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“Artoo, stay with the ship.”
Rey paused at the bottom of the Falcon’s ramp to look up at the astromech droid, who was rolling after her. He stopped halfway down the ramp, but made no move to obey her, instead slowly rotating his domed head, taking in the barren, rocky landscape of Vrogas Vas. Then, fixing his single black photoreceptor on her, he launched into a series of disapproving beeps.
“This planet is completely uninhabited,” Rey said with exasperation.
Artoo still didn’t budge, making only one long, low beep in reply.
Rey sighed, adjusting the strap of her staff to a more comfortable position across her chest and placing her right hand pointedly on the butt of Han’s blaster strapped to her thigh, raising an eyebrow at the droid. “I think I can take care of myself,” she said dryly. “Besides, I have to climb down into the ruins, and your rocket boosters don’t work anymore.” Rey paused to consider, tilting her head. “Remind me to take a look at those later, by the way. I might be able to get them working again.” The droid’s rocket boosters hadn’t been functional for well over thirty years—it seemed doubtful even Rey’s mechanical skills could overcome his advanced age and deteriorated state, but she hoped the prospect might cheer him up. He spent most his time on the Falcon these days, in a state of semi-retirement, powered down more hours than not, but she’d brought him along on this adventure in lieu of Chewie. The Resistance’s ranks were still too few to spare anyone who wasn’t absolutely necessary for a side mission, but Leia had gently suggested Rey take Artoo, who had seemed adrift, a little distraught, since Luke had become one with the Force.
Artoo moved his head fractionally to one side and back with a labored whir, as though shaking it, then made a number of melodic, higher-pitched beeps which ended in a distressed whistle.
Rey softened, her shoulders dropping out of the stiff, defensive stance she’d taken earlier. “I’m not the last Jedi,” she corrected him gently. “Not without a working lightsaber. I need to do this, Artoo. And I need you to stay with the Falcon. I’ve got a comlink if anything happens, okay?”
At last he seemed to calculate that she wouldn’t be moved, and he rolled backwards up the ramp slowly, with a parting warning in binary that if she hadn’t returned in six standard hours he’d set out looking for her.
Rey sighed again, turning to set off for the ruins of the Jedi temple, its broken rock spires looming out of the desolate landscape just a few hundred meters from where she’d landed the Falcon. It had been in ruins since well before the Galactic Civil War, but she was holding out hope that there was still some knowledge to be salvaged from the catacomb-like library she’d been told lay beneath it. The Rebel Alliance had once had a fueling station on the otherwise unoccupied planet, and Luke had come in search of the temple, but Darth Vader had chased him there and a battle ensued. Luke had narrowly escaped with his friends on the Falcon, leaving the temple and whatever it might have held behind, unexplored.
“Did he ever go back, later?” Rey had asked Ben when he told her this one night, curled up in a corner of her bunk with her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them, the air between Ben and her narrowed down to silence but for their breath and their voices, as it always was when the Force connected them like this.
Across lightyears and star systems but simultaneously mere arm-lengths away from her, Ben had sat on a surface she couldn’t see, forearms braced on his splayed knees, ungloved hands clasped together, his eyes gentle but guarded. “I’m not sure,” he said at last. “He traveled many places, all over the galaxy, learning about the Force. Sometimes with me, sometimes not.”
Rey had sat in silence, chewing on her lip, trying to decide if a trip to Vrogas Vas was worth the fruitless effort it might prove to be.
“It would be more worth your time to try the temple on Lothal,” Ben said carefully.
Rey shot him a glare. “That’s deep in First Order territory.”
A corner of his full mouth had tilted up, the closest he ever got to a smile, but his dark eyes were fixed on her with all his usual intensity. “That didn’t stop you before.”
Because you were there, Rey’s traitorous mind replied instantly, and she bit her tongue before it could give voice to the thought. “Sometimes the reward isn’t worth the risk,” she said instead, and she didn’t mean it to be a barb, but he flinched anyway.
Silence stretched between them for a moment, fraught with so many unspoken things that Rey didn’t know how to break it.
Ben broke it for her. “You know I could help you rebuild the saber.” There was a note of petulance in his tone. Always that longing to pass his knowledge on to her, to teach her, undaunted by multiple rejections. “I’ve built one before.” Unlike you , he didn’t say, but the implication hung in the air all the same.
