Chapter Text
Days inched by in a haze. Ben and Rey slept through most of the first one, letting Chewbacca and C-3PO mind the ship. Later, when lethargy gave way to nervous energy, Ben grew fretful of being followed. He was far from ready to deal with his mother or with Cardinal's traitorous First Order soldiers, and Rey had warned him that she had not been discreet with the name of the planet she was looking for. When his worries drove him to pacing and snapping at anyone who tried to calm him, the misfit crew agreed to move the ship out of its orbit around Arrakis.
It was a random point in deep space where they chose to linger, well out of the way of hyperspace lanes or of anywhere with meaning. There in the black, they began the strange process of deciding what to do with themselves.
"Leia would have you back," Rey told him, when the topic of family inevitably imposed itself on their morning routine. "She forgave you before I did."
"I know." It was true, despite all of his self-doubt and loathing. "But she's not the Resistance."
That was a point Rey could not refute, though she plainly wanted to. "She deserves to see you," she argued instead, and to that, Ben frowned and looked away.
"She deserves a lot of things I can't give her."
"Ben..."
His chest constricted and he tried to keep the grimace off his face. As often as not, Rey's concern only served to make him feel worse "Please give me more time."
It was a request he had already made and she had already given, but she nodded. "Okay."
With the discussion put back on hold, Ben fumbled through an attempt to make it up to her. He had never courted anyone before. He had never so much as asked anyone for romantic advice (and had done his best to ignore what his father offered). What little knowledge he had was harvested from holovids and childhood stories and was more than likely dramatized and unrealistic. But then again, he thought, so was everything else between him and Rey.
Recalling a scene from a vid long ago, he lifted her hand to kiss her knuckles, and when her lips twitched in response and she tilted her chin upward, he kissed her lips.
It was silly how much his heart fluttered. It was ridiculous how he could almost forget everything else—could feel nothing else but her. It wasn’t just the Force, although that too sparked and crescendoed with every touch. He might have compared it to being an adolescent boy, except that he had never felt such a way back then. Perhaps that was the reason. Perhaps first loves were alike at any age.
"Ben..." There was a note in her voice not quite of alarm, but of something close.
Belatedly, he realized that feeling nothing but her applied to the physical as well. They were no longer standing between the two beds in the Falcon’s main sleeping quarters. They had lifted off the floor, so subtle that he had failed to notice. They floated in the air together as thoughtlessly as if the ship’s gravity had switched off.
"It’s happening again," he observed, calmer than he felt.
"I'm not doing it." She sounded defensive, but she felt afraid.
"Are you sure?"
Rey’s eyes narrowed, not to glare but to concentrate. Slowly, as if moving against gravity rather than with it, they descended.
"You were doing it too," she chided.
"I know."
He watched the way her brow creased as she searched his face for answers. "Why is this happening?"
"We balanced the Force."
"I know, but why? What does that have to do with floating? Or moving things without meaning to? Or… always knowing what you’re feeling, even when I can’t hear your thoughts?" The last example came shyly, but it came as no surprise. Ben could sense her moods just as constantly since the convergence, as clearly as he could see her face.
"We're more attuned to it,” he said. “Or it's attuned to us." It was a blanket answer. He didn’t know why either, but it didn’t bother him the way it did her. "Why are you worried about it?"
"I'm not worried about it. I'm just trying to understand."
She was lying, but he let her keep it. Easing her fears was another area of deficiency for him—a skill set he had never learned. Time would do the job better than he could.
Time was another thing that felt new to Ben. Oh, he had toiled through periods of waiting in the past, impatient days spent in want and routine after one of the many times Luke or Snoke had told him he wasn’t ready yet. Waiting to be ready for his destiny was, it turned out, quite different from idling after said destiny was over. For the first time, he had no master, be it person or purpose. For the first time, his life was his own.
It felt something like torture.
Without the path of his birthright to follow, Ben was adrift, as aimless as is father's ship set to idling in oblivion. Other than the satisfaction of fulfilling his inherited prophecy, there was only one reason left to stay. One reason left to live at all. That reason, of course, was Rey.
