock as if of its own accord. It swings open and Rey takes a step inside.

The echoing cries of the sobbing child have faded, as if she’s gone in the wrong direction somehow. But now there’s something else she…hears is the wrong word. Hears would mean she heard it. But it’s like she’s hearing with the skin on her arms, with the way the air lands in her nose. It’s as if the whole room is alive in a different way than anything Rey has felt before, and she moves deeper into the vibrations of it all.

There’s a chest in the center of the room, and she kneels down, opening it, her hands trembling.

Lying inside it on a dusty cushion is a silver cylinder with a black striped grip. She extends her hand and the moment she touches it—

it’s hard to breathe is that her breath or someone else’s it sounds mechanical

the world is exploding around her the walls are crashing in on themselves and she feels like she’s going to be sick as stars and flames burst towards one another and she twists and feels a pull she’s reaching for something she doesn’t know what though she’s never done this before

a man collapses before her no anguish smoke on her tongue a hand reaching out to rest on the crown of an astromech droid

someone is screaming calling her name rey rey rey a thousand times a thousand ways

come back quiet girl and there they go they need to come back they can’t just leave her here please don’t leave me i’ll be good i swear i swear i swear

the air hums and a helmet crunches in and a man dies

i’m going mad

i’m not a big deal with the resistance i don’t know if i want to be

she is falling into water salt chokes her she is going to drown she is going to die

she is alone but she is not afraid that is new but there is no need to be afraid if they are safe

the saber is steady in her hand a clear crystal blue she twirls it in her hands it feels natural to twirl it she slices it through the air and it connects with

she is standing between them and the firing squad look we don’t have time for this i’m the one you want let them live

gentle hands on her head soothing hands everything hurts but the hands are so gentle

so what if she dies so long as she dies fighting

these are your first steps

—Rey tumbles backwards, her body both hot and cold, her head reeling, her heart pounding in her chest. It takes her a moment to realize that the echoing footsteps she hears aren’t just in her head. A moment later, Maz Kanata rounds the corner.

“What was that?” Somehow, she knows, the tiny creature will know.

Maz is looking at her with those uncanny, seeing eyes. Then, her gaze drops to Rey’s hands, on the silver cylinder. “That lightsaber was Luke's, and his father's before him. And now, it calls to you.”

She stares at the lightsaber, her throat suddenly dry. It’s warm in her hand, the same gentle warmth as the air outside when she’d first descended from the Falcon. What does that mean, calling to her? What would it be doing, calling to her? She’s nothing, she’s nobody.

“I have to get back to Jakku.” But the words feel feeble in her mouth. She can still feel the stinging in her eyes, the sun as she watched that space ship leave her screaming little throat raw.

“Dear child. I see your eyes. You already know the truth. Whomever you're waiting for on Jakku, they're never coming back. The belonging you seek is not behind you. It is ahead.” Rey shivers. In less than a day, Finn and Ben had shown her more kinship than her parents—than they had ever—Maz is still talking. “I am no Jedi, but I know the Force. It moves through and surrounds every living thing. Close your eyes. Feel it.” Rey takes a deep breath, and does. The blade had felt natural in her hands. So what if she died so long as she died fighting? “The light. It's always been there. It will guide you. The saber. Take it.” Maz closes tiny fingers around Rey’s hand, cementing her grip on the lightsaber.

Rey takes a shaky breath. She feels like she should say something. Anything. She should protest. She should accept that this is fate, that this is destiny. But before she can open her mouth to respond the whole building seems to shake.

“What was that?” Rey shouts and a moment later she is on her feet again and tearing back down the hallway. When she reaches the main floor, people are sprinting out of Maz’s watering hole, shrieking in terror. Up here, the sound of what’s happening is much clearer. She remembers the sound of those ships from Jakku.

The First Order.

“Finn!” Rey screams and pelts for the door. She has to find Finn. If Finn’s a traitor to the First Order—she can’t bear to think about what they might do, what they could do if they found him. “Finn!”

“Rey!” she hears him scream back and she pelts towards him extending her free hand to grab his even as a bomb goes off behind them, blasting Maz’s place to smithereens and knocking them both down on the ground.

“Get to the Falcon!” Han shouts at them both, pointing a blaster behind him and shooting a stormtrooper dead without even looking at him.

“Where’s Ben?” Rey calls to him, and Han’s face blanches. Her hand tightens on the lightsaber as Finn releases her  to grab the blaster Han had given him and—

The thing ignites, a bright blue blade that emits no heat and sparkles in the growing grey day.

It’s as though the lightsaber knows what to do. In her hand, it spins and twirls, blocking blasts from the stormtroopers, sending them ricocheting off into the sky, across the field. It called to me.

She doesn’t have time to protest that a junk rat scavenger doesn’t deserve Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber. She only has the time to block blasts, to do her best to clear the way for her and Finn to get back to the Falcon.

Then, Rey’s ears pick up a different sort of blasts—a more puttering sort—and a moment later, spinning across the sky is a set of X-Wings. They race towards the TIE fighters, shooting at them, and Finn lets out a celebratory whoop.

“That’s one hell of a pilot!” he shouts, because the lead X-Wing is lacing its way through the havoc in the sky with ease and grace.

Rey’s about to let out a cheer herself when her eyes fall on—

A pair of stormtroopers, dragging an unconscious form through the dirt and onto one of their shuttles. A very tall, dark-haired someone.

“Ben!” she yells and takes off running as fast as she can, blocking shots she hadn’t even realized were coming her way with the lightsaber. “Ben!”

But it’s too far, she’s too late and a moment later the gang plank is being lifted and the shuttle is taking off and the stormtroopers are retreating and Rey sinks to her knees, watching them go. “Ben,” she hears herself say.

Come back! she hears herself sob.

Chapter Text

It is because he is not conscious that he knows he has been taken.

There now, the silken voice says, There now. You see? Isn’t this better?

He is two again, and there’s a droid with a kitchen knife, looking at him strangely.

He’s seven again, and he has kicked the table, sending his mother’s new holopad to the floor, the screen shattering and the glass getting embedded in his foot.

He is twenty-three again, and his uncle is standing over him, staring down at him in the night, his eyes full of disgust and rage.

I didn’t think there was this much green in the whole galaxy.

Rey is sitting right in front of him, her three little buns still tight, despite the upset on his father’s smuggling freighter. She’s got as firm a hand with hair as his mother does, if that’s the case—not a single strand has come loose, not a single strand for him to tuck away again.

You want her? The girl?

You can have her, if you like. You can have everything you want and more. Surely you know that. Surely you know you were made for more than chains?

He wants to wake up. He is thirteen again and wants to wake up in his own bed and go and have a cup of caf with his mother while she catches up on the news. He wants to wake up and to have this all just be a nightmare, it all is just a nightmare.

Except it’s not.

Don’t be like that, kid.

You would bring destruction, and pain, and death and the end of everything I love.

Sweetheart, please, just listen to me for a moment.

They didn’t want you. They wanted you to be what they wanted—not what you are. They tried to steer you away from what you are. This is what you are.

And the dream changes—a silken one to a violent one.

He stands tall, his blade bleeding red light in the darkness. He is taller than the rest—stronger than the rest, but physical strength is a weak man’s game. He is powerful with the Force. That is what matters the most.

They die before him—everyone who stands opposed to him.

His father, a look of surprise; his uncle, a look of disappointment; his mother—

No.

Ben reaches for her, not his mother, please no not her he doesn’t want to destroy her she—

Doesn’t love you. Why else would she send you away? She’s like your father—afraid of you. Her fear turned her to the path of hatred. We’ve been over this before, Ben.

No one can love you.

But I—I can give you everything.

A black cloak billows around his shoulders. The wind wipes it all clean. Everything. The dust that he has become, the dirt he was born in—everything about him gets brushed away until he is clean, born anew.

Be who you were born to be—the legacy of your blood—your parents cannot control the power that was Vader.

Your mother lied to you.

You said my grandfather was a hero.

He was, Ben. Anakin Skywalker saved my life. He defeated the darkness that was Darth Vader.

But why didn’t you tell me? 

He sees his uncle hesitate, and knows the truth that his uncle will not confess to. Your mother didn’t want you to know. She didn’t want anyone to know.

A building burns. Children are screaming, thin braids falling from destroyed bodies. His blade? But no. The one in his hand is red. His is blue. His is blue and—

She is holding it too. Blue brighter than the sky as she sends red volleys from blasters spinning away from her. She roars in rage, a fearsome hellcat. “Ben!” she screams to him as she runs.

The girl is made of rage. You can have her too. Have her in a way that you could never otherwise. The Force is strong with her as it is with you.

You won’t have to be alone.

Nights spent curled under thin blankets, nights spent hungry. All to get away from this voice. This voice. This voice. Always in his head will it never leave him—

Alone.

She tucks the blanket around him as he sleeps in the same seat he’d fallen asleep in as a boy.

Don’t you see? So long as you remain on this path, you will always be alone. Always. You and I can bring her with you if you want her so badly.

Blood doesn’t pour from his father’s chest. The wound cauterizes. He reaches a hand up to brush Ben’s cheek. His lips move to make a sound but he dies before he does it.

Rage pumps through him. Yes, good. Feel that rage. It is you. It is yours. The anger of Vader.

His mother never told him. Not once. She’d only ever told him about Bail Organa, who wasn’t even related to him. Your grandfather would be so proud of you, sweetheart. Which grandfather? The one you loved or the one you loathed?

Is that why you hated me mother—you saw your father, your real father, in me?

She dies beneath his blade now too. They all die. The whole galaxy—stars and planets and systems and republics—they all fall before him. Lord Vader’s heir.

Lords have heirs. Senators do not.

Ben! Rey has fallen to her knees, destruction in her wake. There are tears in her eyes as she reaches out to him, reaches out reaches out reaches out and—

Do you think she cares for you? Don’t be a fool. No one has ever cared for you. She has only just met you. How can she care for you?

She doesn’t even know you.

Ben, please. Please stay alive, stay strong. We’ll find you. We won’t leave you. Please, Ben.

A stubborn little thing, isn’t she. She’d have to be. Scum has to be stubborn to survive. But ah—what’s this? Anger on her behalf. You don’t like that I call her scum?

It’s what she is.

You can raise her though. You can take the galaxy—all you want and more. You won’t need to hide anything from anyone anymore.

What good did hiding do you anyway?

I found you in the end.

We’ll find you, Ben.

I found you in the end.

Where’ve you been, kid?

I found you in the end.

We’ll find you, Ben.

Ben.

Ben.

Ben.

Ben?

Chapter Text

Rey stares at the lightsaber in her hand the whole flight. Chewie is in the co-pilot’s seat, and Rey sits behind him as Han flies the Falcon alongside General Organa’s Resistance ships. None of them says a word. Every now and then, Finn glances over at her.

“He’ll be all right,” he says at last—the brave one, breaking the silence.

“He’s made of sterner stuff than the First Order will know what to do with.” There’s a bravado to Han Solo’s voice that Rey wishes she believed.

She traces back every step of the moments since she had first met Ben Solo, wondering if there’s anything she could have done. Not steal the ship? But then he’d have stolen the Falcon on his own, would have gotten drawn into his father’s tractor beam, might have found himself held captive by the gangs who had boarded.

I could have followed him instead of Finn—gone outside with him. Been in the green.

But no—no he had wanted space. Air. His head had been hurting.

Rey’s hand tightens on the lightsaber.

“Maz said this belonged to…” she doesn’t know what to call him. Luke Skywalker sounds like a silly way to address him to one of his dearest friends, his brother-in-law. Luke was too intimate for a man she’d never met.

“Yeah,” Han says, removing the need for her to find an answer right now. “Keep it for now. You handled it well enough. I doubt he’d mind. He’s not using it.”

“I don’t know how to use it,” Rey mumbles. “It was…” An accident? Instinct? Something else?

“Neither did Luke when he first started. Trust me. I was there.”

She finds that oddly comforting.

She closes her eyes. We’ll find you, Ben, she thinks out at the bright streaking stars. I’ll find you. Because if no one else will, she will. She knows that.

No one had come back for her. She’s not about to do that to anyone—not even a strange man she’d met only two days before. If it were Finn, she’d go back for him too. She’d do it for anyone.

“What does the First Order want with him?” she asks. Han shifts uncomfortably in his seat. She’d seen him talking to General Organa. She had seen from afar the way the General’s whole body had seemed to sag, had known from the way she had looked up at Han that he has an answer. “We have a right to know,” she snaps. “He’s our friend.”

“You’d be the first,” Han says dryly. Rey inhales sharply, and he continues. “Ben never really had friends,” he adds quickly, looking determinedly ahead. “He used to get nightmares a lot as a kid and when he got angry stuff around him would shake and break. He…he never had control. He was powerful. With the Force.”

“So they would want him because he’s strong with the Force?” Rey asks.

“I don’t know,” Han says. “I don’t know, kid. I really wish I did, but I don’t. All of this is too much magic for a guy like me. Give me a blaster and a crook any day, but the Force… That’s Luke. That’s always been Luke.”

“We have to find him,” Rey says.

“Lucky we got that little map your friend’s carrying then,” says Han.

“I meant Ben.”

Han stiffens. Then he sighs. “Let’s get to base. Leia’ll be…Leia about it, and already have four plans of action.”

-

“Finn! Buddy!” one of the pilots, is running towards them in his orange space suit as soon as they touch down on D’Qar, BB-8 rolling happily at his side.

“Poe!” Finn bursts out excitedly. “You’re alive!”

“Yeah!” Poe says, throwing an arm around Finn. The two of them begin walking towards the base and Finn turns to wave Rey along to join him, but even as she starts towards him Han calls out to her.

“Listen,” he says, “We’ll get him back.” He swallows. “It took us so long to find him again. We won’t leave him to it.”

Rey’s throat tightens. “How long were you looking for him?” she asks quietly, holding her breath.

“He disappeared from Luke’s about six years ago,” Han tells her. “We sent him to Luke when he was thirteen.”

“That’s a long time,” Rey says. She doesn’t know how old Ben is—but she knows he’s older than she is.

“Too long,” Han agrees. “If the life of a Jedi isn’t the life for him, then it’s not. But we’ll get him back. We—” he cuts himself off and Rey turns.

Leia Organa is standing behind them, her eyes on Han.

“I want my son to come home,” she says, her voice thick, her eyes blazing with determination.

“We’ll—” Rey starts, but is interrupted by someone shouting, “General!”

General Organa whirls around her eyes training on the young woman with blond hair sprinting towards where she is standing.

“What is it, lieutenant?” she asks.

“It’s the Hosnian system, General. It’s gone.”

-

All her life, Rey had grown up with stories of the Rebellion. You couldn’t not. Jakku was a graveyard of Empire ships. The Rebellion had won, had stopped being a Rebellion.

Rey supposes the difference between a Rebellion and a Resistance is that there’s no need to rebel against a system you represent. But does that even matter anymore? With the Hosnian System destroyed, with the Republic gone?

“It’s called Starkiller Base,” Finn tells the room. “They designed it to do just that—to destroy star systems completely. All in one go.”

“I’ve already sent Snap out to try and get a read on the thing,” Poe says, leaning over the table and running his hand through his hair.

“It’s the size of a planet—they built it into one,” Finn says.

“So it’s like the Death Star.” The General sounds almost resigned.

“General,” interrupts C-3PO, the gold-plated protocol droid that had come with her to Takodana. “If I might interrupt. The Death Star was only ever about the fifth of the size of a planet. A large moon at best. If Finn says that it’s been built into a planet—”

“Great,” grumbles Han.

“That would make it at least five times the size of the Death Star,” the droid finishes, looking between the General and her husband with glowing yellow eyes.

“We can’t do anything without more information,” the General says after a time, looking around the room. “But maybe that map that you stored in your Beebee unit, Poe—”

“General,” Threepio interrupts, “We were able to analyze the map and it seems as though it is incomplete. It is only a part of a map, not the whole.”

The General closes her eyes and inhales slowly. “I’d hoped…” she begins with a wry smile before opening her eyes. “Well, nothing’s ever so easy as we hope. We’ll find Luke. But we’ll take care of this first.”

“Is that where they’ll have brought Ben?”

Rey means to ask Finn quietly, but the room is so silent that everyone turns to her with the question. She feels herself flushing.

“Probably,” Finn tells her.

“We have to rescue him,” Rey says adamantly, and Finn nods.

“Hold on,” Han says and Rey turns to him. “Don’t look at me like that, I’m not gonna stop you,” he says. “But you’re not going on that thing while they have a recon mission out to get the scope of it. Ben’s a trooper, he can tough it out for a few days to make sure you both don’t get killed trying to save him. Hell, I’ll fly you there myself when we have a better idea of what we’re up against.”

Rey looks at the General. The General is watching her husband, before her gaze shifts to Rey, curiosity in her deep brown eyes.

When the meeting ends, the General waves Rey and Finn over.

“Are you sure about this?” she asks them both quietly. “I can send others out to get him. Han can go on his own, even.”

“Yes,” Rey says firmly. “We’re not leaving him behind.”

Finn nods next to her. “I know what the First Order’s capable of,” he says. “He saved my life from one of your rathtars. We can’t just leave him there.”

The General’s eyes are bright when she looks at them, and her expression is full of a warmth that Rey isn’t wholly sure she understands. “He’s lucky to have friends like you,” she says, her voice thick. Ben never really had friends.

Nor did I, Rey thinks. Until Finn and Ben.

-

Rey is good at waiting.

She always has been.

She takes herself to the main hanger, full of starships and offers her skills as a mechanic to the team there. She is quite as good at pulling star ships together as she is at ripping them apart, had helped bypass the compressor on the Millennium Falcon, had built and rebuilt her own speeder on Jakku many times. She works until her hands are sore, until she’s sweating and the lead mechanic tells her to go and do something else for a while.

Which is how Rey finds a staff to train with. She swings it, getting used to the weight of it, the circumference of it—both different so from the one she’d used on Jakku for so long.

It’s not long before sweat is dripping down her neck, and she reaches to wipe it away. But when her fingers connect with the skin on her spine, there is no sweat drop. She stiffens because it feels like her skin is buzzing from contact, vibrating as her hand had vibrated when she’d found Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber.

Her hand drops to her side, brushing against the steel that is clipped to her belt. It sends a shock through her and she drops the staff on the floor. It clatters and rolls away.

She unhooks the lightsaber and holds it in front of her for a moment. She’d gotten used to the weight of the handle on her hip sometime on the trip from Takodana, having it in her hand feels more natural than the training staff. She ignites the saber. It hums almost happily in her hand. She twirls it between her fingers and it sings.

“All right,” she whispers, bringing it in front of her in what she thinks she’d call a defensive position. “I can do this.”

It’s strange—training with something that only sticks out in one end. And she tells herself firmly that on no accounts is she to rely on muscle memory in case she accidentally slices her hand of. She wonders if Jedi have ever lost hands because they weren’t paying attention while dueling. She does not doubt that this blade could cut through bone and sinew as easily as if they were silk.

Rey hates waiting. But she can turn waiting into work very easily and she does. She gets a feel for moving with the lightsaber, of how to move her feet with it. It doesn’t feel like part of her arm the way that her staff on Jakku had, but by the time she’s done, she doesn’t think that she’d be half-bad at it before long. What does it mean to be good at a lightsaber? she wonders. Luke Skywalker, if they can find him, would want it back, but he might tell her. And Ben—

Ben would know.

She curls up in her bed that night—a real bed in a real room! She’s never had that before—and does her best not to let that gnawing feeling in her gut that she doesn’t quite understand.

She knows they have to wait. She understands why. It’s for the best—to make sure they’re properly prepared for whatever it is they’ll have to do.

Does he know they’re coming for him? Does he think they’ve abandoned him? Is he waiting or has he lost faith entirely?

Chapter Text

Ben comes to in an empty room, strapped to a rack. The rack is tilted back slightly, so that he is not quite lying flat, not quite standing up. On a metal table by the wall, he sees his blaster and his lightsaber.

You could just grab them, free yourself.

But that is the silken voice again, and Ben shakes his head. Get out, he thinks, but even in his own mind his voice is weak, a whiney little boy’s.

The wall in front of him is blank and when it flickers to life, Ben realizes that it is a screen. And on the other side of that screen is a face he’s never seen before.

The creature is humanoid, with a narrow jaw and a broad, scarred skull. His lips crease into a smile when he makes eye contact with Ben.

“Welcome,” he tells him.

“Who are you?” Ben asks.

“You know me, Ben.” Because of course he does. His is the silken voice. “I’ve been waiting for you for a long time.”

“I haven’t been interested.” Ben wishes there was bravado to his tone, the spine of steel that his mother so frequently is able to lace into her voice, or the defiance. But his voice cracks from the dryness in his throat and his heart is thudding in his chest as though he had been running.

Because he had been running.

From this voice, for so long.

“Come now,” the thing with the silken voice tells him, “We both know that’s not true. If you didn’t want it, you would have thrown me out.”

“I did throw you out,” Ben says stubbornly.

“Did you?”

Ben swallows. Because no. No he hadn’t.

He’d failed to.

“I understand your hesitancy. It is daunting, to wear the weight of that legacy on your shoulders. You are the heir of Lord Vader.”

“If you think that, why have you got me locked up like this?” he demands. “If you care so much about Vader—why are you making me your prisoner?”

“You’re my guest,” the creature with the silken voice says gently.

“Your hospitality leaves something to be desired.”

“You could free yourself easily.” There’s a light to his eyes as he says it. His eyes, unlike his voice, are not silken. They are hard. They are predatory. He has Ben where he wants him, cornered and caught.

Ben swallows. “Who are you?”

“You can call me Snoke.”

“The Supreme Leader?” Ben asks sharply. He’d done all he could to avoid mentions of politics over the years, because politics meant Leia Organa, and Leia Organa meant the nightmares finding him again. But even a fugitive could not avoid news of the Supreme Leader of the First Order making his way with a full fleet out of the Unknown Regions.

“The very one,” Snoke smiles. “I’ve been waiting to meet you for a long time, Ben. May I call you Ben?” Ben flinches, but the expected throbbing in his head at the sound of his name does not come.

Snoke smiles at him.

“There, isn’t that right? Isn’t that better?”

“You sent me the headaches?” Ben asks. He really should have put two and two together on that front. But it had been nice to think that maybe the headaches were his head defending him from attack, warning him, not the attack itself.

“No, you did them to yourself, poor boy. Hurting yourself, denying your true self. You are Vader’s heir.” Snoke tilts his head slightly and a hand comes into the frame of the screen, large, swollen. “The pain made you strong, I do not doubt. When you unleash the Force, you will be a power to be reckoned with, the likes of which the galaxy will never have seen.”

And Ben’s head is full of visions again—smoke and flame, blood and bone, screams and a red lightsaber that cuts through the darkness.

“Destiny,” Snoke whispers. “Legacy. Of course it would be hard to accept, I know. Your parents and your uncle tried to make you theirs. But you were always Vader’s.”

“No,” Ben rasps.

“Come now, Ben. You are older than a child. Now is not the time for petulance. It is your blood, your heritage. And soon you will stand at my side as Vader stood at the Emperor’s right hand. I can help you, guide you. And together we will bring a new order to the galaxy. Not a failing republic, not a failure of an empire. Order. The First Order the galaxy has ever known.”

Ben wants his head to throb. He wants it to burn, to hurt. He wants it to revolt and protest but everything is horribly calm. Everything except his heart, which is still thrumming with adrenaline.

“Let me help you, Ben.” Snoke’s voice is so quiet, so gentle, so silky. A shiver crosses Ben’s body, and he feels almost as though someone is caressing his face, running a thumb over his cheek. “You can be stronger than you’ve ever dreamed. I understand why you would be afraid of it. Fear is natural. Fear is just the beginning. Let your fear make you angry, and let your anger make you strong.”

Ben doesn’t say a word. He just stares at Snoke.

Then Snoke sighs.

“In time,” Snoke says quietly. “In time. I’ll be there soon enough. We found you more quickly than I expected. I would be there in person if I could be. I could help you understand. You won’t be alone for long, I promise Ben. I’ll take care of you, my son of darkness.”

It’s the word son that stirs it in him. “What happened to my father?”

“Han Solo?” Snoke asks, raising the patch of skin that should host an eyebrow.

“What happened to him?”

“What are you most afraid of—that my men killed him? Or that he lives and didn’t even fight for you?” Snoke asks. Ben swallows. His head is hurting again. The room isn’t well lit, but it is too bright for his eyes—the screen is too bright for his eyes.

“They know where you are, Ben. They know where my men took you. And here you are.”

-

Ben tries to knock himself out.

The rack he’s strapped to is made of a sturdy metal and he begins hitting his head backwards against it—the only movement allowed him.

It doesn’t knock him out, and it does make his head ache so bad that he vomits all over himself. He doesn’t have much in his stomach to vomit, and it’s mostly the burning acid that fills his stomach that he heaves all over himself, like a child, like a beast.

They know where you are, Ben. They know my men took you. And here you are.

Snoke’s words ring in his head, echo, pulse in time with his throbbing heart.

-

A stormtrooper comes in with a tray of food.

“Are you going to unbind me or feed me?” Ben asks.

The stormtrooper doesn’t say a word. He places the food on the table next to Ben’s lightsaber.

Oh so that’s how it’s going to be.

-

He does, at last, lose consciousness.

He doesn’t dream.

It is bliss.

-

When he wakes it is not just his head that hurts, but also his stomach. It is empty and the food on the table just out of reach is so close. So close. So very close.

You could release yourself, the silken—Snoke’s—voice says in his mind.

Son of darkness. Heir to Vader.

Who vomited all over himself and smells like sick.

Truly making Anakin Skywalker proud.

His mother though…his mother would be proud.

His head throbs angrily at him. She lied to you. She lied to the whole galaxy about who her real father was, what her real father had done. Uncle Luke had tried to ease the sting of truth when the HoloNet had been abuzz with it. “He died redeemed, Ben.” It was not the first time his uncle’s had spoken empty truths to him, but it was the first time that Ben had wanted to scream about it, and wanted to find his mother and scream at her too.

He won’t think about her. Her or the others. Just Vader. Just his grandfather, whose power was unparalleled and who his whole family had hidden the truth about for so long. “They lied to me about him too,” Luke had tried to comfort him. “I found out the truth horribly, too. Ben Kenobi lied to me, my uncle lied to me.”

What, like you and mom? Didn’t you learn from that Uncle Luke?

Maybe his uncle had learned nothing from Vader after all.

Maybe Ben should learn from him, instead. It’s not like his uncle had been a great teacher anyway.

The pain eases.

He stares at the screen in front of him.

It stays dark.

Ben yells as loud as he can, wanting to shred his voice with the sheer force of it until the inside of his throat is raw and bleeding.

Your pain will make you strong.

The pain has made me weak.

-

His throbbing head makes him lose control of his bladder too.

Now the scent of his own piss fills the room, stinging at his nose along with the drying stomach acid.

-

He’s not sure if he’s conscious or not when he sees Rey. She is holding a lightsaber—his uncle’s, he’d recognize it anywhere—and is testing the weight of it in her hand, swinging it slowly, then faster.

“Rey,” he rasps at her, but she doesn’t hear him. Maybe he’s too quiet. Maybe she’s too focused.

Maybe it’s all in his mind.

Because of course it is.

He’d spent his whole youth thinking that the Jedi were great heroes, knights of honor and discipline and compassion. In his distress, of course his mind was yearning for a Jedi to come rescue him.

It was a Jedi that put him on this path to begin with.

-

The scent of piss and vomit is growing stale. Or maybe he’s just used to it now.

Snoke has not reappeared, but he does not for a second mean that Snoke is gone. Snoke has been in his mind since he was a boy.

They wanted you to be what they wanted. Not what you are.

Ben yells again. Always yelling. Always too loud, too rash, too violent, too impulsive. Not at all like his level-headed mother. His father—

His head throbs.

You’re going to hurt someone if you keep doing that, sweetheart, his mother had snapped. You can’t keep doing this.

She had never believed him—that there had been a voice in his head all along.

He takes vicious pleasure in knowing that he had been right and that she had been wrong.

The food is sitting on the table, taunting him. It, and his lightsaber.

You could be so strong.

Heir to Vader.

No one ever said that Vader was weak.

I had a moment of weakness, Ben. I’m sorry.

So you’re allowed them, but I’m not?

Ben doesn’t want to be weak anymore.

He hits his head against the back of the rack.

It doesn’t knock him out, but it doesn’t make him vomit this time. There’s nothing in his stomach to vomit.

He is hungry. He is thirsty. He wants it. Cruel and clever, Snoke.

How long can I withstand?

He wonders if it’s weakness or strength to do so.

Chapter Text

“So we disable the shields, take out the oscillator and we blow up their big gun,” Poe says, looking around the room. “All right. Let's go!”

People begin moving at once, but Rey stands planted firmly on the ground, staring at Finn.

“What about Ben?” she whispers to him.

Finn looks around then leans towards her. “We’ll get him. We’ll get him before we take out the oscillator. I—” he glances around again. “I worked Sanitation, not security. The only reason they’re listening to me now is because they don’t know that, and the only reason I’m going at all is because of Ben. I’ll keep Solo distracted and maybe you can sneak off.”

“We’ll be safer if we go together.”

“Not if we actually want to get that oscillator.”

He’s right.

Starkiller Base is on its way to D’Qar, and they don’t have a moment to lose. The First Order has had Ben for four days now, and they’re getting closer.

They help Chewie load up the Falcon, while Han and Leia talk quietly near the ship. When Han boards, he settles himself in the pilot’s seat and eases the ship into the sky. It’s not until they’ve broken the atmosphere and put the ship into hyperspace that Han turns to them both.

“Before either of you start with me,” he says, “That oscillator has to be our first objective.”

“He’s your son,” Rey bites out.

“I know he is,” Han growls. “You think I don’t know he is? You think I’m not thinking about what’s got to be done? How many people are going to die if we don’t break the shields on that thing. Ben would—Ben would understand.”

Rey remembers the look on his face as he’d stared at his father for the first time in years, a father who didn’t recognize him immediately.

Would I even recognize my parents if I saw them?

Maybe her parents were great heroes like Han Solo, putting the Resistance and the lives of how many billions of galactic inhabitants before the life of his son.

It doesn’t make her feel better.

“That said,” Han says slowly. “His mother has high expectations of me, so if we come back alive, we’d better come back with him in tow or else she’ll kill me.”

“Should we split up?” she asks, glancing at Finn who is looking relieved. “When we land?”

“I don’t know,” Han says. “What does Mister Big Deal think?” Finn looks at Rey frantically. “What?”

“I worked Sanitation.”

“Sani—what? A lot of people are counting on us!” Han practically yells at Finn.

“We’ll get it done,” Rey says firmly. “He still has more knowledge of the First Order than anyone else.”

“Sanitation,” Han grouses. “And I didn’t think anything could get more hair-brained than when Luke and I…” his voice trails away, and heaves a sigh.

“How are we getting past their shields?” Rey asks, “If the Resistance fleet can’t?”

“Their shields have a fractional, refresh rate,” Han says, sounding very much like a man trying to get himself back in line again. “Keeps anything slower than lightspeed from getting through.”

“We're gonna make our landing approach at lightspeed?” Finn practically yells in horror.

Hell yes we are! Chewie intones, but for the life of her, Rey can’t tell if he’s excited or equally horrified.

“Everyone grab onto your hats,” Han says. “Three, two, one—” and the planet materializes beneath them. Trees go flying as Han works desperately to bring the Falcon level, ripping up snow and frozen dirt beneath them. “I’m pulling up!”

Rey clutches the armrest of her seat and closes her eyes. Calm flows through her, suddenly. She doesn’t know why. It’s as though she can feel the wind on her face—not frigid wind, or burning wind. That gentle, warm wind on Takodana.

The Falcon crunches into the snow, easily sliding several hundred feet before finally reaching a stop. The landing is far from graceful, but when Rey stands, she doesn’t feel shaky. She feels grounded.

She swallows and looks at the other three. “Well? We haven’t got time to lose.”

“Yes we do,” Han says and he gets up, brushing past her to disappear into the Falcon’s depths. A moment later he comes back with a pair of coats. “Here you go, Jakku,” he says.

“I don’t—” Rey begins.

“Take it, will ya?”

Rey does. She shrugs into it. It’s warm and a little bit scratchy, and slightly too big for her. It’s the first time anyone’s ever done anything to try and prevent damage from the elements.

I would have killed for a jacket like this on Jakku. Jakku, where winters were brutal and frigid and snowless because there wasn’t enough water in the atmosphere to make snow. And winter nights in the desert…

She fastens the jacket up and the four of them descend from the Falcon.

“The flooding tunnels are that way,” Finn says, “We should be able to get in there.”

“Do you even have any idea where we’re going?” Han snaps, his teeth chattering with cold.

“We’ll figure it out. We’ll use the Force, or someth—”

“That’s not how the Force works,” Han snaps, but Rey goes still.

The Force.

She closes her eyes and breathes. The cold goes away, and she can feel the steady breathing of the trees. Her veins seem to glow with a warmth she hadn’t known she had, but is as much a part of her as her own heartbeat.

She breathes deeply, aware and unaware at once of Han and Chewie complaining about the cold, of Finn breaking down the door of the flooding tunnels. And when she opens her eyes again, she knows exactly where they’re going.

“This way,” she says, taking the lead.

“Is this like when that rathtar—” Finn begins, but Rey shakes her head.

“No. Ben.”

“Kid, we need to get to the oscillators.”

But Rey isn’t paying attention at all. She keeps running.

“Rey!” she hears Finn shouting behind her. She turns. Han Solo has grabbed his arm holding him in place. A moment later, Chewie is throwing her a comlink.

“Don’t get cocky, kid,” Han calls to her, and Rey nods to him.

She takes a deep breath and doesn’t know what she’s reaching for as she runs but she knows that she’s reaching for something.

-

Had she not been toying with that glowing warmth inside her, Rey would have called it luck—that for every passing patrol of stormtroopers, Rey senses them coming and is able to hide, to duck out of their way, to do something.

Jakku, at night, had been bright with stars overhead—enough to see across the sands. Star Destroyers, at night, had been pitch black, but Rey had learned to fumble her way through them. She feels like that now—as though she has learned to fumble her way through the darkness. She doesn’t know what she’s fumbling for, but she’s a scavenger. She’ll find her prize.

“He still hasn’t cracked?” she hears a stormtrooper ask his partner as they make their way through the hall, Rey crouched in the shadows.

“He’s shat himself now. Disgusting.”

“What does Snoke even want with him?”

Her heart lurches. She knows—she knows—they’re talking about Ben. She’s getting closer. She follows these two stormtroopers at a distance, her ears straining to catch their conversation.

“They forced some water down his throat the other day. The Supreme Leader doesn’t want him to die. But he’s delirious now.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I don’t either.”

The two stormtroopers pause in front of a door that has a third stationed outside it.

Rey fumbles in the darkness.

There’s someone on the other side of that door. Weak, and sickly. His head hurts.

What she wouldn’t do for a distraction, something to send the guards running, and then she could cut open the door with her lightsaber, or break the fuse holding it together—it’s probably a wiring setup she could maneuver. That would be subtler.

The guard is talking to the two patrolling troopers and Rey closes her eyes. Please, please, please think of something, she begs herself. She’s always been able to think of something. A fuse getting blown, or the power going out, or someone accidentally firing a blaster down the hallway or—

“What was that?” one of the stormtroopers asks.

Rey freezes.

She doesn’t know what that was, but she felt it.

And to her astonishment, all three stormtroopers go off, the guard having been distracted from his one job.

She doesn’t question it. She doesn’t hesitate.

The moment the three of them have rounded the corner she leaps forward, breaking the fuse panel by the door. Her fingers know what to do as she tugs at a wire and a moment later she hears the door’s slide quietly open.

The room stinks, but Rey doesn’t care. It’s not as though Jakku was a place for fragrance. There is a rack with someone tied to it in the middle of the room.

“Ben?” she asks quietly as she rounds the rack and looks at him.

He looks even more sickly than before, his face positively gaunt with big dark circles under his eyes. True to what the stormtroopers had gossiped, he smells of piss, and shit, and vomit. He is not conscious. “Ben,” Rey breathes, and reaches up to touch his face.