Rey had flushed, some mix of anger, embarrassment, and frustration at her own failure heating her cheeks. “It’s not rebuilding it that’s the problem,” she’d retorted sharply. “I understand the mechanics of it; I followed the diagrams in the Jedi texts. It’s the crystal.” The crystals, now, shattered into two jagged halves in the fiery wreck of Snoke’s throne room, when she and Ben fought for control of his family lightsaber, the push and pull of their powers so perfectly balanced it split in half. “The pieces aren’t big enough to power it, I think, and no matter how much I meditate over it I—” Rey had pressed her lips together, helplessly, against her instinct to confide in him, the only person in the galaxy who might understand, the last of her kind, really. Leia had the Force, but for her it was a latent, instinctive thing, never deliberate and never controlled in the way Rey was attempting to master it.
All she had was herself, and a half-dozen dusty, ancient tomes in languages she struggled to understand—and the man the Force delivered to her nearly nightly now, sad-eyed and quiet and still and gentle in a way he rarely was in person.
“I need to find a new crystal,” she’d said at last, firmly. “Or a holocron, or something that can tell me what I’m doing wrong.”
Ben was silent, and just looked at her gravely, no doubt considering his struggles with his own kyber crystal, how he’d cracked it when he’d tried to bleed it under Snoke’s tutelage, how unstable it had been ever since, a thing of light unnaturally bent to the dark, yearning to return to its true nature, its natural state.
Much like its master.
“Where are you?” Rey had asked quietly, abruptly changing the sensitive topic. The question was becoming a habit now, a ritual each time the Force connected them like this. And his answer was different almost every time she posed the question. He was constantly on the move, trying to stay elusive as a wisp of smoke in the wind.
After ending his brief stint as Supreme Leader in characteristically dramatic fashion, taking a dreadnought and a handful of high-ranking First Order officers down with him, ripped apart in the upper atmosphere of Corellia by the sheer strength of the Force channeled through him as he narrowly escaped in his TIE Silencer, Ben Solo was the most wanted man in the galaxy, and possibly beyond it.
“Arkanis,” he’d said, slowly, keeping his eyes on her face. A jolt of fear had shot through Rey at the word, straightening her back and unraveling her arms from around her legs, drawing her inexorably to the edge of her bunk, towards him , and it wasn’t fear of him—it never was anymore, and hadn’t been for a long time—no, it was fear for him.
“Ben,” she’d breathed, a little desperately. “What are you doing there.” It wasn’t a question, more a plea. She could guess well enough what he was doing on the homeworld of Admiral Hux, the current de facto leader of the First Order, the homeworld of any number of First Order officers and supporters.
Ben clenched his jaw, moving his lips together in that distracting way he had when he was deep in thought. Rey barely spared his mouth a glance this time, though, too caught up in a sudden whirlwind of concern for him—which he seemed to sense, and which seemed to gratify him despite his efforts to conceal that feeling.
“General Peavey doesn’t trust Hux,” he’d said, stubbornly. “And the feeling is mutual. The right piece of intelligence placed in the right hands could turn the entirety of the upper ranks of the First Order against each other.”
Rey couldn’t argue with his logic—if First Order leadership was busy tearing itself apart, it couldn’t be tearing the galaxy apart. A hole in their unified front could be just the weakness in their armor that the Resistance needed to bring them down for good. But even the revelation of an opportunity of that magnitude hadn’t been enough to comfort Rey. All she could think of was Ben alone, surrounded by enemies, a one-man storm, a force of nature, but still just a man. Flesh and blood. Killable. Her body went cold at the thought.
“Ben,” she’d whispered again, sliding off the edge of her bunk to kneel in front of him, tilting her face up in supplication. “Come join the Resistance.” Come join me, she didn’t say, and she never pleaded, she never begged—not with words, anyway. “You can’t fight a war alone.”
A shadow of a smile flitted across his full lips, and his eyes were dark and warm, too easy to get lost in, when he brought his ungloved hand up to cup her cheek, the brush of his bare skin against hers a now-familiar fire burning straight down to her soul, and to his. “I’m not alone,” he said, voice low and soft as he moved his thumb to brush against her lower lip, his gaze dropping with it.