He had known that balancing the Force would require a vessel of Light. He had not entirely believed, as Snoke had, that the vessel was Luke. Ben thought he would have recognized it sooner if that were the truth. He'd been having dreams since he was a child, visions of the Arrakis temple and of his purpose. He wasn't sure whether Snoke had opened his mind to those visions earlier than the Force intended or merely sensed the shape of them and taken advantage, but regardless of the monster's manipulation, Ben's destiny had always been the same.
He had dreamed, also, of Rey. They were fleeting, haunting images, more common in his youth. Before he ever met her, he had known the way she felt. He had sensed, in an abstract way, her importance to the galaxy, and he had felt less alone when he thought of her.
Now she kissed him again, for they had little else to do. She kissed him long and sweetly, hands coiling in his hair and caressing his face. Her fingers seemed to possess some magnetic attraction to the scar she had given him, yet each time she caught herself stroking it, she would stop. Her wariness amused him. He would never have asked her to treat him with such delicacy. He did not deserve it after how many times he had hurt her, but he found, in some deep and weary part of him, that he was desperate for it.
A resolution came upon him then, humbling in how obvious it should have been. He was accustomed to devoting his life to someone or to something outside of himself. He didn't know how to exist without that, and neither did he want to. Unless or until he found a more worthy purpose—and he doubted that he ever would—he would devote himself to Rey.
With their hands warm on each other's skin, their hearts and minds locked together like two halves of a perfect whole, it was easy to believe that nothing else would ever matter as much as she did.
Just as Ben was contemplating the benefits of levitating them both again, Rey's stomach growled.
He waited for her to react, but she ignored it.
In retrospect, it shouldn’t have surprised him when she set hunger aside in favor of kissing him. Hunger was an old and familiar companion, less of a concern when food was more readily available than it had ever been in her youth. Kissing was, apparently, a far more immediate concern.
He had been in the process of changing clothes when their conversation began, it being as early in the Falcon's arbitrary morning as it was, and his shirt still lay across the bed. If the boldness of her hands was anything to go by, he suspected that Rey’s timing had been intentional. Every brush of her palms and fingertips over his bare, scarred skin tingled like electricity without pain, zipping up his spine to his brain and dangling him over the edge of dizziness. It might have been their unity in the Force that intoxicated him so, or it might have been as simple as a tender touch after too long without. There was, after all, more than one kind of starvation.
As if in reaction to that thought, Rey's stomach growled again.
This time, Ben pushed her away, although she pouted and fought back. It made him smile, and then it made him chuckle, and that was finally enough to stall Rey's fervor.
She met his eyes with a mixture of reproach and amusement. "We don't have to stop."
"Your stomach disagrees."
"That's never stopped me before." She pressed in to kiss him again, but he held her off.
"Before, you had to ration your food," he argued, still feeling the tug of a smile at the corner of his mouth. "You don't have to do that now."
That, at least, made her determination falter a little. “It's fine…"
Ben squared his bare shoulders… and then had to hold her firmly in place when she listed towards him again. "I'll cook for you."
"What?" Apparently it wasn’t an offer she had expected.
"You must be sick of those ration packs."
She looked at him with genuine confusion, brow furrowed and lips pursed. "Food is food."
Ben smiled again, without even having to try. "Stay here."
With eyes full of curiosity and—unbelievably—trust, she did.
The Falcon’s sleeping quarters had undergone a handful of transformations during the ship’s service. For Lando Calrissian, it had been a stately captain’s chamber, whereas Han and Chewbacca had angled for the space-saving practicality of a shared crew quarters. Later, after Han’s marriage and the birth of his son, it had become a family bedroom, and that was the state it had largely remained in. There were two beds—the original captain’s bed, wide enough for two and inset cozily into the wall, and the narrower bed with Ben’s name on it. A third bed put in by Han had later been taken out again to make room for a kitchenette, which Ben went to now.
Like so many other parts of the ship, it felt like stepping into a memory. Ben had stolen treats off this counter when he was small enough that he had to reach over his own head to get them. He had helped his father try to cook meals—failures, mostly—and asked many times for Chewbacca to lift him up so that he could pick out his favorite cup. The memories specific to this place were not sad ones, but it was easy to follow the trails they left, and every one of those would lead to darkness, whether the road they took there was long or short.