His eyes snap open and he inhales sharply, his nostrils flaring. “Are you there?” he asks. “Can you see me?”

“I’m here, Ben. We’ve come to rescue you.”

He blinks at her slowly. “We?”

“Me, Finn, Chewie, your father.” He doesn’t look relieved. At the mention of his father he flinches. “Let’s—let’s get you out of there.”

She bends and examines the wrack, trying to find the power component.

“Magnetic,” Ben rasps at her. “Did you find a key?”

“No,” Rey says, tugging the lightsaber from her belt. “I can do one better though. Stay still.”

He doesn’t move—he can’t move, and she ignites the lightsaber and cuts through the cuffs at his feet first, then at his arms. He collapses forward onto her, breathing heavily and she wraps her arms around him. “I’ve got you,” she says. He is so warm, and heavy, and he’s there, she found him. She’s come to rescue him and she’d really found him. “I’ve got—” He pulls away and pushes past her, grabbing the food on a little table she hadn’t noticed before. He shoves it into his mouth, consuming it as quickly as he can. “No,” Rey says, “Ben, more slowly. You’ll retch it up again if you eat it too quickly.”

He pauses. He swallows. He looks at her. His eyes flicker. They are dull, exhausted, feverish. He takes another bite, more slowly this time, and Rey tugs at her belt for a canister of water. “Here. Drink.”

He takes the water and downs it, his throat bobbing as he swallows. Then he hands it back to her and keeps on eating.

“We don’t have much time,” Rey whispers. “We’ll go back to the Falcon and wait for the others there.”

“Where are they?” he asks. His voice is still raw. She wonders if he’s been screaming.

“They went to blow up the oscillator. So that the Resistance can—”

He grabs her wrist. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what.”

“Don’t say anything. I don’t want to know. I can’t—I can’t…” He is breathing hard, panicking. “If I know, then he’ll—”

“Ben?”

“Please.”

Rey reaches a hand out to him and takes the one that’s hanging limply at his side. He stares at her. “I won’t say more,” she says. “But we need to get out of here. Are you ready?”

Ben stares at her hand in his. He stares and stares and Rey feels suddenly warm. Maybe it’s the coat and awareness letting herself be aware of things now that she’s found her prize, or maybe it’s that Ben’s fevered fingers in hers is oddly calming. He’s here. And so am I.

She squeezes his hand.

He swallows. And takes a deep breath. And squeezes back.

He lets go of her hand and grabs the lightsaber on the table, clipping it to his belt. Then he takes his blaster in hand.

“We’ll have food for you on the Falcon, I promise,” Rey whispers to him. “And blankets, and a ‘fresher, and everything.”

Ben jerks his head in a nod and a moment later they are back out in the hallway.

“Which way?” he asks her.

“This way,” she replies, heading back in the direction she’d come in.

“Is this like with the rathtars?”

“Why is it that both you and Finn bring that up? I found you, didn’t I?”

“Yeah. You did.”

She glances up at him. He looks so tired. For all he’s huge, she doesn’t doubt that she could knock him over with just a finger right now.

“We need to keep moving,” she tells him. He nods.

They do.

He moves more slowly than Rey would like, but she can’t blame him for that. This is the first time his legs will have moved in days, he has been starved, and sick.

“How’s your head feeling?” she asks him

“I’m managing,” he says through gritted teeth.

“Guards!” And she tugs him into an enclave, closing her eyes and willing the Stormtrooper helmets to block them from view. She and Ben are standing so closely together she can feel the heat of his fever rolling off of him. He smells even more rancid now that he’s sweating fresh sweat. But he’s alive, and he’ll be clean soon.

“Good thing they can’t smell through those helmets,” Ben snorts when the coast is clear, as though he’d read her mind. “Or else we’d have been found.”

“Come on,” Rey says, taking his hand again. His grip is stronger in hers this time, steadying the pounding of her heart. Please, she begs whatever luck—the Force—has been guiding her so far. Please let us just get out.

They round a corner and there are a good twelve stormtroopers standing by the door that she and Finn and Han and Chewie had first entered, examining it.

“Look!” one of them calls and Ben doesn’t hesitate. He raises his blaster and fires, killing two of the troopers before the others even know what’s happened. The rest of his shots go awry, though, but it’s enough time for Rey to have ignited the lightsaber in front of him and rush forward.

“Rey!” she hears him shout, as the stormtroopers start firing at her. Then, more desperately, “Rey!”

She swings the lightsaber—or maybe it dances of its own accord in her hand. Muscle memory, dreaded during the brief practice she’d had with it, takes over as she swings and blocks blasts coming her way, doing her best to slice blasters apart. Everything is noise and bursts of light.

Behind her, she can hear the sound of Ben firing his blaster after her too.

A blast connects with the back of her shoulder and she lets out a cry.

“No!”

And then she feels a wave of wind unfurling behind her and the stormtroopers in front of her are knocked out into the snow, their weapons spinning through the air into the trees in the distance. She stares at them.

“Ben?”

Had she done that? Or had he?

“I’m sorry,” he moans as he approaches her, reaching a trembling hand to touch her shoulder where he’d accidentally shot her.

“I’m fine,” she says. “We’ll fix it on the Falcon.”

Ben stiffens, and it’s as if everything slows down as she stares at him. He doesn’t look around, but he takes a deep breath and something about him changes, his presence, as though life is flowing around him, flowing through him, like the breeze through the trees on Takodana. He extends his hand outward and Rey hears a scream. She whirls around. A stormtrooper is being held in the air as if—well, by the Force. A moment later his helmet crunches in on his head.

“Ben,” Rey gasps in horror as the stormtrooper’s corpse falls lifeless to the ground. It’s horrific—seeing just how small the helmet is, the blood dripping out of it onto the snow. Ben had done that. They’d both sent blasts at the stormtroopers, but this is different somehow. Brutal.

“Let’s go,” he rasps. He tucks his blaster into his belt and, hand shaking, reaches for his lightsaber.

He presses the ignition and it illuminates, a clear bright blue that throws his face into a sharper relief. He flinches away from the light.

“We match,” Rey whispers, holding her own out but almost as soon as the words are out of her mouth, he’s turned his off again. With a determined look on his face that she doesn’t think she’s ever seen before, he takes off into the snow.

“Rey? Rey? Come in, Rey?”

The comlink. Finn. He sounds frightened as he calls out to her through the thing.

“Finn?” she asks as she presses it to her lips as she runs after Ben, wincing because that’s her shot shoulder she’d moved to bring the thing to her mouth.

“Where are you?”

“Heading back to the Falcon.”

“Did you find him?”

“Yes. I’m with him now.”

“Chewie! Blow it!”

And she hears—no, feels—a rumbling in the earth beneath her feet—smells—smoke pouring out into the air, mixed with chemicals—hears the explosion that Finn and Chewie have detonated.

Rey’s legs move even faster and ahead of her, Ben loses his balance and falls to the ground. Rey hurries to him, collapsing to her knees next to him, biting her lip to keep from gasping at the way the blast sends a sharp pain through her arm to her heart as she rests her hand on his shoulder. He’s groaning, and clutching at his head.

“Ben?”

“Get out!” he screams, his voice shredding with the violence of his yell.

“Ben—let me—” but he’s propelled her away from him using the same Force that he’d used to blast those stormtroopers off their feet. Rey lands on her hands and knees, gasping in surprise, her shoulder really complaining now.

She shakes herself then leaps to her feet again, running for him. “Ben,” she begs. “Ben, please let me help you.”

His head is feverish and his eyes are bright for the first time as he looks up at her. “I keep giving him what he wants,” Ben says, his voice eerily quiet.

“Giving who? Ben, come on, we’re nearly there now.”

“He’s going to kill everyone. He is. It’s all going to be destroyed.”

“Who? Ben—”

“Me.”

Rey’s heart falters. She can’t tell if he’s laughing or crying as he shakes now, and Rey is still clinging to his putrid clothing, trying to drag him along.

“Vader,” Ben chokes out. “That’s who I am. I’m Vader.”

“You’re delirious,” Rey insists angrily. “You need food, water, and a ‘fresher. Now get up.”

“How aren’t you repulsed by me? Even my parents are.” He still sounds delirious. But he is getting to his feet now, at least. He bends down and picks up his lightsaber, which he had dropped in the snow.

“I know repulsive,” Rey responds fiercely, thinking of Unkar Plutt, of Teedo, of everyone on Jakku who had watched her like starving wolves, waiting for her to die so they could feast upon her lair. “You’re not repulsive.” She takes his hand again, and he closes his eyes. His head lolls back ever so slightly and Rey is convinced he’s about to lose consciousness.

But he opens his eyes again. “I’m going mad,” he whispers.

“You’re not.”

“I am. I always have been. It’s all been putting it off, pretending that I’m not.”

“You need food,” Rey repeats. “Come on.” She tugs his hand and this time—this time he comes. He moves slowly, like an old man whose muscles have long ago atrophied.

Through the trees and snow and wind, they make their way slowly. They reach the Falcon where they’d crash landed it and Rey leads Ben aboard.

“’Fresher. Now,” Rey commands, pushing him towards it. “I’ll find you some clothes and get you something to eat.” She pauses, watching as he stumbles towards the tiny cabin. “Do you need me to help you?” she asks. He’s weak, and sick, and all sorts of things.

“You’ve seen enough of me at my worst,” he says dryly. “Spare me what’s left of my dignity and let me clean my own shit off me.”

Rey nods, and retreats, and leaves him. First things first, she finds some bacta for her shoulder, sighing the moment it touches her skin. Then, she tears through several drawers until she finds clothes that look like they might fit him, and blankets as well. She folds them and leaves them outside the ‘fresher before she going to prepare food.

“Finn,” she asks the comlink breathlessly as she begins to cook. Finn hasn’t contacted her since they blew up the oscillator.

“Nearly there,” Finn says. “Can you power up the ship?”

“On it.” She heads to the cockpit, flicking through switches on the dashboard. Then she heads back out into the main bay. She finds Ben sitting at the dejarik table, a cup of the stew she’d hydrated for him in his hands and a blanket wrapped around his shoulders.

He looked smaller, sitting like that, wrapped in a blanket, his hair hanging loose and damp in his face. “There’s more where that came from,” she tells him going and sitting down next to him. “If you’re still hungry.”

He doesn’t look at her immediately. He just stares at the stew for a moment, before raising the cup to his lips and drinking down the broth. “Rest,” Rey whispers, hoping that’s comforting. “You’re safe now.”

He glances at her, his eyes hard. Then he shakes his head and turns back to the stew. “No I’m not. I’m never going to be safe.”

“You’re not alone, then,” Rey says taking his hand again and squeezing it. He looks down at their hands again, his nostrils flaring. He moves his jaw as though chewing on something.

Footsteps are echoing up from the gang-plank and Rey lurches to her feet, drawing her lightsaber and preparing to fight in case it’s stormtroopers.

But it’s Finn, and Chewie.

“We need to get out of here,” Finn says, panic dripping from his voice.

“Where’s Han?” Rey asks.

But it’s not Finn who answers, but Ben. “He’s off world. They took him.” And then, horribly, Ben jams his head back against the wall, his face scrunched in pain.

“Ben—” Rey begins, but Finn grabs her wrist. “You need to help Chewie fly us off this place. The Resistance is gonna blow it up any moment.”

Rey looks back at Ben, who’s still hitting his head against the wall, and Finn takes a step towards him. Rey turns away, hurrying towards the cockpit, hearing Finn say to Ben, “Come on, man. Stop that. That’s not going to help anyone. And I bet it doesn’t even feel good.”

Chewie is sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, and Rey takes a deep breath and settles down in the seat that had belonged to Han Solo. Together, they maneuver the Falcon into the air, into the atmosphere.

Chapter Text

Rey had been right.

He isn’t going mad.

That is comforting.

To an extent.

He eats, and the more he eats the more he feels like—

He can’t say himself. He doesn’t know what he is supposed to feel like.  But he does feel.  Specifically: he feels terrible.

He sits there with Finn, breathing in and out as the younger man watches him, clearly worried he’s going to try cracking his skull open again.  “I won’t,” he tells Finn quietly.

“Yeah.  I’m not gonna trust that,” Finn says, and a rush of warmth mixed with annoyance floods Ben.  He’s used to that emotion, though.  That has always been how he felt about his family.

“What happened with my father?” he asks.

“We were setting up the explosives,” Finn supplies at once.  “Your dad was on the far side and he got caught.  At first it looked like he’d be able to talk his way out of it. Then Phasma showed up.”

“Phasma?” 

“She was my captain. When I was with the First Order.”

Ben nods slowly.  He can see it now in his mind’s eye.  His father knows how Stormtroopers work. He’ll put on a smile, fake some orders—he’s a contractor, or something, double checking the coupling capacitators on the oscillator.  The low-level grunts that Snoke employs—they won’t know whether to believe him or not—enough to stall while Finn and Chewie continue laying blasts.  Then an officer in a crisp uniform shows up and that is that. Han Solo is disarmed and brought to the prison bay—and, when it is clear that the planet is gonna blow, taken off-world.

Did Snoke tell them who he was? Ben wonders.

He reaches out with the Force.

There is no silken voice in his head—only memories.  Ben, no!  That way leads to the Dark side!  You have to control yourself.

Come on, kid, don’t be like that, his father had said to him when he had seen him for the first time in sixteen years.

Heir to Vader, prince of darkness.

But Rey had come for him, his father had come for him too.  Finn, Chewie—his mom probably knew about it too.

They didn’t want you.  They wanted you to be what they wanted—not what you are.  They tried to steer you away from what you are.  This is what you are.

How easily he had crushed the skull of that stormtrooper.  How easily he had hurt himself.  Pain and death do not bother him as they should.

There’s a darkness in you, Ben.  It frightens me, because I’ve never seen the like of it before.  But I am not afraid of you.  I was weak.

He runs his hand through his hair, his fingers pausing over the bruising on the back of his head.  Darkness, he thinks.  It’s calming. To just—call it that.  He can never be a Jedi like his uncle because there is too much darkness in him.

You see? Snoke’s voice creeps into his mind.  What you are.

Rey comes out of the cockpit and gives him a soft smile.  “How are you feeling?”

“How’s your shoulder?” he asks, not answering her question.

“Sore,” she admits. “But we’ll get it fixed the rest of the way back on D’Qar.  I pu some bacta on it.”  She steels herself.  “I’m sorry about your father.  We’ll find him.”

“If they don’t kill him,” Ben says darkly.  Rey frowns, and he adds, “I’d be surprised if they did.  He’s worth more to them alive, holding him over our heads.”

He thinks of Snoke. Strange, that his mother and he would face the same creature in different ways.  Which of us does he wish to destroy more profoundly?

He goes cold.

He wishes he were unconscious again.

He wishes he were dead. He should have just stepped in front of one of those stormtrooper blasts.  That would have made everyone’s life easier.  It certainly would have made his own easier.

You know what it is now, though, a voice inside him that sounds almost like his own tells him.  You’re not mad.  That voice inside you was real, and it was Snoke this whole time. 

His mother’s adversary. A Force user.  Someone whose ambition was so great that he sought to blot out the age of Empire all on his own.

Heir to Vader.

Ben feels horribly small, wrapped in a blanket on his father’s space ship, eating stew like he’s a child again.  He can see it all so much more clearly than he had before.  Everything that Snoke wants is wrapped up in some legacy, written in his blood and in the Force.  And he won’t stop until he has it.

-

There’s celebration on D’Qar when they arrive, people cheering and throwing their arms around one another in the fleet’s success in destroying Starkiller base.

Finn goes off to find his friend the pilot, and Rey helps Ben up from his seat.  He leans heavily on her, still feeling dizzy and lightheaded despite having food in his stomach that he’d managed to keep down.  The sky is bright, the air is pleasantly warm, and as she leads him towards the medical bay for examination, a small woman, grey haired and straight-backed pulls herself away from the celebration.

That his mother looks older than when he had last seen her doesn’t surprise him.  But she has the same gait to her movement, and her pace increases rapidly the closer she gets until she stops just a few feet from him.

“Ben,” she breathes, and her eyes are bright and Ben can sense her right down in his gut now that the Force is pulsing through him again. 

“Hi mom,” he says quietly, his voice thick, and a moment later she’s hugging him and Ben doesn’t mean to start crying, he really doesn’t.  But he thinks the last time he was held at all was when his mother had whispered be good to him before he’d gone off to Luke and she even smells the same as he bends to press his face into her hair.  For just a moment, everything abates, the knowledge of where his father is, the crushing weight of how it’s his fault.  For just a moment, he’s safe and his mom’s holding him and she’ll keep the darkness at bay.  She always does.

“I can’t believe you got even taller,” she says looking up at him.  “I’m going to break my neck, trying to see your face.  How did you get this tall?”  She’s shaking her head. 

“We were going to the medical bay,” Rey pipes up.  “He’s been through a lot and I got shot.”

“I’ll come with you,” Leia says.  She hasn’t looked at Rey at all.  She can’t take her eyes off Ben. 

It takes her until they are all the way inside before she asks the question he’s been dreading. She stops short in her tracks, looking back over her shoulder towards the Falcon where Chewie is standing, talking with Threepio.  “Where’s Han?”

Ben swallows and meets her gaze.  “I don’t know,” he whispers. 

His mother closes her eyes. 

She always does that.

She doesn’t like it when people see her grief.

-

They hook Ben up to a thing that’ll pump nutrients right into his bloodstream.  “You’ve been malnourished for a long time,” the medi-droid tells him after reading his signals.  “Longer than just a few days.”  This doesn’t surprise Ben at all, but when his mother looks at him there’s worry in her face.

Rey is taken care of swiftly—the plasma bolt wound is easy to fix with a patch of high-strength bacta, and she'd already had some medium-strength on it—and she removes herself subtly, clearly wanting to give mother and son some space.

“They have dad,” Ben says at last.

“I know,” his mother replies, clearly trying to soothe him as though he’s eight again.  It shouldn’t rankle as much as it does.  “We’ll get him back.  We’ll think of something.  It won’t be the first time I’ll have to go rescue your father.”  She pauses, looking carefully at him.  “Where’ve you been, Ben?  Why did you leave Luke?”

Anger flashes across him, and he’s hooked up to a heart monitor and his mother’s eyes flick to it when his heart rate increases before his eyes.  “You’ll have to ask him that,” Ben says through gritted teeth. 

“I will,” she says quietly. “When we find him, I will.  But I want to know why you left.”

Ben looks at his mother. 

I saw such darkness, Ben.

Heir to Vader.

His mother hadn’t even told him that Darth Vader was his grandfather.  She had hated Vader, he had tortured her, and destroyed her homeworld, had murdered her mother.  She had lied to him, lied to the whole galaxy, and left Luke to pick up the pieces—something he had failed spectacularly at.

“Why didn’t you tell me that Darth Vader was my grandfather?” he spits out and Leia flushes.

“I didn’t want it to weigh you down,” Leia says.

“So you chose to lie to me.”

“You were a child.”

“And then I was off with Luke, so out of sight, out of mind.”

He can see that he’s hurting her, can see that his anger upsets her.  He doesn’t know if he cares.  It hurt—that you lied to me.  It should hurt you too.

“Was that what you and Luke fought about?”

“Fought?” Ben asks. His uncle done exactly what Snoke had done, got caught in it, and then made up some drivel about how sorry he was. Not that his mother had ever believed Ben about the voices in his dreams.

“Why else would you leave?” Leia asks.

“Because I can’t be a Jedi.”

His mother looks at him sadly.  “You can. You can be anything you—”

“I don’t want to be a Jedi. There’s too much Vader in me.”

His mother freezes. There.  Let her be repulsed by him too.  First his uncle, then his mother.  Let them all see that he’s not what they think he is. 

Rey’s face flashes across his mind and now it’s his turn to freeze.  Not what Snoke thinks I am either.

“That’s not true,” Leia says at last.  “You’re—you’re nothing like him.  You’re loving, and kind, and—”

“And I murder people in cold blood,” Ben says.  “I’m powerful with the Force, but that power doesn’t come from the Light and it never has. That’s why you sent me to Luke to begin with.  To turn me into something I’m not.  Isn’t that it?”

“To help you with your nightmares.  To help you learn to control—”

“Yeah, well, it didn’t help,” Ben says bitingly.  “The only thing that helped was going off on my own and cutting myself off from the Force and pretending none of it was real, and none of it was part of me, because every time I thought about myself, they’d come flooding back again.”

His words hang in the air and he stares at his mother.  He wills her to say something.  He needs her to say something.  She always has something to say.

But she doesn’t say anything.  She looks winded, sad, old, small.  When had his mother ever looked small?

She can’t help you. She doesn’t want to help you.  I can, though.

It’s Snoke’s voice, smooth and soft. 

“Snoke,” he says to his mother.  That seems to stir her from her misery.  “He’s the one who sent me nightmares.”

Her neck straightens, her jaw juts, and her eyes harden.  Yes.  That is the Leia Organa that Ben remembers, not the tired old woman.

“He has Force users?”

“No.  He is one.  I hear his voice in my mind.  He wants me to be his Vader.”

It is not as comforting as he wants it to be—seeing his own horror mirrored in his mother’s face.  It makes him feel small again.  Why can Snoke make them both feel small?

“So he sent you nightmares, stoking the darkness in you, hoping to send you to him.”  Her voice is steadier than the look on her face.  Ben clings to that steadiness.

“Yes.”

“And you’ve resisted him thus far.”  Pride flashes through her voice.  “You’re here. You’re alive.  Vader was never more than a slave, but you’re free.”

“Am I?”  He doesn’t mean to say it aloud, doesn’t mean to sound deflated and lost.

“You are, sweetheart,” his mother says fiercely, and she reaches a hand out, cupping his cheek, brushing her thumb along his cheekbone and he’s small again, and crying, and his mother is brushing his tears away, telling him it will be all right.

Except it hadn’t been all right.  She’d been wrong.

“As long as Snoke’s alive, I’m not free,” he says wearily.  “I don’t trust my own head.  I don’t know if I’m thinking things he put here, or if I’m thinking them on my own and—” his voice breaks and he stops talking.  And I’m afraid, mommy.

He’s almost thirty, and afraid.

Weak.

Pathetic.

“This only serves to confirm further that we need to find Luke.  As soon as possible.  If Snoke is a Force user, that means that our family is stronger together when it comes to facing him.  When you’re strong, you can—”

“I’m not going to find him,” Ben nearly shouts, that hot rage back.

His mother looks at him sharply.  “Ben—”

“I won’t.  I refuse.”

“Ben, he can help you.”

“Oh, like he did the first time?”

“Ben—what happened?”

Ben’s trembling now, and there are instruments on a metal tray by his bedside and they start shaking. They’re shaking because Ben’s shaking with anger.

“Never mind,” his mother says.  “Ben, stop. Stop, if it’s that distressing, please. I don’t need to know.  We’ll find him some other way.”

She’s watching him closely, undoubtedly gauging his reaction to the news that she still intended to bring Luke Skywalker home.

Ben doesn’t react at all. He doesn’t say another word.  They sit there, silence stretching out like galaxies between them.

“I’m glad you’re safe,” Leia says at last, reaching a hand out again and brushing some of his hair out of his face.

“I’m not safe,” he says dully.

“I’m glad you’re here, then,” she adjusts stubbornly.

Ben wishes he could say the same.  But he’s exhausted and he feels empty and so very afraid.  He wishes he were asleep again.

Then, it occurs to him,

“Is there something that can knock me out?  I…I haven’t slept well,” he confesses.

Leia glances down the ward and waves the medi-droid over.  A moment later, he’s being injected with sweet sleep and his eyes close, and he exhales.

When he wakes again three days later, Rey is gone.

Chapter Text

Rey never dreamed of greatness.  It was part of why she’d been so confused when the lightsaber—Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber—had called to her below Maz’s. She’d had a child’s imagination of heroism, but what she’d really longed for was a home, wanted a family.  She didn’t care if that meant she stayed a garbage rat forever—so long as someone loved or needed her.  Those childish imaginings had all been to comfort her through her loneliness because what garbage rat could ever dream of such  greatness when she was completely alone?

After Starkiller Base, after rescuing Ben—alone—from a First Order cell, people start to look at her differently.  They start to whisper behind their hands about her.

She’s used to being whispered about, used to being stared at.  She’d had a reputation on Jakku, fierce and untrusting, and when you were the sort of person who was untrusting you tended to get people watching you, wondering what you’d do next.  But the eyes that follow her now aren’t untrusting.

If anything they are too trusting.  And Rey doesn’t know what to do with that.

“I’ve been noticing that too,” Finn tells her quietly when she brings it up, a slight frown to his forehead.  “It’s like people think we’re…we’re heroes or something.  For getting on and out again.”  He doesn’t sound wholly enthused.

“What’s wrong?” Rey asks him.

“I don’t know if I like it—the attention I mean.”  He’s avoiding her gaze.

“You’re still trying to run away,” she whispers, going suddenly cold.

“Phasma saw me—she saw me.  She knows I’m with the Resistance now.”

“You’ll be safer here than on your own,” she protests.  “And—”

“I’m not leaving you, don’t worry,” he says.  “But I don’t like the attention.  I don’t want them parading me out, putting a target on my back when my captain knows what I was up to, that I helped destroy Starkiller.”  He takes a deep breath.  “Whatever I told Han, and you, when I was just trying to get out—I’m not a big deal with the Resistance.  I don’t know if I want to be.  And I think I became one somehow.”

“I don’t think there’s any going back,” Rey tells him, biting her lip.  “I don’t think we get to be unknown anymore.”

Finn glances around the mess hall.  Conversations are hushed in the immediate vicinity, but the further away the Resistance members are, the more boisterous they become. 

“No,” he agrees. “There’s no going back,” and he looks at her, his gaze stern.  “No going back to Jakku, either.  If I’m a big deal, so are you.  You don’t get to jump ship.  We’re in this together.”

Rey likes that—in this together.  She’s never been in anything together with anyone.  And not going back to Jakku—well…

“Excuse me,” C-3PO appears at their shoulders.  “Miss Rey—General Organa would like to see you.”

Rey gets to her feet at once, before saying, “See you later,” to Finn and following the gold-plated protocol droid through the base until she reached General Organa.

The General’s room is sparse—a table, some chairs, several holopads resting on surfaces.  There’s a window that looks out over the main drag of the base, presently empty of people, but, Rey is sure, much more active when it’s not lunch.  The General is sitting in a chair reading through information on a holopad herself but she looks up and waves Rey over when the doors close behind her.

“How’s Ben?” Rey asks at once.

“Still sleeping.  He’s been through a lot,” the General says. “I can’t thank you enough for what you did, getting him out.”  Her eyes are bright, and her voice is a little thick.

“Of course,” Rey tells her, feeling suddenly embarrassed.  She hadn’t done it to be thanked, to be rewarded—she’d done it because she couldn’t fathom letting Ben stay imprisoned.  But when Leia Organa spoke, she knew she couldn’t say that. His mother took it personally, even if she might try to appear otherwise.

The General reaches out a hand and squeezes Rey’s.  “I had always hoped I’d see him again, get a chance to…” she pauses, as if trying to think of the right word, before shaking her head.  “The road recovering the time we lost will be hard because it’s been hard for him.  Thank you for bringing him back home.”

“It was luck, really,” Rey whispers.  “He was trying to steal the Falcon at the same time as me and Finn.”

“I’m too old to believe in luck anymore,” Leia says.  “Luck wasn’t what helped Luke blow up the Death Star—luck wasn’t what got Han and me through that asteroid field, no matter what he says.  Things are fated, or they’re not.  And the Force is strong with you.”

A shiver goes up Rey’s spine and her mouth goes dry as Leia gives her a significant look.  Her brother’s lightsaber seems to weigh suddenly so very heavy on her belt.  “You have already done so much for me.  But I have to ask you to do one more thing, and I think you’re the only person who can do it.”  She nods to the lightsaber.  “That belonged to my brother.  I don’t know what happened between him and Ben—the second I asked, Ben started to well,” she pauses and takes a deep breath, “lose control, which means asking him is going to be completely out of the question for the time being.  But we need Luke.  I need Luke.  And I need someone to bring him back.  And he could teach you so much.  Snoke,” she pauses, her nostrils flaring, “Snoke is strong with the Force. You know this.  You—you’ve seen what he’s done to my son.”

Rey knows.  Rey knows too well.  She saw Ben falling apart in the snow, hitting himself in the head—and even before that, the haggard defeated way he seemed to move. 

“Training you to defend yourself is of the utmost import.  And if you can keep helping the Resistance—that’s your choice.  But I don’t want Snoke to turn his gaze on you, to try to manipulate your mind the way he’s tried with Ben.”  She gives Rey a steady look, an intense one, one that makes Rey both feel very small and very strong all at once.  “So?  Will you go and find my brother?”

Luke Skywalker. 

Her heart patters a little bit faster just at the thought of his name.

His lightsaber had called to her.

“Yes,” Rey says, her voice rasping.  Then, clearing her throat, a little louder, “Yes.”

Leia seems to sag with relief.  “Thank you,” she says as she opens a box on her desk that Rey hadn’t even noticed. She hands Rey a small glowing device on a leather thong.  Rey looks up at Leia, her eyes asking a question.

“This is a cloaked binary beacon,” Leia says as she takes a second device on a matching chord and wraps it around her wrist.  “They react when they’re near one another, and if you press,” she reaches over and presses a button in the center of the device, “it will help point you towards the other.  I can’t guarantee that we’ll still be in D’Qar by the time you make it back with Luke. We shouldn’t be, since the First Order knows we’re here.  This will help you find us if our ships can’t locate each other.  This will bring you home.”

The corners of Rey’s eyes sting, and she looks between Leia and the beacon. 

She’ll be leaving. But this life—these people—they won’t be lost to her forever.  She’ll be back to them soon. 

They want her to come back.

-

“Everything will be all right,” Finn promises her as she boards the Falcon with Chewie.  Finn, who had promised her together, who she’d been afraid would leave her and now she’s the one saying goodbye.

“When Ben wakes up,” she says, “tell him…”

“You’ll be back,” Finn says firmly.  “And that you couldn’t wait for him to wake up to say goodbye.”  He gives her a firm hug and she rests her forehead against his shoulder. 

“I’ll be back,” she tells him, needing him to understand just how much she means it.  “I’ll see you soon, Finn.  I promise.”  I won’t leave you behind.  Either of you.

The Falcon is much quieter with just her and Chewie and Artoo. Artoo rolls around the ship, sometimes connecting to the computer main frame and chatting with it as though it were an old friend, other times repairing things that sometimes needed repairing and other times most definitely did not. 

There is only one reason that Chewie is flying with her right now, and the Wookiee had told it to her matter-of-factly as they made the jump to hyperspace.  “Leia said that Luke’s our best shot of rescuing Han.  It worked last time.”

“Last time?” Rey asks, sensing that there’s a story there.

“A long time ago, during the Rebellion,” Chewie begins, and that’s how Rey hears the exact details of the destruction of the Tattooine Hutts—though she does wonder if Chewie exaggerates a little bit.  Somehow she doubts that Han Solo was shooting people while still blinded from his carbonized state.  She’s heard plenty of tall tales about Han Solo in her life but none of them seem so tall as that.

“He’s your best friend,” Rey observes, thinking of Ben and Finn.  Hadn’t she done something like what Chewie describes—diving into the bowels of the enemy to rip out a prisoner she cared for, and damn whoever tried to stop her?

“After a certain point, friends become family,” Chewie tells her and there’s a sadness there.

“You don’t have any family anymore?” Rey asks.

“Somewhere,” Chewie says, “Lost to me.  Then found briefly.  Then…” he makes a sad noise that isn’t a word.  “Then I chose my family.”

“Do you regret it?”

“No.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t miss them.  It’s nice to hear your own language spoken every now and then.”

Rey reaches a hand out and pats Chewie’s arm. 

“We’ll rescue Han too—I promise.  I made good on my promise about Ben, didn’t I?  I don’t leave people behind.”

-

Space travel is slow, as it turns out, when you’re not getting boarded by smugglers and criminals and flying out of hangars at lightspeed and on your way to rescue a friend from the First Order.  The coordinates that they’d gotten from the map will take them far out into the Unknown Regions, which Chewie estimates will take them five or six days. 

He teaches her how to play Dejarik and defeats her thoroughly every time.  “You’re not as bad as some,” he tells her, not unkindly after ripping one of her players apart again. 

When she grows bored with the game, she sets herself to examining the Falcon.  She knows that Unkar Plutt had put a compressor on the ignition, but she has yet to determine what else the ship might need in order to be in fighting form. She tightens wiring, resets the dampeners, and, when she grows tired of that, sets herself to cleaning the ship. It’s gathered grime over the years and when she asks Chewie when the last time it got properly cleaned was, he just laughs at her. 

“Probably when Lando owned her.”

Rey doesn’t know who Lando is, but she can connect the dots.  She reorganizes the supply closet, she cleans the captain’s quarters which are so covered in dust and grime that she can’t fathom anyone sleeping there.

It’s when she’s on her belly with a rag, cleaning the grime from under the bed that a piece of paper comes loose. It’s a drawing—a child’s by the look of it.  It has two figures drawn onto it—both barely more than lines with circular heads.  One has a green extension to his arm and the other one is much smaller, clearly a child compared to a man.

In big block letters, she sees the words happy birthday uncle luke and her heart twists.  The card had clearly never made it to Uncle Luke.  She tucks it away in her pocket to give to Luke Skywalker when she sees him.

With the captain’s quarters clean, she offers them to Chewie to rest, but he just shakes his head.  “It would be too strange.  I wouldn’t fall asleep.  You take it.”

So she does, curling up on the bed and staring up at the ceiling.  Han Solo had slept in this bunk.  So had Leia Organa, probably.  Had Ben? 

He’s probably too tall to fit in it properly now, she thinks as she begins to drift off.  He’s so tall…

Consciousness reclaims her sometime later, the hum of the ship filling her ears before fading slightly. Confused, she opens her eyes and to her complete shock, she sees Ben sitting there in a seat.

“How’d you get on the ship?” she blurts out at the same time that he says, “You came back.” 

There’s something almost wistful in his tone before his gaze clouds and he says.  “No.  No—you’re not here.”  It turns into a full on frown.  “How are you—no.  You’re not doing this.  The effort would kill you.”

“Not doing what?”

“Connecting us.  How…” he stares at her, his gaze hungry for answers, his mind clearly spinning as quickly as it can.

Rey swallows.  “I’m glad you’re all right.  I knew you would be, but you were still asleep when I left. Did Finn tell you I said goodbye?”

Ben nods, but he doesn’t look pleased.  Though, to be fair, when has he ever looked pleased?

“How are you feeling?” she asks, doing her best to ignore the shadows on his face.  “Calmer?”

He snorts.  “My dad’s been kidnapped by my worst nightmare and it’s my fault.”

“It’s not,” she insists. “There was no way we’d leave you there.”

“Yeah?  Maybe you should have.”

She stares at him, surprised.  Why would he even say that?  “I don’t leave people behind,” she snaps.  “I’m not my parents.”  Her voice cracks over the word. 

Ben’s eyes flicker. “They left you?” he asks softly.

Suddenly it is Rey’s head that hurts—hurts like she’s been staring at the sun, blinding her as she stares after her parents’ departing ship, and leaving her unable to hide in the shadows.  She lifts a head to her forehead, rubbing at her skull.

“Rey?”

She shakes her head and when she looks back at him, the pain lessens a little bit.  “We’ll rescue him.  Your father.”  His face twitches when she says the word father.  “We won’t leave him with Snoke.  We’ll bring Luke back and—”

He gets to his feet and turns away from her, breathing hard.  He’s wearing different clothes now, ones that fit him a little better, ones that are cleaner, and the line of his torso tapering from his shoulders to his hips makes Rey’s mouth go dry. 

“When you come back with Luke, I’ll be long gone,” he tells her at last. 

“What?  Are they sending you somewhere?”

“No,” Ben says, his voice eerily calm.  “No, but I’m not going to stay here if he comes.  I never want to see him ever again.  So I guess that means goodbye.”

