Chapter Text
It takes them four days to reach Luke.
Four days where Rey can’t keep what little food they have in her stomach, where she coughs so hard that her mask becomes stained with dried blood. She can drink, though, so that’s something.
She passes out more than once on Kira’s back and Ben has to catch her and adjust her, putting her stomach down across his daemon’s back and--apologizing profusely to the unconscious Kylo--positions him similarly, doing his best to tuck him into the blankets since he is so much smaller than Rey.
Her fever doesn’t abate, and by the time he can see Artoo flying overhead above them, she’s mumbling things in delirium. “Ben,” she moans. “Come back.”
“I’m here, sweetheart,” he tells her desperately. He has known some fear in his life, but nothing--nothing is quite like the fear that she will die when they are so close.
Artoo keeps circling overhead, bright golden wings in the dusty sky. He doesn’t go to the cabin in the distance to tell Luke, and he doesn’t land. He just watches them approach and Ben is too tired to feel dubious about it all.
He sees Luke on the porch and his sweat turns cold. They are nearly out of water by now, and his feet are tired and blistered but that doesn’t stop him from wanting to run the other way out into the wastes because that hell is safer, somehow, than the way he feels looking at his uncle.
And then Artoo swoops in front of him, turning quickly before going to settle on Luke’s shoulder, long talons digging in lightly.
“Ben,” his uncle says.
“Luke,” he replies. He feels like a boy again.
“Who’s this?” Luke’s eyes are still the same clear blue, but his beard is dusted with gray now. Oddly, he is not wearing a mask. Why isn’t he wearing a mask?
Luke’s eyes are on Kira’s back, where Rey is lying face down.
“This is Rey,” he says. “She’s a scavenger from the river. She doesn’t deserve to die.”
Luke raises his eyebrows. “Does anyone deserve to die?”
“You thought I did,” Ben says before he could stop himself.
Ben, Kira groans.
Luke doesn’t say a word. He just stares at his nephew and everything feels wrong. It always has with Luke. His uncle is supposed to be a hero, supposed to be protective, supposed to care about him, love him, and yet--
“You killed Han,” he says.
“I did,” Ben says. “I’ve killed so many people I’ve lost count. I’ve tried to kill myself, too. Didn’t work.”
Luke raises his eyebrows. Then he sighs.
“We have that in common, I suppose. Bring her in, Ben. She doesn’t deserve to die because of what we are to one another.”
“And what are we?” Ben asks.
“I don’t know anymore,” Luke says, turning towards the door. “Bring her inside.”
Ben settles Rey--at Luke’s instructions--onto the bed at the back of the cabin. A moment later, Artoo flaps by and rests Kylo down in the crook of Rey’s arms.
“She won’t keep food down,” he tells his uncle. “And she’s coughing blood.”
His uncle goes to a cabinet and rifles through it for a long moment. Then he comes back with a paper packet of sugar, a vial of amber liquid, and an injector. He opens Rey’s mouth, pours some of the sugar under her tongue, then fills the shot with the amber liquid before sticking it into her arm.
“We’ll see how she takes that,” he tells Ben before giving him a beady look. “Why her?”
“What?”
“Why her? Why do you want to save her? How many miserable souls are out there suffering because of what you’ve helped to do? And yet you pick her?”
Ben looks at his uncle, and death is more on his mind than it had been when he’d thrown himself into the river. “I tried to drown myself,” he says. “Whatever you may think of me, there’s only so much I can take, so much of a monster I can let myself be.”
Luke crosses his arms over his chest, a crease deepening between his brow, and Ben continues.
“The current was too strong and I washed ashore, and she found me there and let me on her boat. No questions, no judgement, no anything.”
“She didn’t save your life,” Luke says. “And you want to save hers.”
“Let me finish, will you?” Ben snaps at his uncle, whose eys flash with something that Ben hasn’t seen there before.
He pauses, waiting for Luke to respond. When he doesn’t, he goes on. “She believed in something in me when no one had for a long time--not even myself. I believe in myself when I’m around her. That I can--” He thinks of Unkar Plutt, of the two men he’d shot, of all the blood he’d shed. He thinks of the townsfolk he’d helped Rey sell her wares to as well, of protecting them from bandits posed as First Order. All of it hits him like Kira kicking him in the chest. And when he speaks again, his voice is thicker than he wants it to be. He doesn’t want this to be over. He doesn’t want her to die. “That I can help, rather than hurt. That I can make it better. That I can’t undo what I’ve done, but I can try to do better than that.”