Rey had leaned into him, mouth moving against his thumb, her lips beginning to form the shape of his name, but before she could give voice to it, the world rushed noisily back in and he was gone. Rey had fallen forward, off-balanced by the sudden loss of him, bracing a hand against the durasteel floor as her breath came quick and loud in her ears, as her body shook with dry sobs she’d tried desperately to hold in.
The Force was balance, the Force was life, but sometimes it was cruel .
Now, Rey stood on the lip of the ruins of the Jedi temple as the arid, gaseous winds of Vrogas Vas whipped through her hair, wrinkling her nose against the unpleasant smell, remembering Ben’s words. The Empire had tried to destroy all memory of the Jedi. They hadn’t succeeded—but Ben’s grandfather had set foot on the planet, had been aware of the existence of the ruins.
He might have wiped every last bit of evidence the Jedi were ever there from the face of Vrogas Vas, Ben had warned, a strange note of something Rey couldn’t identify in his tone.
But the spires were still there, crumbled but recognizable, and Rey was journeying below the surface of the planet. Adjusting her staff over her shoulder again, Rey’s eyes roved over the gaping chasm in the ground, searching for the safest path downwards through loose, broken boulders.
She was a scavenger to the very bone—she’d always be able to find her way through the treacherous wrecks of former glory. Taking a deep breath, she began her descent.
The air cooled only a little as she made her way down, more mild than the surface heat but far from the damp cavern-cool of Ahch-to. Rey was a creature of the desert, and this felt familiar—like the dark bowels of the fallen Ravager on Jakku.
The lower levels of the temple had been carved straight into the rock, and they were damaged, but not as thoroughly as the above-ground portions. Rey followed a winding stone stairway downwards, picking her way around fallen boulders, jumping over small gaps in the rock beneath her feet, finding hand and footholds in the wall to climb across the missing sections that were too wide to leap over. When she encountered unblocked hallways, she ventured down them, but found nothing but piles of rocks blocking the way, or else unfurnished rooms that resembled prison cells, with nothing but bunks carved into the walls and no personal effects of long-dead Jedi in sight.
After what felt like hours, one of the passageways she tried finally opened into another lofty cavern, this one with a staircase spiraling upwards from the floor on which she was standing, and there were shelves carved into the walls at intervals—mostly empty, but even from her low vantage point she could see a few were occupied.
Her energy spiked at the sight—perhaps this trip hadn’t been futile, after all.
Rey was halfway up the winding stairway when a sudden tremor ran through the rock beneath her feet, an almost-gentle, rolling motion but startling enough that it nearly took her off her feet. She caught herself before it could tip her off balance, pressing her back against the wall and away from the narrow edge of the stairs for the few seconds it continued.
When it stopped, Rey took a deep, steadying breath. Earthquake , she thought. She’d never felt one before, hadn’t known they were common to this planet, and she stood still for several moments, until she was sure it had passed, before continuing on her path upwards.
Rey’s search turned up several empty chests, as well as a variety of useless everyday artifacts—plates and cups and ancient, frayed bedding that felt like it would crumble to dust under her fingers. It wasn’t until she reached the shelves closest to the ceiling of the cavern that she found something remotely useful, buried beneath a stack of old robes—a book, with actual paper pages, though not nearly as old as the Jedi texts she already possessed. Her heart leapt when she flipped through the pages—it appeared to be written entirely in Basic. The light in the cavern was too dim to examine its contents closely, so she tucked it carefully into the satchel strapped to her belt and moved on.
Some minutes of searching later, she found a small metal box with a rusted lock on it. The lock was easy enough to break once she’d crouched down and struck it with a rock at just the right angle, and when she lifted the lid to find a holocron inside, her breath left her entirely.
She reached out a hesitant finger to trace the geometric shapes carved into one of its many crystalline sides. It flared briefly blue at her touch, as though alive, and something flared in her chest in response. She’d never seen a holocron in person before—only in one of Ben’s memories he’d shared with her—but she recognized one when she saw it. When she felt it. Tears sprang to her eyes, inexplicably, as she considered the treasure that might be inside, a hologram of a Jedi, long-dead, lost to history, explaining some mystery of the Force still elusive to her.