“Ben—” He turns to look at her and it’s something about his expression, heated and angry, that makes her snap. “What is it about you?  You have a family, a father who risked his life for you, and a mother who loves you—and you just want to run away from it?  Run away from them?”

“My uncle isn’t my parents. He’s not my family,” Ben snarls.

“He was once,” Rey retorts and she grabs the piece of paper she’d found under the bed and shoves it towards him.

“Some things can’t be undone,” Ben says, staring at the drawing he’d once made of him and his uncle. “Can’t be unseen, can’t be unexperienced.”

“What’s so bad that—”

But Ben has disappeared completely and Rey is breathing as though she’s been fighting, staring at the place that he’d been only moments before.

Then she folds the paper and tucks it into her belt.  Maybe it will matter more to Luke Skywalker than to Ben Solo.

Chapter Text

“The First Order knows where we are,” the General tells the gathered recruits. “Which means it’s time to ship out again. Commander D’Acy will be leading the efforts to get us offworld as quickly as possible. Any questions or concerns go her way.”

And that’s it. Immediately after, D’Acy is commanding different squads to take on different responsibilities with a meticulous efficiency. Ben stops listening, though. He shouldn’t pay attention to any of the gory details.

“I should go,” he tells his mother as she approaches him, but she shakes her head even as he says, “Snoke will know where you are so long as I’m here. He’ll know anything I know as long as I know it.”

“We can take on Snoke,” his mother says as she leads him into her room.

“How? Because I’ve been trying my whole life and I haven’t been able to—” he cuts himself off, breathing hard through his nose, but an odd wave of unexpected calm washes over him. Rey had been in this room. Before she’d left, probably—talking to his mother, agreeing to go find Luke. Had she found him already? Ben already regrets sleeping for as long as he did. If he hadn’t, maybe he could have convinced her not to go.

Idly he begins to test the Force. He does not reach out—it hadn’t been a reaching, whatever it was that had connected her to him. It had been different. Something else. What had it been?

Because he was sure it hadn’t been a hallucination.

“Ben?”

He’d been too lost in thought, had missed whatever it was his mother had been saying because it was far easier to think of Rey than it was to think of Snoke. “Aren’t you tired of running from the fight,?” his mother asks, her tone telling him that she is repeating the question.

“I’m not running,” he spits through gritted teeth.

“So I suppose you’re still planning on shipping out before Luke gets here.”

“Assuming that Rey can convince him to come, yes.”

“And how isn’t that running?”

Rage seizes him, and the table with its holopads starts to shake. “Maybe I’m tired of having to face everything on my own.” Luke, Snoke—what difference did it make. Both of them tried to get him on his own, and both of them did it the exact same way. And the worst part of it all is that even if Snoke’s more dangerous—and Ben knows he is—Luke hurts more, and maybe always will.

“You won’t have to do it on your own.”

“Because you’re going to side with me over Luke.”

“I don’t know what happened, Ben. You won’t tell me.”

No. He won’t. He won’t because she’ll look at him and say, that’s not true. That’s impossible, the way that everyone would if he told the truth: that perfect hero Luke Skywalker grew past his own perfection.

Or, worse, she’ll ask him why it’s such a big deal.

“I’m going to leave,” he tells her. “I’m going to—”

“Abandon your father,” she says, and Ben lets out a snarl like a wounded animal, rounding on his mother. She’s so much smaller than him and it still jars him. He still expects to be smaller than her. He feels it too much.

“I’m not leaving him,” Ben grits out, feeling his whole body deflate at the words.

“Ben,” his mother’s voice is gentle. “You’re not a little boy anymore—you need to think further ahead than you do. You can’t constantly react to things. That’s how Snoke keeps getting to you.”

“You have no idea how Snoke keeps getting to me,” he growls at her. He thinks of Rey. You could have her if you wanted, Snoke had promised, and then she’d appeared before him, as though she’d never left, with only a slight muffling of the ears and no exertion through the Force as far as he could work out. How? “He’s not after me the same way he’s been after you. And it’s not like you’ve been able to stop him either.”

His mother inhales sharply. “Maybe not, but I’m not giving him what he wants.”

“How do you know? He couldn’t get me for years.”

“He tried isolating you from us on purpose. He had a reason for it. Stay, Ben. Please. We’ll fight him together, we’ll destroy him together and then—”

“We’ll be one big happy family again?” Ben snorts. He can imagine dinners with Uncle Luke over a long table, pretending like his uncle hadn’t—he hadn’t—

“We can at least try,” his mother whispers, but he shakes his head. “We were happy once.”

But Ben can’t remember that. Or maybe she’s referring to the time before he’d been born, when it had been her, and dad, and Uncle Luke and monsters to defeat in the name of hope and light.

“If you go, you go,” his mother tells him. “But at least make sure you’re choosing it and it’s not choosing you.”

-

He finds Finn talking with Poe Dameron, who is already suited up in his oranges.

“We’ve got a ship with your name on it,” Dameron is saying to Finn. “If you want it.”

“I’m not a pilot. I was only ever a gunner,” Finn says dully. “And I bet your two-man ships are already filled up.” The way that Poe hesitates tells both Ben and Finn that Finn hit the nail on the head with that one. “You don’t have time to train me.”

“We’ll find something for you,” Dameron vows.

“Look, I’m just waiting for Rey to come back. I don’t know if I’m here long term.” That makes Ben pause and he glances between the two of them. He tries to imagine Finn and Rey exploring the galaxy together, taking off in a ship the way they’d planned to take off in the Falcon without knowing that Ben had been on board. It’s a good image, but it leaves him feeling oddly lonely as he looks at Finn, who is looking at Poe. They’d keep each other safe. Rey’s strong with the Force, and will learn how to use it, and Finn…

Ben inhales sharply. It’s there in Finn, a flicker of light, faint not for lack of strength but for lack of untapped potential. You don’t have time to train me, Finn had just said. When this is all over, though…

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get there. I get it—you need time.” But from his tone, Ben is fairly sure that Dameron is sure that Finn will be joining the Resistance in no time.

If Finn is frustrated by the assumption, he holds it back until Dameron turns to Ben. “What about you? You gonna help out?”

Ben stares at him blankly. “Help?”

“As I remember, you were quite the pilot even as a kid. You on that speeder.”

Ben remembers the speeder, a gift from his dad—(“He’s gonna be a pilot—best in the galaxy, you’ll see”)—but he doesn’t remember Poe Dameron being there.

“He helped fly us off Jakku,” Finn adds unhelpfully. They’re staring at him and there’s a war in Ben’s mind. Does Poe want him to be some shadow of who he was supposed to be, like his mother, like his uncle? He has all the blood of a pilot—Luke Skywalker’s and Han Solo’s natural finesse. And Vader. Don’t forget Vader. But that was a life he’d turned away from when he’d turned away from the Force.

Except the Force is still swirling around him. He hasn’t turned it off ever since he’d accidentally shot Rey.

I want to fly.

In the back of his mind, he hears his mother’s voice.

You can’t constantly react to things.

Ben pulls his lips back in a smile that he knows doesn’t meet his eyes. “What sort of ship were you thinking?”

-

“Happy beeps here, buddy, come on. We've pulled crazier stunts than this,” Poe’s voice comes in over the comlink, and Ben’s lips twist in a wry smile. The droid is afraid, and he can’t blame it, even if his heart is singing in his own chest. He’s doing something, he’s out there, fighting. See, mom? Not running away. Ben’s hand tightens on his controls. Not yet, he tells himself.

It’s been two days since the evacuation order and Ben’s not officially part of the Resistance or anything, but it’s all hands on deck, and they’d lost too many pilots over Starkiller. So here he is. Just follow my lead, Poe told him, as though he was supposed to understand what that meant.

He hangs back now with the rest of the Black Squadron, his eyes, like everyone else’s, on Poe’s ship, so tiny in the face of the First Order dreadnaughts and Star Destroyers he was facing.

“Just for the record, Commander Dameron,” his mother’s voice catches in his ear, “I'm with the droid on this one.”

Of course she is. She’d thought it was too dangerous, but the second that Ben had said he was going too, she’d paused, looking at him, unsure if he was serious or not, and that had been all the advantage that Poe had needed to press forward.

“Thank you for your support, General,” Poe replies, then, to BB-8, “Happy beeps.” His voice changes then, growing more important, lower, louder as he hails the First Order Fleet. “Attention! This is Commander Poe Dameron of the Republic fleet. I have an urgent communique for General Hugs.”

Hux. Something about the name stings Ben’s brain. Why? He’s never heard it before. Then he tilts his head back against the seat and takes a deep, shaking breath. Of course. Snoke had left something in his mind, some connection. The Supreme Leader of the First Order and one of his Generals. You could be Vader.

What would that make Hux to him? Someone who commands him? Or someone he would command?

“Hi, I'm holding for General Hugs,” Poe says in his ear, jerking him out of the thought. “Okay; I'll hold. Hello? Yup. I'm still here. Hux? With an ‘H’? Skinny guy. Kinda pasty? Look, I can't hold forever. If you reach him... Tell him Leia has an urgent message for him. About his mother. Beebee-ate, punch it!”

And Poe’s ship shoots forward at top speed. Ben’s fingers twitch on the controls again. He wants to fly forward like that too, wants to feel his stomach lurch with going too fast, to see the stars blur, but know that he’ll be fine because of course he’ll be fine. He’s never had trouble flying. Even without the Force, when it had been harder, when his reflexes had been sluggish, he’d still been good at it.

Your father’s son? Vader was a pilot too. A better pilot than Han Solo.

“Desperate, aren’t you?” Ben whispers to no one.

“Beebee-ate, my weapon systems are down. We gotta take out that last cannon...or our bombers are toast,” Poe’s voice rings in his ears, quiet now, though. Eerily so. “Make your magic work, buddy”

Desperate? His brain pinches in on itself. Hardly.

“You did it, Poe. Now get your squad back here so we can get out of this place.”

Just showing you the truth, as I have always worked to. Can you say the same of your mother? Of your uncle?

At least make sure you’re choosing it and it’s not choosing you.

“Sorry mom,” Ben mutters as he accelerates forward, wanting nothing more than to move because maybe if he’s moving his head will shut up for a few minutes.

“No, General—we can do this. We have a chance to take down a dreadnought,” Poe says in Ben’s ear, and Ben’s flying faster than he’s flown in years—Poe had been right, this thing does pack a punch. Faster than his father’s hunk of junk for sure, and more delicate, the way that he weaves his way across the stretched surface of the dreadnaught. “These things are fleet killers, we can't let it get away.”

“Disengage now. Commander, that is an order.” His mother’s voice is stern—hard.

But Poe is choosing, and so is Ben as he zooms forward, taking out a TIE fighter as Poe calls in the bombers because he can sense the two grunts who are piloting and gunning the thing. That could have been Finn, a voice tells him.

No, not Finn.

Finn had never been part of the TIE corps fleet.

“They gave me the name Solo when I signed up for the Imperial Navy,” his dad had told him, ruffling his hair. “Fit me well. Fits you well too, kid.” Solo. All on his own. Like he has been for years.

His fingers tighten on the trigger of the ship and he blasts another TIE to pieces. It feels good, watching the thing explode in front of him into a thousand tiny flaming pieces, like a combusting bug on a windshield.

Poe’s talking in his ear, giving orders, but Ben’s not listening. He’s high on the speed and the flames and he knows even as he goes that he’ll be able to get the drop on all too many of those TIE fighters. They don’t have pilot’s blood—just pilot’s training.

You see? The difference between blood and training?  

He should have known better, should have known that he can’t keep the voice—keep Snoke—out.

I could train the girl—easily. She wants mentorship so badly, I could give it to her. But you—you have blood.

Don’t you also want mentorship? A true mentor—not just Skywalker’s lies?

You could be my apprentice, as loyal and faithful and powerful as Vader.

Ben destroys three more TIE fighters, his jaw set. He spins and twirls and slaloms his way through blasts that don’t even come close to hitting him—because of course they don’t. This is child’s play, and he’s not a child anymore.

I don’t need anyone, he thinks viciously as he fires at yet another TIE. Distantly, he hears Poe commanding the bombers to move closer to the dreadnaught, ordering his Black Squadron to take out the TIE fighters that are streaming out of the ship, doing all they can to approach the bombers.

But all they can isn’t enough, because Ben’s flying at their side, as close as a shadow, picking off fighters that think they can get him before they even know he’s there. He cloaks himself in the stars and feels alive, his heart pumping free in his chest.

You see what you could be?

“Bombers, begin your drop sequence!” Poe yells into the comlink, and bombs begin to tumble their way down, heavy enough from their fall to maintain their trajectory once they leave their gravity spheres.

It’s a sight to see—the dreadnaught exploding. If a TIE was like an exploding bug, the bombs set off flames in the dreadnaught’s fuel systems, and bursts of fire and death scatter across the surface of the thing.

Ben can feel them dying. Ben can feel their fear.

Good.

It makes him go cold, the way his own voice layers so melodically with Snoke’s.

Suddenly he’s six again, running to his mother because the nightmares are making him upset. He whirls his ship around, not even bothering to wait for Poe’s command that they get back to the Resistance fleet. He’s not formally enlisted, he was just helping out.

There’s darkness in you, Ben. The likes of which I haven’t seen in years.

He pelts through the bleak, dark space, every nerve in his body going haywire. And when he slows down to land in the hangar, his eyes take too long to adjust to the light.

He swings himself out of the X-wing, ignoring the cheers from the Resistance fighters, shying away from their attempts to clap him on the back. They want Dameron and his Black Squadron, not him. He feels like he’s going to be sick.

Indeed, he finds a fresher and empties what little was in his gut. At least it’s not all over myself this time, he thinks as he gasps for air, his throat coated in acid and bile. He throws some water on his face, cleans his mouth, and stares at himself in the mirror.

He is pale, and sweaty, and shaky. Clean-shaven now, but the dark circles under his eyes are still there and—

“Ben?”

She’s staring at him. Rey. She’s there and she can see him. Can she see his reflection? He can see hers.

He sags against the wall behind him and closes his eyes.

“What’s wrong?”

Maybe I am going mad. You shouldn’t be here, and I sound like Snoke. He thinks back on the exhilaration of the flight, the freedom of it, the power he’d felt.

“Everything. Always.”

He takes a deep breath and turns to face her.

He can see the way the light hits her, wherever she is. The Falcon, if he had to guess. The look of the light is too even and too dull to be sunlight. She’s wearing the same vest she’d been wearing when last the Force had connected them, and a shirt that cuts a V beneath her neck, revealing the hint of her breasts. It’s a jolt through him, noticing that and he jerks his eyes back up to her face where they belong. Her hair is tugged back from her face the way it always is and her eyes are oddly frightened. He doesn’t like that. He doesn’t want her to ever look frightened.

“What are you afraid of?” he asks her.

“I’m not afraid,” she replies at once.

“You are,” he says. He knows that look in her eyes too clearly. It’s not like others he’s seen on her face before, burning determination, refusal to give in. “Are you afraid of me?”

“For you,” she says carefully. “Not of you. Ben, what’s wrong?”

“Everything. Always,” he repeats. Then, because she rolls her eyes and has the look of someone who is about to berate him for being a smartass, he says, “I—I keep hearing him in my head. Snoke.”

Understanding and sympathy flash across Rey’s face. It means more than Ben knows how to express.

“Well,” she begins slowly from his father’s starship. “You’re also hearing me in your head, so it can’t all be bad, can it?”

He swallows. He wishes she were there now, that she were taking his hand the way she had when she’d rescued him. The voices in his head—the ones that aren’t even Snoke—all go still when she’s around.

I could train the girl—easily. She wants mentorship so badly…

He closes his eyes. She probably does need a teacher. He doesn’t know which would be worse—Luke or Snoke. He doesn’t want either of them to touch her, either of them to know anything about her. The Force is connecting her to him, not them.

He takes several deep breaths and tries to memorize this feeling, the way the Force is humming through him right now, the way it must be humming through her. How is it doing this? They should both be dead from this.

“Are you going to ask Luke to train you?” he asks her.

Rey bites her lip and avoids his gaze. “I don’t think he wants to.”

“You’ve already found him?” he asks sharply, opening his eyes. Maybe the light on her face is a lie. Or maybe she’s just on the Falcon for shelter. Stupid of him to assume that she might not be there yet. He’d been out cold for several days, after all.

Rey nods, looking at him warily as though expecting him to yell again. Guilt floods at him. He never wants Rey to be wary of him.

“We got here two days ago,” she tells him. “I tried to give him back his lightsaber. He wanted to throw it into the sea. He won’t talk about what happened either, why he came here, but he’s refusing to leave with me.” She looks so sad, so disappointed, so lonely that Ben can’t help himself.

“Bribe him with blue milk. He always liked it.”

The expression on Rey’s face makes it look like she’s seen too much and a smile quirks at his lips. Even when she looks purely revolted she’s—Ben’s brain catches up to him at last.

He’s standing in a bathroom, has just thrown up again, Snoke’s in his head still, the First Order is hunting for him, for his mother’s Resistance, and he’s Vader’s heir more than Luke Skywalker’s and the more that he thinks about that, the more comforting he finds it. He’d run from it for so long, but there’s some dark part of him that can’t be cut away, that’s as much a part of him as the light that seems to be bursting out of every pore of Rey’s skin. If he calls it what it is, he doesn’t have to pretend to be something he can never be.

And Rey might just be another vision in his mind, planted by Snoke.

“Good luck with my uncle,” he tells her.

“Don’t say it if you don’t mean it,” Rey snorts. “I know you don’t want me to bring him back.”

She’s not wrong. He wants nothing more than for her to be light years and light years away from Luke Skywalker, away from Snoke, away from anyone who could hurt her.

So he tries something he can mean. “I don’t want him to be an ass to you. I don’t want anyone to be an ass to you,” then, chagrined, “I’m sorry I was an ass to you before. The last time we…”

Rey gives him the sort of smile that seems to curl in on itself, the sort that implies tears quiet as much as pleasure. “I don’t know what this is,” she whispers. “How it is that we’re talking still when you’re back with the Resistance, but I’m glad. I didn’t like leaving you behind.”

Ben’s heart swells. He tries to think of something to say, but Rey’s already looking around. “I should go,” she tells him. And just like that she’s gone. And the lightness in his chest starts to fade.

He drifts out into the hallway. The Raddus is quiet, and he can tell from the way that the engine is humming that they’ve pulled into hyperspace either while he’d been vomiting or talking to Rey. People are moving briskly through the hallways, but none of them seem to take any note of him.

It’s calmingly familiar—just being a face in a crowd. A fugitive again, though in a different way.

Ben drifts through the ship. Everyone around him moves with purpose, but he doesn’t. Everyone around him believes in what they are doing, that it’s right, that it’s necessary, but Ben doesn’t know what he believes.

Because you know the truth: that all of this is futile. I know it’s hard to admit to yourself. There’s so much they’d rather believe. But you and I have always known the truth. Search your feelings the way Skywalker told you to.

Part of it is. Ben can accept that.

You’re also hearing me in your head, so it can’t all be bad, can it?

Ben shakes himself and goes to find Finn.

Finn is in the mess hall with half of Poe’s squadron, sitting around a sleek chrome table with a cup of caf in his hand. Everyone seems to be smiling and laughing, clearly pleased with the destruction of the Dreadnaught. The moment one of them—Snap, he thinks he was called—catches sight of him, he bursts into applause. “And here’s our ace!”

Ben freezes, flushing as the entire table turns to stare at him and joining Snap in his applause. He sees grins and nods and a few of them even gesture him over to join them. “You got what, twenty TIEs all on your own?”

“I—I guess,” Ben says, clambering over the bench feeling like he’s all knees and legs and settles next to Finn.

“Where’d you learn to fly like that?” asks one of the squad—a bomber from the look of her uniform.

“Learn? He’s Han Solo’s son. It’s in his blood,” Jessika grins.

Ben looks down at his hands. When he’d been very little, he’d sat on his dad’s lap and held the controls and steered the Falcon. Or at least, that was what it had felt like. His dad’s hands had rested on top of his own. “You got this, kid,” his dad had whispered. “Feel her move. Just like your old man. There you go. Star pilot in no time at all.”

They’ve all kept talking around him—diving into legends of Han Solo, the Rebellion General, who had made the Kessel Run in fourteen parsecs. “Twelve,” Ben corrects automatically, because his dad would have done it. (“He rounded down,” his mother had said once, rolling his eyes, much to dad’s indignation.)

“Twelve? You’re lying.”

No, my dad was, but—

Ben looks away. There’s a lump in his throat now. His dad should be here with him now. Or Ben should be back and imprisoned or something. How many times had he dreamed of his family coming to rescue him from the voices in his head and the only time they’d really tried, it had been Rey who had succeeded and his dad—

He closes his eyes and reaches out before stopping short because they’re in hyperspace and he’s gonna be sick if he does this in hyperspace. They’re moving too fast.

“Commander!” Snap booms out as Poe joins them. One of his cheeks is flushed as though he’d been slapped. He’s lucky if that’s all she did, Ben thinks, wryly. His mother doesn’t take disobedience in her ranks well.

“Not quite,” Poe says, grimacing. “Captain.”

“Oh man,” one of the bombers says.

“She demoted you? Over that?”

Someone pushes the jug of caf towards Poe and he pours himself a mug, shaking his head. “I doubt it’ll be for long. I mean—it can’t be, right?” He shrugs, trying to look nonchalant. “Anyway—it’s not a big deal. What is a big deal is what we all did just now.” He tugs a grin onto his face and raises his mug. “We’re gonna bring them down. Like that dreadnaught!”

The table cheers and drinks, and one of them pulls out a deck of cards and they begin to play. Poe leans over to Finn and Ben, his gaze serious. “She gave Rey a cloaked binary beacon. That’s how she’ll know how to find us.”

“She told you?” Finn asks sharply as Ben inhales through his teeth. Rey hadn’t told him about it, but he couldn’t fault her for that. It’s not as though they hadn’t been confused enough as it was with the Force connecting them. With the Force connecting them, it had never even crossed his mind that Rey wouldn’t know where they were. He’d tell her, he’d bring her home. But his mother had accounted for everything short of Force miracles, and Ben couldn’t help but be relieved in that.

“She showed me,” Poe said. “It’ll be ok. She’ll be able to make it back to us.”

Finn lets out a relieved sigh, and glances at Ben. “That’s something, I guess,” he says. Ben nods. For a moment, he thinks he should tell Finn everything, that he’s seen Rey, spoken to her not even an hour ago. But the words die on his lips. He trusts Finn, trusts him with his life, but he doesn’t want to have to put into words the way that connection makes him feel, and he doesn’t want to have to pretend he doesn’t feel the way he feels.

Not alone—not anymore. Even if I leave, she’ll be with me.

Somehow, that thought makes him want to stay.

Nothing’s ever made him want to stay before.

As the bombers deal out a second round of their game, one of stands up and waves to someone.

“Rose! Come on!”

“Is it all right?”

Ben turns. The girl is short, with dark hair and tawny skin—like the bomber who is gesturing her over. Sisters? Ben wonders.

“It’s all right if Rose joins us, right?” the bomber asks, and is met with enthusiastic nods. Rose comes and sits down next to the bomber, across from Finn and Ben.

“Finn,” Finn says, extending his hand. Rose blushes furiously as she shakes it.

“I know,” she mumbles.

“You’re sort of a big deal with the Resistance, haven’t you heard?” Ben mutters in his ear and Finn elbows him. Somewhere, Han Solo would be grinning at him for that.

“Rose works in engineering,” the bomber says. “And she’s the best sister in the world.”

“She has that look about her,” Finn says, giving Rose a kind smile. “Engineering, huh? How long you been at it?”

“Since we joined,” Rose says, glancing at her sister. “Paige joined up with the fleet, but sometimes I get vertigo, so figured better to keep me planted, you know?”

“Too well,” Finn grins, and gestures to Ben and Poe. “These two are the crazy pilots. I’d probably be more in the way than not.”

Ben doesn’t catch Rose’s response because someone’s tapping on his shoulder. He looks up to see Poe standing over him and he gets to his feet and the captain leads him over to the caf dispenser to refill the jug.

“I’ve never seen her that mad,” Poe says and he glances at Ben as though he and Ben share something in the way his mother reacted. “She doesn’t usually lose her cool, does she?”

In that moment, every moment that Leia Organa had lost her cool with Han Solo floats to the top of his mind. Your fault, he thinks, because it sure had felt that way sometimes—that every fight they’d had was his fault, even though he knows that that couldn’t have been the case. “No,” Ben shrugs. “I guess not.”

Poe grimaces, as though he’d hoped that Ben would refute him. It rankles. Poe probably knows his mom better than he does, these days. He’d last seen her about fifteen years ago. “Well…I’ll figure something out,” Poe says at last. “I don’t regret it. She said we could have lost half the fleet. But we didn’t. You kept everyone clear.”

“Would you have gone out if I wasn’t there?” Ben asks.

“Hell yeah we would have.”

“That’s why she’s angry,” Ben says quietly. Your fault. Poe had gotten demoted because the action would have failed if Ben hadn’t been there. Ben’s not reliable. Ben’s never been reliable. So his mother saw it as a bad command.

“Because you were flying with us?” Poe laughs in disbelief.

“Because of what would have happened if I hadn’t been.” Ben glances back at the table. The squad is groaning at a play someone just made in their game and Finn and Rose are talking animatedly at the end of the table. How many of them would have died if it weren’t for him?

How many people had Ben killed so that they could survive?

The enemy. The First Order.

Grunts like Finn had been.

Sometimes lives must be sacrificed for the greater good. Even your mother knows this.

Suddenly, Ben wants to be alone. He mumbles something to Poe and slips out of the mess hall, going to find the bunk that his mother had assigned him, even if he hadn’t formally enlisted.

It’s too short for him, because every bunk he’s slept on since he was fifteen has been. He curls his knees up to his chest and wraps his arms around them, and takes several deep breaths.

Not going mad, he tells himself firmly. I’m not.

No, you’re not.

But you are going dark.

This time, it doesn’t feel even a little bit comforting.

Chapter Text

She supposes she shouldn’t be surprised—that Master Skywalker is as stubborn as he is. Ben’s got stubborn in him, after all, and General Organa has a backbone of steel.

Luke Skywalker barely looks at her, barely talks to her for the first three days she’s on Ahch-To. He had thrown the lightsaber she’d tried to give her over the edge of the cliff he’d been standing at the edge of, and Rey had gone to find it later, unwilling to let anything bad happen to the weapon.

But Rey has always been good at waiting—especially for people who seem as though they don’t care whether or not she is waiting. So she follows him around the island, seeing too much about his taste for milk and getting thoroughly soaked by rain or sea spray—which stings far more than she’d expected it to—more than once.

Each morning, when he emerges from his hut, he sees her sitting there, her staff across her knees, watching him. He shakes himself and trudges off, doing whatever it is that he has been doing to distract himself ever since he came to this planet.

Some people, Rey decides, don’t handle being alone very well. Rey had, if she had to be the judge, and like for so much, she has had to be the judge. She hadn’t let her loneliness get the better of her.

She’s not sure the same can be said of Luke Skywalker. Perhaps it’s in his blood, because being alone certainly seemed to have done no good for Ben either. Skywalker seems to have lost all taste for company, which hardly seems like a good way to exist. It’s one thing if, like Rey, you have Teedos and Plutts to make your life miserable, and scavengers who’d gut you for an extra portion. But Luke Skywalker is wholly on his own on this island, and the Caretakers who frequent the place hardly seem to like a threat to his existence.

He’s let himself go, Rey thinks. Which she supposes he might deserve after all he’s done. Except that he doesn’t seem to be enjoying it. It would be one thing if she’d found him thoroughly in love with the life he’s leading.

But this—this feels like penance.

For whatever happened with Ben?

She doesn’t know. And since invoking Leia, and the Resistance hadn’t worked, Rey decides on the morning of the third day to try it, squaring her shoulders and handing him the birthday card she’d found on the Falcon.  He stares at it for a long time.

“Your nephew, Ben Solo,” she begins, and Skywalker looks up at her, his clear blue eyes distrusting. “He’s come home,” she decides. “He’s with the Resistance now too. So whatever you—” Skywalker turns his back on her and marches away without a word. “What happened?” she calls after him. “Between you two?”

“Go away,” the old man grouches over his shoulder. “Go back to whatever corner of this galaxy you call home. Go back to where it’s safe.”

“It’s not safe,” she snaps. For an old man, he sure moves quickly, climbing up that hillside. “Not with the First Order out there. Not with Snoke. That’s why you need to—”

Something tingles in Rey’s mind. That same glowing feeling, that same lightness she’d started noticing every now and then. Except this time, it doesn’t feel like light. It feels like voices turned to light. It sounds like—

these are your first steps

—the vision in Maz Kanata’s castle. Rey goes still. She looks about her and her eyes settle on a tree. She notices three things at once: this is the only tree she has seen on the island; it is massive, larger than some of the rock formations that she has followed Luke around over the past few days; and it is dead.

Dead, but light.

Rey’s feet take her towards it, as her feet had taken her down a set of stairs beneath a watering hole. The voices-turned-light in her mind start to grow louder, and yet less clear the closer she gets to the tree.

The tree is hollow and Rey steps inside what she supposes could be called a door. Light filters in through the darkness, through holes and knots that have weathered countless years. And at the center, standing on a small shelf, are a series of very old books.

“Who are you?”

Rey whirls about. Luke is standing behind her. He is watching her, more closely and more curiously than he has at any point since she arrived.

“I’m Rey.”

“Where are you from, Rey?”

“Nowhere.”

“No one’s from nowhere.”

“Jakku.”

Luke pauses, considering. “Yeah, that’s pretty much nowhere.” He cocks his head. “And why did Leia send you?”

Rey decides on honesty. “Because Ben refused to come get you. Because she wants me trained in the Force. I’m—”

“The Force is strong with you, yes,” Luke interrupts. His voice sounds hollow, echoing in the hollow darkness of the hollow tree.

“I have what it takes,” Rey says. “To be a Jedi.”

Luke snorts. “And what does it take to be a Jedi?”

Rey doesn’t know. Heat floods her face. “Leia thinks I do,” she tries.

Luke takes a step towards her. He’s old and stooped and shorter than she is, but in that moment he is a giant.

“You don’t have what it takes,” he says at last. “No one does.”

“You did,” Rey snaps, annoyed. “What made you so special?”

Luke just shakes his head. “I didn’t.” He turns back out the door. “The Jedi…it’s a dream, Rey. A nice one, maybe. But it’s a dream. I can’t train more Jedi—I am not the Jedi I thought I was, and I refuse to bring more destruction down on people.”

“But you’re Luke Skywalker,” she snaps at him, following him out the door and back out into the misty day. “You are the hero of the Rebellion.”

“I was that person. I’m not anymore,” Luke says.

“So everything that he was doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that Snoke has Han Solo captive, or that your own sister is on the run from the First Order? You don’t want to help them?”

“My help has been more a curse than a blessing of late,” Luke says angrily.

“I wouldn’t know. I only see you not even trying.”

“Then go on. Back to Leia. Tell her you failed because I failed. She won’t begrudge you my stubbornness.”

“And how do you know your help will be a curse? Because of Ben?”

Luke glares at her.

“You certainly have the arrogance the Jedi had in spades,” he snaps.

“And so do you,” Rey retorts. He lets out a begrudging laugh at that. “Do you really think that you can’t be of any help to the Resistance? To the galaxy?”

“What do you want me to do? Walk out with a laser sword and face down the whole First Order? What did you think was going to happen here? Do you think that I came to the most unfindable place in the galaxy for no reason at all?”

“You can have your reasons,” Rey says. “That doesn’t mean they’re good ones. Not when people need you.” She stares at him, breathing as heavily as if she’d been fighting. “You came here as some sort of penance, didn’t you? You’re not happy to be here, that’s for sure. Why is removing yourself better for that than coming back and helping?”

Luke is staring at her.

Then he starts to laugh.

“Oh you are good. I see why Leia sent you now.” He hoots with a mirthless delight.

“I told you why she sent me,” Rey snapped. “She wants you to—”

“Train you, yes. But she knows you’re not going to let me say no and you’re going to sound just like her when you do it.” He heaves a sigh and turns and looks out over the endless ocean before them. “Fine. I’ll teach you something. And maybe then you’ll understand why I can’t help the way they want. Why I am helping by staying where I am right now.”

Rey doesn’t let a smile spread across her face until she’s left him there on the hillside.

-

Rey rises before dawn the next day, eager to start her lessons—that’s what they are, aren’t they? Lessons with Luke? She ties her hair tight behind her back and leaves the little hut she’s been sleeping in and settles outside the one that Luke’s been living in.

She waits.

And waits.

And waits.

The sun is getting higher in the sky, and beads of sweat are starting to collect along her neck and under her arms. Perhaps this place is not so hot and dry as Jakku but the moisture in the air makes her sweat faster than she’d like.

She gets to her feet and knocks on the door. “Master Skywalker?”

Nothing. She pushes the door open and finds the little hut empty.

Where is he?

She looks about.

The caretakers are going about their business and a few of them are looking at her oddly as she stands there, trying to figure out what had become of the old Jedi.

“He can’t have gone that far,” she mutters to herself. She’s followed the man around almost the entire island. It’s not particularly big. If she can find Ben in the bowls of Starkiller Base, she can certainly find Luke Skywalker.

So she takes a deep breath, and closes her eyes and reaches out the way she’d done before.

She can see the whole island, as if from above, riding through the sky as though she’s the sun, as though she’s the moon. She can feel the spray of the ocean, the fierce winds that break the calm of the waters. And she can feel...

She frowns. She can’t feel Luke. It’s as though he has never existed on this island, as though she had completely made him up. Except that she knows that she hasn’t.

So she tries again. She must be missing something. She reaches, she reaches, she reaches, letting the Force flow through her as it flows through this entire island, rock and bone and dirt and grass until she finds—

There is something under the ground on this island, a cave—hollow and cold and dark. She can see it now, the mossy entrance, droplets of water clinging to the edges of it. Even in the heat of the day, it doesn’t seem as though it will ever truly be dry.

She can hear whispers coming from it as she’d heard the whispers coming from the great hollow tree the day before. Calling for her, urging her to come, to explore, to see what lay beneath it all. Don’t you want to know? I can show you everything, it seems to say.

And then suddenly it’s like she’s drowning, buffeted back and forth by the currents of the waters around the island, her head and body spinning, unable to breathe, unable to think until her eyes open and she’s gasping for air and staring at Luke Skywalker.

“You went straight for the dark,” he tells her. “The moment you didn’t have any guidance, you went to the darkness.”

“What was that?” she asks him. He looks afraid, and his fear is making her frightened. “Is there something wrong with me?”

Luke stares at her for a good long while before responding. “No,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with you.” He turns away from her and climbs the hill.

She follows.

“What do you know about the Force?” he asks her as they walk. “About light and dark, about balance?”

“I don’t,” she says. “I only know what Leia told me.” And what Ben refused to. Vividly, she sees him collapsing in the snow, fists against his own skull, screaming at someone to get out of his head.

“What did you see earlier?” he asks her. “When you were looking for me?”

Rey pauses, considering. “The island. Life. Death and decay...that feeds the new life. Warm. Cold. Peace. Violence.”

“And between it all?” Luke prods her as they enter a cave.

“Balance. And energy... A force.”

“You aren’t a Jedi, but you saw all of that,” Luke says and there’s something in his voice, like he’s about to go in for a kill that Rey can’t see. “Why do you need to be a Jedi to know the ways of the Force?”

“I don’t understand,” Rey says.

“At the height of their power, the Jedi allowed Darth Sidious to rise, create the Empire and wipe them out. It was a Jedi Master who was responsible for the training and creation of Darth Vader. It was I who—” Luke stops short, breathing heavily.

Rey waits, her throat dry. You who what? What happened with Ben?

But he doesn’t tell her.

“So much failure at the hands of the Jedi. Don’t you see? Why should it be the Jedi who triumph? Haven’t we proven time and again that we aren’t worthy of it? Light and dark…” he points to a mosaic on the ground. It is beautiful, half white pebbles, half black.  “True light and dark—they exist in balance with one another. You can’t have one without the other. Balance. But that’s not the Jedi way.”