Luke watches him, and his eyes are so steady that it makes anger flicker in Ben’s breast.
“I don’t need your forgiveness,” he snaps. “I hadn’t done anything wrong-- anything --when you tried to--”
“No, you don’t,” Luke says quietly. “But I need yours.”
Ben blinks at him.
“You were barely more than a boy, Ben. Whatever darkness was in you--whatever failures and sins--they weren’t wholly your own. If they’d grown there, it was because we failed you. I failed you. I’m sorry.”
Ben stares at his uncle, just gapes at him open-mouthed.
“I turned you into a monster in my mind, rather than face what hand I had in creating that,” he said. “Even when you showed up--it was easier to think you were here to kill me than it was to think you might be here to save her.”
He takes a slow breath and behind him, at that precise moment, Rey starts to cough, so much so that she tosses and turns on the bed. Ben’s at her side as though he, and not Artoo, had wings, running his hand over her back as she hacks. More blood.
“It’s all right,” he tells her. “It’s all right. We have medicine now. You’re going to be ok.”
She’s shaking and crying and her eyes are almost yellow from the fever.
“Let’s try this,” Luke says quietly and a moment later he’s pressing a mask over Rey’s mouth--a ventilator. He plugs it into the wall and it starts pumping oxygen into her, clear and cannistered. Kerrrrpahhhh. Kerrrrrpahhhh.
“It was my father’s,” Luke says idly. “He had trouble breathing too.” He gives Ben another sad look.
“Why weren’t you wearing a mask outside?” Ben asks. He can’t see one anywhere, and the cabin is small enough that he would.
“Stopped a while back,” Luke said. “When one vascilates between bitterness and guilt, one does strange things. You wanted to let the water have you, I wanted to let the air have me.”
Ben stares at his uncle and his uncle stares back and suddenly his head hurts. He’s tired, he’s worn, he’s worried and he feels as though he’s absorbed too much rotten to know what’s good anymore, too many lies to know what’s the truth.
“So we fix it together?” he asks quietly.
Luke holds out a hand.
Ben shakes it.
Then he sits down on the bed next to Rey and watches her breathe.
**
It takes Rey two weeks to recover something remotely close to fully. But she’s off the ventilator after two days and can keep food down after three. Luke keeps injecting her with medicines that Ben doesn’t know, and after the first week, she reaches for Ben and pulls him into the bed to sleep alongside her. They don’t do anything more than that--his uncle is in the room, sleeping on a pallet on the floor. But how good it feels to hold her in his arms again, to hear her increasingly steady breathing.
Luke goes out to the market every other day. His food rations stretch much less far now that he’s got three people in his tiny home. The space helps. Ben and Luke haven’t talked about what fixing it together means. Ben doesn’t want to think about anything but Rey.
“Luke’s my uncle,” he tells her. He has a sponge in his hand and a bowl of not-distilled-but-clean-enough-for-bathing water and he’s cleaning some of the sicksweat off her. “He tried to kill me. That sent me to Snoke. I helped break the world, Rey. I did.”
A confession. No apology. No pivoting from what he’s done. No trying to sweeten it, to make it tolerable. No I was just doing as I was told , no I was kinder than the rest . He tells her of murders, tells her of policies that led to famine, led to orphancy, led to the sky disappearing behind clouds of smog and the water getting slick with purple and gold oil.
He tells her of his father, tells her how his mother still held out hope for him, tells her everything and she sits there quietly and listens. He tells her why he tried to drown himself, and tells her about wanting to but not shooting Unkar Plutt. To her, he confesses all his darkness so that she can know, she can choose, or reject, but that it won’t be a lie he’s living.
When he’s done, he towels her dry, and helps her dress again. Her breathing is still weak, her arms shaky. And when she tucks herself under the blankets again and looks up at him, she looks as though she is thinking hard and thinking carefully.
“What do you want to be?” she asks him.
He thinks of his uncle. I failed you.
“Better than I have been,” he tells her.
“I think you already are,” she tells him and gives him a faint smile. “You’ve helped me, after all. And I think this is just the beginning.”
Air leaves his lungs at her words. He leans himself forward, pressing his forehead against her chest like he’s a child again. She runs her fingers through his hair.
“You lived,” she tells him. “And so did I. Let’s do something with that. This is a beginning, not an ending.”
And so it was.