Quick as they had opened, Ben slammed shut the mental bulkheads between the present and the past.
Predictably, Rey didn't stay where he had told her to for long.
"What are you making?" She came to lean on the counter and peer around his shoulder while he arranged bowls and pans and ingredients in the small space.
"You'll see."
"Who taught you to cook?" she asked.
"A droid. And Luke."
"Not your parents?"
He glanced back at her, trying without much conviction to project a sense of impatience. "Are you only going to ask questions in this conversation?"
"What kind of droid?" The tone of her voice didn't change, but there was a laughter-flavored feeling across the Bond.
"A housekeeping droid. We had one when I was a kid."
"Do you always cook with your shirt off?"
Ben impressed himself by managing to keep a straight face. "Do you want me to put one on?"
Rey didn't answer right away. Instead, she let her knuckles trail up the expanse of his shoulderblade. It was a timid touch at first, stiff and hesitant as if she hadn't been mapping his chest so thoroughly a moment ago. When he did not pull away, she was emboldened again, taking the two small steps necessary to lean her entire self against his back. Only the thin cloth of her undershirt divided her from him. Her cheek lay warm and soft where her timid hand had been a moment ago. Her eyelashes tickled his skin.
Ben had to pause and collect himself before he could continue working.
Their relationship was a strange jumble of a thing. The first time they'd kissed hadn't felt like the first time at all, so familiar a gesture it had been. Likewise, nothing felt more natural than sleeping in the same room, guardian of each other's dreams.
Likwise, in their day-to-day camaraderie, it had proven more difficult to avoid physical contact than it was to maintain it, and that had little to do with the cramped quarters. They missed each other when they were apart, even if apart meant only an arm's length away.
"Did you sleep okay?" she asked him, as she had asked him the day before. As he hoped she would ask him again and again in the days to come.
"Most of the night."
"Me too."
Something from that long struggle against waking came back to him and an opportunity to tease her presented itself. "You were talking in your sleep."
"I was?" She sounded genuinely surprised. "What did I say?"
Ben cleared his throat and—for fear of being heard by the ship's other occupants—spoke in a very quiet falsetto. "'No, Master Luke, I don't want the green stuff'." He felt her smile against his back at his mimicry. "What did he do to you on that island? It sounded traumatic."
Rey laughed, her breath hot and moist on his shoulder. "Could have been worse, I guess." Then she grew quiet and tense. "Is it okay to talk about him?"
"I'm fine." It was less of a lie than it had been before.
She turned her face to rest her forehead on his shoulder. "Good."
There was silence for perhaps half a minute while Ben tried to cook with her pinned to his back. It broke when Rey giggled.
"What?"
"I'm trying to picture you in your mask and cloak, cooking."
"I didn't cook when I was Kylo Ren."
"Oh. That must be the secret, then."
"What secret?"
"Of the Light Side."
Ben huffed, only to be momentarily mesmerized by the feel of her moving with the lurch of his shoulders.
"I'm serious," she argued, still soft. "Food can change your life."
"Says the scavenger."
"I know what I'm talking about."
"Yes, you do." Yet again he was smiling, and he must have been hypersensitive to the sensations of his own body, for the stretch of his lips felt new and wonderful. "... Hand me the Akivan pepper."
"Which one?"
He twitched a hand and the jar floated off the shelf. "This."
Grinning, Rey plucked it out of its airborn course and presented it to him.
"Smartass."
To that, she laughed.
The dish was one he had learned from Luke, chosen that morning only because it was one of the few they had all the ingredients for. Still, he had spoken the truth to Rey. It was easier these days for him to think about his uncle—not easy, but easier. He had a better understanding of what had happened, and while it did not erase the primal terror born in that last night of his youth, it helped him contain it. It helped him step back and see past it.
Rey helped him.
She hovered beside him now, watching every move he made. It would have been a nice gesture, he thought, to explain the steps to her, but small talk was a task that daunted him even on a good day, so he simply let her watch.