“But you could still train me to use the Force,” Rey protests. “I could still help fight the First Order. You could still fight the First Order.”

But Luke is shaking his head. “Light doesn’t destroy dark, and dark doesn’t destroy light. Light can’t be light without darkness, and darkness—how do we know it’s dark when there’s no light?”

“I don’t—” Rey starts but Skywalker cuts her off.

“You went straight for the dark, earlier. That frightened me. It shouldn’t have.” He stares at her with a hunger she doesn’t understand, as though he’s looking for something in her that she doesn’t know how to understand. “The Resistance...they need you. Not me.”

Rey lets out a frustrated growl. “So train me,” she snaps. “Give them what they need.”

“No,” Luke says and it’s as though the weight of galaxies is resting upon his shoulders. “No. No then I’ll fail them and you just like I failed Ben.”

- 

It is late in the afternoon when Rey grows tired of just sitting there.  She goes to the edge of a cliff and begins swinging her staff back and forth as she had done for so long on Jakku. It’s comforting, the steady heavy metal in her hands. Balance, she thinks bitterly as she swirls it around her head and neck, bringing it hard to the ground with enough force to smash in a man’s skull.

She trains until she’s got a full shine of sweat on her skin, and it’s only because of a strong breeze that she doesn’t notice when Ben joins her.

“How’s your training going?” he asks her and she nearly jumps out of her skin. He’s standing there behind her. He looks a little less sickly than she’s ever seen him, and his hair is tied back behind his neck in a short ponytail. He’s watching her—almost hungrily.

“He’s refusing to train me,” Rey says.

“So you’re training yourself?” he asks, nodding to her staff. She leans on it for a moment.

“I’ve got to keep myself fit, don’t I? I’m not going to be here forever.”

“No,” Ben agrees. Then he pauses, as though considering. A moment later, his lightsaber appears in his hand and she can feel the hum of its blue blade in the air. “I can train you though.” He looks almost frightened of the assertion, of his own boldness, that he would dare propose such a thing.

“To use the Force?” Rey almost can’t breathe. This feels big from Ben—Ben, who had fled it all for so long. That he’d offer for her.

He points with his lightsaber towards her staff. “At least to fight with it. I don’t know if I’d be any good at the rest.”

Rey goes to where she’d deposited her bag and fishes out the lightsaber she’d found in the basement of Maz Kanata’s castle. She ignites it and turns to Ben. Her heart is pounding in her throat.

“How do I start?” she asks. Her throat is dry, and her voice cracks a little bit and she clears her throat. Ben sinks into a stance.

“There are some opening stances,” he says. “Ultimately…” he grimaces. “Well, as far as I know, you and I are the only ones out here who actually have lightsabers to fight with.” Rey notices that he doesn’t mention his uncle. “So ultimately it should be about what comes naturally for you. Keep yourself grounded. Balanced. And remember that you’ve only got one attack end, and not two.”

“So what do I—” Rey begins, but Ben is lunging for her and Rey has the briefest moment of wondering what will happen if his blue blade slices through her through the Force before she raises her own blade to parry his attack, her feet dancing her away from him as he spins his blade between his hands and turns back to her.

Then he’s rushing her again. She’s ready for him this time—sort of. Her blade catches his, sparks, and they both spin away from one another.

Rey pulls a defensive stance, her blade raised in front of her in both hands, her eyes on Ben.

“You’re not telling me what to do,” Rey points out.

“You’re good with that staff. Anyone tell you how to use it?” Ben asks.

“No, but you said—” he rushes her again, and she lets out an annoyed yell and ducks his swing and catches his blade with hers for a third time.

“I said I’d teach you,” he says. “I didn’t say how I’d teach you. Learn by doing. So long as it feels comfortable and it keeps you alive, it’s worth it.”

“Yes, but aren’t there movements I should know? Aren’t there…” she doesn’t even know what they’d be called.

“Forms,” he says. “Yes, there are. And you’ll have plenty of time to learn them once you know how to keep yourself alive. Keep yourself alive. That’s the most important thing.” Something in the way he says it, the way his brown eyes seem to burn at her sends a chill up Rey’s spine. She’s never seen him look this determined before, this lucid. He’s carrying himself taller, less like he’s trying to hide from the stars and more like he’s planting himself. This, she thinks, is who he was supposed to be from the start. She likes it.

He clears his throat, and her eyes dart back to his. She hadn’t even noticed that she’d been staring at his full lips. “Forms will be easier to teach you when I can actually be there with you, anyway.”

“You and Luke,” Rey mutters to herself, not expecting Ben to really reply, “You both have formal training but keep saying that the training’s not worth it. How can I know that if I have nothing?”

Ben stands very still, his eyes narrow.

“Luke said—”

“He said that the Jedi have it wrong,” Rey says. “And he refuses to train me to be a Jedi, just like how you’re,” and now she rushes him, “refusing to train me how to actually fight like one.”

He stares at her dazedly as he lazily blocks her strike and steps out of her way. “Luke…” he says again slowly.

“Yes, Luke,” Rey snaps, getting more annoyed by the second. “You and Luke both.”

And she can tell even as she swings at him that he’s too lost in thought to catch her blade this time and in a moment of panic, Rey wonders if she’s about to find out what she didn’t before when she’d blocked his blow.

But she doesn’t.

Because she stops the blade right by his throat as he stares at her, his own lightsaber hanging limply at his side.

And then he’s gone and it’s just Rey and the rock and the sea and her frustration that she keeps not knowing things that she wants to know.

Chapter Text

Ben can’t breathe.

Luke? Thinking the Jedi have it wrong?

It’s only when his lightsaber falls out of his hand, clattering and rolling its way across the floor that he jerks himself back together.

That feels bad, somehow. That feels wrong somehow. Because Snoke—

Because Snoke will revel in it. And maybe Ben should never have been a Jedi, was never made to be a Jedi, but his uncle—his uncle was.

Ben swallows.

For better and for worse, his uncle was.

His head is hurting.

Not the usual kind of hurting, the Snoke kind of hurting, a different kind. A dehydrated kind.

He bends down and grabs his lightsaber and makes his way through the Raddus. He pauses in a ‘fresher for some water, and then drifts towards his mother’s quarters. If she’s there, then—should he tell her? Would that shake her precious hope?

It’ll only just get her asking what you know, and why you won’t tell her, Ben thinks.

He likes hyperspace. It feels like he can only have the good parts of life when he’s going this fast, and none of the worst.

Which is why he decides not to go find his mother. He goes down into the mess hall and settles himself once again with Finn and his friends, acutely aware that he doesn’t belong, but not sure that’s enough to keep him away. Finn’s his friend after—

Friend.

He’s never really had a friend before. Not till Finn and Rey. Even the other students at his uncle’s praxeum—they’d been...well he hadn’t been friends with them. The voices in his dreams had kept him from getting close. Skywalker raises lambs to slaughter, Snoke had whispered to him one night when he was sixteen. Are you a lamb? Or a lion?

But right now, sitting next to Finn, he just feels like a person. A person with a friend who smiled at him and made room for him on the bench when he’d shown up without asking him anything.

Ben’s hands tremble around the glass of water that he’s drinking from as the chatter continues.

The flashing lights that mean they are coming out of hyperspace go off and Ben braces himself.

There was no need, though. The pilots on the bridge are good at their job and it’s a smooth transition back to realspace. Poe gets to his feet.

“Wish me luck,” he says.

“With what?” Ben asks.

“Trying to get my job back,” Poe says with a determined smile, and off he goes.

“Do you think it can happen?” Rose asks Paige.

“He’s gotten out of some tight scrapes in the past. I don’t know how this might stack up in comparison, though,” Paige tells her sister.

Whatever Rose is about to say, though, Ben doesn’t hear. He doesn’t hear because he lurches to his feet, knowing he’s going to be sick because that’s Snoke’s gentle touch pressing in on his brain again, more powerfully than ever before. Closer than ever before.

Ben feels hands on him, a firm grip, someone trying to help him as he stumbles away from the table. Finn? Probably Finn. Finn’s his friend. He’s never had friends before and—

I’m your friend.

“You’re not,” Ben growls.

Oh, Ben. I am. I’m the only person who’s ever truly cared for you. Even the little traitor doesn’t care for you as I do. You are the center of all I want for this universe, Ben. How is that not friendship?

Finn is there, pressing into his vision. If he can just focus on Finn, he’ll be able to keep Snoke at bay, he will—he can do it.

“Ben, buddy, it’s ok. It’s ok,” Finn says.

“No, it’s not. They’re here, Finn, they’re here—the First Order.”

Finn’s eyes widen in horror and his grip on Ben’s arm tightens. “That was the shake, wasn’t it? They’re—”

The entire ship shakes and Ben stumbles against the wall. “We need to get to the X-Wings,” Ben moans. If he can just move fast again, he’ll be able to—

To pretend to be your father? Why would you want that? He’s nowhere near as strong as you are, Ben. Do you want to see him?

Ben doesn’t, but his eyes are suddenly full of Han Solo, strapped to a torture contraption. There’s blood on his weather-beaten, wrinkled face, and his hair is matted with the stuff. His lips are cracked, his nose is broken, his eyes are purpled, and his head is lolling forward. You lasted much better through your—

“Torture,” Ben says viciously, and Finn looks at him sharply. Ben is staring at the ceiling though.

No, not torture. I was testing you. Just as I test him. And you were much stronger than he is. Why would you want to outrun the stars like Captain Solo when you could be so much more than that.

“Vader?”

You understand now.

There’s something—something that Ben’s forgetting, something important. Something he can’t think of while Snoke is in his head like this. Something Rey had told him. What was it? But no he can’t think of it. He won’t let Snoke touch her.

You cling too hard to those who will use you, Ben. You always have. That is why you are with your mother now, isn’t it. Yes, it is I see that now.

It makes no matter. She can be taken care of.

“No!” Ben bellows and he rips his arm away from Finn.

“Ben!” He hears Finn roar after him, hears Finn sprinting down the corridor after him. Ben feels the ships approaching the bridge, feels their fire, he reaches for the blast that is making its way through space towards his mother.

And he is too late.

Space is dark, and cold, and empty, and sucks at any life it can get hold of like a baby, like a vampire. And it sucks the life force away from every person on that bridge and he feels his mother, his mother, his mother—

He reaches for her Force signature. Don’t die, he begs her. Don’t die alone.

It was his father who always left. His mother was always there. Always there and not. Don’t, please.

Mommy.

You see? Clinging to her like a boy, coddled at her breast like a baby. You can grow now. Be the man you were destined to be, the man she feared you would become.

The father she had loathed.

This man was killing his mother, and telling him he had to become the father she had hated, that he had no destiny beyond what had come before him, could not exist in his own way.

He’d take his mother over that.

He keeps reaching for her. She hasn’t died yet. The impact of the blast hadn’t killed her, and her lungs are laboring to keep the oxygen they need to survive inside a little while longer. Her blood vessels are failing, swelling, and the Force—

It’s so bright.

Bright, and twining with his, and he pulls as hard as he can.

Please mom. Hold on.

I have you.

He runs again, down the hallway to some sort of door that is there for some reason some engineer thought was good enough. Ben’s grateful for that now as Finn pounds on the lock and it hisses open and his mother collapses into his arms, her heart beating weakly but beating beating beating.

“Mom,” he whispers, clinging to her tightly. “Mom, please.”

He carries her all the way to the medbay with hate in his heart.

-

“That's Admiral Holdo?” Poe asks him. “Battle of Chyron Belt, Admiral Holdo?”

Ben doesn’t know much about the battle of Chyron Belt, but he’d recognize Amilyn Holdo anywhere. Tall, serene, vibrant haired and vibrant eyed, she looks around the room and Ben feels—

Not safe. He doesn’t ever feel safe.

But he doesn’t feel hopeless, at least.

“Yeah,” he says. “That’s—” Aunt Amilyn, who had always told the best stories, and had always brought sweets for him, and had always managed to make his mom smile with fond memories of the homeworld that Ben would never known. “That’s Admiral Holdo.”

“Not what I expected,” Poe says and he gets to his feet.

Ben watches as Holdo listens to Poe, and watches as she throws him off her bridge, and watches as she makes her way around the room, assessing damage, listening to her commanders, being caught up to speed about the status of the Resistance now that the First Order could trace them through hyperspace and destroy more than half of their fleet by dropping on them, unexpectedly, out of the dark.

How, though, Ben wonders. More and more that shouldn’t be—like the Force connecting him and Rey. It had seemed like Snoke hadn’t been able to keep tabs on him when they’d been moving that fast. Had he been wrong? Was he the reason that the fleet had gotten attacked, that his mother—

Amilyn is standing over him, tall and calm and Ben looks up at her.

“You look worse for wear,” she says, “But that doesn’t make you any less a sight for sore eyes.”

He tries to smile up at her, but it feels more like a grimace. It probably is a grimace.

“They can trace us through hyperspace?” he asks. “Is that really technology that can exist?” He asks because he needs to know, because if it isn’t real, if it is just that Snoke is that powerful…

“Our intel has always been a bit spotty on their tech,” Amilyn says. “But we know that the Empire was working on it, and the Order’s got a lot of old Empire people on staff. So it wouldn’t surprise me if they had figured it out.”

It shouldn’t be as much of a relief as it is. It makes everything a million times harder for anyone who is trying to resist. Half of the Resistance’s tactics had involved sneaking off into hyperspace, just as the Rebellion had been before.

No wonder they’d gone and researched this.

“How do we beat them then?” Ben wonders aloud.

Holdo smiles and pats him on the shoulder. “We get through the night. Then we strategize,” she says. “I can’t tell you more. You’re technically not even on staff, and even if you were, you’d be too junior for it.”

Another relief: now he doesn’t have to figure out how to tell Amilyn that he can’t be trusted—not while Snoke’s in his head.

“I’ll get off your bridge, then,” he says, getting to his feet at last.

“Ben,” he turns and looks at her as he reaches the door.

“You look like you’ve given up hope. The Force is with us. I can feel it.”

The Force is never with me, Aunt Amilyn, Ben doesn’t say. He just waves goodbye, feeling like he’s seven again, and goes off into the ship.

It’s only been several days since he had started connecting somehow with Rey through the Force. He’d only connected with her an hour or so ago. But he wants to see her face again. He wants to have her berate him for not teaching her saber forms, because if he stares at her body for too long—even to correct her positioning—his stomach lurches in a way that has nothing to do with how it’s been lurching most frequently for the past week. She’s so young, don’t think about her like that. But he can’t help himself. He wants to hear anything she’ll tell him. Everything always feels better when they’re connected. The rest of the galaxy stops for a moment and it’s just him and Rey. Rey, who has always been kinder to him than he deserves, and who has always sought to understand him in a way that no one else ever has.

You sound like a lovesick child, he thinks viciously. Then, with a chill, he remembers Snoke promising that he could have Rey if he wanted her so badly—if he just came and joined Snoke.

Desperate, he thinks suddenly. Snoke’s getting desperate.

Why else would he take Ben’s dad, try to kill his mom, and offer him a girl he’d just met? After years and years and years of trying.

Something was changing. Something was shifting. Time was running out. But Ben was missing pieces, things he doesn’t understand. But he does stand a little straighter as he enters the medbay and sits down at Leia Organa’s side, reaching for her, not with his hand, but with the Force.

I wish I were better at Force healing, mom, he thinks, as he curls his Force signature around hers, like a cat climbing into its owner’s lap. He’d never really been good at it to begin with. It had been the sort of Force skill that was too meditative for his roiling mind. I’d fix this. I’d help you, and then I’d go help dad. There’s so much I could do….

And that’s what it is. That’s what has Snoke so afraid.

He’s not on the path to becoming a Jedi anymore. A Jedi is, for all his power, still a Jedi, bound to a code of some sort.

Ben’s wholly free to do what he wants. Too dark for the path of the light and too light to sink into what Snoke has to offer.

I’m coming for you, he thinks suddenly, and the ferocity of the thought makes him feel almost as though he believes in his own strength. And stars help you when I find you.

- 

Poe Dameron finds him sometime later, sitting with his mother still.

“Hey,” Poe says, glancing between Ben and Leia. “How is she?”

“She’ll live,” Ben says noncommittally.

“That’s—that’s good. When’ll she be—”

“I don’t know,” Ben says. “Depends on how well her system takes to the treatments.”

Poe has the distinct look of someone who is waiting for the right time to say what’s on his mind, but doesn’t know how to casually bring it up. In other words, his usual self, Ben thinks. Ben hasn’t known Poe for very long, but this, he senses is a truth.

“What’s up?”

“Can you be trusted with a secret?” Poe asks.

“Not really,” Ben asks honestly. He pokes himself in the head. “Didn’t Finn tell you? Snoke likes to eavesdrop.”

“Right…” Poe says. “Then…Then I guess I shouldn’t give you details.”

“Better not.” It’s for the best. It grates, but it’s for the best.

Poe nods. “Well…before he left, Finn asked me to give you this.”

“Before he—” Ben’s mind goes blank. Finn’s gone?

He’d left? Just like that—without saying goodbye? Just like Rey.

Except the Force had seen fit to connect him with Rey again.

Somehow, he didn’t think it would be the same for Finn. He’d caught what might be a Force signature in Finn, but it was nothing—nothing like the strength of Rey’s.

He’s gone? It makes him almost want to cry. Why not this, too, on top of everything else?

Finn had helped him earlier, when Snoke had come back so horribly into his brain. Finn had kept him from hurting himself, had been sharp and kind all at once. And now he’s—

“He’ll be back?” he asks Poe.

“Hopefully,” Poe says, before adding. “No details. He had to go quick, there wasn’t enough time. But if we live through this, he’ll be back.”

Ben breathes a little more easily. It’s not like he just up and left.

Even if he didn’t say goodbye.

He looks down at what Poe had pressed into his hand.

It’s the binary beacon—the one that is twin to Rey’s, the one that’s supposed to bring her home.

Ben’s hand tightens over its gently pulsing light.

It’ll bring her home, he thinks. And then, far more frighteningly. And that home is me now.

Chapter Text

Rey waits for Ben to reappear before her, wanting to know what about what she’d told him had spooked him so much. She’s a patient person, can wait forever when she needs to, but this—this is different from wearing down Luke Skywalker, or waiting for her parents. She can feel that in her gut.

She has noticed that there is a difference between what Ben doesn’t want anyone to know and what Ben doesn’t want Rey to know. Ben had been determined to keep the truth of what happened with his uncle buried deep down where no one could find it, but he hadn’t written Rey off the moment she’d gone to Luke, no matter how upset he had been. On the contrary, if she was to judge from their subsequent conversations, he had been hesitant to let her go.

Which meant, she thought, with the right pressure, with the right care, he would tell her. If he knew that she wouldn’t hate him for it, wouldn’t push him away.

Because she wouldn’t.

She knows that down in her soul.

She trains with the lightsaber again, but he doesn’t appear before her. She tries to imagine his movements against hers, but finds herself lingering on little details that aren’t relevant to the training—the taper of his hips, the way his hair shone now that he’d washed it.

Keep yourself alive, he’d told her when they’d first sparred. Which, she supposes, means she just needs to get more and more comfortable with the weapon. I knew that, though. She’d started doing that while Ben was being held prisoner. She wishes it didn’t rankle.

But it does. It does, not least because Luke Skywalker is as determined as possible to be thoroughly unhelpful. She’d asked him for more lessons, for more answers to her questions, but he had just shaken his head. “No. You need to find your own way, Rey.”

Rey yells, and slices her way—not entirely on purpose—through a large rock formation.

Why do I always have to make my own way? she thinks bitterly as the rock topples off the cliffside, bouncing right through a Caretaker cart and into the sea. Wasn’t there anyone who would ever offer her a hand in help?

Leia did, Rey thinks before her rage retorts, sending me to her unhelpful brother while her unhelpful son—

She stops short. It’s one thing to rage against Luke. She feels guilty, being angry with Ben. He just wants her to keep herself alive. He’d said it himself—it’s easier to teach saber Forms in person.

Even when he’s far away, he wants to help me. If her rage has her feeling hot, the warmth of that thought—far from adding to the flame—seems to ease it. Ben is perhaps one of the least capable of helping people she’s ever met. She’s seen him try to tear his hair out of his own head to keep the voices at bay. But the first thing he’d ever done was help her fly off Jakku.

She disengages the lightsaber, a lump in her throat. She reaches out with the Force, trying to understand better how their connection works, but it’s like the first time that she’d seen the Ravager on Jakku. Large and impenetrable, and she needed to find the right parts for Plutt.

I did that. I can do this too.

But it didn’t feel any less daunting than being six and staring in the maw of a graveyard ship.

Luke should help me more than Plutt did. It doesn’t speak well of him that he doesn’t, Rey grumbles to herself. And there it is again—that she always has to do it all herself.

It’s exhausting.

She’d thought she’d find answers here, but instead she’s just found frustration. Instead of guidance she’d just…

Why was it that she kept hoping that the universe would be different from what she’d always known it to be? Uncaring, unhelpful, hell bent on making her feel as small and powerless as it could. Maybe the best teachers she had ever had were, in fact, her parents. They had dispelled her of so many illusions that she had clung to for so long when she was so young. Maybe she was just a bad student, constantly hoping that they might come back for her.

The moment you didn’t have any guidance, you went straight for the darkness.

She had thrown herself into the bowels of the Ravager when she was little, though the darkness frightened her. If everyone was so intent that she work it out for herself, perhaps it was time to go to the one place that had offered answers.

Even if it frightened her.

Perhaps because it frightened her.

Rey rubbed her face. She hadn’t been aware that she was crying until she felt tears under her eyes. She’d thought it was just more sweat, the heat of the sun.

She returns to the huts, deposits her bag and vest there before pausing and looking at her lightsaber. It had chosen her, called to her. That’s what Maz had said. She’d thought that Luke would help her become a hero, like Leia wanted. But maybe that, too, she’ll have to do for herself. Angrily, she throws the thing on her pallet and goes down to the beach, walking along the edge of it until she finds that shady corner with the moss-covered hole.

Unlike when she’d found it through the Force, it is silent now. No promise of showing her what she wants to know, no whispered suggestion that she explore its inner workings. It looks so very bland in the shaded sunshine.

Which only makes Rey more annoyed. “Come on, then,” she growls at it and jumps down into—

Rey can’t swim.

She’d never learned.

She grew up in a desert, where rain—when it fell—was absorbed swiftly into nothingness. She thrashes under the water, trying not to panic as the current sends her rolling and turning until she doesn’t know what is up and what isn’t anymore. She reaches out with the Force, and she thinks she hears a voice she knows and doesn’t know calling to her through the water.

Mom! she thinks in a moment of instinct, lashing out towards it. Mom please!

But the surface of the water doesn’t come. She can’t find it. It’s all darkness around her. The water is underneath a rocky outcropping and even if there is sun and light somewhere above her, it’s black on all sides, like space, like death.

I’m going to die, she thinks.

It’s oddly calming. Oddly fitting—that she’d drown instead of dehydrating in the Jakku sands.

Then—

Keep yourself alive.

Ben?

But that’s a memory of him, the way he’d half-smiled when he’d twirled the lightsaber between his fingers, the way that he is there with her, even if, even when—

Her head breaks through to air and Rey gasps and flails. The salt water of the sea stings her eyes and goes down her throat, making her gag but she’s alive. She’d made her way back out of the darkness.

Somehow, she swims to the rocky edge of the water and tugs herself up. She sits there, coughing and shaken, until her heart rate settles itself, until her body stops shaking, until her eyes adjust to the darkness.

She is in a cave. A shallow one, with some moss on the ground and behind her, a wall so smooth it looks almost like glass. She gets up to examine it and sees her own reflection—a reflection that goes on forever and ever and ever.

“Is this what you were going to show me?” she asks, her voice echoing oddly.

Don’t you want to know? the dark had called to her. I can show you everything.

“You’re not showing me anything,” she whispers. “Just myself.”

Foolish girl. How is that not everything?

And she stares into her reflection, a string of Reys that stretches on through the mirror, each of them leaning closer to get a better look. Her tan is weaker than it had been on Jakku, and her skin is softer. But it is her eyes that catch her off guard.

She stares at them, not knowing what to make of them. Are those her eyes? Those hungry, lonely things? Where had the defensive hellcat gone? Or had she only ever imagined that she was fierce? Was she really only a frightened, overgrown little girl?

She bites her lip.

She’s here to bring Luke Skywalker back. His lightsaber had called to her. She’s powerful with the Force—more powerful than she has any right to be. She’s supposed to be more than just a frightened girl longing for family.

But that’s all she sees in herself. She reaches out her hand to touch her own cheek and her reflection disappears. The cave is clear—the mirror is clear. Clear, and dark.

She swallows. Is this a pathway? she wonders, and she takes a step forward, through the mirror.

These are your first steps.

One step, and then another step, and then another. She is surrounded by solid dark now, so different from the darkness she’d been drowning in, the one she’d thought she’d heard her mother’s voice in. She can hear her own breath, echoing oddly now.

She can’t help it:

Can you show me my parents?

If darkness could laugh, she senses it would be laughing now. She proves herself the crying child, her loneliness washing away any attempt to cling to that errant hope that she might, in fact, have something heroic to her, something of legendary caliber.

She cringes as the dark replies.

Didn’t they prove themselves unworthy of you years ago? Are you not your own past, present, and future? Wholly your own? That was a blessing, not a curse. What will you do with it?

It doesn’t feel like a blessing.

She thinks of Ben, attacking his own head, hounded by legacies, weighed down by them until she thought he just might break. She thinks of Finn, standing on the precipice of what he could have been if he’d only known—he who hadn’t even chosen his own name—freedom. Rey, at least, had done that.  

But I want—

We don’t always get what we want, child. Those who fear the dark learn this young for they too must sleep at night.

Are you my mother?

No, the dark responds immediately, I care about you far more.

Rey tastes salt on her tongue, wet from her eyes for the wet of the dark waters had long since dried away.

“Who am I to be?” she asks at last. Will I have a family?

And the darkness replies,

Whoever you choose.

-

Rey climbs her way back out of the cave on slippery stone. The sun has set and the darkness is truly in full swing and—to make life easier—it is now raining, great heavy raindrops falling from great heavy storm clouds that rumble and flash from time to time.

She can’t tell if she is glad she went into the darkness or not. She’d gone for answers, and had only come away with more questions—some of which she did not like. But that, at least, seemed to be the way things had gone since she’d left Jakku so she couldn’t even pretend that she was surprised by it. Had she chosen to remain on Jakku for as long as she did? The first second that she had even contemplated leaving in desperation, there had been Finn and Ben and off she’d gone. Could she had left when she was younger? Could she have gone in search of them?

Had she chosen her own pain? Had hoping that she would be saved from it merely elongated it?

And what about now. That pride she took in waiting, in being good at waiting—was that pride at putting herself last, when she could…

But no. No, the Resistance needed Luke, not Rey. Even Luke said that Rey didn’t need Luke. And Ben had offered to teach her what his uncle couldn’t. Perhaps he hadn’t finished his Jedi training, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t tell her some things. She could be—could be her own past, present, and future, something wholly different from generations of Jedi who had come before her.

What did those Jedi know about what she had endured? What she could endure? They were all dead anyway.

The rain lashes at her face and Rey is glad when she reaches her hut. She lights a fire, takes off her vest and hangs it on the wall to drip dry, and is about to strip off her trousers as well when there is a knock on her door.

“Can I come in?” Luke asks her.

“Yes,” Rey says before she can stop herself. She’s not sure she wants to put up with Luke Skywalker’s grumbling right now.

But her door is already opening and there he stands, taking off a long woolen coat and hanging it on a peg by the door.

He looks at her for a long while before coming and sitting by the fire with her. “You went to the dark,” he says at last, watching her with those blue eyes of his. They are sharp in the firelight, glowing at her with a fire she doesn’t fully understand.

“I did,” Rey says, feeling her jaw jut out defensively. “You said that it wasn’t a—”

“It’s not,” Luke says, shrugging. “Not least because you came back.”

Rey frowns. “Of course I came back. Why wouldn’t I come back?” The dark had been frightening, it had been comforting, it had been mystifying and tantalizing. But she had never had the intention of staying down there forever.

“The dark—it can be…seductive. I don’t like that word,” he adds. “That’s the one that my master used, and presumably other Jedi masters. Seductive.” He scowls and puts on a thick voice. “He was seduced by the dark side of the force.” The expression fades. “That’s what they said of my father.”

“Darth Vader,” Rey breathes.

“Anakin Skywalker,” Luke replies evenly. “He was both. Vader quite as long as Skywalker.” His gaze is suddenly distant, and she wonders if he is remembering what his father looked like.

“You’re afraid of the dark,” she says. “That’s what you said.”

“I have been,” he sighs. “I will be again. It’s the folly of getting older, really. You come to fear that which didn’t daunt you in your youth. I wasn’t afraid of the dark when I was a boy. But I saw it in Ben and…” He swallows and Rey’s breath catches in her throat. “Well, it doesn’t matter.”

She lets out an exasperated snarl that catches Luke quite off guard. “Doesn’t matter? It’s the only thing that matters, isn’t it?”

Luke cocks his head at her. “You don’t even know what happened.”

“I don’t have to to see what he’s become—what he’s been forced to be.”

“And I didn’t mean to say it didn’t matter for him,” Luke says firmly. “Merely that time has passed. I can’t undo what happened. Not to Ben, not to the rest of them.” He takes a deep breath. “There was a darkness in my nephew’s head. Almost all his life, he’s been strong with the Force and so much of that strength came from the darkness. Leia…she trusted me with her son. She wanted me to teach him, to help him control it, to be a Jedi like me, like our father... He used to complain of hearing voices that weren’t there. That isn’t abnormal. For one so strong with the Force, he might well be communing with the past, or the future. I tried to teach him to control it. But it never seemed to work. And he went darker, and darker.” Luke swallows. “And one night, I looked.” He balls his fists on his knees. “I looked, and I saw so much more than I was expecting. And yes—yes I was afraid of the darkness in my nephew. I didn’t know what to do with it, with him.

“But I wouldn’t have to.” He closes those burning blue eyes. “I didn’t have to. Because when Ben woke, he fled. I tried to keep him from running. I could help him better, now that I understood the magnitude of it all. I didn’t realize—his head has never been safe, never been…private. And I had violated that safety in the exact same way that Snoke had done for years. He didn’t trust me, and if he couldn’t trust the great Luke Skywalker, who could he trust?”

Me, Rey thinks fiercely. He can trust me. He does. She knows that.

“He fled. I tried following him, but he’s always been a good pilot—as good as me, as good as his father. I lost his trail. And when I returned to my other students…” There are tears, suddenly, in his eyes. “The First Order had descended upon them in my absence—had killed every last one of them, even the younglings. I lost all of them, just like that.” He turns his gaze back to Rey. “You want me to teach you? I have only ever destroyed my students. The Force was no greater guide for me than it was for thousands of generations of Jedi—all destroyed at the hands of a Skywalker.”

“Fine,” Rey says at last. “Don’t teach me, then,” she says, and Luke looks thoroughly startled. “Prove just how useless you truly are—unwilling to help even your friends.”

“My friends would be better off without me.”

“Are you truly so deluded as to think that?” Rey is so tired, so worn through that she doesn’t even realize that she’s yelling until she hears the question ringing in the hut. “Friends are what make life worth living when you don’t have anything else!” And suddenly she wants nothing more than to get off this island, get off this planet and back to her friends. She is tired of this, tired of waiting, tired of having everything she tries get flung back in her face. She wants to get back to Finn and the promise of together, no matter what came next, back to Ben. She gets to her feet and grabs her vest, her staff, and her bag, before turning back and giving Luke Skywalker one final look.

“Have it your way,” she says. “But you’re not my parents. I don’t always have to be the one left begging.”

She bursts out of the hut just as a clap of thunder rolls over the island—a storm to match her rage. She doesn’t know what she’ll tell Leia, but she’ll have plenty of time to work that out on the trip back to the Resistance. All she needs is the binary beacon to bring her home.

She marches her way down the hills to the Falcon, the wind and rain billowing around her. It’s all right, she tells her thudding heart. It’s all right. Leia won’t hate you. Ben said he’d teach you. It will be all right. It will be all right.

But part of her can’t help thinking she is making a huge mistake in her anger. Luke was warming to her, if she’d just waited a little longer instead of berating him about how he was heartless and selfish.

“Chewie!” she calls as she approaches the Falcon. “Chewie—we’re—”

But a strike of lightning cuts off her words, forking its way through the darkness and striking the outcropping right above the Falcon.

She sees it as if it’s in slow motion, just as she had when she’d cut her way through that rock earlier that day with Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber. The outcropping above the Falcon seems to glow, then she hears a crackle, a grind of rock coming loose, and then it is falling, falling, falling and Rey hears herself yelling, reaching out with the Force but not knowing what she should be doing and—

The rock stops short as if held by, well, magic, mere feet above the ship.

Rey lets out a triumphant yell before realizing that she isn’t the one who had caught it.

She whirls about and, etched against the night sky, she sees Luke, his hand raised almost lazily. With a flick of his wrist, the rock tumbles into the sea.

Rey stares at him, and he turns his gaze to her. Then he begins walking.

“You need a teacher,” he tells her. “Can’t even lift rocks.” He smiles, as though enjoying some private joke. Then, more seriously, “Chewie would have ripped my arms off if I’d let anything happen to her, and that’s a light punishment in comparison to what Han would do.”

She’d thought she would feel victorious in this moment, that she’d convinced him. She should feel victorious. She’d done it, hadn’t she?

“Why?” Rey asks him as he passes her. “Just like that?”

Luke looks at her and shakes his head, then points to cliff face that’s still smoking from the strike of lightning. “The island is the same, even if that rock’s gone. It looks different. It’ll be different. Maybe porgs will make their nests there now. Maybe in a thousand generations the caretakers will tell legends of this moment. But the island is still the island. The truth is still the truth. I failed. But sometimes a strike of lightning changes the shape of the failure. The wind will blow around the island differently.” He rolls his eyes. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had to pull something this teacherly out of my—well never mind.” He keeps going. “You’re the lightning strike. Don’t forget that. You make it the way you want it to be and don’t let anyone stop you. Not even me.” He laughs, and it sounds positively jubilant. “Least of all me.”

Chapter Text

“We’re on our way back,” Rey is positively glowing when she tells him that, and her face is so lovely in its excitement even though his stomach fills with dread.

“We…Luke?”

The wide grin fades into a more tentative smile. “Yes,” she says quietly. “He’s in the cockpit now with Chewie.”

“Where are you?”

“In the captain’s quarters.” Ben can’t see her surroundings, but in his mind’s eye, he knows that she’s sitting on his father’s bed as she talks to him. Her hair is wet as though she’d just come out of the ‘fresher. Maybe she has. Except she looks a little too much like a drowned womp-rat. “There should be blankets in the cabinet next to the bunk,” he says. His dad had wrapped him in them once, when he’d been very small and his nightmares had woken him up screaming.

Rey looks surprised for a moment, then she stands and goes to the cabinets. A moment later, she’s thrown a blanket around her shoulders and is settling back down. “Thanks,” she says. “It was raining when we left.”

He nods. She’s coming back. She’s coming back, and then—

Then she’ll be trapped on this ship just like the rest of them. Unless Finn does whatever it is that Finn told Poe he was going to do.

“What’s wrong?” Rey asks. She’s watching him closely and he grimaces. He hasn’t spoken to her since it happened, he realizes.

“The First Order’s on our tail,” he says, “They killed most of our command. General Or—My—she’s…” Rey inhales sharply and her eyes go bright and he knows she thinks she’s dead, “She’s alive. She’s just,” he watches her sag with relief as he fumbles for words. “Unconscious. They can track us through hyperspace, so we can’t outrun them. And fuel’s running low.”

“So maybe it’s a good thing that Luke is coming. He’ll be able to help, somehow. If only with morale.”

Ben doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t know what to say to it. Because Rey’s probably right, but the idea of looking at his uncle again, of being in the same space as him, as having to pretend that everything’s fine. Although maybe Snoke will get distracted and leave him alone in favor of the more powerful Skywalker. Or he’ll leave him to torment me, just like he tried to kill my mom.