Rey closed the metal box carefully, hugging it to her stomach and squeezing her eyes shut for a moment.
Which was why she was unbalanced and unprepared when a second earthquake shook the walls of the cavern, this one neither rolling nor gentle, but violent enough to dislodge large chunks of rock from the wall and send them tumbling to the cavern floor far below. Rey shifted on her feet to steady herself on the shaking stairway, reaching out a hand to brace against the shuddering wall—but all at once the ground fell away from beneath her feet and she was falling, falling, the cavern floor below coming up to meet her so quickly she only had time to twist in the air, trying to protect the precious holocron with her body while she flung her free hand out, summoning the Force in an attempt to slow her descent, to soften her landing, and everything went dark.
When Rey opened her eyes, she felt bleary and disoriented. Her head was pounding—why was she lying on the ground? When her vision cleared and she stared straight up at the roof of the cavern high overhead, everything came rushing back, and she tried to sit up, but fell back to the ground with a wince instead. When she brought a hand up to the back of her head, her fingers came away painted with faint, dark red smears of blood. Great .
Rey lay still, trying to breathe evenly, taking stock of her body, grasping ineffectually at the threads of clear thought that kept flitting, illusive, through the haziness of her mind. Her leg was numb—why was her leg numb?—and when she summoned the strength to lift her neck up a little she saw the cause: a good-sized boulder was pinning her left calf to the floor. She lowered her head gently back to the ground, closing her eyes, taking deep breaths, trying to center herself in the Force, which was difficult with the pulsing pain in her head.
Rey was a scavenger, Rey was a survivor. She’d had bad falls before—she’d had bad injuries before, and she’d saved herself from both, and that was before she knew what the Force was and how to use it.
She set the holocron box, still safely tucked against her stomach, on the ground next to her, and blinked down at the boulder. Lifting rocks , she thought to herself wryly, glad she could still find humor in the situation. Stretching out both her hands, she breathed deeply, reaching out to the rock, to the Force around it, in it, and after a few seconds it trembled and shifted, lifting slowly clear of her leg, and she dropped it to the side, panting with the effort. The effort that would have been easy as a finger twitch if her head wasn’t pounding so hard .
She stretched her leg, tentatively trying to rotate her ankle, and a searing pain shot up her calf in response, tearing a rough whimper out of Rey’s throat.
Somewhere beyond the immediacy of the pain, she was mostly just annoyed at herself. This was so stupid —all the power of the Force at her fingertips and she’d stranded herself in the underground ruins of a temple on an uninhabited planet. If her ankle was broken, she’d probably have to crawl out on her hands and knees, and wouldn’t that be humiliating when Artoo spotted her and started beeping I told you so —and then Rey’s ears were ringing, and the thought occurred to her that maybe she should be more concerned about falling unconscious as the result of a concussion—
There was a man—or something humanoid—standing with its back to her a few meters away—or was there? Possibly she was hallucinating. It was tall and it was garbed in the sort of mismatched armor bounty hunters frequently wore, with a battered helmet concealing the entirety of its head. But the breadth of its shoulders looked achingly familiar, and Rey frowned at it, her forehead crinkling, and even that hurt—
The creature turned its head slowly towards her, and its entire body tensed. And then it was moving—but not in a straight line—as though it was navigating obstacles Rey couldn’t see. And then it was saying her name, voice muffled by the helmet, and then it was kneeling next to her, head swiveling from side to side as though checking that it was alone, and then it was whipping the mask off and shaking messy black waves of hair free and—
“ Ben ,” Rey said hoarsely, dreamily. She didn’t know how he was there. It seemed like there was something she was forgetting, something slipping just out of her mental grasp. “What are you doing here?”
His lips were trembling, dark eyes wide, and he looked terrified. She didn’t know if she’d ever seen him look terrified before. “Rey,” he said raggedly, running gloved hands all over her. “Rey, what happened?”
“What are you doing here?” she said, with an odd sense that she’d just asked that question, although she couldn’t remember doing it.
“I’m not really here, Rey,” he said worriedly, one of his big hands coming to rest on the side of her head, cradling it. “You know that.”
