Chapter Text
All around her: the sick, the broken and the beaten. There was that metallic, horrible smell of dried blood in the air as Rey walked past the wounded survivors. She had a few burns, bruises and cuts of her own from the last battle. The medics were hard at work, some of them needing to ignore their own injuries in order to help others. Rey wished that she could be of some use to them, but she was hopeless at medical work. She watched as Rose bandaged a whimpering pilot and as Poe sat next to Finn, his arm around his shoulder, both of them trying to forget the horrors of the day.
So this is war, Rey thought. An endless cycle of battles lost, of changing bases, healing the survivors, mourning the lost, recruiting more young souls to be thrown into a deadly fight and in the end having to witness the pain and loss over and over and over again. And still they looked to her.
They looked to Rey.
She seemed to be a beacon of hope for them, a taste of a better future. Whether she was piloting a fighter or with a blaster on the battlefield people were always filled with heart in her presense.
Rey wished that they weren’t. She often had people, normally young people, new recruits come up to her and say “I’m here because of you,” “you’re going to be our last hope, I know it,” “you’re the fire of the Resistance,” “you’re going to revive the Jedi and bring order again,” and, almost the most hurtful, “you’re my hero.”
She wasn’t a hero. She refused to think of herself as such. She was just a girl trying to do some good in a chaotic world consumed by war. In her heart she felt alone, afraid. The real heros were Leia Organa, Poe Dameron, Rose Tico, Finn and everyone else who was putting their heart and soul into the resistance, into the light...
She did not want to admit to anyone that deep down she could feel the low push of the Dark Side deep within her soul.
Try as she might, it would not leave her. It was embedded in her bones, in her being. As if it had been there all along, waiting for an awakening...
She left the main area of the base into the barracks, making her way through the bunks into her room.
She had felt selfish when she had requested her own private room on just about every base, especially when everyone else had to share. But she didn’t want to risk anyone finding out about her and Kylo. Not that there was anything to find out... they hardly spoke. But she doubted that the Resistance would be too happy about their posterchild’s ability to have direct communication with the enemy.
Rey collapsed onto her bunk, exhausted. She reached out to the bedside table and grabbed a small bottle of disinfectant. Closing her eyes, she let a few dropplets drip onto the gnash on her arm. She winced, letting the pain fade before setting the bottle back down and starting to dress the wound.
It was when she was alone when the voices would come at their loudest. The echoes of battles: the cries and screams of the dying and the sometimes already dead. Months of war, months of discord and running and fear had changed her.
The sleepless nights had become more and more frequent. Tossing and turning... the recurring nightmares... the uneasiness that came with the realization that the only way to calm the swirling storms in her head was...
“Ben.”
She sat up and there he was, standing a few steps away from her.
“Rey.”
She turned away from him, tucking in the loose end of the bandage and lying down on her bed, “I’d rather not do this now.”
”I heard about today.”
She remained silent. Yeah, she was pretty sure that the entire galaxy heard about today.
”I’m sorry, Rey.”
”No you’re not,” she said, “this is what you want. You want to continue to beat the Resistance, to crush us. You think if you carry on like this we’ll die out but we won’t, Ben. I promise you, we won’t.”
”I am sorry.”
The words were so soft, gentle. Rey tried to hide from the sincerity behind them... but of course she couldn’t. She could hear his thoughts clearly. Being linked he had seen the horrors that she had, too often had he felt the same fear, pain and survivors guilt that she had. Deep down, she knew that he had stopped ordering attacks, leaving them to Hux. He had grown more brooding, silent around the First Order captains. The warhad ended up changing him as much as it was changing her.
”It hurts.”
”I know.”
”No,” Rey sat up again, looking him the eye, “no, you don’t. You only catch the tail ends of it. The splurts of emotion. My fear, my worries. You don’t know these people. You don’t care for them. You don’t give a damn what happens to them, I do. I do and everything that happens to them is my fault because they follow my lead and they think I’m some sort of angel that’s going to lead them into a new future and you - you don’t know what that’s like, you don’t see what I see you can only feel and you can only - ...” she had not noticed the tears that had suddenly come streaming down her cheeks, “I- I...”
”Rey, please.”
He was beside her now, without thinking she laid her head on his shoulder and let him take an ungloved hand and use it to wipe her tears away.
”It’s madness, Ben. It’s madness, and chaos and... I feel...” she closed her eyes, “it’s so lonely.”
”You’re not alone, Rey,” he put an arm around her, pulling her close to him, “you’ve never been alone.”
She breathed in his warmth, his comfort... part of her wanted to rip herself away, continue to cast him out, he had hurt her, he had betrayed her, but...
In the end she had been the one to turn her back on him. She had not taken his hand. She had closed the Falcon door.
So, she only whispered, “please stay, please hold me a while.”
And there they remained, throughout the night, until the dawn of a new day in the wild, wild world.