He hates having Snoke in his head. He always has. But right now, there’s so much and he feels like more of a drag on the Resistance by the second, and his mother isn’t even conscious to dispel him of that.

Rey’s still watching him closely, and she clearly misinterprets what he’d been thinking about because she says, quietly, “He told me what happened. What he did.”

He feels like he’s going to be sick, all of a sudden. Why is it that he always manages to feel sick around Rey? She’s one of the few people in his life who is unequivocally soothing, but his stomach is rolling right now.

It’s probably because Snoke’s been in his mind too much lately, but he can feel that pressure on his skull, the one he’d woken up to, the one that had revealed his uncle’s face. It’s not the same, some voice protests, one that sounds like every person he’s ever loved who has loved his uncle. He was trying to help.

Except his help had hurt.

Why does the help always hurt?

Rey hasn’t said anything. He can see her preparing to, though, from the way she is licking her lips nervously. Ben wants to look away, but he can’t. Now is when she’ll tell him he’s overreacting. Now is when she’ll tell him he was wrong, and that his peers at the praxeum died because of him. Now is when Rey, too, will—

“Ben,” she whispers and she reaches her hand out for his, slowly, tentatively.

He swallows and stares at it.

He knows, of course—knows that theoretically at least she could hold his hand through the Force. He still doesn’t understand the nature of their connection, forgets until it’s too late all too frequently that he wants to understand the how of it desperately because if he understands the how of it, maybe he can make sure that it never goes away, and that he’ll always have her, sitting there with him even when she’s not there, licking her lips nervously, shallow breath catching in her breast. He knows that she’s reaching for him because she has complete faith that she can hold his hand. Their lightsabers had sung and connected when they’d sparred. But Rey, thousands of lightyears away and winging her way back…

He reaches for her, prepared for the disappointment of his hand going through hers like she’s a ghost, even though he knows their skin will connect.

Her hand is warm against his, and the skin of it is calloused. He has known this, though. He has known it since she first took his hand on Starkiller. He remembers that warmth, how steadying it had been, how much he had needed it because if she was holding his hand—if someone was holding his hand—he wasn’t alone, and someone might actually care about him.

This warmth is like that warmth.

And yet also not.

This warmth is on his palm, in his fingers as they bend towards her wrist, wanting to hold her close.

It is also up his arm, in his heart, in his mind, in the air he thinks he is breathing, pressing into his eyes, so tantalizingly comfortable that he wants to close them, to rub his face in her hair, against her neck.

He knows the Force. He knows its intricacies, he knows its lies, but he has never wanted to believe in it more than he does right now, as he feels Rey’s hand press against him, against all of him, against his past, against his future—supporting him through time and space.

He watches as her eyes widen in surprise, as a tear drips down her face, and he shifts, wanting to move closer to her, wanting to pull her closer, into his arms maybe, or just…

Getting sentimental, are we?

She’s gone. She’s gone and he yells because that’s what he’d remembered moments before, except it’s not Luke this time, it’s Snoke, the way it almost always is.

Snoke is laughing in his ears.

No.

Not his ears.

In his kneecaps, in his elbows, in the space between his vertebrae. Everywhere that Rey had been warm just now, Snoke is cold.

Cold, and mocking.

You are. You are sentimental. You care for the girl. You have compassion for her. Odd, for one so dark to be drawn to one so light—but I suppose she must be drawn to the dark too, if she likes you.

Ben wants to cry, he wants to scream again. His hands are in his hair again and there are tears in the corner of his eyes but he will not cry.

I said it before, and I’ll say it again. You are stronger than your father.

Snoke doesn’t show him his father this time, though. He doesn’t show him anything. Ben is staring out into the empty space that Rey had once filled and Snoke is chuckling in his head.

Ah, what a choice to make. Stay with your mother, wait for your girl, or save your father.

He’ll be executed, by the way. I plan to execute him. Can’t let the great General Solo live, even if he’s little more than Corellian street scum. Hardly worthy of Vader’s daughter, but I suppose he could have done worse than make you.

“Shut up,” Ben grits out, “shut up, shut up!”

He wants Rey back. He wants Rey, he wants Rey, or Finn wherever he is, who’d stopped him from hitting his head against a wall. He’d even take—

Skywalker? Now there’s a surprise.

More laughter.

You must hate me. I suppose I can see why, but I have done nothing but try to help you, Ben. That’s why I connected you to the girl to begin with.

He’s going to be sick now, he really is. Snoke had made their connection? Snoke?

You wanted her—even before you knew you wanted her, you wanted her. How could I not connect you to her? It would be cruel not to do so, when I had the capacity—far crueler than anything else I might have done to try and stoke your power. I told you: you could have her if you liked.

Was I a liar? Did I lie to you?

I gave her to you. She’s all but yours. You could take her.

Or you could lose her forever.

“I wouldn’t. We’ll beat you.”

Will you? It won’t be long at all until my fleet has you fully cornered. Skywalker may be strong, but he can’t defeat my Supremacy.

Come to me, Ben. It won’t be all bad. You will have to let go of parts of your past, but they were holding you back.

Just like your father.

And Snoke is gone. Gone, and Ben does—as he has been threatening to for a while—vomit, lurching towards a waste bin.

I’m too used to this, he thinks as he manages to avoid getting any sick on his clothes. He sinks to the floor, shaking and feeling feverish from the whiplash of Rey’s warmth and Snoke’s cool.

He’d been naïve to think that the Force had chosen them to be a pair somehow. Had wanted to believe it. Had needed to believe it, that Rey—that Rey—

That she meant something to him, more than just his own yearning.

But he’d been wrong about that. Wrong and naïve and stupid.

Snoke is powerful, powerful enough to send him nightmares from the Unknown Regions. Of course he’s powerful enough to connect Rey and Ben somehow. There must be some way of doing it, if you don’t stick to the Jedi code, if you used the Dark Side.

The Dark Side.

Oh it was so cleverly done, he thinks, leaning his head back against the wall. He almost hits himself again, but maybe because Finn’s gone, can’t stop him, he doesn’t. Give him what he wants through the Dark Side. Make it so that the light only loses things for him. His father, his uncle. Perhaps if he’d truly given into the Dark Side he could have saved his mother too.

And Rey?

He wants to see her, he wants to hold her, but even the thought of her now is enough to make his skin crawl. How much of what he’d spoken with her, what he’d felt with her—how much had been Snoke? Was any of it even real? Or had Snoke placed a clever hallucination in his mind, as viscerally real as the roiling ones where he was surrounded by blood and smoke and death?

Questions upon questions upon questions and this is why he thinks he’s going mad.

Your father’s always been a little bit mad, but don’t tell him I said so.

The memory of his mother’s voice makes the breath catch in his throat.

And then, the memory of Snoke’s, I plan to execute him.

Han Solo, who hadn’t recognized his adult son. Han Solo, who had always tried to avoid responsibility—except when it mattered most. Han Solo, who had made the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs, who had smuggled for the Rebellion, who had married a Princess and who had held his son when he’d woken up from his nightmares, even if he didn’t understand them, even if he didn’t think that they were real.

Real enough for you now, dad? Ben thinks. He wants it to be vicious. But really, he just feels empty inside.

Ben gets to his feet at last. The movement is smooth, it is calm, it is collected.

He empties his mind, the way that his uncle had always tried so hard to get him to. He will lose his nerve if he thinks about it for too long. And his nerve is probably the only thing of his he has left, raw and exposed as it is.

It’s the one thing Snoke can’t touch.

He takes a blaster from a shelf and holsters it at his hip. Then, because he may need it, because he probably will need it, because Snoke would likely be surprised if he showed up without it, he takes his lightsaber too.  

Ben makes his way through the Raddus, moving stealthily.

He’s good at stealthy. He’s had to be in the years since Luke.

But is there even need for stealth, when he’s running right into the maw of the beast?

Chapter Text

“Hailing the Raddus,” Luke says into the com, staring at the huge starship on the Raddus’ tail. “This is Luke Skywalker aboard the Millennium Falcon, will you let us land?”

Rey's eyes were on the ship behind the Raddus. She had never in her life seen a ship so large. It could eat the Star Destroyers on Jakku for breakfast. We’re up against that? It is not a comforting thought. She glances at Chewie, who seemed to share her misgivings, even as the com crackles and a voice she does not recognize says,

“Good to hear you, Luke. We’re lowering our shields in Sector Five.”

“Roger that,” Luke replies and he and Chewie guide the Falcon into one of the Raddus’ bays. It looks worse for wear, as do the ships in it.

“Things are bad,” Luke murmurs to her. “Where was the rest of the fleet?”

“I—” Rey hadn’t even noticed that. She’d been too preoccupied by the massive black First Order ship on their tail.

Luke grimaces. “Maybe staying behind was a better idea. At least I would have lived longer. It was a joke,” he adds, rolling his eyes at her expression. “Come on.”

“I’ll get her settled,” Chewie tells them as they get to their feet. The Wookiee has become very possessive of all of the Falcon’s needs. Rey has let him do it. She suspects it’s his way of taking care of Han, even when Han is gone.

They are met by a whole slew of people that Rey doesn’t recognize, but the tallest of them, a slim woman with violet hair steps forward and Luke clasps at her hand. “Luke,” she says warmly, smiling at him. The smile is grim, but her eyes—clear and blue like Luke’s—are dancing with delight.

“Amilyn,” he says with an old familiarity. “Where is she?”

“In the medical bay.” They begin walking, Rey trailing after them. “It was the Force that saved her. She should have asphyxiated out in space like that, and it’s mostly her heart that’s been having trouble with the experience.”

“Never let Leia hear you say her heart was weak,” Luke says and Amilyn chuckles.

“She won’t hear it from me, but she may hear it from the medi-droid that’s been tending to her.”

“I can take it from here,” Luke says. They round a corner and run into Poe Dameron, Oddy Muva, and Kaydel Ko Connix standing together, speaking in hushed tones. Amilyn and Luke continue on but Rey pauses for a moment.

“Hi,” she says warmly.

“Rey! You’re back,” Poe says. There’s something strained in his voice, though, and he glances behind her to Luke. “So you got him, then.” She really doesn’t understand why he says it like that, as though he’s deflating.

“Yes,” Rey says. “We’re on our way to heal Leia—at least I think that’s what he’s going to do.”

“Rey,” Luke calls. He and Amilyn have paused down the hall and both are looking at her.

“I’ve got to go,” she says and waves as she heads off. “Sorry,” she says to Luke.

“Greeting friends is important,” he shrugs, “But you wanted a teacher, and Force Healing’s tough and this is a good opportunity to get started.”

“The Force can heal?” Rey had not known that.

“It can do lots of things,” Luke says.

Amilyn’s eyes are still on Poe and the others. When Rey turns to look at them too, maybe give them a warm smile, they’ve already turned away and are making their ways down the hall.

Amilyn heaves what sounds like a frustrated sigh, and the three of them continue on to the medical bay.

The bay is clean and bright, like the whole ship, filled with all sorts of humming from all sorts of machines. Leia is far from the only body in the bay.

“What happened?” Luke asks as he looks around.

“The First Order,” Amilyn says. “They tracked us through hyperspace, somehow.” Rey’s eyes bug out of her head, and Amilyn nods all-too knowingly. “And then they attacked. Got a good portion of our fighter pilots as they were suiting up.” She sounds weary. Rey searches the beds they pass for familiar faces but sees none. She can’t tell if she’s relieved or not. Surely Ben would have told me if something had happened to Finn.

“Well,” Luke says, glancing at Rey. “Looks like you’re going to have lots of opportunity to practice.” She squares her shoulders and nods.

They end up at a bed at the end of the medical bay and Luke settles in a seat that has been pulled close to Leia’s side, as though the previous occupant wanted to hold her hand. Luke glances over his shoulder at Rey.

“I was going to have you help, but given how much there is to do, I think you should watch first. Reach out with me.”

She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes at the same time that Luke does and feels a wave of light washing over Leia Organa’s body. He starts with her heart, as Amilyn had warned. The organ is beating weakly, and Rey doesn’t know the words for what he does. It’s not that he sends a jolt of energy into it, to bring it back to its usual pace, it’s more like he soothes it, tells it that it’s all right, and helps it pump for a few minutes while he moves on to her lungs, her gut, her neck, her brain—all of which have been struggling because of her heart’s weakness. He bathes them all in light, and she can feel the organs start to swell with new energy as oxygen and light pumps into them in Leia’s blood.

When Luke is done, Rey opens her eyes and sees that Leia’s eyes are open as well, watching her brother.

“No sudden movements,” Luke tells her. “But you should be all right now.”

“Luke,” Leia says, her voice thick, “Part of me thought you weren’t going to come.”

“I might not have, but you sent the right person for the job,” Luke says.

Leia’s eyes slide to Rey and she sees approval in them, and Rey’s throat goes thick. “It’s good to have you back, Rey,” Leia says, reaching her hand towards her. Her hand is soft, and her grip is firm if a little tired.

“I could say the same of you,” Amilyn says, and Leia’s eyes snap to the taller woman.

“Status report?”

“Not good, but we’re still on track.”

“Good,” Leia says.

“On track for what?” Luke replies. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you’ve got a Snoke on your tail.”

“We’re getting within transport distance of Crait,” Leia says. “Once we’re close enough, we should be able to evacuate down to the old Rebel base there until help can get to us. Hopefully the First Order will just…fly right by. It will mean losing this old thing,” she adds, patting the wall of the Raddus fondly. “But she’s had a good run and will go out in style.”

“Crait,” Luke breathes. Then he laughs. “You remember every blasted Rebel base in the galaxy, don’t you?”

“Not all of them,” Leia says, “But Crait’s got a special place in my heart which makes it hard to forget.” She takes a deep breath and sits up. “All right,” she says. “Let’s get—”

“General!” Poe’s voice cracks like a shot from a blaster through the medical bay and all of them turn to look at him.

“He looks determined,” Luke muses quietly as Poe moves towards them.

“What is it, Poe?” Leia asks as she gets to her feet. She’s still in the clothing that the medidroids had put her in, white and soft.

“I’d like a word with you alone.”

“There’s nothing you can say to me that you can’t say in front of these people,” Leia says, sounding almost amused that she’d have to say that aloud. “Although,” she pauses. “Perhaps not in the medical bay. I’ll need to change.”

“General, there’s no time,” Poe snaps.

Leia raises her eyebrows, then glances out the window towards the giant First Order flagship. “Probably not much,” she says. “But I imagine we at least have enough time to get me to my quarters and a bit of privacy.” She marches past him, shaking her head and a moment later, Amilyn has stepped into stride behind her.

“She’s a coward and a traitor to the Resistance and her plans will destroy us,” Poe says loudly. Leia pauses, visibly heaves a sigh, and replies, without looking at Poe,

“Privacy, Poe. Come on,” and she waves all of them along.

That seems to unnerve Poe but he falls into step with Rey, and remains silent the rest of the way to General Organa’s quarters.

“We’ll be back for them,” Luke tells her. “They are in stable condition.”

“Will it all be like that?” Rey asks him.

“No,” he replies. “Stitching things back together can be—well it depends if it’s internal or external. Leia was all in one piece. Just weak. Wounds and burns—those require reinvigorating the flesh which can take lots more time and even more energy.”

“General,” Poe says the minute they’re inside Leia’s quarters again. “She’s running from the fight. She’s fueling up the transports with whatever we have left. They’re not armed for combat. We’ll be sitting ducks out there, waiting for the First Order to blast us out of the stars.”

“And what do you propose as an alternative?” Leia asks evenly from a closet. They hear a rustle of fabric, and Poe’s cheeks pinken a little. She’s completely out of view, but the fact that they all know she’s getting dressed seems to have had an effect on him.

He pulls through it fast, though. “General,” he says, and there’s a nervous edge to his voice. Clearly he had expected her to be more annoyed with Amilyn’s plan than she is. “Finn and Rose are on their way to the Supremacy to shut down the tracker. Once they’ve done that, We’ll be able to slip off into Hyperspace and they won’t be able to—”

“You sent two of our operatives to try and shut that thing down?” Amilyn asks sharply. “On whose authority?”

“On his own, apparently,” Leia says, emerging from the closet and wearing a long dark dress. She goes over to a vanity in the corner and unwraps her hair from the white cloth they’d put it in in the medical bay and begins brushing it out.

“Did you even give them an escape plan?” Amilyn snaps. “Or was it all—”

“Oh, let’s not do this,” Leia says. “There’s not enough time, and we need to get Finn and Rose back from the Supremacy.”

“General!” Poe protests, but Leia cuts him off with a look through her mirror.

“On your left, soldier. What do you see?”

Poe glances on his left out a window. There’s a planet—the one that Rey presumes she and Luke and Holdo had been talking about.

“What is that?” Poe asks.

“The mineral planet, Crait. An uncharted hideout from the days of the Rebellion.”

“That's a Rebel base?” He sounds winded.

Leia nods as she begins twisting her fingers through her hair. “Abandoned, but heavily armored, and with enough power to get a distress signal to our allies, scattered in the Outer Rim.”

“That could work,” Poe says slowly.

“It could,” Leia says dryly. She glances at Amilyn. “Sometimes it’s more important to protect the light than it is to do the flashy daring thing. We need to figure out how to get Finn and Rose off that ship. You’re in contact with them?”

“I am,” Poe says. He pulls a comlink out of his pocket. Leia nods to him, and he flicks it on, a determined look on his face. “Finn—you read me, buddy?”

“Not a good time,” is Finn’s immediate response, and Rey’s heart lurches at the sound of his voice. She’s missed him. Talking to Ben regularly had eased the ache of missing them both, but the moment she hears Finn’s voice her heart aches to see him again. “This place is crawling with officers.”

“Finn, you need to get out of there. Abort the plan.”

“We’re close though!” is Finn’s reply, almost desperate.

“Finn, that’s an order from the General.”

Finn doesn’t reply immediately. He can’t. Because,

“All right—hands where I can see them.”

No.

They’ve been caught.

Leia closes her eyes and rests her face briefly in her hands. Poe stares at the comlink in complete horror as the weight of what’s happening hits him.

“We have to help them,” Rey says immediately.

“I don’t know if there’s anything we can do,” Leia says. Her voice sounds empty, emotionless, but her hands are trembling as she finishes pinning her hair.

“So we’re just going to leave them there? Like Han? We didn’t leave—” She looks around. “Where’s Ben?” Everything had happened so quickly when they had arrived that it hadn’t occurred to her how strange it was that Ben hadn’t come to greet them, to see his mother freshly healed. Unless he’s avoiding Luke.

She’d been beginning to think that seeing her might be more important than hiding from Luke though. She closes her eyes and reaches out and—

“He’s not on the ship,” Luke says slowly, clearly doing the exact same thing as Rey. “He’s—” He wheels about and stares out the window at the First Order ship. “What are you doing there, Ben?”

Rey goes cold. Ben, and Finn, and Han, and whoever this Rose person is—they’re all there?

“We have to help.”

“I don’t think there’s anything—” Luke begins.

“We have to do something,” Rey practically yells. Her heart is hammering in her chest, there’s an odd ringing in her ears. I can’t lose them. I can’t.

“Rey, we need to get the Resistance to safety,” Amilyn says, not unkindly. “I know it’s hard, but we need to help as many people as we can in one go.”

“And just leave the others to die? I can’t do that. I can’t.” She turns and looks at Leia, not knowing what she’s going to say, just knowing that she’s got to do something.

“Might Ben have gone to help them?” Leia asks Poe. “Did he know they were close?”

Poe shakes his head. “He didn’t want to know the plan. Said it wasn’t safe from Snoke if he knew.”

Because Snoke can read his mind, because Snoke knows his every secret. And Snoke’s holding his father prisoner. Rey wants to cry.

“Rey, I know it’s hard,” Leia says with that same empty voice. Her son and her husband, she thinks. She’s soldiering on, not letting herself get swept away from what she needs to be. It makes her angry at the older woman, it makes her sad for her. “But I don’t see how there’s a way that we can actually help them. Sending our people into the depths of that ship already was a failure, I don’t see how sending you—”

“Let her go, Leia,” Luke says quietly, his eyes on Rey. Rey turns to look at him, but the moment she does, he turns to his sister. “Do you really think she’ll stay very long if she loses them? She might, of course. But she might also blame us for the loss.”

I wouldn’t, Rey thinks at once, but she doesn’t need to say that out loud, not when Leia is watching her brother, and sighing, and saying, “I don’t like this. What if we lose her too?”

Luke doesn’t reply, but he gives Leia a significant look before turning to Rey. “Go,” he says.

“Are you coming with me?” she asks.

He considers. “No. This isn’t my time to be Ben Kenobi.” Rey doesn’t know what that means, doesn’t know who Ben Kenobi is, but she doesn’t have time for that. She nods to the room and turns on her heel and heads out.

She’ll need a ship. Except that most of the Resistance ships had been destroyed when the First Order attacked the Raddus. She could take the Falcon, she’s sure Chewie would fly with her. But that would just put him in harm’s way like the rest of them, and if she can’t save Finn and Ben and Han and Rose, at least she won’t let anything bad happen to Chewie.

So an escape pod.

She makes her way down into the bowels of the Raddus to the escape bay. It looks like several of the pods have already been jettisoned. Had Ben taken one?

That is the last thought she has before the doors of the pod close behind her.

Chapter Text

The first thing they do when Ben arrives on the Supremacy is cuff him. The cuffs are tight, and scrape against the cloaked binary beacon tied around his wrist. His heart pangs when he realizes he had forgotten to take it off. It would be a catastrophe, if Rey followed him here instead of finding his mother.

It feels like a stupid precaution in all honesty. Now that the Force is thrumming through him again, he could flatten every single one of the stormtroopers that Snoke sends to detain him, could crush their skulls, their throats, their lungs until they were dead.

He doesn’t though.

Because of Finn, Finn who had once been a Stormtrooper but is one of the only people in the galaxy that matters to him, who had made it out and who has such a shining soul. Or perhaps because of his father.

He is focusing on his breathing now. In and out. In through his nose, out through his mouth, his organs all collapsing in as he exhales. He is stronger now than he was the last time he was in First Order custody, though he is not as strong as he was when he’d fled Luke.

They take him into an elevator and he closes his eyes. He does not reach out with his feelings to see what awaits him. He does not think of Rey, though he wants to. He will not think of her so long as Snoke’s—in and out. Breathe in and out. Think of his father.

He lets anger flood him then. His father telling him to behave, that there was no reason to act like that, that they’re just dreams, Ben. His father, who hadn’t even really been able to look at him when they shipped him off to Luke. His father, who hadn’t recognized his only son when he’d clapped eyes on him for the first time since he was a boy. His father, who was stupid enough to get himself caught in the first place. His father, who Snoke is going to execute.

He hears the elevator doors decompress and he opens his eyes again as a man dressed all in red enters the elevator and grabs his arm, pulling him down a long black walkway. The entire throne room is huge and red. The hangings on the wall are solid crimson, the guards—seven more of them, in addition to the one who was leading Ben—seemed to melt into the walls. And at the center of it all, a golden throne.

Snoke is smaller than he had expected. He’s taller than any man Ben’s ever met—taller than Ben himself—but he’s still not as huge as the holo of him had made Ben think when it had been Ben strapped to a torture device on Starkiller base. He is leaning on an elbow on his throne, garbed in gold and purple as though he is some ancient king, his dark eyes staring at Ben hungrily. He does not look away as the guard standing with Ben proceeds to the throne, kneels, and presents Ben’s blaster and lightsaber to Snoke.

“Ben Solo,” Snoke says, his voice smooth as velvet. He flicks his hand and the two weapons land on the armrests of his throne at his side. “I’ve been waiting for this moment.”

Ben doesn’t say a word. His throat is dry. He is focusing on his anger.

“Good,” Snoke says, “Your anger makes you strong. I know you are angry with me now. But hopefully you will see that there is so much more to be angry about than these little…” he waves a hand, “indiscretions on my part. The cruelties of a teacher. But you are familiar with those.”

Memories of Luke pressing into his head. More anger.

“But you see, now, don’t you? However angry you are with me—it’s nothing compared to your other angers. I never once tried to tame you.” He leans forward, “I even gave you the girl. That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

He refuses to think of Rey, but the memory of her pressing into his future makes its way through his mind anyway.

Snoke laughs.

“Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? The carrot or the stick. Too long everyone chose the stick with you, when they should have chosen the carrot. She’ll be here soon enough. Here for you. The family she is choosing, after hers cast her aside. Not unlike your own.” Snoke leans back in his seat. “Nothing to say, my young apprentice?”

“What’s there to say?” Ben rasps out.

“Is this what your submission looks like? Wordless? I’d have imagined more from you, given how hard you resisted. But I suppose every man must be surprised at some point. Vader was a man of few words as well.”

Snoke smiles.

“I have something for you,” he gestures his hand, and a moment later one of the red-clad guards steps forward, carrying a large black box. He steps before Ben and opens it with a hiss.

Inside it is a crushed helmet, covered in ash. Ben has seen enough pictures of Darth Vader in his life to recognize his helmet.

“A gift. A token in honor of your bloodline. You have chosen wisely, shedding your parents, shedding Skywalker. Your grandfather—he would have given you everything. So I shall in his stead.”

What was he supposed to do with it? Take it? Put it on? He looks up at Snoke and when he does, the guard closes the box and steps away.

“He would be proud of you,” Snoke says. “On this day, in joining me, you help stamp out the Resistance—the last remnant of that rebel alliance he sought to crush. It is his legacy that we preserve today, that you will carry forward for years to come.”

Behind him, he hears the elevator doors open again and Ben doesn’t have to turn around to know who is being brought to him. It’s why he’s here, after all. Ben focuses on the memory of his father when he’d first seen him for the first time in years.

“But here he is,” Snoke says. “I did tell you, he would come to me again, General Solo.”

“Captain,” he hears his father correct. “I’m not the General in the family.”

“But you were a General once,” Snoke replies.

“Briefly. Then I retired. Family reasons.” Han Solo’s voice is weary, and Ben can hear that he’s speaking through puffy, broken lips.

“Yes, you had a son,” Snoke says. “Who you did not care for, or love, or understand. Who you were thoroughly ill-equipped to raise. To think—a man who doesn’t believe in the Force raising the most powerful child in all the galaxy.”

“That’s irony for you,” Han says. “Sorry kid,” he adds. He’s level with Ben now, but Ben is refusing to look at him. He can’t look at him. He’ll lose his nerve if he looks at him.

“To think,” Snoke’s voice is triumphant, “that if you’d merely known your son, neither of you would be here in this predicament, would you? If you had trusted him, if you had loved him…” He heaves a melodramatic sigh. “But that was always going to be your downfall, Captain Solo. Hubris. Assuming that you could make your way through on instinct, rather than taking the time to nurture.

“Ben,” Snoke says and Ben looks at him. “No, that name sits wrong. You aren’t Ben Solo. Not anymore. Perhaps not ever. We shall find a new name to you, that fits you as well as Darth Vader. In the meanwhile, my apprentice—it is time to become who you were born to be.”

And the lightsaber shoots towards Ben’s hand and lodges there.

“I have felt your hate,” Snoke says. “I have felt your bitterness. And I commiserate. You who have endured so much—it is time to put this pain in the grave where it belongs.”

“Ben,” his father says softly. “Kid.”

“Don’t be like that?” Ben asks softly and finally, finally he is looking at his father. He lets that raw pain shine out of his eyes, every time his father hadn’t been enough for him, every time he hadn’t been enough for his father.

“Ben’s a good kid,” Han says, not taking his eyes off of his son even while directing his words to Snoke. “He won’t do this. He’s not a monster the way you are. He’s got friends and a family who—”

“Love him? Has anyone ever truly loved him? He can see the lies in your words, Captain Solo. He can see the pitiful attempt on your part to spare your own life. When have you ever spared him any pain? When did you protect your son?”

“When I flew onto your Starkiller base to rescue him,” Han retorts angrily.

“But you didn’t go to get him, did you? It was the girl, wasn’t it?” Rey, whose hand was the first hand Ben had held in years, who wasn’t a dream, wasn’t a nightmare, who had always tried to break the spell. “I will ask you, and I know this is hard, Captain Solo, to accept the truth of my words. I have always known your son better than you. I know his heart, I know his mind. I see his every intent, oh yes.” Ben turns the lightsaber in his hand, and breathes deeply and very, carefully, turns the blaster on Snoke’s armrest. “I see him turning his weapon to strike true, to destroy his true enemy!”

When Ben had been a kid, he’d wanted to be a pilot like his dad. He’d wanted to fly across the stars as fast as he could. He’d idolized his father’s sense of humor, had listened with rapt awe to every story that his father had told him—especially the ones that Leia hadn’t wanted her son to know, either because he was too young, or they were too dark.

Ben’s a pilot now. He has flown across the stars. He even thinks that he’s got his own brand of Han Solo’s dark sense of humor. But now, more than anything, the one thing he’s relying on more than anything else is that part of his father that had made him think that Han Solo was brave, even if he had a habit of running for his life:

Ben Solo shot first.

Just like his father.

And he heard Snoke’s gasp from across the room as he fired not once, not twice, but five times, stopping the monster’s heart completely before flicking his fingers and bringing the blaster into his father’s hand.

Then he ignites the lightsaber and says, “Stay back. You’re hurt.”

“You got a plan?” his dad sounds impressed, sounds relieved, sounds determined.

“This was about as far as I got.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Han says and he fires the blaster towards the guards who have leapt into action. The blast ricochets off their armor. “Well that’s not good.”

“Stay back,” Ben repeats.

And he lunges forward.

Once, he might have called himself a warrior, a knight in training—all muscle and power and fluid motion.

But he hasn’t fought like this in years. The muscles he’d worked hard to grow have atrophied, and a blaster feels more natural in his hand than a lightsaber. But Ben thinks of Rey, thinks of telling her to keep herself alive and decides that that’s the best advice he can give himself as he botches a movement that he’d once been masterful at in an attempt to attack one of the guards. His heart is pumping adrenaline through his body, making him strong and the Force is pumping light he had not known was there through him as well. But that doesn’t make up for the fact that he hasn’t trained with this weapon regularly in years and there are eight guards around him now, determined that he die for what he’s done.

The good thing about being as tall as he is is that his reach is farther than any of the guards. His blade is long, and Ben is able to keep them at more than an arm’s distance with that. That’s a start. All eight of them are focused on him—the larger threat, he’s sure. His father is old, and tortured, and his weapon doesn’t do anything against their armor. They’ll make quick work of him when they’re done with Ben.

If they’re done with Ben.

Ben lunges, his cut swiping through the air with a vivid hum, but the voulge that the guard is using catches his stroke and he has to dance back, away from the next strike. The next time an attack comes, it’s two of them at once, moving in tandem to try and catch him, and it’s all Ben can do to dodge both cuts before he pulls himself away, swinging his blade wildly because he’s panicking more than he’d like to admit

Focus, Ben.

Is that his uncle’s voice? Or his own?

It’s not Snoke’s.

The Force flares through Ben, throwing the two closest guards into the bodies of those behind them. He doesn’t waste the moment. He lunges forward and drives his lightsaber—hard—through the chests of two of the prone guards before disengaging it to dance away from the other six who are circling around him.

Somewhere in the throne room, his father whoops.

Dread fills Ben as two of the guards look at Han Solo, who is standing there, his blaster hanging limp in his hand at his side. Then they turn to him.

“Dad,” Ben shouts and sends one of the voulges from the dead guards flying, hilt first, towards his father. Stay alive, he begs silently, because he can’t focus on his father with four guards breathing down his neck, can’t focus on the fact that Han Solo had always been a pistol fighter and never had used a saber as far as he was aware, was tired, old, and recovering from torture.

Ben yells as he charges at the closest two guards. This time his strike lands true and he’s as surprised as the guard he kills that it actually worked. The second guard stumbles away from him and swings his electro whip so that it cracks menacingly at Ben. He bends, picks up a bisento from the floor, aims, and sends it flying right into the man’s chest before turning and facing the remaining two guards.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees his father, trying valiantly to use the weapon between broken fingers. He hears his father yelling as he lunges forward, trying to get an attack in.

No, dad, just defend yourself. Let me handle this. Please.

The moment of distraction catches Ben in the leg—specifically with a vibro-dagger. He lets out a yell of pain as he practically hurls his lightsaber towards his attacker. With one of his daggers lodged in Ben’s legs, the guard is not as well defended as he could be and Ben manages to slice his arm completely off before charging him headlong into some sort of generator which slices him up well and good. Ben then turns towards his last attacker, limping his way towards his father, keeping his eye on all three guards.

“You ok?” his dad asks him.

“I’ll be fine.”

“Don’t get cocky.”

“I’m not getting cocky. Just let me fight, will you?”

They’re all focused on him again. And maybe he shouldn’t get cocky, but he can’t help but think that if two fully fit guards couldn’t handle Han Solo, Ben might be able to make quick work of them.

So he charges one of them, but his leg burns from the wound and his strike misses. He tries to pull the three guards away from his father, to take the attention off him again, but one of them gets him in his saber arm and now it’s on fire too, blood seeping down his arm as he grimaces and—

Focus on the pain. The pain will make you stronger.

His uncle would hate him for it, but Ben doesn’t have much of a choice, and he doesn’t much give a damn what his uncle would think so he focuses on the pain and this time, when he darts forward—faster than he should be able to—he kills another guard.

Only two left. Only two left, he can do this. Except that he can’t, because he misses again, his arm is really not doing well, and one of the guards uses the handle of his bisento to trip Ben so that he’s falling, flat on his face, his nose crunching horribly and his vision going black for just a second.

He flips himself over summoning his lightsaber back to his hand and igniting it, preparing to defend himself, but also knowing that this might be it.

He sees it almost from outside of his own body.

His father comes up from behind one of the guards, taps him on the shoulder, says, “Hey,” then punches him in the face. Ben stabs the guard through the gut with his lightsaber at the exact same moment that the last guard does the same to Han Solo, twisting his blade before throwing his body into the same generator that Ben had used to kill another guard.

He hears it from outside of his own body too, the yell of anguish that he makes as he lurches forward, kicking the man, and using the force to crush his frustratingly strong armor inward, tighter and tighter until he’s destroyed the man’s organs completely.

That wheezing, choking, sobbing sound. That’s coming from him as he stares at the generator.

It had spat out some of Han Solo’s bloodied clothes but other than that it is humming innocently, powering this horrible ship, this horrible room.

The blaster that Ben had used to kill Snoke, that his father had used in the fight is lying on the floor.

He was protecting me. He died because of me.

The sobs shake his whole body. His yell of anguish fills the room, and the corpses of the men he’d killed trying to save his father—the seven guards and Snoke—they all shake as the raw Force fills him.

Your pain will make you strong, the silken voice whispers.

“Shut UP!” he yells at it. “Shut up shut up shut up you’re dead!”

Dead, but not gone. Unlike his father.

He grabs the blaster and stares at it for a moment. His hand is trembling.

He could just kill himself so easily. End it all. The pain—why doesn’t it ever stop? He can kill his tormenter but it will still hurt, is it even worth being free if it doesn’t stop hurting?

“Ben? Ben, what’s—”

That’s Rey’s voice, she’s standing before him. Is she really there? Snoke’s dead, so she can’t be a hallucination. Had she followed the binary beacon to him?

He looks up at her.

“Ben,” she says it low and slow. Her eyes widen at the sight of his face. His nose is probably still dripping blood, and he’s sweaty and crying and he watches as pity stretches across her face. Then she looks around.

No, she’s not there. She’s somewhere else, trying to be subtle about the fact that she’s talking to thin air, and Ben reaches out and feels the now familiar signature of the Force.

“He’s dead,” he whispers.

“Snoke?”

“And my dad.”

“Ben,” Rey breathes again. Doesn’t she know any other words. She reaches for his cheek, but he pulls away from her touch. She’s so beautiful with her eyes shining at him like that, but he doesn’t want anyone to touch him right now, he doesn’t want anyone near his head right now, doesn’t deserve the solace of her holding him even if it’s the one thing he wants. Especially because it’s the one thing he wants. She freezes. “Ben, where are you. I’ll come find you, and we’ll go back to the Resistance.”

The Resistance. And his mother.