The dish wasn’t fancy, but it was one he had a rare fond memory of as a boy. He mixed and baked flatbreads from a bag of powder and set rehydrated vegetables to fry, seasoning them with the pepper she had helped him to retrieve and a sauce mix from another vacuum-sealed package. The bread cooked fast, and when it was done, he worked the flakey layers open and spooned the vegetables inside. Rey's eyes had stopped following his hands at some point and were glued on the food itself, so intent that he feared she would start scavenging bites from the pan if he didn't finish quickly enough.
"Go sit down," he ordered, and in her eagerness, she all but scurried back to the bed—his bed rather than hers. "It's hot," he warned, and came to hand her a plate.
"It smells amazing."
"It's the sauce."
She didn't answer because she was already picking and nibbling at the edge of the stuffed bread pocket, not patient enough to let it cool.
"I'll take a plate to Chewie."
Rey didn't react to what he had said, so neither did he, but the nickname had manifested itself unbidden for the first time in his adult life and he was not quite able to ignore the slip. Facing Chewbacca was a trial, but they were a crew, at least for the time being, and not sharing a meal with him would have been more awkward still.
Ben took the time to pull on a shirt before leaving the almost-comfort of the sleeping quarters. Chewbacca was in the cockpit, where he always was when he wasn't napping in the main hold or working on the ship's maintenance out of boredom. On that particular morning, he was slouched in the copilot's seat with a datapad in one massive paw. He did notlook up when Ben entered, but Ben knew better than to think his presence unnoticed.
"I made breakfast."
Chewbacca looked.
Ben closed the distance and handed him the plate.
"It smells good," Chewie rumbled in Shyriiwook.
"That's what Rey said."
"Thank you."
Solemn, Ben nodded and left.
In the corridor on his way back to Rey, at the midpoint where the curve of the hull distorted the sounds from the rest of the ship, Ben stopped. Something had touched his right ear, soft and formless like a breath. His instinct was to shield himself, fortify his mental defenses. A warning touch had often preceded one of Snoke's painful tests. So well conditioned was the former Kylo Ren that his body responded before his mind, muscles tensing and heartbeat accelerating, yet there had been no hint of a threat in the touch. Someone or something was reaching out to him, and it wasn’t Snoke. It would be unwise to ignore it.
Cautious, like cracking open a door, he opened himself back up to the Force, questing outward with his senses, but no matter how far he reached, he could find no trace of a living presence except for those who belonged. Had it been a warning, then? A request? Or merely his senses adjusting to the newly balanced state of the Force?
Unnerved, he went back to Rey, and was mildly surprised to find that she had not devoured her entire meal in the span of absence. He caught her chewing with a look of meditative focus. She opened her eyes only belatedly to acknowledge him, smiled around her mouthful of food, and waited until she had swallowed to ask, "are you going to eat?"
“Maybe." He meant it to sound teasing, but the word fell flat. He could hardly blame her for her concern, given his less than stellar record for self-care. He refrained from saying anything else while he prepared his own plate and came to sit on the floor by her feet.
He regretted that choice as soon as it was made, turning his head away to hide his grimace when pain lanced through his injured knee.
"Ben?"
"Hmm?" He mumbled, aiming for nonchalance.
"What is it?"
"I'm fine."
"Liar."
He looked at his breakfast and thought about taking a bite, hoping Rey would drop the subject if he seemed sufficiently distracted.
"You should have rested more before you ran away to change the universe."
It was not the first time she had scolded him for that after their departure from Arrakis. "What's done is done."
She wasn't done. "If it hurts you too much, please tell me."
"I've had worse."
"I don't care."
He twisted around to look at her, ignoring the further distress it caused his knee. She was holding her plate on her lap, her hands on its edges to balance it. She wasn't eating. Ben found himself touched that she would deem something as trivial as as a mostly-healed wound more important than her meal.
Healing wounds, to him, were as common-place as food, and sometimes as nourishing. He opened his mouth to argue or to reassure her further, but the look in her eyes changed his mind. "... Alright."
She smiled again, just a little, and picked back up her breakfast.