“That’s funny,” Rey said, and she tried to laugh, but it jarred her body too much, and it hurt. “It feels like you’re right here.”
“No, it’s not funny.” Ben leaned closer. “It’s not funny at all.”
His fingers were stroking her hair now, and Rey leaned into them, closing her eyes. “Mmm. That feels nice.”
“Rey,” Ben said urgently, and that was becoming a little irritating. His other hand closed around her shoulder, and he shook it. Rey’s eyes snapped open, and she scowled at him. “Rey, you can’t fall asleep.”
Rey’s scowl deepened, but there was a nagging thought in the back of her head, somewhere in the region where it was hurting, that he was right.
“What happened?” he asked, leaning closer, so close she could feel his warm breath brushing across her cheek, and stars it really did feel like he was right there.
Rey thought for a moment, letting the memories filter slowly back into her hazy mind. “I climbed down under the temple. I fell. I...hit my head? I think my ankle might be broken. I need to tell Artoo-—oh! Artoo!” She suddenly remembered she had a comlink, and began feeling around for it in her pocket as Ben’s hands moved down her leg, carefully removing her boot so he could inspect her ankle.
Rey winced against his hands just as her fingers closed around the comlink and she pulled it out of her pocket and held it in front of her nose to examine it, so close her eyes almost crossed trying to focus on it. The comlink was cracked down the middle, and there were several wires sticking out of one end. Her hip must have landed on it and crushed it. “Oh kriff,” Rey said, like this was nothing but a mild inconvenience.
“It’s either broken or very badly sprained,” Ben reported, looking up from her ankle. “You won’t be able to put any weight on it.”
Rey was still processing this information and trying to formulate a new plan when Ben returned to his place at her side, leaning over her again, his dark eyes wide and worried and his hair falling into his face, broad chest rising and falling with his quick breaths. “Rey, I’m coming to get you,” he said, and there was a catch in his resonant voice, a quiver to his full lips. She realized all at once that he was desperately anxious about her, which seemed a bit silly, to her mind.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Rey said, a smile in her voice that turned into a small grunt when another throb of pain went through her calf. “I’ve gotten myself out of worse situations than this.”
Ben gaped at her. “ I’m being ridiculous?” He sounded outraged, and he held his gloved fingers up for her inspection. “ Your head is bleeding .”
Rey brought a hand up to the spot in question, pressing against it gingerly. “Only a little. I can Force-heal it.”
Ben’s open-mouthed incredulity morphed into a frown. “You don’t know how.”
Rey flashed him a cheeky smile, or tried to. “I’m a quick learner.”
Ben sighed, a great, chest-heaving gust of air. “Even you can’t Force-heal broken bones, I’m afraid.” He sounded exasperated, mostly, but there was an undeniable hint of fondness there as well, an admiration for her stubbornness, maybe, the same admiration he held for most of her qualities that both frustrated and awed him by turns.
Rey chewed on her lip, considering. There were no life forms on Vrogas Vas except for invasive wasp-worms, and she hadn’t spotted a single hive yet. There was nothing that would attack her, try to kill her or eat her. Artoo wouldn’t be able to roll down into the ruins to help her out; she’d have to get herself out—but she could crawl. The situation wasn’t dire. She didn’t need help.
But then she remembered the broken sections of stairway she’d had to jump across in her descent, and that they were probably more broken after the earthquake shook free loose stones and boulders and—perhaps she did need help after all.
Rey had friends now, she had people who loved her, but she was still a solitary, fiercely independent creature—by long years of forced habit or nature, she didn’t know. The idea of needing help, or asking for it, of having to trust and depend on someone else, pained her.
She let out a long, slow, resigned breath. Ben leaned closer, seeming to sense that she was relenting. As if her refusal would stop him from rushing to her side anyway, Rey thought with a hint of wry amusement, and realized with a strange little thrill—maybe she liked that.
“You’re halfway across the galaxy,” she whispered, clinging half-heartedly to one last protest.
“No, I’m not.” Ben was stroking her cheek now, softly. “I’m on Kuat. I’m just a few hours away.”