But instead of calming him it makes him tremble more. He can’t do this, he can’t. He can’t bear the weight of his father, the weight of his mother and his uncle and his grandfather, he can’t carry it all. What happens when the weight of the legacy is so heavy that you just shatter?

“Please, Ben. Let me help you. I came here to help you.”

But Ben just shakes his head. He looks at Rey, and all he can think is that the reason she’s here is because of Snoke. Snoke did this, he connected them, and because he had known before Ben had that he wanted her there, not just in his head, there with him.

He doesn’t want anyone in his head anymore.

So he takes a deep breath and with the practice of six whole years, he shuts down the Force inside him.

Rey vanishes.

His lightsaber is lifeless in his hand. He clicks the ignition once or twice to make sure—truly sure—that it’s gone, and the blade does not extend.

Then he gets to his feet, still staring at the generator.

He clips his lightsaber to his waist, then tightens his grip on the blaster and limps back towards the elevator.

He doesn’t know how he’s going to get off this ship.

But he’ll make it up as he goes.

He’s Han Solo’s son, after all.

Chapter Text

Rey can feel from the way that he disappears that this time, it was not the Force disconnecting them; it was Ben.

Immediately, she reaches out through the Force, trying to feel him, but she feels nothing at all. It’s like she’s following a trail through the sands, but the wind has blown the way forward away.

She takes a shaky breath, a deep one. She’ll figure out how to help Ben. She will. She can and she will. Because she is who she chooses to be and she chooses—she chooses—

There are tears on her face.

Why is she crying? It’s Ben. Ben cares about her. He’s not going to leave her behind. He’s just upset because his father died. She’ll find him, and comfort him, and Snoke is dead now, he’s gone, so hopefully he’ll be a little less, or maybe a little more…

Finn. She has to find Finn. And Rose. She doesn’t know what Rose looks like, but they probably won’t have separated her and Finn, right? She can’t waste another second. If Ben’s going to make it harder for her to find him, then she can’t put him at the top of her list and risk losing him and Finn and Rose. Especially now that Han’s gone too.

She swallows.

Han’s gone. She hadn’t been able to save him. I won’t fail your son, she promises him.

She closes her eyes and tries to get control of her emotions.

She can do this.

It’s like being back on Jakku. She just has to know how to find. And she’s got her instinct, has got the Force.

There’s a computer terminal on the wall about twenty feet away from her. She glances around to make sure the coast is clear, then hurries to it, pressing on the panel and staring at the several options that it has given her.

LATEST UPDATES ON RESISTANCE PURSUIT

LEADERSHIP ON THE VESSEL

SUPREMACY MAP

She presses the map first, which loads with a helpful red dot indicating where she is.

“This thing is huge,” she mutters to herself as she stares at it.

Then she sees a blue dot that seems to be moving and presses it.

A helpful informational window pops up, saying Execution.

And that’s it.

“Execution?” she wonders aloud. If Han Solo is already dead…

Her stomach lurches and she knows—she just knows that that’s Finn.

No.

No. No she can’t let this happen, she refuses to let this happen. She has no idea where Ben is—Ben doesn’t want her to find him—she can at least do something to save someone she loves from—from—

She takes a deep breath and traces the distance between the red dot and the blue, and then takes off, her lightsaber in her hand, running faster than she’s run in recent memory, letting the Force flow out of her like the waves on Ahch-To to find her friend. She knows she should be being stealthy right now, should be trying to avoid the security cameras in the hallway. But there’s no time, if Finn’s already being prepared to be executed.

I won’t lose him and Ben at once. I won’t. I refuse.

Her legs are screaming, and she’s panting by the time she reaches the hangar, and only then does she slip to the side to catch her breath and get a sense of what she’s up against.

What she’s up against is at least a three hundred officers and stormtroopers, standing in neat rows, staring at a spot that Rey can’t see, presumably where the execution is taking place. They are right in the middle of the bay, and as far as she can see, there is no way to get close without being seen.

She swallows, and forces herself to be calm.

If Luke had come with her, she is sure that they could handle it, couldn’t they? If he had stopped that rock from falling on the Falcon on Ahch-To, then he could stun or freeze blasts from a distance or something. How had he done that? Their time on the Falcon had been dedicated to beginning to teach Rey to understand her feelings. From understanding comes control, Luke had told her. You cannot control what you cannot understand.

This is what Rey is pondering when the entire ship shakes, when it seems to crack open from the impact of something so large that Rey doesn’t even know what it could begin to be.

-

She comes to in the darkness, smelling smoke, hearing the crackling flames. She can hear emergency sirens.

Emergency sirens. The First Order.

Finn.

She pushes herself up onto her forearms, looking around. Stormtroopers are lying on the ground. They had been knocked as unconscious as Rey had been. She gets shakily to her feet, then starts to run, her lightsaber in her hand. Finn. Finn. Finn, she tells herself as her whole body protests at the motion after having been so recently knocked flat on the ground.

She sees him, lying on the ground, face down, next to the body of a smaller woman.

“Finn,” she moans as she falls to her knees next to him, shaking him. She can feel that he’s alive, and wishes desperately that she had done more than just watch Luke heal his sister when they’d been on the Raddus. Instead, she has to content herself with pinching Finn until his eyes jerk open.

He blinks, staring at her uncomprehendingly. “Rey?”

“Finn,” she practically sighs with relief.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know,” she tells him. “But you need to get off of here, Finn. You and—is this Rose?”

The woman on the ground next to him stirs and opens her eyes. Finn glances at her and she sits up. So does he.

“You and Rose need to get out of here,” she says, “Go to Crait, or wherever you can get to. As soon as you can.”

“What about you?” Finn asks.

“I—” Rey takes a deep breath and reaches out again. But there’s nothing of Ben anywhere near. “I have to find Ben.”

“Ben?”

“He was here. He was on the ship. I don’t know where he is now, but he’s not in a good way. Han’s dead.” Finn’s face falls.

“We’ll help,” he says. “Me and Rose. We can all escape together.”

She loves him for that. But she shakes her head. “No,” she says firmly. “It’s not an all or nothing sort of deal, this. I’m trying to get as many people to safety as possible. I don’t know what caused this, but it’s definitely not safe for—”

“Not safe for you either,” Finn tells her stubbornly.

“I can take care of myself,” Rey says.

“Yeah, but you don’t have to. We can have your back, Rey.”

“And what’s this? Lover’s quarrel?” comes a voice that Rey has never heard before in her life.

Finn is on his feet before Rey even knows what’s happened, standing between her, Rose, and the woman who had just spoken. The woman is garbed in chrome armor, and is nearly as tall as Ben.

“I told Hux not to draw this out,” the woman continues. “Pity he didn’t listen to me. But that means that I get the pleasure of killing you myself.”

“Let’s go, chrome dome,” Finn says, bending and picking up a weapon from the grip of an unconscious stormtrooper.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” the woman says, and she raises a blaster, pointing it right at his chest. “You see, I don’t need the show that Hux does. I’m more than content to just do it myself.”

She takes aim and fires.

But she hadn’t been expecting Rey’s lightsaber, which ignites in her hand as she pushes Finn aside and sends the blast back over the woman’s shoulder.

“You bloody well won’t,” Rey growls at the woman, who laughs.

“Touchy,” she says. “Are you the little desert rat that FN-2187 took a fondness to?”

“She’s the one the Supreme Leader wanted for Solo,” comes a pinched voice. A man with red hair and pale skin is pulling himself to his feet.

“Well, then we mustn’t harm her, must we? Orders are orders,” the woman says. “But it’s good to know we have her. The Supreme Leader will be pleased to hear that.”

“He will,” the man agrees. “I’m going to go up to command. I don’t know what happened, but the Supreme Leader—”

“I’ll take care of the scum,” the woman replies. The man nods, and hurries off towards the hangar’s exit. “Now, where was I?”

The woman points the blaster at Rey, then at Finn and then, after a moment’s consideration, on Rose.

“No,” Finn says, stepping between the woman and Rose. “Don’t you dare.”

The woman laughs. “Dare? That’s bold of you, FN-2187.” And she fires at him. Rey steps forward to block the blast but another one comes quite as quickly at Rey’s shoulder. She yells in as much fury as pain. The shot is far too close to where Ben had accidentally shot her when they’d been escaping Starkiller.

“Come on, little Jedi,” the woman says, almost singing with delight. “Surely you can do better than that. Surely you can defeat a blaster with a lightsaber.”

Rey lashes out with the Force and sends the woman flying backwards towards the flame. “Too right,” she shouts before whirling on Finn and Rose.

“Get on that transport over there.”

“Rey—”

“Now, Finn!”

“We’re not leaving here without you,” Rose says stubbornly.

“I won’t accept no for an answer,” Rey hisses. “They want me, not you.”

She doesn’t know what they’ll do to her when they realize Snoke is dead. She doesn’t get the sense that they’ll know either. But she does know she’s safer than either of the two of them from whatever the woman and man had said to one another.

“This isn’t a sacrifice situation,” Finn retorts angrily. “We don’t get to run free by trading ourselves for you. That’s not how this,” he gestures between the two of them, “works. That’s not how friendship works.”

“I know that,” Rey hisses. “Do you have a better plan?”

“Fight our way out. Find Ben. And go.”

Another shot comes their way which Rey deflects without even looking at it. The woman is back. “Yes, I rather think it was a lover’s quarrel,” she says, bemused.

“Shut up, Phasma,” Finn snaps.

“Shall I just wait for you to finish your little bickering. When it’s convenient for you, we’ll carry on?”

“That sounds great.”

“And highly unlikely,” Phasma says as she levels the blaster at them. “Men.”

And the stormtroopers who have gathered around them raise their blasters too.

“Finn,” Rey pleads.

She feels him stiffen beside her.

“She’s a coward!” Finn roars at the stormtroopers. “She was my captain once too, did you know that? And she’s a weak-willed coward. She’ll do anything so long as she survives. IS that really who you want to serve? Is that really what you believe in?”

Phasma fires at him, but Rey deflects the shot once again.

“Do you really think the First Order is going to win with people like her in charge? Do you really want them to win?”

“Blast him,” Phasma commands.

“Why, because I’m telling them the truth? And you don’t want them to know?” Finn roars. “Don’t want anything to unshiny that pretty armor of yours, do you Phasma?”

And she fires again, not at Finn this time, but at each of the stormtroopers around him, killing them instantly. Rey yells in fury even as Phasma levels her blaster, once again, at Finn.

“Their deaths are on your conscience, FN-2187.”

“The name’s Finn,” Finn shouts at her and he rushes forward, swinging the weapon he’d picked up and he’s moving too fast for Rey to protect him, but clearly Phasma’s surprised that he would even do this is so great that she doesn’t shoot her blaster until Finn’s already knocked her hand aside and swung the weapon at her head.

She falls.

And she falls far.

Finn spits after her before turning back to Rey and Rose.

“Right,” he begins to say, “Ben,” before he freezes in horror.

Rey whirls around.

She doesn’t know how many stormtroopers there are, but there are sure a lot of them. And an officer that she doesn’t recognize.

“Stun them,” the officer commands, and Rey steps in front of Finn and Rose.

“Now will you go?” she snarls.

“Rey,” Finn protests again.

“Look we don’t have time for this, she says, then shouts, louder, “I’m the one you want. Let them live.”

“Not likely,” the officer says, “They were caught trespassing and trying to break into our engines.”

“I’m the Jedi. Snoke wants me.”

That makes the officer pause.

It’s enough.

Rose grabs Finn’s arm, and hisses to Rey, “You’d better be right about this or I’ll never forgive you,” and drags Finn away.

“Stun them!” the officer shrieks again, but this time, Rey runs forward, slashing her lightsaber at him and it devolves from there.

She cuts open several blasters before something hits her hard in the back.

Chapter Text

Ben is expecting there to be TIEs on his tail within seconds of taking off, but there aren’t, because the Raddus flies straight into the Supremacy, and Ben’s heart stops for a moment.

A suicide run, he thinks as he stares at the etched explosion—searing hot white against the black of space. Mom—did you—

He swallows. He swallows and he can’t tell if it’s that he needs to know, or if it’s that he needs to know how much more pain he can take. But he’s also in no position to even try to stop himself from doing anything, no matter how painful the ramifications of it might be.

He takes several deep breaths, staring at the impact of the ship. The Supremacy has been sliced in two—not straight down the middle, but enough that he’s sure that thousands will have died.

That is when his mind catches up with him.

His mother would never do that unless she was desperate, and if she were desperate she would have gotten everyone off the ship first. If it was a suicide run, the Raddus had still had transports.

He twiddles the radar of the shuttle he’d stolen and sees them—a series of tiny transport ships dotting his screen.

He swallows, and stares at them. He could go, he could flee, he should flee, he is danger.

You would bring destruction, and pain, and death and the end of everything I love.

At least make sure you’re choosing it and it’s not choosing you.

It’s as if the destruction in his wake has settled the roiling thoughts he’d had ever since he’d forced his way off the Supremacy. He is comfortably numb now. He can think a little more clearly.

He can at least say goodbye.

He can at least say goodbye to Rey.

He stares guiltily down at the binary beacon which is glowing dully on his wrist. He’d just cut her off. She’d probably be angry with him, but at least he can apologize. In person. Without the remnants of Snoke’s infiltration into the deepest corners of his mind, a reminder that even the good parts of his life are rotten to the core.

So he turns his stolen shuttle around and flies towards the transports. When they come into easy view through the viewport, he notices the Falcon flying along side them, and it’s only then that he remembers—if Rey had come back, that means Luke is there too.

His hands start to tremble.

Snoke may be dead, but Luke’s still alive and Luke had gone into his head too, and Ben’s sure—he’s sure—that his uncle will say he’ll never do it again. But Ben doesn’t trust his uncle anymore.

He tried isolating you from us on purpose. He had a reason for it. Stay, Ben. Please.

If he keeps going, heads straight past the planet that the surviving members of the Resistance are headed towards, is that giving Snoke what he wants, even in death?

What do I want?

He thinks of his father, that punch to save his son’s life that had ended his own, and his heart twists again.

Mommy.

He thinks of Rey, reaching out to him, asking him where he is, telling him she’ll come find him and they’ll escape back to the Resistance together.

You don’t have to be alone, Ben.

Had Rey ever said that? Or is he just imagining it—the lighter part of his consciousness knowing even now what he’ll listen to.

And no, you’re not going mad.

“I’m not so sure about that.” His voice is hollow to his own ears, but he turns the controls of the ship he’d stolen and soon enough he’s coming up on the Resistance transports. He puts in a hailing frequency he knows his mother has used in the past and says, “Ben Solo,” because he doesn’t know what else to say.

He doesn’t get a response, but he’s not expecting one since he’s not even sure that they’ll be using that old hailing frequency. He sees his mother approach the window. She’s not close enough to see her expression, but she’s there, her hand resting against the glass as though she’s reaching for him.

The old Rebel base on Crait is heavily armored, and they land six resistance Transports in it, as well as Ben’s stolen First Order TIE. He eases himself out of the cockpit, not caring if he makes his leg any worse as he limps towards where his mother is disembarking.

She throws her arms around him and holds him tightly, and Ben can feel in her breathing that she is trying very hard not to cry.

“When you disappeared,” she tells his chest, “I thought I’d lost you both.”

So she had felt his father die. He should have known that. He should have thought of that.

He tightens his arm around her and cups the back of her head the way his dad had always done when his mom was distressed and that’s when he feels wet begin to seep through his shirt.

“Snoke’s dead,” he tells her quietly, as though if he repeats it, it might somehow turn out not to be the truth. “I killed him.”

“Good,” his mother says viciously. “Good.”

That’s when she breaks the hug and looks up at him. He swallows.

In her eyes, he sees memories of Han Solo. He’d failed to save him. He’d only hastened his death. If I’d just kept hiding, he thinks. If I’d just… If he hadn’t tried to steal the Falcon back on Jakku, none of this would have happened. Snoke would still be alive, he’d never have met Rey, but at least his dad wouldn’t be—he’d still be—

“Whatever it is you’re thinking,” his mother says sharply, “is not helping anything right now. It’s not your fault for trying to save him.”

“It’s my fault he was there to begin with,” Ben mumbles.

“It’s Snoke’s fault he was there to begin with, and you killed Snoke.” There’s nothing like the full brunt of Leia Organa’s determination and behind her, he sees members of the Resistance hissing in one another’s ears. Did she just say he killed Snoke?

“Too many losses,” his mother says, and she sounds tired. “But you came back. No one ever comes back, but you did. You and Luke.”

She glances back at her brother, who is keeping his distance, his eyes on Ben. Ben’s mouth goes dry.

“I don’t know what happened between you two,” his mother tells him firmly. “That’s between you. But he’s here to help, and so are you. For as long as that help is necessary—”

His uncle looks old. There’s white in his hair now, unlike that night when he’d woken Ben up with an all-too-familiar sensation of someone pressing into his mind, that someone else was going to drive him mad. There are lines on his face that weren’t there before and there’s a haunted look to his gaze that—if Ben cared about his uncle—he’d wonder at.

Instead he looks back at his mother.

“I can try,” he whispers. He wonders if he means it.

“I’ll take it,” his mother says and she lets go of him and turns to go to Luke. Ben stays where he is. His mother glances over her shoulder at him, then rolls her eyes and shakes her head and continues.

It’s going to be like that, he can’t help but think. She’ll never understand. Not ever.

It hurts. But he also doesn’t care. This is a lesser hurt than all the other pain he’s feeling right now.

He turns away from his mother, away from his uncle, and looks around at the gathered Resistance members. He sees Poe, watching him closely, and Paige, and Snap, and some of the others who he had met while hanging around as Finn’s shadow. There is no sign of Finn though. Had he made it back? Wherever he had gone, does he know how to find them? He doesn’t know if he can face the answers to any of those questions right now.

And where’s Rey?

How strange it is, not to feel her presence, like when that’s how he’d first known her. But it was like the Force had overpowered all his other senses. She must be angry with him for cutting her off like that if she isn’t coming to talk to him now that he’s no longer talking to his mother. He supposes he deserves that. It was only going to be a matter of time before Rey started to grow weary of him like everyone else.

He hears his mother ordering the Resistance to start sending out distress signals to the outer rim, and he feels more than hears or sees his uncle approaching him.

“Ben,” Luke Skywalker says, so quietly. Ben doesn’t turn to face him. “I failed you, Ben. I’m sorry.”

I’m sure you are.

Ben doesn’t say a word.

When he’d been little, when he’d drawn that picture that Rey had found on the Falcon, he had wanted to be his uncle quite as much as he’d wanted to be his father. Now he could be neither of them.

Vader?

Snoke’s dead but the damage is done. Even Rey—he’ll never unfeel the experience of her reaching for his hand through the Force, across lightyears.

Why can’t I just be myself? he wonders distantly. That’s what Rey would ask. He doesn’t even know how to be himself. What self is left to him? The smuggler’s son, the diplomat’s? The fugitive feels more like Ben Solo than either of those memories, but even that sits wrong.

He’s not fleeing anymore. He doesn’t have anyone to run from.

Not even his uncle.

That’s when he turns to look at Luke Skywalker. His uncle looks up at him, nervous. Nervous, and old, and short, where he had seemed a giant once to Ben. Ben swallows. Words catch in his throat.

He jerks his head in the approximation of a nod before turning to look out over the salt.

“Your grandfather came here once,” Luke says at last. “Your mom’s dad. Bail Organa. When he was working with the Rebellion. That’s how she knew about it.”

“Did Vader ever come here?”

Luke does not stiffen at the question the way his mother would. He only replies, “I don’t know. He may have.”

“Snoke wanted me to be his Vader,” Ben says sharply. “He said the dark in me was as strong as Vader’s, that that was my destiny.”

“Maybe you were his Vader,” Luke says, but before Ben can even react to that beyond his muscles tensing, he clarifies, “Vader killed the Emperor and saved the light. You killed Snoke.”

It shouldn’t be as gutting as it is.

“There’s darkness in you, Ben,” Luke says. “I was afraid of it, where I wasn’t afraid of Vader’s. I failed you. I should have trusted you. Just because there’s darkness in you doesn’t mean you have to be dark, or that you want to be. That was true of Vader too.”

With that, his uncle leaves him and Ben only realizes he’s trembling when the pebbles around his feet start to shake too. He breathes. They stop shaking. There are tears on his face, but he keeps breathing.

How strange it is—that years of hating and mistrusting his uncle—with only a few words everything gets complicated again. He feels like a little boy again, but not alone this time.

And no—not feared this time.

It makes all the difference in the galaxy.

But he doesn’t have time to dwell on it.

“Incoming!” he hears someone call. “Solo—we need to close the blast doors.”

And he retreats into the base, wincing as he hurries because he still hasn’t taken care of that cut in his leg. He’s not sure he wants to. Every time it hurts, he remembers his father.

He pulls the blaster out of its holster and lines up behind some of the barriers that the Resistance fighters have set up. His hand is steady as he points the blaster at the incoming ship, knowing that it will probably just make it through the closing blast doors.

The moment the ship crash lands—it’s dorsal rudder struck from its body by the hard old durasteel doors—they begin firing at it. At least until the hatch opens and they see hands raised and hear the shouts of “Don’t shoot!”

“Finn?” Poe calls in delight. “Rose! You’re alive. Where’s my droid?” and BB-8 rolls towards its owner, beeping delightedly.

Finn and Rose descend from the shell of the ship, both looking tired. Such a landing would probably have meant that they’d both look a little pleased with themselves. But they don’t.

“Where’s Rey?” Leia asks, and with those two words, Ben’s heart stops. He’d assumed she was hanging back, waiting for the right moment after he talked to his mother, talked to Luke, or that she was too angry to want to talk to him right now. But she’s not here at all?

He sees Finn grimace.

“She—she sent us ahead,” Finn says and Ben whirls around, the Force flooding back into him again because she’s still there? She’d been on the Supremacy when the Raddus had run into it? It’s a wave—stronger than he’s felt in years because he can’t even remember the last time he allowed himself to reach out this far, to really stretch his span. He’d forgotten just how far he could go as he presses on beyond the Supremacy into the stars.

There’s no sign of her.

“Ben,” he hears his uncle say as the whole cave starts to shake.

“Is she—” he hears Rose start to ask, her voice muffled because she has clapped her hand over her mouth.

“Ben, we don’t know anything,” Luke says firmly. “We can’t leap to conclusions. This isn’t helping her. Try to stay—”

“Calm?” Ben rounds on his uncle. Calm like Vader? Cool and collected and controlled?

“We’ll find her,” Luke says.

“Like my dad? You won’t find him, will you? They shredded him.” It’s a blow that lands on them both and he watches Luke flinch.

My fault. My fault. My fault.

His fault, and the last thing Rey had known of him was him pushing her away. Why was it that he always did things that hurt him and everyone around him? If he’d just let her find him, if he’d just gone to her, she’d be here now, she’d be safe and not—

She may be alive. Some winking hope in the corner of his mind whispers. They might just have knocked her out, or bound her Force. She may be alive.

He stands there for a very long time and it doesn’t surprise him that it’s Finn who steps forward and looks him in the face. “She refused to leave without you,” he says and it’s as much a knife to the gut as the blow that had killed his father. “She was going to send us on ahead no matter what. Then there were too many of them. She stayed to distract them while we got away. I didn’t want to leave her, but she wouldn’t come.”

My fault. My fault. My fault.

It helps, though. He can see his pain and rage mirrored in Finn’s eyes and he jerks a nod.

“They didn’t want her dead,” Finn says. “They said Snoke needed her, or something. They set their phasers to stun. So if you can’t…feel her or whatever. That’s probably why.”

He looks down at his wrist. The binary beacon is still glowing. They’d have crushed it, wouldn’t they? If they’d known what it was? They’d have confiscated it only if they’d seen the need to. It could lead them straight to us, he thinks wildly. He should destroy it, break it right now.

But it’s Rey’s way home.

He can’t.

“Snoke won’t have need for her if he’s dead,” Ben grits out.

“Then they’ll be confused,” Finn retorts stubbornly. “They don’t know what to do when the chain of command gets decapitated. They’re not creative thinkers. They just follow orders. It’ll buy us some time. To figure out how to get her back. Because we are gonna get her back.”

“Finn, Ben,” Poe calls. “We’ve got fighters incoming.”

Ben senses them and stares up at the cave ceiling. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he says uneasily. He looks around for his mother and finds her in the crowd, watching him the way she always has—as though afraid he’s going to explode.

“The Falcon,” he says. “We can carry—” Not everyone. There are a good fifty people in this cave. Fifty where we started out with thousands, Ben thinks.

“We have to try,” his mother says, though what she wants them to try, he’s not sure.

“Pity the transport got destroyed,” Luke says, looking at the ship that Rose and Finn had arrived on. “We could have used that.”

“They don’t hold fuel for very long,” Ben says. “They’re for short hops, not escapes.” He doesn’t know how he knows it, but he knows it. Probably some instinct he got from his dad. Or some memory from another life, when he’d gotten by stealing ships that were made for deep space travel.

“Even if we stand and fight,” Poe says, “They’ll just keep throwing men at us until we’re dead. Even if our allies send help, we’d have to survive long enough for them to even get here.”

“This place is well fortified,” Leia says. “So long as they don’t break through, we might stand a chance.”

“But who’d come fish us out with the entire First Order breathing down our necks?”

Ben looks at his mother. “You could exchange me,” he says quietly. “They’ll want me for killing Snoke, and I’d be that much closer to helping—”

“No,” his mother says fiercely. “We do not give up anyone to the First Order. Not now, not ever.”

“I’m not part of the Resistance.”

“You’re my son,” she growls at him. “You’re part of the Resistance whether you like it or not.”

“This isn’t Alderaan’s crown, mom,” he snaps. “The Resistance doesn’t run in my bloodline.”

“Maybe not, but your father didn’t die for me to hand you over,” she says. “That’s the end of it.”

-

It’s ultimately Chewie who puts an end to their situation.

“We won’t know until we’ve tried, and she’s got a lot of nooks and crannies.”

It’s cramped. Extremely cramped. But they manage to fit. There isn’t so much freedom for everyone to move around the ship, but there is enough space for everyone to sit on the floors, to lean against one another. They even manage to store their weapons in some of the smuggling hatches that his dad had used for years.

“Did you ever smuggle people with him?” Ben asks Chewie as he sinks into the pilot’s seat.

“Once or twice,” the old Wookiee replies. “But never quite this many.”

“I sure hope not,” Ben says. “Everyone strapped in? Who’s gunning?” He taps the com in his ear.

“Me and Paige,” Finn says.

“We never did unstick the thing, did we,” Ben asks.

“Nope. But we’ll figure it out. We just need to get to hyperspace.”

“We need to outrun them first,” Leia adds. His mother and Luke are sitting in the seats right behind him and Chewie, seats they’d been in together since they were nineteen years old.

Ben swallows.

“All right, let’s get going,” he says to Chewie, who replies with a rumbled, Activating now.

The Millennium Falcon really is a hunk of garbage. She’d been considered an outdated model around the time of the fall of the Galactic Republic, but his dad had always talked about her as though nothing could ever top her. He’d made alterations through the years, but never enough to change the base engineering.

But she really clips as he and Chewie navigate her into the air, into the atmosphere.

The Supremacy is still in view, cracked open like an egg.

“How far out do we need to get?” Ben asks Finn.

“I’m not sure. Rose will know,” and then he hears both Paige and Finn shout for her.

“As much space as we can get,” is Rose’s reply, which Ben finds thoroughly unhelpful, especially because he can’t take his eyes off the Supremacy.

Rey’s still on that thing. Alone.

Left behind. I’m leaving her behind.

“Ben,” Luke says quietly. “We can’t help her when we’re on the run like this. We can’t do anything. It would be a suicide mission.”

It wouldn’t be the first time Ben thought of dying.

But he remembers the feeling of his mother being blasted out into space, of his father being shredded before his very eyes, and he takes a deep breath.

“TIEs incoming!” Chewie rumbles and—yeah that’s a lot of them.

“Let’s see if she’s still got it in her,” Ben says as he twists the controls in his hands and now the Supremacy is out of sight of the cockpit, though it remains burned into the back of his head.

“We just need to outrun them,” he hears Poe say and he glances quickly over his shoulder to see the commander—he’d been re-promoted, in light of, well, numbers—standing in the doorway.

“That shouldn’t be too bad. They’re slow,” Leia says.

“But we’re heavy.” Ben glances at the computer screen. Probably not the heaviest cargo that she’d ever carried, but it’s definitely taking a drag on their generator. “Finn, Paige, you ready up there?”

“Only if they catch us from the front,” Finn calls at the same time that Paige says, “On it!”

One gun, a slower Falcon, and the entire Resistance. Bad odds.

Never tell me the odds, he can practically hear his father grumbling. Ben looks up and sees the gilded dice chain that his father had always hung for luck at the start of each run. Ben reaches a hand up. They’re cold and smooth beneath his fingers. You always helped dad. Help me too.

And he and Chewie weave as best they can through the blasts being sent their way. More than once, a shot grazes the Falcon, enough to make the whole ship shake and the gold dice jangle too loudly for Ben to ignore.

“Rose!” he hears Poe bellow, and Rose’s shouted reply from somewhere in the ship of, “I’m working on it!”

“What’s she working on?”

“Shields, hyperdrive, you name it. Anything we can get help on,” is Poe’s reply.

He hears a cheer in his ear. “I got one!” Paige shouts.

“Can you do the other ten?” Ben calls back.

“Little victories.”

“That aren’t going to keep us from getting—” he twists the controls and the ship goes perpendicular, avoiding two more blasts, “killed.”

When he’d gotten into that X-Wing during Poe’s dreadnaught gambit, he’d remembered what it was to feel speed. But now, he is remembering how to anticipate, the Force flowing between his enemy’s hands and his awareness, and helping him move and dodge the ship around.

Behind him he hears the sound of someone being sick. Glad it’s someone else for a change, he thinks wryly to himself.

“Finn, is the Supremacy still in sight?” Ben asks.

“She’s getting smaller.”

“Rose, is this an out-of-sight, out-of-mind sort of thing?”

“We really should go as far as we can,” she calls again. “If we outrun her local scopes, she won’t have anything to latch onto.”

“How long before those TIEs pull back?” Leia asks.

And Luke answers, “Soon, probably. They really can’t do deep space on their own.” The last word is groaned because Ben twists the ship again. But he’s right. Moments later, Finn calls into the com,

“They’re turning back!”

“Now let’s hope they don’t send something bigger out.”

“They don’t have anything bigger that could catch us at this distance,” Poe says. “Unless they’ve got tech we don’t know about.”

Ben heaves a sigh and throws himself back into his seat, staring at the darkness ahead of him, letting his heart calm itself, letting his senses ease up.

Don’t think of Rey, he commands himself, and it feels like a betrayal. This—you need to—

“You flew well,” his mother says, leaning forward and resting her hand on his shoulder. “You always did. But you flew like Han just now.”

Ben swallows and looks up at the dice, dangling prettily from the overhead lever.

He takes a shaky breath. “Mom, where are we headed?”

“Naboo,” his mother replies.

“The Mid Rim?”

“If Snoke’s dead, there’s no time like the present to press our advantage in the core worlds. Also it’s not too far and we’ll have some places to hide.”

“Who do you know on Naboo?” Ben asks. He’s never even heard his mother mention Naboo before in his life, but there’s something in her tone that implies a high familiarity.

“My mother’s family,” she says. “The Naberries will help us.”

Chapter Text

They land in Keren, and do their best to remain unobtrusive.

This is easier said than done, however: some fifty people making their way out of a YT-1300 light freighter is just about the last thing that anyone expects to happen on a regular basis. But Leia bribes the portmaster with a heavy black ring she’d been wearing and he promises that he will be subtle about it all.

“I don’t want people going too far,” Leia warns Poe and D’acy. “Just because I don’t suspect foul play doesn’t mean I don’t want to be prepared for it.”

“We’ll be careful,” Poe tells her, and Leia reaches for her son’s hand.

“Let’s go,” she says quietly.

Ben only grunts.

He has never been to Naboo. It had always seemed to idyllic for someone fleeing his own head, so the peace promised by the beautiful landscapes that the system was famous for had always seemed as though they would be forever out of his reach.

“We have family here?” Ben asks quietly.

“Yes,” Leia says. “This way.”

She leads him through the city to a small public house which boasts a sign in Alderaan’s script that makes Ben do a double take. He frowns, but his mother is already pushing past him into the public house and making her way straight for the bar.

“If I were to need to make use of your com,” she says to the bartender, “Would it be a terrible inconvenience?” Her voice is low, and she keeps her eyes downcast and for a moment, Ben thinks she might be subtly bribing the bartender as she had done the portmaster. The bartender glances at the braid that twists its way along the top of his mother’s head, before saying,

“Hardly an inconvenience. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you,” his mother replies. “For both. Ben—” she turns to him. “Sit down. Have a drink,” and the bartender leads her towards a back room.

When he returns, he pours Ben a heady dark beer before Ben even has the chance to put in an order. “Sorry for your loss as well,” the bartender says.

“Thanks,” Ben mumbles. He’s trying not to think of his father. He’s trying not to think of Rey. Once, he’d been very good at not thinking about people who mattered to him. But he’s gotten rusty. Amazing how little time it had taken to get rusty.

He takes a sip of beer.

“Your mother—she knew the planet?”

Ben nods. From the continued motif of Alderaan calligraphy, and knowing his mother, she’d probably remembered this place from a previous trip. Even looking around the bar, he sees braids and a style of clothing that he’s only ever really seen his mother wearing.

“She has that look,” the bartender says. “You wouldn’t have, would you? Too young?”

“Too young,” he says.

“So you must have known your dad’s homeworld then.”

“No,” Ben replies. “He never wanted to go back to Corellia. I only ever went there—” without him. When he’d been on his own. It had been all he could do when he’d been there to make sure that he wasn’t thinking about Han Solo, and he’d had roiling dreams two nights in a row and had fled the planet as fast as he could.

“Hard losing a dad,” the bartender says. Ben looks up at him. “I guessed—from her hair and your face. When’d he go?”

“Few days ago,” Ben says. His throat’s thick, and he takes a sip of beer. It feels like years. Keep looking forward, he tells himself. If you look back, you’ll fall apart.

If he looks back, he’ll think of Rey and wonder if she’s alive, wonders if he left her to her death. The binary beacon is still glowing on his wrist.

My fault.

He should have gone back for her. Now who knows where she is. If she’s alive still, they’ll have evacuated her off the Supremacy with everyone else.

Thankfully, the bartender seems to get that Ben isn’t much for talking right now and goes off to make drinks for another customer. Ben continues to drink the beer down until his mother reappears, her face unreadable.

“Thank you,” she says, pressing some credits onto the bar, but the bartender shakes his head and pushes them back to her. Then Ben follows her out of the public house and she loops her arm through his as they stroll through the streets of Keren.

“This is one of the few outposts of Alderaan left in the galaxy,” Leia tells him quietly. “I came here once, a long time ago, to save them from the Empire. It’s good to see them still thriving.”

“Did he remember you? The bartender?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” she says. “He would have made it known if he had, I think. I think he was just being kind. I hope he was just being kind.” She sighs. “It’s nice to think that Alderaan still means something to someone. I know that will fade. But it’s nice to know it still matters to more people than just me.”

Ben doesn’t know what to say to that. Maybe he should care more—but Alderaan had never felt like it was his. He had never known it and though his mother had been its princess, it was through no bloodline he’d ever been attached to.

My blood destroyed Alderaan, he thinks.

Except it hadn’t. Alderaan still meant something to those who hadn’t been there when the Death Star had destroyed it.

“My cousin,” his mother says at last, “is named Pooja Naberrie. I may have talked about her once, before I knew she was my cousin. We served in the Imperial Senate together.”

The name doesn’t ring a bell, but Ben had never paid much attention to the comings and goings of all his mother’s political contacts.

She continues. “Pooja is the younger daughter of my mother’s older sister, Sola Naberrie. My mother’s name was Padmé Amidala.”

“I know,” Ben says, clearing his throat. His mother gives him a sidelong glance. “Luke told me. After Vader…” After your lie came out.

His mother sighs. “I should have told you,” she says wearily. “You shouldn’t have gone so long without knowing about her. Padmé was once the Queen of Naboo, and served several terms in the Senate before the end of the Republic. She married Anakin Skywalker in secret and died at the time of his transformation into Darth Vader.  Pooja and I worked that much out together in the years following the restoration of the Republic. As you know, we were girls together in the Imperial Senate, and friendly enough.”

“And you had no idea she was your cousin?” Ben asks.

“No more than I knew that Luke was my brother when I first met him,” she says. “Pooja always sympathized with the Rebellion, despite Naboo being the Emperor’s homeworld. Padmé stood for the Republic, for democracy—not for empire. She never stopped fighting, never stopped resisting all that he thought the galaxy should stand for, even if that meant taking a stand against her own husband. She was kind, and clever, and smart, and passionate. And her niece was quite the same.”

As is her daughter. Ben looks down at his mother. He is sure that to anyone watching them on the street, they look no more and no less than a son accompanying his mother through the sunshine. No one could guess that they spoke of blood and power as they made their way through the streets of Keren.

“I—” Leia pauses and looks around. Not, Ben thinks, out of suspicion, but rather because she is taking in this place that…well, that some would call more her homeworld than Alderaan, if this was where her mother had been born. Another queen, he thinks absently. To be the daughter of two queens, but to hold no monarchy, to want no monarchy. To only want the power given to her, not to expect it to be bestowed upon her…

“I didn’t know anything about my mother,” Leia says at last. “I never asked about my birth parents growing up. I loved my parents dearly, and suspected that if they had adopted me, it was because I had no other family. They gave me all I could want and more. It’s from Pooja that I learned about Padmé for the first time, though she and my father were close friends and worked together in the Senate. In the years following the revelation about Darth Vader—”

“You knew though,” Ben says. “You knew for a long time.”

“That he was my—yes. Luke told me. That man tortured me and destroyed my home. Bail Organa was my father, not him.” And there is ferocity there again, anger, fury. “I thought for years that I wanted nothing to do with the woman who would have loved him. That she and I could never have anything in common.

“I was wrong.”

She says it simply, sadly, and her hand tightens on Ben’s arm.

Then more words spill out of her, like a dam breaking. “I was wrong about so many things, Ben. I should have told you sooner about Vader. I thought I was protecting you. I thought I was sparing you the pain of knowing, of having to grapple with what he means. Better for you to know that you would have been adored by your grandfather—because he would have loved you, my father would have loved you—than to wonder forever at the legacy of a man who wanted to destroy his own children.”

“Luke said Vader saved him,” Ben frowns. Another of Luke’s lies?

“Perspective,” his mother replies. “Vader did save Luke. But not after trying desperately to get him to join him on the Dark Side, to rule the galaxy as father and son. That would have destroyed Luke, even if it didn't kill him. It would have destroyed him.”

Like it destroyed me, Ben almost says. What would happen if he did? If he told his mother that maybe he was more Vader’s than hers, that there’d always been too much dark to him.

But she’d known that.

That was why she’d sent him to Luke to begin with.

Had that been to destroy him, the way that Vader had wanted to destroy Luke, to crush the light out of him as she had wanted the dark crushed out of her son?

She hadn’t gotten the son she’d wanted out of it, and would never have him. Ben can’t be whatever it is she wants him to be. He’s got too much else to fight through.

It was done out of love, though.

He doesn’t know if that makes it better or worse. He’d tried to save his father out of love, after all. He’d still failed.

Leia breaks the silence that has stretched between them. “I say all this because I hope you’ll stay, Ben. I won’t make you, of course. You finally get to be your own person, safe from anyone prying into your mind. I don’t want you to think that I will keep lying to protect you, or not tell you things because I am afraid of how you’ll react. You’re not a little boy anymore, and—” she pauses and when she continues, her voice is much thicker, “and I’m not the same woman who was your mother then. I’d do things differently if I could. But I can’t change the past. I can only try to use it to change my future. Our future.”

She takes a deep breath. “If Vader’s in your blood and mine, so is Padmé.”

Ben turns to face her, taking in her dark dress, the twisted mourning braid along the top of her head, the stubborn steely expression on her face that is the same as everything he remembers from when he was a kid, while all the rest is different.

“I don’t know what I’ll do,” he says at last. “But if I leave, I’ll say goodbye. And I’m not leaving until we know what’s happened to—” He can’t say her name. But his mother understands.

“We’ll be far better placed to help her here than we were on Crait,” she says. “I know it didn’t feel that way.”

“There has to have been something we could have done.”

“Not without risking everyone’s lives, and you know better than me how much Rey would have hated that.” She has him there.

But something about the way she’d said it makes it feel like Rey has already died, and he has to take deep breaths again to remember what Finn had said. Stunned, not killed. Safe at least for a time. He hasn’t been hopeful in years, but he has placed all the hope he has on those words.

“We’ll get her back. We won’t leave her to whatever the First Order will do to her. I promise. I remember being nineteen and captive too. I thought no one would come for me. My father and mother were dead, my homeworld was destroyed. Rey knows she has us. And I’m not going to let her down.”

-

Pooja Naberrie is a small woman, a few years older than his mother. She has the same look to her hair—that it was once dark and is now greying, though her grey is several stages of grey lighter than Leia Organa’s. She wears a stately gown and is the only person he’s ever seen in his life whose ornate hairstyle could give his mother’s a run for her money.

She greets the Resistance with a sizable transport that will take them up into the mountains and gives Ben and Chewie instructions to follow her in the Falcon. “There will be a place to keep it safely landed,” she says to Ben, clearly sizing him up.

They beat Pooja’s transport by a good half an hour, but when they land at the coordinates she gave them, it is clear that they had been expected because two technicians greet them and say that they’ll help get the Falcon settled if Ben and Chewie would like to go into the house for refreshment. Ben glances at Chewie.

“I’m keeping an eye on her,” Chewie says, “I don’t trust them with her.” Ben swallows. He hadn’t thought about it until right this moment, but his father is dead. What happens with Chewie? Will he stay? Or will he go off throughout the stars, looking for other Wookiees to live out the rest of his days with. Chewie seems to catch that question in Ben’s face because he reaches a hand out and rubs it through Ben’s hair rather messily. “Time for that later,” he says.“Let’s save Rey first.”

Warmth floods him as he looks up at the Wookiee. He nods and turns to the technicians.

“Thanks,” he says. “Chewie’ll stay with you. Help make sure things go the way they are supposed to. She’s an old girl, and finicky.” And his dad would roll over in his grave if anything bad happened to her on his watch. Sure, he’d given up his life to save Ben, but he’d come back from the grave and haunt him till he died if something happened to the Millennium Falcon.

Ben follows a protocol droid down from the landing pad.

“You are one of Senator Naberrie’s guests?” the protocol droid asks.

“Yes,” he says. “The rest are coming in her transport.”

“Welcome, sir. Is this your first time on Naboo?”

“It is,” he says. In Keren, it had been pleasant, warm, with sun like late summer. Up in the mountains, the leaves are turning red and the air is cool and crisp.

“I hope you enjoy your stay,” the protocol droid says. “If there is any way I can be of assistance, I urge you to let me know.”

“Thank you,” Ben says idly. He pauses as they round a corner and the view takes his breath away, mountains and valleys rolling together as far as the eye could see. Rey would love it here.

His hand tightens into a fist.

I’ll bring her here one day. I will.

The house is quiet, and the furniture is well constructed. Art hangs on the walls, and there are holos scattered throughout. Ben settles himself in a seat in a sitting room, and waits, idly flicking his way through the pictures of the family—his family, distantly—that he sees there.

He freezes.

There’s a picture of two young women with heart shaped faces, standing next to one another. Behind them, almost as though he is a shadow, stands a younger man with cropped blond hair and padawan’s braid. Ben presses the categorization on the picture. Padmé and Sola. 22 BBY.

He swallows.

He’s seen pictures of Vader. He’d held Vader’s crushed shell of a helmet in his own hands, a gift from Snoke. But he’d never seen the face of Anakin Skywalker before and he knows without being told that the padawan in the background whose eyes are on Padmé—that’s Vader.

Padmé looks like his mother.

He turns the holo over and stares out of the window. There’s a lump in his throat.

He doesn’t have time to dwell on it for very long. He hears the sounds of footsteps and a moment later Pooja and his mother come in at the head of a troupe of tired looking Resistance members.

“Now,” Pooja says to the gathered crowd. “The house isn’t quite big enough for all of you to get beds above ground, though we will do our best to accommodate as many of you as we can up here. It is nicer, I know. Most of you will be staying below ground in the old wine cellars. A former occupant of this house was much more of a drinker than me and mine, so they are quite extensive.

“I understand from my cousin Leia that you will need time, and secrecy, and resources to prepare what comes next in the struggle against the First Order. I can assure you that members of my household will be subtle, and that anything you have need of, you shall receive.”

She looks around at all of them. “You look tired. There are ‘freshers ready for you, and bunks below stairs, as well as a hearty dinner prepared.”

“All on such short notice?” Ben asks under his breath. He recognizes the flicker in Pooja’s eyes and knows she had heard him.

D’acy sends people on their way, while Leia, Luke, Finn, Poe, and Ben stay behind.

“I rather suspected when I’d heard that Snoke’s Supremacy had been run through by a Resistance cruiser that my cousin might come knocking,” Pooja tells Ben. “If our current queen were stronger, I rather suspect there would have been longer support of the Resistance. But she is…” Pooja makes a face. “Well, there are two schools of politics on Naboo: those who supported Palpatine and those who remember Padmé.” She nods to Leia. “I rather suspect you can guess which one the House of Naberrie practices. What’s next?”

“They have one of ours captive,” Finn says before Leia can react to her cousin’s question. A rush of warmth fills Ben at his friend’s words. “We need to get her back.”

Pooja looks at Leia, who inclines her head. “She was taken on the Supremacy, and we don’t know her status. We have reason to believe that Snoke would have wanted her kept alive, but Snoke is dead.”

Pooja’s eyebrows fly up. “Dead?”

The mood of the room shifts tangibly. “Did that not get spread around?” Poe asks sharply.

“There’s been no mention of it on the Holonet,” Pooja says and there’s a positive gleam in her eye now. “Just that his flagship was shattered by a Resistance cruiser. He’s truly dead? The Supreme Leader?”

Ben jerks his head in a nod, and Pooja’s delight spreads across her face.

“That,” she says contentedly, “is exactly the sort of news we can work with. And we haven’t a moment to lose.”

“Indeed,” Leia replies. “Now is the time to act as quickly as possible on as many fronts as possible. And I’ll need as much of your help as you’re able to give me.”

Pooja’s smile widens and in that moment the family resemblance between her and Leia is even more striking. “The pleasure would be entirely mine,” Pooja says. “I can assure you, I am still quite as adept as I ever was in terms of gaining and spreading information. The former to find out whether your lost warrior is still alive—and the latter for destroying the First Order, once and for all.”

Chapter Text

Ben knows when he’s being kept at arm’s length.

He learned it young. He learned it when his mother was off being busy and serving the galaxy while he was being kept at a distance.

Then, it had been because he’d been an irascible child. Now, he suspects, it’s because he’s an irascible man. She doesn’t want me to see if she’s not focusing on Rey.

Which makes him quite convinced that his mother is not focusing on Rey. Or at least, not in the way that Ben wants to.

Each day, he goes out into the mountains and practices saber forms. His leg still hurts him. Luke had offered to heal it, as well as his broken nose, but Ben had shaken his head. He doesn’t tell him that it was the wound that had led to his father’s demise. He doesn’t tell him that the pain will mean he doesn’t forget his father.

Maybe he could be being more helpful. Maybe he could be doing something—anything to help. But he feels to fragile, too breakable and for the first time in his life, he trusts the instinct to protect himself as much as he can. He doesn’t know what will set him off, and if he sets himself off…

He swings the blade. He’d made it with his own two hands as he’d been growing into adulthood, had found a crystal of shining blue kyber. It hums convivially in his ear, a part of his soul that’s—not alive again. Alive for the first time, maybe.

“I don’t really see how one lightsaber is better than an onslaught of blasterfire.”

Ben nearly jumps out of his skin. Finn’s standing behind him. How long he’d been there, Ben doesn’t know. It’s the first time in a long time he’s really lost himself in the motion of something. It feels nice. Less painful. Easier. Except that Finn’s question sounds like one his dad would ask.

“Depends on distance,” Ben says. “Obviously if you have a blaster against my head, a saber isn’t going to do anything. But from there…” he doesn’t quite smile. His muscles don’t want to work that way these days, as if they ever had. But he nods to the blaster at Finn’s hip. “Try and shoot me.”

“Rey would kill me if I hurt you.”

“Didn’t you say Rey blocked blasts from Phasma? I’m quite as capable as she is.”

Finn looks at the blaster in his hand, then aims at Ben’s shoulder and fires.

The blade in his hand flicks towards the blast as easily and lazily as if it were a choreographed dance, and Ben sends the blast up into the clear Nabooan sky. “From a few feet away, blasterfire’s nothing,” he says. “Especially since frequently, people are all aiming for the same places.” He points to his head, to his breast, to his groin. “So you can keep the movement pretty contained. Harder when you’re trying to defend a lot of people, but just yourself, or maybe—maybe one other person.” He takes a deep breath. If they’d just had blasters. If their armor had just been penetrable by blasters. Then his dad wouldn’t have been defenseless. Then Ben could have stopped them.

“Can I try?” Finn asks.

Ben looks at him, and he looks back and there’s a stubbornness set to his jaw that reminds Ben, oddly, of his mother.

Ben reaches out. Finn’s never been boiling over with the Force the way that Rey is, but then again, his father hadn’t been either, and there’s no way his father wasn’t strong with the Force, with that pilot’s instinct of his. It was a conclusion Ben had come to when he was fifteen, at his most bitter that his father still told him they were just nightmares, even in letters. But it’s still there, that little bit of Force in Finn. If we get Rey back, I’m going to train him. I’m going to train them both.

So he hands Finn the lightsaber.

“It’s lighter than I thought it would be,” Finn says. “What’s this metal?”

“I…” Ben pauses. He had known once, had memorized all the best metals for making lightsabers because he wanted his saber to be the best. “I don’t remember.” It’s strange. His memory’s always been good. He’d always been a good student. But it has been…ten years or so, he supposes.

Finn hefts the lightsaber, then pulls it into a defensive stance that’s almost perfectly the opening of Soresu. “How do I look? Terrifying?”

“More than you know,” Ben replies.

Finn hands him back the lightsaber.

“How much combat did you see? With the First Order?”

Finn grimaces. “Not much. My first assignment was on Jakku, and pretty much right after that I defected. Not much of a soldier, I guess.”

“Or the best kind,” Ben shrugs. “You seem to be doing well for yourself here.”

“It’s good to have something to fight for, I guess,” Finn says. He settles down on the drying autumn grass and Ben joins him as they look out over the mountains. “Rey’s the only reason I stayed but,” he takes a deep breath, “When Phasma killed those stormtroopers, just to save her own skin. For a second, I thought—was I like her? When I wanted to run and leave you all behind? Leave all this behind?”

“No,” Ben says. “You weren’t. You—”

“Cared about other people. That’s what this is, isn’t it? Caring about other people—fighting for other people. It’s bigger than I thought it was, and I knew it was big. I don’t come from anything but the First Order, and I want to burn it to the ground and let everyone be able to just… think for themselves.”

He glances at Ben. Ben can relate to that, at least.

“Poe’s out there talking about freedom, and democracy, but I just don’t want people to think they can only think a certain way. It’s what made me want to run. That I was thinking the wrong way and I’d be destroyed for it. Well, that and just plain quitting. They don’t know how to not follow orders. They never learned how not to. And that’s just…sad.”

“You want to give them a new path?”

“Or show them that there is one. And if they don’t want it, then they don’t want it. But I know some of them will. I did. It’s strange, being invested in people I’ve never met before.”

“Sneaks up on you,” Ben says. It had snuck up on him, after all—Finn and Rey, the first friends he’d ever had. The other students at his uncle’s praxeum had never mattered to him the way those strangers he’d stumbled upon on Jakku did.

“I wanted to run away from this rebellion,” Finn confesses. “Right before you were taken. I was trying to flee out to the Outer Rim.”

“Not a dumb choice.”

“Yeah,” Finn says, “But now…I can’t fathom leaving. I get why people are fighting for this. Better than some of them do, I think. Like, they do it because they should do it, because they were raised with idealism from the Old Rebellion, and Leia Organa’s at the head of it. I’m fighting because I don’t know what I’d have been without them and I hate that. Also they kidnapped both you and Rey.”

“Do they know if she’s alive?” Ben asks. Safer to ask Finn, somehow, than his mother. He knows with Finn he won’t get his mother weighing the rest of the Resistance too.

“Poe and I have been working on decoding some intercepted communiqués that Pooja got us,” Finn says. “I was never high up enough to get some of their codes, though, so sometimes I feel more like a drag. They’re trying to figure out who’s in charge, and are trying to figure out what to do now that rumors that Snoke’s dead have hit the HoloNet.”

“So they started spreading it?” Ben asks.

“Almost immediately,” Finn says. “They don’t want to give them a monopoly on the story. If they have it, they control it. And we can’t let them have control.”

“What about Rey? Do you think—”

“If they’d killed her, they’d want us to know, I think. Just out of spite, or because they think she’s important—and they’re not wrong. She is. I don’t think they know what to do with her. She’s not Luke or Leia, she’s not high up in the chain of command. She’s just a girl. But they’re smart enough to know that we care and that means if they kill her, they want it to matter. But not one of them is the strategist that Snoke is.”

Not one of them has the power to put images of them torturing her into my mind, Ben thinks. His stomach squirms. Are they torturing her? He can’t fathom them not—trying to get information she doesn’t have out of her. His hand tightens in the grass, ripping it out of the ground.

The thought hits him and he sags back against the grass. The saber forms hadn’t exhausted him nearly so much as the thought that goes through him now.

“What?” Finn asks.

“I have to find my uncle,” Ben says glumly. It’s the last thing he wants to do, the last thing he would ever have thought he would do. But Rey—he needs to know. He needs to reach her. And the only person alive who knows more about the Force than him is Luke Skywalker.

“See you, then,” Finn says and Ben turns suddenly.

“Finn?”

“Yeah?”

It’s instinct, really—that makes him do it. Or maybe he’s just a coward who can’t keep staring at it, feeling guilty, wondering when the light will go out and that’ll mean the end of everything. Besides, the only reason he has it is because Finn had wanted him to. And if Ben thinks he’s Rey’s home, then Finn damn well is too.

He unwraps the binary beacon from his wrist and tosses it to Finn.

“Catch.”

Finn does, his hand tightening over the little blue light. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to.

-

Luke is sitting under a tree, meditating, and Ben is about to leave him to it when Luke says, “What is it, Ben?”

It’s like he’s twelve again, and nervous about a question that had popped into his head during his last lesson, afraid to look stupid, afraid to look weak.

Except it’s very different now. The field is more level. He is grown. His questions are more complicated, and not ones that would betray stupidity so much as naïveté.

“You haven’t been able to feel her, have you?” Ben asks.

Luke shakes his head. “I’ve been trying. But I don’t even know where they might have taken her once they evacuated the Supremacy. We’ll have to wait until someone can find a hint of their plans. I can’t find someone in the Force if I don’t even know where to look.”

“Snoke could,” Ben mutters bitterly and his uncle gives him a steady look. Once, he knows, Luke would have tried to comfort him. Or perhaps would have dove into the theoretical ways in which Snoke was magnifying his Force Sensitivity, what techniques he was using that stemmed from the Dark which Ben could never touch. Instead, he just remains silent.

“Snoke,” Ben begins before swallowing. His throat is very dry. Too dry. “Snoke connected us. Through the Force. I thought I was hallucinating her. Maybe I was. But it was also real.”

Luke frowns at that. “It’s not unheard of—two strong Force users being connected through the Force. It’s rare that it’s a third party that creates such a bond. I don’t know if…well, you and I both know that I haven’t read every record in the salvaged library. You were always more of a historian than I was.”

“So it could be real? And not just in my head?” Ben asks. He needs his uncle to tell him. He doesn’t trust his uncle with all his heart or anything, but he knows that Luke wouldn’t dare lie to him right now.

“It could be. That’s not to say…well, you know Snoke better than me, and you said you thought it might have been a hallucination.”

Ben swallows. He remembers the touch of Rey’s hand, of her palm pressing into his soul and future. It was real, he knows.

“I tried to understand how it worked,” Ben says at last. “I’d never encountered anything like it. It seemed…whimsical. I couldn’t figure out rhyme or reason for why we were connecting when we did. But I haven’t connected with her since Snoke died. Do you think—” the question rushes out of him like a frightened boy, “Do you think it vanished when he died? If he was maintaining?”

“If it was a true connection, he would have needed to consciously sever it,” Luke replies. “To consistently maintain it would have drained his life force down too much, especially at such a distance. So I’d guess it’s still there. If she’s alive. And I think she is.”

“How do you know?” Ben demands. Is there something his uncle isn’t telling him?

“I don’t,” Luke replies. “I just have a feeling. And I’m choosing to believe it.”

Ben blinks. “That’s not good enough,” he mutters.

“No,” Luke says, “It’s not. But it’s what I’ve got so far. As I said on Crait, there are any number of reasons that we might not be able to sense her. She could be unconscious—which would also explain your being unable to connect to her. I think that’s where my thoughts keep returning to. It’s safer to keep a Force user unconscious than it is to try and torture them or overpower them. And Finn says that they were prepared to try and contain her. They might have some sort of suppressant for her Force, but those are unpleasant to have around, and Snoke…well, I suppose the ship could have been big enough…” Luke loses himself in thought.

“How was Snoke able to keep tabs on me?” Ben asks at last. “I moved around for years and he was always able to find me in the end.”

Luke gives Ben a sad look. “There are of course ways to track people through the Force,” Luke says, “but usually that requires being in close proximity to them, which Snoke wasn’t. Either he was able to amplify that in ways I can’t fathom or…” he glances at Ben. “Or he was able to lay some sort of seed in your mind. Some sort of beacon, that would call to him under certain circumstances.” Luke sighs. “His voice was always so strong in your mind. That would be my guess.”

Ben looks at his uncle for a long time, not bothering to keep the hurt and betrayal out of his face. Yes, he thinks. You know. You know so clearly.

“I wish I could undo it, Ben. I failed you,” he repeats.

“Yeah,” Ben says at last. “You did. And what’s worse is you hurt me, just like him.”

The words hang between them, horrible and heavy. It could stretch on a long time, he knows. But he’s tired of long silences. He’s lived them for too long. So instead, he says, “We’re not going to fail Rey.”

“No,” Luke agrees, determined. “We’re not.”

“So what do we do?”

“Tell me more about this…connection,” Luke says. “It strikes me as the strongest chance we’ve got.”

Ben steels himself, stares into his uncle’s eyes for several long moments, and bares his soul.

Chapter Text

She does not know what it is, but the only thing that comes to mind is cute.

It is a reptile and it is kept in a small glass cage by the door of the cell they’ve kept her in since she woke up. There is a little frame in the cage, on which the reptile crawls, and there is a light that shines down on it to keep the plants alive. They feed her twice a day and the thing once a day. For the most part, it sleeps.

Rey tries to do the same.

Her head and back hurt. Her back from where she’d been stunned and her head, she supposes, from where it had hit the ground. In the glass of the cage and low lighting of the room, Rey thinks she sees a huge bruise that spreads across her forehead. But she can’t tell if it’s the light and wishful thinking, or if it’s truly there. She presses it once and it sure feels like a bruise.

The stormtroopers that come to feed her and take away the bucket they’ve left for her to shit in—better than how they treated Ben, she can’t help but think every time she squats over it—never say a word. She doesn’t ask them questions. The questions, she thinks, are only going to get lies or torment, and she’d rather seem strong and unbroken in her cell than like a begging, sobbing child.

Especially since she can’t use the Force.

At first, she’d thought it was because she’d hit her head. When she tries reaching out with the Force, to see if there is any trace of Ben, to see if there’s any trace of Finn and Rose, she doesn’t feel anything. It’s like there’s something muffling all of the nerves in her body.

When she thinks it’s something in the food, she stops eating it. But after a day of near starvation where everything is worse and the muffling feeling hasn’t gone away, she decides that’s not it.

Then her eyes land on the cute little reptile in its glass cage.

She doesn’t know enough about the Force to know about ways to stop it, but the First Order wouldn’t very well give her a pet just for fun would they? It’s not a coincidence that they’re keeping this creature in the same place as her. It’s suppressing her Force, somehow.

You could kill it, the scavenger tells her. It will starve you happily.

But it blinks at her lazily, and she hadn’t even been able to leave BB-8 to Teedo. I’m weak, she thinks sadly as she slumps on the ground next to the thing.

You’re not cruel, a voice in the back of her mind corrects her, memories of Jakku flooding her now with the thought of how she’d first found BB-8—how ferocious she had been, how indomitable. There is a difference. You are what you choose to be. That is strength.

She wishes she could believe it of herself now. Something has changed in her in the past few weeks. She doesn’t feel like the same girl as that sand-covered scavenger.

She lies on the bench in the corner and stares up at the smooth black wall of the ceiling.

It’s never fully dark in her cell. The light keeping the plants alive in the reptile’s glow dully even when the system shuts off the overheads light. And of course, there’s the binary beacon tied around her wrist.

Perhaps they’d thought it was a piece of jewelry and let her keep it where they had taken her lightsaber from her. Or maybe it had just missed their notice. Regardless—it glows around her wrist, pulsing quietly in time with her heart, reminding her that if she manages to get out of here alive she does have a way to make it home.

Somehow, though, she doubts she’ll ever see that home again—see the people she loves again.

Whenever those thoughts creep into her mind, she slams her mind away. Maybe she’d drawn out her own pain, waiting the way she had done on Jakku for parents who didn’t love her. But at the very least, she had developed a will as strong as steel when it came to not letting herself think about horrible truths.

After the first day that she’s awake, she starts scraping little lines into the side of the wall, using the end of the spoon that they had given her to eat with. Three days pass before anyone above the rank of stormtrooper enters her cell.

But enter they do—the slim, pale, redheaded man that had gone off to find Snoke when Rey had been helping Finn and Rose. He is flanked by two other officers whom Rey has never seen before. His face is pinched, and he is sneering at her, clearly pleased with the predicament.

“Rey,” the man says in a clipped tone. “I have questions for you.”

“Do you?” she asks.

“I do,” he replies.

“Funny. Took you five days to come talk to me. They can’t be very important questions.”

The sneer slips ever so slightly.

Rey remembers Unkar Plutt. Once upon a time, her smart mouth would have gotten her smacked across the face, or worse. But she finds, oddly, that she’s not afraid of this little man. He could torture her, he could kill her, but she’s still not afraid of him. So what if she dies so long as she dies fighting?

“Brave Jedi to the core, eh?” he asks her at last, trying to recover his balance.

“I’m not a Jedi,” Rey replies.

The man takes out the lightsaber and twirls it his fingers, but he does not ignite it.

Rey decides that rolling her eyes is a good idea. “Wielding a lightsaber doesn’t make you a Jedi, no more than being Force sensitive does,” she tells him. I sound like Luke. She decides that is a good thing.

“Where did you get this?” the man asks.

“Found it,” Rey replies.

“Where?”

“In a basement.”

The man gets frustrated with that. “Where?”

“On Takodana. You’ve already destroyed the building it was in, so there’s no use going there to see if there’s more goodies for you.”

“And is this the lightsaber you used to murder the Supreme Leader?”

Rey raises her eyebrows. “I’m sure you’ll find if you check your security footage, I was never even close to the Supreme Leader. I was with Finn and Rose in the hangars. I saw you there.”

“You murdered the Supreme Leader,” the man says and she can see that he knows that she knows he’s lying. And he doesn’t care. “And for that, you will die. This,” he hefts the lightsaber in his hand, “will be destroyed. And the entire galaxy will know what befalls those who try to resist the First Order.”

He chooses that word on purpose—she can see it in his eyes. But he seems to be the talkative type, and continues. “Oh yes, we’re coming for your pathetic friends,” he says quietly. “There are too few of them to withstand us. Barely a handful. You should have just let Phasma execute FN-2187 and his little companion. It would have saved them both so much pain, so much trouble.”

“Phasma, you mean? It would have saved her pain and trouble.” He glares at her. “I’m not in the business of saving the First Order any trouble at all.”

“And we aren’t in the business of saving rebel scum any trouble either,” he retorts. He glances sideways at the creature in a cage. “How’s your roommate? Are you two comfortable?”

“She’s cute and keeps to herself. I don’t have a problem with her. Does she have a name, or can I name her?”

He’s not even beginning to smile now. There’s pure rage on his face. “You,” he hisses at her, but clearly can’t think of what else he wants to say.

“You had more questions for me?” Rey asks. “Or was it just about the lightsaber?”

“Where have they gone?” the man spits at her, clearly enraged. “Your friends, where have they flown off to?”

Flown off to.

So they aren’t on Crait, as Leia had planned.

They’d left her behind.

Good.

Odd, that it’s good to be left behind. But if it means they are alive…

“I thought you could track them through hyperspace.”

He looks positively livid now. “Our ship got blown apart,” he pinches out. “Because one of your friends flew right through us, or don’t you remember.”

“I do,” Rey replies, reaching up and rubbing the back of her head where she’d fallen at the impact. “I was here. And then you captured me. So I don’t know where they’ve gone.”

“They didn’t give you a rendezvous point?”

“I came in an escape pod,” Rey points out. “They weren’t expecting me to be far from the ship to begin with.”

“You could have stolen a ship like your little friends,” the man says. “One of our Upsilons.”

“They’d be awfully hard to fly without a co-pilot.”

That’s when the hand comes, she sees it, gloved and leathered and flat—a slap. The man’s hand is thinner than Plutt’s was, and it stings more than it hurts.

“Your insolence will be your downfall,” he says.

“I’m already your captive and you’re planning to execute me,” Rey replies. “I don’t think it’s my insolence that got me here.”

That’s what turns him on his heel and sends him and the other officers from the room, the door sealing shut behind him.

Rey goes and sits by the cage of the little lizard creature. It crawls towards her and blinks at her lazily.

So they got away. She can’t help but breathe at that. She won’t be breathing much longer, but the Resistance lived, they’d escaped. And Luke was with them—he was helping now. She’d done that much. And Finn and Rose…They had escaped. They had to have. He wouldn’t have mentioned them the way he had if they hadn’t. She hadn’t failed completely in the end. She’d saved them. She’d done what she’d set out to do, even if she’s sitting locked away in this cell now, waiting for her death. It was worth it, if they lived.

And Ben?

They’re pinning Snoke’s death on me, not on him. Did that mean they didn’t know who had done it? That felt odd. They’d have had security footage at the very least. They’d be executing Ben if they had him.

She tucks her knees up to her chest and stares at the little lizard creature. She doesn’t dare say a word to it, because she’s sure that this cell is being recorded. But her thoughts are whirring. Why me and not Ben?

Han had died. Han had died, a great symbol throughout the galaxy, whether as a Rebellion general or as a smuggler—someone who defied any power to hold him back. But Leia still lived, and their son. And Luke Skywalker.

They don’t want to turn him into a symbol. The next generation of a family that overthrows whatever would oppress. If the son of Leia Organa and Han Solo destroyed Snoke, what sort of hope would that spread throughout the galaxy, what sort of power would the Resistance gain? Better a junk rat from Jakku, whose name no one will remember and who will be executed swiftly.

Except they hadn’t executed her yet.

There has to be something I can do, she thinks as she looks at the little lizard creature. Why are you the way you are so that I can’t even reach the Force?

It blinks back at her.

She misses Finn—his sheer bravery in taking what little he knew and turning it into a weapon. If Finn were here, she’d know all about…

She looks around. He’d been in sanitation, but they’ve given her a bucket, not a toilet. But there are air vents. She gets to her feet and stands on tiptoe. The ceiling is a little too high for her to reach.

She looks down at the cage. “Sorry,” she tells the little lizard creature, and she climbs up onto the top of it. It bears her weight as she reaches up to touch the grille overhead and—

“Ow!” Electricity shoots its way through her arms and she topples over, landing hard on her side and hitting her head against the bench she’d taken to sleeping on, knocking over the pail of excrement. She lies there, her heart hammering in her chest, her head throbbing, her hair positively crackling from the shock. Ok—so not that.

When she steadies a bit, she sits up and tilts the pail back up. It’s not like the room smells more like piss than it had before. Rey’s used to horrible smelling things so it doesn’t bother her, really.

But it makes her think of Ben when she’d found him on Starkiller, smelling rancid and completely out of it. He’d thought he was hallucinating her. Not once when the Force had connected them did he think he was hallucinating her, but on Starkiller, when she’d actually been there with him, he had. He’d wanted to die. If you’d killed him then, you’d have saved yourselves a good deal of trouble, she thinks savagely at the door.

Instead he’d lived. He’d lived, and he’d killed Snoke and now he was free.

Oddly, that makes her throat lump up. Finn and Rose and the Resistance leaving her behind, that doesn’t hurt her, but Ben severing the Force and running without so much as saying goodbye…

Goodbye, she thinks at him, wherever he is. I’m going to die, but at least you’re free.

It’s not a bitter thought. It’s not even an angry one. Ben’s got enough bitterness and anger in him to feel all that when he learns that she’s going to die, pinned for his actions.

Keep yourself alive, he’d told her while they’d sparred.

Keep yourself alive, she thinks at him. If this is the cost of your freedom, don’t squander it.

She pushes away the thoughts of sharing that freedom with him, because what good is it to imagine holding him in her arms, running her hands through his hair, pressing her face into his chest and feeling his heart beating strongly there.

Find Finn again. Stay with him. Find peace with your mother and your uncle if you can. Be a family. Have the family I always wanted, since I can’t.

She hadn’t wanted to be a hero—she’d just wanted family.

She tucks her knees up to her chest again, and leans her head back against the bench and refuses to cry.

She doesn’t want the First Order to see her tears.

Chapter Text

“We’ve found her.”

Ben’s head jerks up, and his skin goes cold. His mother reaches for his hand, and she runs her thumb along the side of his. “Sweetheart,” she whispers. “They’re going to execute her.”

She hands him the holo and he begins to read.

It comes in snatches of phrases. The assassin of Supreme Leader Snoke to be executed and broadcast throughout the galaxy and our leader may be dead but our power remains there will be order and those who defy us will be crushed.

He throws the holo across the room and it shatters against the wall. His mother doesn’t even look upset at the outburst.

“I thought you said we were going to be able to do something,” he says. His voice is hollow to his own ears, quieter than the drumming of his heart in his ears.

“I know, Ben, I know. But we didn’t get our information in time. If this is what they were planning the whole time, then we—”

“Wasted our time. We could have gotten her out. She’s been there for days and they’re going to kill her tomorrow. We could have gotten her out.”

“Sweetheart, you’re panicking.”

He is. That explains his heart, at least. He is panicking. He is terrified. He wants nothing more than to hold Rey in his arms, to keep her safe. He’d left her on the Supremacy if he’d just gone and found her, they could all have escaped together, they could—

He looks around the room. It’s just him and his mother and his uncle and he stares at his uncle.

“Do we know where?” he asks.

“On one of their space stations,” Luke says. “We’ve been able to determine where all three are currently located, but we don’t know which one she’ll be on.”

“Who knows?” Ben asks, his mind turning to Finn.

“They broadcast their intentions throughout the HoloNet. Everyone knows.”

Ben gets to his feet, letting go of his mother’s hand. He leaves the room and goes down into the wine cellars beneath Pooja Naberrie’s house. He sees Finn staring at a map of the galaxy with Poe, Rose, Paige, and Kaydel. They all look up when they see him.

“Yeah,” Finn says. He’s trembling too. His hand is wrapped around his wrist, around the binary beacon.

“What have we got?” Ben asks. He doubts that the answer will give him more hope than the one he’d gotten from his mother, but the least he can do is try.

Finn’s expression is grim. “Even if we were to determine which of the bases they’re holding her on, I don’t see how we’d get there in time. They’re all just…” he points to the map, which has three red dots on it, “just out of reach.”