Rey leaned into his hand, and considered that those might be the sweetest words she’d ever heard. “Okay,” she said quietly, bringing a hand up to hold his hand against her cheek. “Come save me, Ben.” Her lips quirked around the oddness of her own words, half a jest and half an earnest command, and Ben leaned forward, drawn in by her gravity like a planet to a star, and pressed his lips softly to her forehead, murmuring something so quiet against her skin she could barely hear it, but it almost sounded like always, sweetheart.
When he pulled back, Rey spared a moment to thank the Force for not arbitrarily cutting off their connection yet. “Can you please comm Artoo so he doesn’t fall in some rock crevice looking for me?”
Ben’s face seemed to blanch for a moment, long enough for Rey to marvel at the absurdity of the former Supreme Leader of the First Order being afraid to speak to a droid. But this was Artoo—Artoo who might as well have been a Skywalker himself, Artoo whose memory had never been wiped, who’d seen the best and worst of Ben, and she understood.
“Only if you promise to stay awake,” he replied at length, trying and failing to keep the worry out of his voice.
Rey slowly struggled to a sitting position, first propping herself on her elbows then leveraging up on her hands, dragging herself back to lean against a rocky outcropping. “I will,” she promised, then smiled. “That means I have hours to work on my Force-healing.”
When she looked up, he was gone, and she was unsure when the Force had cut off their connection. But she was sure of one thing—he was already on his way to her, and that assurance glowed warm in her chest, expanding outwards from her heart in a way that could become dangerously, comfortingly familiar.
By the time she felt Ben make planetfall, Rey had satisfactorily healed her head wound, and reduced the swelling of her ankle a little, though she couldn’t do much beyond that. She’d flipped through the book she’d salvaged but the light was too dim to do much reading, and she still had a headache. She was too exhausted to even attempt to use the Force to open the holocron, and thus was so bored that she was nearly dozing, despite her best intentions to keep her promise.
It seemed to take longer for Ben to locate her in the temple ruins than it had for him to travel to Vrogas Vas from Kuat, and Rey was well and truly falling asleep by the time his strong arms wrapped around her, lifting her effortlessly and cradling her against his broad chest, and it felt so nice Rey wondered if she was dreaming.
“Ben?” she breathed, relaxing against him, nuzzling her cheek into his shoulder. “Are you real?”
He pressed his lips to the top of her head, murmuring against her hair. “I’m here, Rey. I’ve got you.”
Rey woke to the familiar durasteel lines of the top of her bunk and the soothing sounds of a med droid whirring around the crew quarters. There was a soft pillow beneath her head and a bacta cast encasing the lower half of her left leg.
And there was Ben, right at her side, his huge body contorted to fit on an old shipping crate pulled up to her bunk, elbows braced on his knees as he held one of her hands in both of his, even as she’d been asleep.
“You’re awake,” he murmured, leaning over and brushing his lips against her forehead again, his steady breaths ruffling her hair, and Rey could get used to that—though she was beginning to wish he would start brushing his lips other places. But there’d be time for that later.
Rey blinked up at him, at the earnest relief on his face, the softness, the gentleness, the love —and she didn’t know how she’d never realized it before. He held nothing back from her, and it was only fair that she hold nothing back from him in return. “Thank you,” she whispered hoarsely, and his gaze was riveted on hers. “Thank you for coming for me.” Ridiculously, against her will, her eyes began welling up with tears. “I don’t—I can’t—ask for help. It’s a luxury I never had. Needing someone else.”
Ben’s eyes were wet too. “You have it now,” he said, his voice rough with emotion. “You’ll always have it.”
Rey gave him a soft smile, reaching up to run her fingers through his hair. “Will you help me with something else, then?”
He brought a hand up too, enclosing hers in it entirely. “Anything.”
“I could use some help rebuilding a lightsaber,” Rey said, a hint of mischief in her voice.
Ben’s eyebrows shot up in genuine, unguarded surprise, but it quickly morphed into warmth. “I could use some help too,” he countered softly.
“Oh really?” Rey raised an eyebrow, genuinely curious.
“I’ve been trying to fight this war alone. I don’t want to do that anymore.”
Rey blinked, startled at this confession, then turned her hand in his to entwine their fingers together, warm and steady and grounding. “You’re not alone,” she whispered.
Ben’s smile was new and yet familiar somehow, dimpled and wide and the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. “Neither are you.”