He’s not wrong. The First Order bases aren’t close enough to make a hyperspace run in a day. That’s why they didn’t schedule her execution sooner, a voice whispers in his head. They wanted to make sure they were out of reach, that it could go off without a hitch.

Ben’s hands tighten at his side and he swallows, staring at each of the three little red dots. They look like targets.

“I will destroy them for this,” he says. He doesn’t know what he had been planning to do when he fled the Supremacy. He had been wild with grief and freedom. He could very easily have flown off into the stars and never looked back. For all of his mother’s struggles with the Order, those were her battles, not his. His had been with Snoke, and he’d come out of it on top.

But if Rey dies, that’s not Snoke. That’s the First Order.

And he’ll tear them apart with his own hands.

He knows he can, he has dreamed of the power he could wield if only he wanted to, has dreamed of blood and flames since he was a child. It had frightened his uncle, it had delighted Snoke, and Ben’s not afraid of it anymore—not anywhere near as afraid of it as he is of losing Rey.

He looks at Finn and Finn looks back and he knows that Finn understands him completely.

-

“You don’t have to watch it,” his mother tells him later. He’s out in the mountains again, staring out at the hills. He’d promised himself that Rey would see them one day, so he burns the memory of them into his mind in case, somehow, the image of them can make their way to her before it happens.

He and Luke have spent the past few days testing the Force, trying to replicate the connection he’d had with Rey, to see how it had been built, to see if maybe they can force it to flare to life just long enough so that she knows…knows what? That they’d failed her?

“I do,” Ben says quietly. He needs to see her face one last time. He hasn’t seen it in too long, and sometimes he wonders if he’d just made the whole thing up, a way to get through all of his pain.

His sleep hasn’t been tormented, but it hasn’t been easy either. It’s like years and years of nightmares have trained him to sleep poorly, even when there’s no Snoke.

He dreams of Rey, sometimes.

Her smile, her laugh, the way she’d held his hand. He dreams of kissing her, of holding her close to his chest, of peeling away her tunic, of sitting with her in the sunshine, of weaving flowers in her hair.

Those dreams are worse than nightmares. When he wakes from them, she’s gone again. That’s how it’s going to be until I die. She’ll always be gone.

“Sweetheart,” his mother says and she sits down next to him and pulls him against her side and it’s only then that he realizes that he’s crying. “I know. I know.”

I know, I know, his mother had always whispered into his hair when she’d held him, when he’d cried, his nightmares overpowering everything in him. She hadn’t known then, not even a little bit. But he thinks of his father, and thinks she might know now.

“I’ll be there with you,” his mother whispers after she has let him cry for a time. “Always, sweetheart. Always.”

There’s something frightened in her voice, something desperate. She’s afraid I’m going to leave again, he thinks. Or something darker, maybe.

It feels like the end of something.

Or maybe the beginning.

-

Ben stares at the broadcast. He is sitting in the back of the room, his mother in a seat in front of him and Finn at his side. He can taste tin in his mouth, his heart pumping hard in his chest, as though it is trying to pump for both him and Rey, as though it knows hers will soon stop and his will be the only one left between the two of them.

They are making a show of it. Crisp red banners with the First Order’s starburst insignia hang from the back wall behind a dais. There is a chopping block there, and they clearly plan to have Rey extend her neck over it. No firing squad. One clean, swift, strike. They have their cameras taking in rows and rows and rows of soldiers, lining up in clean white armor. Officers are filing in, and there’s even some ridiculous music playing—bombastic, and triumphant.

“Trying to hide that their Supreme Leader was murdered by a single girl,” Ben hears Pooja scoff from the front of the room.

He wonders if Rey could have done it, could have killed Snoke. He thinks she could have. She’s ferocious, and more powerful than she knows. They’ll never know. If it meant losing Rey, was it worth it? he wonders desperately. He needs them to bring her out. He dreads them bringing her out.

And there she is. They are leading her, surrounded by stormtroopers all of whom have blasters pointed at her, through an aisle in the middle of the room, her hands cuffed in front of her. She looks so small in her grey wrappings amidst all the black and white. The cameras are too far away to see her face.

Please, he thinks across the Force. Please.

His ears grow muffled and she pauses.

“Rey,” he breathes and she is there in front of him in the room on Naboo with him, close enough that he could touch her while being thousands of light years away. Her eyes go wide and almost immediately mist over with tears.

She jerks forward, as though she has been struck, and he lurches to his feet, catching her in his arms and there she is, warm and pressing into him, pressing into all of him, past, present, future, dark and light, his heart, his soul.

And he holds onto her, he closes his eyes and focuses on her, focuses on the way she feels, the here and now, that she is not alone, that she’ll never be alone, he won’t let her be alone. He sinks into it, the Force, sinks into it more than he’s ever done before. This is not a time for idle exploration, this is a time for Rey and a time for him, and if he uses every ounce of Force in him to make sure she knows she’s not going to die alone, it’ll be worth it.

It feels like fainting, the way his head is spinning. It feels like his skin is melting and solidifying all at once, that he is both hot and cold, light and dark, perfectly balanced with Rey in his arms. It feels like flying, little breezes puffing their way across his skin as he holds her.

“Ben?” he thinks he hears someone—not Rey—gasp in surprise, but his ears are even more muffled now than they were when he and Rey finally connected again.

And then the muffling stops altogether and he hears a very different voice.

“Fire!”

And instinct kicks in. His lightsaber is in his hand and he is cutting through the cuffs around Rey’s hand and a moment later they are back to back as she holds out a hand and summons a lightsaber out of an officer’s stunned and slack grip. Ben levels his blade at the stormtroopers in front of him who, despite the command to fire, seem to be too stunned to even move.

Because it’s not just Rey who can see him now—it’s all of them. He’s not on Naboo anymore.

He’s here in front of the firing squad.

With Rey.

Who is berating him.

“This was monumentally stupid,” she calls to him over the sounds of blasterfire, as she does her best to stay alive, the way he’d told her to when she’d asked him to teach her saber forms.

“No, it wasn’t.”

If it means that she is alive, that there’s even a breath of a chance that she’ll survive, or, at least, that she won’t die by herself surrounded by her enemies, it wasn’t stupid. He feels like he’s going to faint again—and not because, apparently, he traveled through light years via the Force. Because the effort exerted to do so…

Well, what doesn’t kill you… he thinks as he lurches more than lunges to block a volley of shots. They are coming in so very fast, and he remembers how easily Finn had sunk into Soresu half a galaxy away. Ben can’t even make it halfway into the form. Stay alive, he tells himself, as he’d told Rey. It had worked for him against Snoke’s guards.

And he’ll destroy them all if Rey goes the same way as his father.

He can feel her through the Force, so vibrant and there. He can feel the way her heart swells when she brushes against him, that she matters enough for him to do something this stupid and not care. Because he doesn’t care. He can’t care. Maybe he’ll let himself care if they get out of this alive.

“How are we going to get out of here?” Rey grunts at him as if she’d read his mind—which, on second thought, it’s entirely possible she’d picked up on some of his thoughts through the Force. Her exertion is showing, but she’s moving more fluidly than he is. If he’d just completely drained himself getting here—it’s a miracle he can even stand—she seems positively well rested. They haven’t been torturing her.

The thought is oddly invigorating.

“I didn’t exactly plan this,” Ben calls back.

“Right,” Rey replies, and then, more quietly, “Well then.”

He’s not entirely sure how his arm knew to angle the saber just so to block no less than seven blasts, but they all go ricocheting back at the stormtroopers, who either stumble back into their fellow soldiers or who fall to the ground, unmoving.

It gives him an idea.

How fit do you feel? he tries asking her silently. They’ve never communicated silently before—he doesn’t even know if Rey knows how. But somehow, he suspects she’ll pick it up quickly.

Oddly well, she tentatively replies, her voice floating like heaven across the surface of his mind. Why?

Because I’m about to do something even more stupid and may need your help.

“Ben,” Rey begins, to say, but it’s too late—there’s no time, there are more and more blasters pointed their way with every passing second. How they haven’t been hit already is either a testament to the Force or a testament to how badly the First Order trains its stormtroopers in marksmanship because it certainly isn’t because Ben’s fighting well.

Ben thinks of his father, thinks of Snoke, thinks of whatever they might have been doing to Rey in the past few days. He thinks of Finn, ripped from his family as a kid, and thinks of his mother, who should have been able to retire peacefully and stop rebelling against those who would destroy people long ago. He thinks of himself, of running and hiding from a shadow that had been after him since he was a child, afraid to sleep, afraid to remember who he was, or those who loved him.

And he lets his rage flow through him, stronger than an ocean’s wave as he lets it crash over everyone in the room, knocking soldiers flat on their backs like dominos, a clatter of armor and surprised shouts.

If that hadn’t taken everything out of him, he’d have grabbed her hand and made a break for it. But instead he is struggling to stay conscious. If his heart had a voice, it would be yelling at him for what he’d just done and why he can’t just keel over and fall asleep, but instead has to keep going. So it’s Rey who grabs his hand and tugs him and his legs that follow her while his head is in a daze.

“That was also very stupid,” Rey is yelling at him as she drags him along towards some door. “Are you all right?”

Everything is too bright, and his ears are ringing as though a bomb had just gone off right next to him, but her voice comes through crystal clear, though whether through the Force or just because she’s Rey, he doesn’t know.

You need to run faster, he tells his legs. We need to get out of here.

They try to comply, though he gets the sense that they, too, would be screaming at him if they could.

“Any idea where we’re going?” he asks Rey who is leading the way.

“Not in the slightest,” she replies.

“We should steal a ship,” he tells her.

“Are you all right to fly?”

“Probably better than running.”

He feels the Force flow out of her, flow through the entire ship, and the moment she does it’s like peace washes over him, setting to ease the last of his rage, like the sky over the mountains on Naboo.

Then she jerks his hand, hard, to the left. “This way.”

“No rathtars?”

“Shut up.”

He grins.

-

They are crouched behind a set of crates in a hangar. The entire space station is on high alert, and there are hundreds of stormtroopers surrounding each of the ships in the bay.

“How on earth are we going to break one out of here without getting caught?” Rey whispers to him. He’s leaning against her. He wants to be leaning against her, yes, his heart is delighting at the contact, but it’s more because he needs to than he wants to. His breathing is ragged as though he’s just run for hours—which given that he’d transported himself somehow across the galaxy, seems like he got off easy. She’s so warm, and she’s alive. She’s alive. Not safe yet, but soon. Because they will get out of here. They will.  

“I only have stupid ideas,” Ben says. “And not just the stupid unthought out ones—ones I don’t even know could work.”

Rey grimaces. “Same,” she replies. “How did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Get here? Through the Force. How?” Her eyes duck down as she asks, and her cheeks flush and he can feel the you came all this way for me that she doesn’t say aloud.

Ben blinks for a moment. “I don’t know,” he says. “I just…I needed to, so I did.”

Rey’s eyes go bright and now it’s her turn to blink up at him. Her face is so close to his. Is he imagining it, or do her eyes drop down for just a second to his lips?

Then her jaw juts and he sees pure Rey determination written all over her face.

“Did you spark the connection? Or did it do it itself?”

Ben doesn’t like where he thinks these questions are going.

“No.”

“We have to try something.”

“Not if it gets you killed we don’t.”

“Look,” Rey snaps, “One way or another, the risk is that I get killed. Either it’s because they catch us and don’t waste time stunning, or it’s because we escape but—”

“We escape together,” he says forcefully. Rey smacks his arm. They’re in too much danger to be arguing quite this loudly.

“I’m not saying we don’t,” Rey hisses. “I’m saying it looks like we don’t. And then we do. If we can do what you did again.”

“And what if it doesn’t work? What if you—” He can’t bring himself to say it. He refuses to even think of coming all this way and Rey dying anyway. Himself—oh he doesn’t care if he dies if it means she gets out. It’ll probably make everyone’s life a lot easier. But he won’t let Rey die.

“Then at least I’ll be dying on my own terms, not on theirs,” she says, her voice shaky. “If I’m going to die, it’s going to be on my terms. But I’m not going to die.”

“How can you know that?”

“Because you’re with me.”

And he breaks.

It’s not the time or the place—he knows that, knows just as well as she does that all it would take would be one stormtrooper catching sight of them for them while distracted for that to be that—but he can’t care about that. Not in the face of her faith in him. Nothing besides them in this moment matters, and he pulls Rey into his arms and his lips find hers and she exhales in surprise before clinging to him. Her lips are chapped, but he’s never tasted anything so sweet as them. Their noses knock together, and he has no idea if he’s doing this right because he’s never actually held someone this close before, much less kissed her, but for a moment, everything is calm, everything is clear. His heart is pumping so strong and alive in his chest and Rey—hers is too.

“I’m with you,” he whispers into her lips and she nods.

“And I’ll be with you. I promise.” She’s still got that jut in her jaw and he sighs and knows she’s going to have her way. She has faith in him—he has to have faith in her too, even if every instinct in his body is screaming that they can’t be this lucky twice.

She turns back to the hangar, her eyes blazing with determination, to survive, to love, to be loved.

-

Ben watches her go. She’s very sneaky, and he’s sure she’s using the Force to get to the shuttle that she’d designated without anyone being any the wiser. Then Ben follows her to the one next to it, twin to her own.

Where Rey distracts the guards by her ship to get on board, Ben sends his onto his ship with what sounds like a shot from a blaster.

“What was that?” And they both go up the gang plank.

Ben follows them, and it’s two quick swipes with his saber before they’re dead and he shoves them into the trash chute to be expelled into space when he’s taken off. “Sorry, Finn,” he mumbles as he closes the chute. Then he settles in the co-pilot’s seat. He takes a deep breath.

Even sitting down he’s more tired than he wants to admit, than he can allow himself to be. But he finds her a moment later through the Force, powering up her ship as he powers up his.

“Ready?” she breathes. He knows she’s not actually sitting next to him, but it looks like she is, the way it had looked like she’d been there with him in the ‘fresher after he’d been sick, or in Snoke’s throne room. Her hands are resting on the controls on her shuttle, mirrored over to his. Whether or not the Force will actually carry her motions over to his ship—and his to hers—they haven’t had time to worry about. If necessary he can pilot this thing on his own.

“No,” he replies. She glances at him from the pilot’s seat, and with a jolt he remembers seeing her for the first time in his father’s ship on Jakku, watching her fly like a maniac through ruined Star Destroyers.

He leans forward and kisses her again. This time, their lips spark and fizzle through the Force and he knows they’re leaving some sort of impact on eternity.

“I’m taking off,” Rey says. And a moment later his ship is pitching forward and he knows it’s because Rey’s hands on her ship are also working on his ship. Out of the viewport, he sees her ship starting to raise itself up. Her balance is off. Ben twiddles his controls, knowing that his hands are leaving an impact on the control unit of her ship, just as hers are on his.

“If we get separated, where should I go?” She asks him, her breathy right next to him. Her ship is making its way out of the hangar, but Ben’s steadied his, keeping it as still as possible. They can’t know he’s here, they can’t know they’ve separated.

“Naboo,” he tells her.

“Never heard of it,” she replies before making a whooping sound of delight. “This one’s got a kick! Nothing like the Falcon though.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing. And you’ll love it. It’s beautiful there.”

“Can’t wait to see it.”

Pilots and guards alike are moving quickly now, the latter summoning more into the hangar, the former leaping into TIEs to chase after Rey’s shuttle.

“They’re getting on your tail now,” Ben tells her. “I’m going to have to…”

“Keep yourself safe,” she tells him. “I’ll handle it. Worse comes to worst, I’ll be there with you soon.”

Ben hears footsteps behind him and gets to his feet. Rey can manage a bit on her own now that she’s fully airborne. A moment later, two pilots in dark armor appear. He kills them as quickly as he killed the stormtroopers and loads them into the trash chute as well. “Could really use a compactor,” he mutters to himself when the seal won’t close all the way. He’ll worry about that later. He needs to get in the air while it’s still easy to blend in with the swarm of TIEs.

“Ready,” he tells Rey and he kicks his ship into gear, following the rest of the fighters into the air. “Try and get as far from the base as you can,” he tells her.

“Working on it,” she grunts. Her face is lined with concentration and she moves her steering mechanism and—

“Careful,” Ben says as his ship veers sideways.

“I’m trying to be,” she snaps. “There’s a lot of them. You don’t have gunning on yours, do you?”

“Not unless I want to send the thing into freefall.” He doesn’t quite trust the Force enough for Rey to keep the ship stable while he’s firing. “They’re close on your tail.”

“I know that,” Rey replies. “How many?”

“Six.”

They’re up ahead of him, weaving around Rey as she shoots through the stars. She’s dancing through their shots as neatly as she can, and Ben, lagging behind all the rest, mimics her motions.

“I’m going to pull close,” Ben tells her. “Are you ready for this?”

“Going to try!” Rey says and she reaches her hand over and squeezes his.

Please, he begs the Force. Please, you owe it to me to work just this once.

He doesn’t know if there’s anything he can do except sit there, reaching for her. She hadn’t done anything when the Force had brought him to her execution. But he hates just sitting there, waiting, hoping, praying that somehow she’ll make her way to him as he’d come to her.

He sees the blast and knows it’s going to be trouble, knows because Rey’s trying to do something she doesn’t know how to do, because one of her hands isn’t on the ship’s controls, because there’s only a split second to take care of it, to get out of the way, to freeze it and they’d both noticed it too late.

“Rey!” he yells as her ship explodes, his hand squeezing hers tighter, refusing to let go because if he lets go, if her hand disappears from his—he feels like he’s going to be sick.

But her hand does not fade from his. Her grip slackens a little, but it’s still there, her palm a little bit sweaty from nerves.

“I’m here,” she moans. “I’m here, I’m—” and she sags forward and Ben smells burned flesh.

“Rey,” is all he can choke out. It’s like the only word he knows is her name.

“Get us out of here,” she rasps. The scent of melted skin and fried hair and clothing fills the cockpit.

“Rey—”

“I’ll keep,” she tells him, before repeating, “Get us out of here.”

He turns his focus back to the ship. He doesn’t want to release her hand, but he needs both of his to steer now that she’s hurt.

His heart nearly stops when he lets go of her, but she doesn’t fade, she doesn’t disappear.

Ben looks out at the stars. The TIEs are turning back. They think they’ve gotten their mark, and they’re getting a little too far out from the station.

One handed, he puts in coordinates and punches into hyperspace before turning his seat towards Rey.

It’s not as bad as he dreads.

She’s leaning forward, away from the back of the seat and the back of her grey wrappings had been burned off. Beneath it, he sees her skin—hot and raw and burned, stretching from her buttocks up to the back of her head. She is watching him, her eyes pained.

“Can you stand?” he asks her, squeezing her hand one last time before letting go.

She does, flinching, and she leans into his chest. He doesn’t wrap his arms around her, doesn’t want to touch the open sore that is her entire back. He leads her towards a bench in the back of the ship, settling down on the ground next to her.

He takes a deep breath. He’d never been good at healing with the Force. He’d actually been flatly terrible at it. But he’s done so much for Rey today, so if ever there was a time to get it right—

His vision gets blurred and his stomach rolls and Rey’s hand shoots out to grab his arm.

“I’m fine,” he pants, his heart racing in his chest.

“You’ve overexerted yourself,” she rasps.

“No, I—”

“Is there a first aid kit?” she asks him. “I don’t need to be perfect—I just need to get through.”

Ben swallows. He can feel her pain through the Force, knows that it hurts worse than any sunburn she’d gotten on Jakku. “Rey,” he whispers.

“Ben, please—you need to take care of yourself. I’ll live.”

Shakily, he gets to his feet.

“I’ll be right back.”

On his way to the cabinets, he passes the garbage chute. He really should get rid of those corpses, so he expels the four dead bodies in it before sealing it off properly. Then he rifles through the shelves and containers, hunting for any sign of medical products he can find.

“Not quite enough,” he tells her when he gets back, holding up a bottle of bacta that’s not even the size of his hand.

Rey tries to smile. There are tears in her eyes. He hates that he can’t heal her. He doesn’t want her to suffer anymore than she’s had to in the past few days.

“But it’s something,” he murmurs, sitting down on the ground next to her. “Where does it hurt most?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Everything just…” Her lips are trembling, her eyes are bright and Ben decides to start with her head. Gently, he coats her skin with it. Most of her hair has been burned off since it had been drawn back from her face. Vaguely, he wonders if the bacta will heal her hair follicles. If it doesn’t, it won’t matter, he tells himself fiercely. Rey is more than her hair.

He coats it onto her skin until there’s no more in the bottle.

“I’m going to look for more,” he tells her quietly. There’s got to be more somewhere.

But Rey’s eyes are closed. Her breathing is easily.

She is asleep.

-

She sleeps for the rest of the day, and wakes only when Ben is pulling into atmosphere.

“Where are we?” she asks.

“Corellia,” Ben replies. “Best place to steal a new ship. This one’s a little obvious. Also get some more bacta for you.” He still gets dizzy whenever he tries to use the Force. He hopes this passes soon, it’s getting tiresome. Rey hasn’t tried healing herself, and he suspects that she’s just as drained by their gambit as he had been getting to that base to begin with, even if she hadn’t had to go as far as he had. “How are you feeling?”

“Terrible,” she says, but there’s a smile on her face. “But it will pass.”

Ben nods. He finds a blanket which he uses to cover her head—the least sensitive of her burns now—and trail down to cover her back. She winces every few paces when the blanket ripples against her burns, and leans against a pillar as Ben haggles his way with a scumlord who he’d once stolen a ship from and who hasn’t quite forgotten that fact.

“This one’s a nicer ship,” Ben tells him, truthfully. “And I don’t need one half-so nice. Just one that’ll get me where I’m going.”

The scumlord senses that there’s something Ben isn’t telling him, but can’t work out what it is, and decides, ultimately, that he doesn’t care.

So Ben loads Rey and several containers of bacta onto the old freighter that he’d acquired and they take to the stars again.

He and Rey tune into the HoloNet while he’s rubbing more bacta onto her back and arms and shoulders. He avoids her buttocks—which need it too. But when she leans sideways on the bench to give him access, he takes a deep breath and begins to rub the cream into her skin. She sighs and it goes straight through him in a way that it really shouldn’t. He’s tending to her wounds, not—not—

Rey’s eyes are lidded lazily as she stares at the footage of them fighting the First Order and Ben does his best to turn his attention there too. It’s hard, with his hands where they are.

“That looked very cool,” Rey says as the holograph of Ben knocks over wave upon wave upon wave of stormtroopers with the Force.

“Good, because I’m still recovering from it,” he says. They watch themselves as they take off running and the commentator appears, telling the galaxy that the First Order reported having destroyed the ship they’d tried to steal.

She eases herself up into a sitting position again and leans in and kisses him and he wants nothing more than to hold her to him again, for as long as he lives. But he can’t do that just yet. Her skin is too raw. So he pulls away, and rests his forehead against hers, cupping her cheeks between his hands and listening to the sound of her breath.

He feels like he’s finally come home.

Chapter Text

The mountains are aflame with autumn leaves as they break into Naboo’s atmosphere three days later and Rey’s breath catches in her throat. Red and orange and yellow leaves, a gentler warmth than the sands of Jakku. Dry colors that promise new life at the end of the oncoming winter.

It’s like being back on Takodana, except this time—

She glances at Ben. He’s watching her, his eyes gentle. “We’re here,” he says at last.

She flushes.

Those two words send a shiver down her spine.

They’ve been mostly quiet during their flight from Corellia. Every few hours, Ben had applied more bacta to her back and she had grown used to the feeling of his hands on her skin, quite as soothing as the substance he applied. He would lightly kiss her cheek and she felt safe. Cared for. And so unbelievably alive. And though her imagination sometimes gets away with her, wondering what would happen if she pulled herself into his arms and kissed him until they were both breathless, she doesn’t do that. The skin on her back is too new for that, and she suspects that that’s to the fore of Ben’s awareness too.

The way he looks at her, though—

She’s never had anyone look at her like that—like she is the most important person in the galaxy. She believes it, almost, when she sees it in Ben’s eyes.

Ben lands them and almost immediately three guards with blasters rush the ship, ordering them to disengage all weapons in the name of the Naberries.

Rey looks at Ben, but he doesn’t seem nervous at all as he gets to his feet and helps her up. She winces.

The bacta is definitely helping, but sometimes when she moves it still feels raw. It doesn’t burn anymore, though, and for that she is eminently relieved. The new skin is tender but growing back, and there’s even an itch on her scalp that she thinks means that her hair is starting to grow again.

They descend from the ship and the guards almost drop their weapons in surprise.

“You died though,” one blurts out in surprise.

“No,” Ben says and his hand tightens in Rey’s. “That’s just the HoloNet believing everything the First Order says.”

He leads Rey towards a house of smooth orange and grey stone and there’s someone running towards her.

“Finn!” she shrieks in delight and she takes off towards him and a moment later his arms are wrapped around her, holding her as tightly as he can. She’s missed him so much, and her heart swells as they hold one another. To think that she’d ever doubted him, ever worried that she couldn’t trust him. They sway back and forth until Finn pulls away.

“I like the new look,” he says, eyeing the long forelocks that frame her face—the only hair left on her head. “You’ll start a new rage in hair style throughout the galaxy.”

She elbows him and he hugs her again. “You’re alive,” he sings delightedly. “We thought you’d died. It looked like you died. How come you didn’t die?”

“Ben,” Rey says, turning back to him. Ben’s standing a little way back, watching them. But even as Rey turns to look at him again, his gaze flicks towards the house and Leia Organa, who is standing there, leaning against the doorframe, her hand over her heart.

“I knew you’d lived,” she breathes. “I knew it. I knew it. I knew I would have felt it if you’d died.”

And she’s hurrying to close the space between her and her son, flinging her arms around his middle and holding him tight. Then she looks up at him and says, “That was extremely stupid of you.”

“Rey’s already beaten you to that one.” There’s a smile to Ben’s voice that makes Rey’s heart patter a little bit faster.

“Good. She’s a smart girl,” Leia says before turning to Rey and holding out her arms. Rey steps into them and rests her head on Leia’s shoulder as the older woman strokes her back through the clothes that Ben had stolen for her on Corellia. “Welcome home, sweetheart,” she whispers.

“Not to be wholly mercenary,” comes a voice that Rey doesn’t recognize, “but it might be good to blast this little reunion across the HoloNet, because the First Order has been touting your deaths for the past few days.”

The speaker is a short woman with greying hair, who has the same steely brown gaze as Leia. Rey pulls away from Leia and the woman extends her hand. “Pooja Naberrie,” she says, “Welcome to Naboo.”

“Thank you,” Rey rasps out. Her throat is dryer than she had expected it to be.

Ben has come to stand behind her and she looks up at him over her shoulder. Without really meaning to, she reaches a hand back and laces her fingers through his.

-

“The bacta already did most of the work,” Luke tells her when she’s lying face down on her bed, feeling the Force flow over her skin. “Looks like the burns weren’t too bad to begin with. You’re lucky to have gotten out of there just in time or else this could have been Vader levels of bad.”

He does ease the parts of her that still feel raw, though, the deeper parts the topical bacta hadn’t quite been able to reach at her armpits and just above her rear.

“Are you still going to teach me?” she asks him when he’s done.

“How to heal?”

“How to use the Force.”

“You’ve already done things I wouldn’t begin to know how to teach you,” he says seriously. “But yes, if that’s what you really want. I can do it.”

Rey doesn’t really know what she wants. Right now, she mostly just wants to sleep.

So she does.

-

Leia leaves for Coruscant the next day, with Poe, Kaydel, and Pooja. “We haven’t a moment to lose,” Rey hears her tell Ben from the hallway of her sitting room. “At every step of the way, we’ve managed to show how weak the First Order is without Snoke. Their messaging, their leadership. It’s time to spring into action.”

“Is Coruscant—” Ben begins, but his mother cuts him off.

“It’s as good a place as any—especially for getting the Core planets together, and they’re the ones we need right now. If we can get them to shake, and get the full brunt of their fleets behind us, we can put the First Order on the run for good.”

Rey steps into the room quietly. The door is open, and she’d rather be in the room listening than eavesdropping—even if it feels a little like she doesn’t belong. The moment she does, Leia holds out a hand to her, and she goes to sit by the older woman. “You both should stay here. Rest.”

“You sure you don’t need the heroes of the Resistance to send a symbol?” Ben asks dryly.

“If I do, I’ll let you know,” his mother responds seriously. “But given that you both have spent a little too much time in captivity in the past month, I thought that you both were due for some rest. You’ve more than done your fair share and—” she looks between them both. “Healing is an important component to rebuilding.” She turns back at Ben. “And I want you to heal.”

Ben’s jaw twitches nervously and his eyes go bright.

“Pooja thought you both might like the lake country. Take yourselves swimming, enjoy the sunshine,” Leia tells them. “I’ll grant Finn and Rose leave to join you if you’d like—if you can convince them to take it.”

Ben glances at Rey. “If you’d like,” he says quietly. “I’ll go if you go.”

Rey’s eyes sting with tears as she looks back at Leia. Leia’s eyes are bright, her expression gentle and a warmth that Rey has been noticing in the past few days spreads across her once again.

It feels like Ben’s hand smoothing bacta over her spine, like Luke’s Force signature easing her aches. It feels like being taken care of.

-

They’re first night in the Lake country, Rey cuts off the remains of her hair. It just looks weird, she decides, and it’ll all grow in at the same rate that way.

“I look like an egg,” she tells Ben.

“Yeah,” he agrees, looking up from where he’s flopped on a sofa, reading a holo. “A little bit. But you’re still you.”

She holds up a hand mirror to the back of her head so she can see the reflection of the skin in the glass in front of her. It’s pink, and soft beneath her touch. When she prods it, it’s almost springy compared to the old skin she has from Jakku—weatherworn as it is.

“Does it still hurt?” Ben asks, putting his holo down and getting up.

“Not really,” Rey says. “It’s just more sensitive is all.”

He brushes his lips against the back of her head and then nuzzles his nose against it, making Rey inhale sharply.

“Is that ok?”

“Do it again.”

So he does. He sits down on the little bench next to her, and wraps his arms around her, kissing his way across the back of her skull until he reaches her cheek, her neck, her lips.

She sighs into his mouth and leans into his embrace.

The house is quiet. Finn and Rose have joined them, but they are staying in other rooms. Outside, Rey can hear the gentle lapping of the lake against the stone base of the house, the breeze through the leaves. None of them are as loud as the sound of her own heart in her chest, beating so strongly as Ben kisses his way up and down her neck.

“I love you.”

The words do not surprise her, for she has known he has loved her, down in her soul for longer than she thinks either of them were aware of what love could be, guarding their wounds as they were. What does surprise her is the ease with which she returns the words, the way she brings his lips from her neck to her own and slips her tongue into his mouth to rub against his.

That makes him groan, and return the gesture enthusiastically—so enthusiastically that Rey nearly gags and has to pull away from him.

“Sorry,” he says sheepishly.

She just kisses him softly without tongue this time, and then extricates herself from his arms just long enough to stand up and take his hand.

The sky darkens with Rey and Ben curled around one another on a bed so soft Rey’s not actually sure it’s a bed and not a pile of silken clouds. She runs her hands over his face, his arms, his chest, reveling in the sturdiness of him. When they’d found each other, he had been starved and unhealthily thin. Now he has muscles—not great bulging ones, but ones that show he’s been practicing with his lightsaber, that he has fought for his life and won. He doesn’t feel as though he’ll break when she pushes him.

On the contrary, he holds her so well, supports her as she rolls him onto his back and lies flush against him, his fingers trailing up and down the fresh skin of her spine, pushing her shirt up so he can feel it. He leaves trails of fire on her skin, heat that is quite unlike the press of the Jakku sunlight. This skin on her back has never known that heat, it never will. The only heat it knows is Ben. Ben, who is sucking at her shoulder as she kisses her way through his hair, loving the silkiness of it now that it’s clean.

She loves the smell of him, she loves the taste of his sweat and skin, wants nothing more than to feel him holding her. She tugs her shirt up, over her head and looks down at him for a long moment while he stares up at her as though she is every star in the galaxy.

Then he sits up and, without breaking eye contact, presses kisses along her breasts, sucking at the skin there until Rey is panting and rocking her hips unconsciously against his. Her hands weave through his hair, and when her eyelids flutter shut, she can’t hear the sound of the lake anymore, or the leaves, or the wind.

Just them.

That’s all she hears. That’s all she feels.

And when Ben pauses in kissing her breasts just long enough to tug off his own shirt, Rey pushes them back down on the bed and rests her head on his chest for a moment, breathing.

For a moment, they lie there, Ben rubbing his hand over the top of her head. She can feel him protruding into her belly, knows that she’s undoubtedly wet and ready for him, but she wants to remember this feeling forever, being supported, being loved.

“Everything ok?” he asks her quietly.

“Just listening to the sound of your heart,” she replies, tilting her head up to look at him. She kisses his chest, kisses her way up his breastbone, sucks at the skin of his neck until her lips find his again, sighing as his hands start to knead at her rear, over her trousers.

And when, very tentatively, his hands slip beneath her trousers to the new skin beneath, she gasps, and holds him tight and buries her face in his neck.

I’m wanted, is all she can think. I’m loved.

It makes every caress that much sweeter. It makes every choked out sigh that much more relieved. That Ben is holding her now.

At some point, her trousers end up on the floor—as do his. They were too much in the way anyhow. She isn’t on top of Ben anymore, but he isn’t on top of her, either. Her leg is thrown over his hip as they lie curled against one another on their sides, his cock riding up the seam between her thigh and her hip, his hands rolling at her breasts while she has one hand in his hair and another on his ass, pulling him as close as he can get to her without being inside her. She ruts against his hipbone, relishing the waves of relief that the motion sends through her body, and letting out little sighs into Ben’s chest as he kisses the top of her head again.

“I love you,” she mumbles into his skin, and that is when she feels his hand drop down from her breast to her slit, fingers probing tentatively as he learns the way that her skin folds.

“I love you,” the words press against the top of her head, and carry their way all the way to the tips of her toes. “I love you, you make me want to live, you make me want to go everywhere I’ve already been and really experience it this time.”

“We’ll go everywhere,” Rey tells him. “I want to see every single one. I want to—I want to—”

But she can’t quite phrase what she wants to, because his fingers have found a spot at the top of her slit that feels so delightful that her breathing grows ragged, as though she has been running, as though she has been fighting—but far, far more pleasant. He rolls it between his fingers, presses into it with his thumb and soon she is shuddering against his chest, kissing it, biting it as pleasure overtakes her and she loses herself in Ben, the taste of his sweat, the rhythm of his heart.

And when she regains conscious thought, she pulls him into her, holds him as close to her, holds him as tight as she can until he has lost himself in her too, heat flooding out of him and into her once again.

They lie like that for a while, curled on their sides, kissing what parts of one another they can reach until their breath steadies and fades into the sound of the lake.

-

“Come on in! The water’s fine!” Rose calls out.

Finn is following her, paddling valiantly after the lessons she and Ben had just given him.

“Come on,” Ben whispers, holding out his arms and Rey gulps.

Swimming had seemed like a good idea in the morning over breakfast, when they’d all had a good night’s sleep, and enough manners not to note the various blemishes that had been sucked into the other pairs’ necks. But now that they’re actually out by the lake…

“You can do it!” Finn calls. “I’m doing it. Sort of.”

Then he turns to Rose and sends a splash her way which, far from outraging her, makes her giggle and splash him back in delight.

“I’m not going to let you drown,” Ben says seriously. “I didn’t cross time and space to prevent your execution just to watch you die here.” His lips start to twitch in a smile.

Rey dips a toe in the water. “It’s cold,” she tells him.

“You’ll get used to it. The sun’s actually keeping it pretty warm,” he promises.

“Not sure I believe that,” Rey grumbles. Then she takes a deep breath and lets herself drop into the water, popping up a moment later, shrieking. “It’s very, very cold.” Especially on the skin on her back and her head. Oh this is terrible, worse even than when she’d nearly drowned on Ahch-To.

Ben pulls her against his chest and kisses her, and she feels his Force swirling around her.

The cold fades.

And Rey sighs and turns to Finn and Rose, who are still splashing one another, and murmurs, “Ok. I can do this.”

And she does.