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“What do you mean you can’t find recruits?! No one, absolutely no one, wants to rebel against the First Order?!” Poe yells into the comm sitting on the table, making both Leia and Rey jump and wince simultaneously. It had been like this for months on end. Weeks after the battle on Crait had ended and the galaxy had learned of Supreme Leader Snoke’s death, Kylo Ren declared himself Emperor and announced that it was time for a change. A few months later, and more than a few “patrols” from the rebel fleet found people from all walks of life happy in their new lifestyles.
The stormtroopers were disbanded and those that had homes to return to were given the information they needed and granted permission to leave, everyone that wanted to work had jobs that paid a living wage, those that could no longer work were given the appropriate lodging and benefits needed to live comfortably, slavery was next to non-existent and somehow, the benefactors that had supported the war and the building of weaponry, were quiet on the subject and seemingly content with Kylo’s ruling. It raised more than a few suspicions in what was left of the rebels, Leia included.
Rey however didn’t care about this stupid war anymore. She hadn’t cared since the moment she closed the Falcon’s door in Kylo’s face and she couldn’t, wouldn’t, start to care again. She’d cried her heart out that night when they’d finally reached an uninhabited planet, clinging to Leia who didn’t understand but knew to let Rey cry anyway. The next morning, with her eyes bloodshot and puffy, Rey wondered if she’d made the right decision as his anguish in losing his mentor, his father, his uncle, and then herself all by his hand washed over her, breaking her heart even further.
The bond had only opened once since that day, a week after Crait, and they’d ignored each other the whole time until it let them go; neither one of them willing to admit that Snoke had lied and that they were bound by a power that far exceeded anything that dirty rat could ever dream of. Three months after that and Rey, attempting to meditate, is left grasping at nothing as the Force seems cold and distant to her, like it’s punishing her for making the wrong decision. Still she tries, and tries, and tries, until…. She stopped reaching for the Force three weeks ago. She never liked the cold anyway.
Rey excuses herself from the meeting and walks out into the forest that surrounds the base with no particular direction in mind. She lets her mind wander while she walks. She thinks about the decisions that led her to be where she is and who she is, but when her thoughts inevitably turn to him, she runs. She sprints until her lungs burn and her legs threaten to give out and yet she keeps going. It hurts. Everything hurts. She’s cut off from the Force, cut off from him, cut off from her friends that still have no idea why she was on Snoke’s ship, cut off from Chewie because he’s still mourning over his best friend and nephew, the perfect mix of the two that he sees in Rey. Cut off from everything she’s ever known, but she knows nothing because she is nothing, but not to him and as black spots blur her vision she wonders if the blessed heat she’d felt in the Force the first time she’d reached for it had been him all along.
Ben is awoken in the dead of night to repeated beeping. Thinking it’s his alarm, he reaches over to his bedside table, hits the stop button and when it doesn’t stop, he throws it across the room. Yet the beeping continues. Growling, he sits up and wipes his eyes, ready to scream only to be met with a sight he never wants to see again in his life.
Rey’s face is swollen, covered in cuts and still bleeding in some spots. Her clothes, or what’s left of them, are hanging off of her in shreds. There’s an odd shaped hole in her stomach that’s bleeding sluggishly as if she’d been pierced. Her right arm is bent in a horrible angle, as is her left ankle, and the med droids that he can hear are speaking of a possibly broken back and pelvis considering how her hips are jutted out oddly. Ben’s heart rate skyrockets and he calls his comm to him using the Force and shakily types one of the only two numbers he’s ever bothered to memorize. Two soft rings go by before - “Ben?” a sleepy, astonished voice says on the other end of the comm. He takes a shaky breath and, on the exhale, “Mom...Mom, what happened to Rey?”
Two days later finds Ben standing with his mother as Rey is put into a medically induced coma and sunk into a bacta tank to heal. From what they could decipher Rey had been running when she fell down a hill, hit her head on a rock and kept sliding right over a cliff face. It wasn’t the initial fall that got her, it was the short stop at the rock filled bottom that hurt her so badly. Thankfully her pelvis was intact and her back, while broken, would heal just fine. But the image of her lying in that bed on Death’s door would forever be ingrained in his memory.
He’d asked Leia when he’d arrived why he couldn’t feel her Force signature and she explained that she didn’t know, but that she hadn’t been able to sense Rey for a few weeks. To say he’d been upset would be an understatement. He’d been praying to the Force to forgive them and save her every moment since. While she’d never let on that she knew, Leia could hear every word he sent into the void.
Leia glanced at her son and sighed as a conversation opener. When he took his eyes off Rey for a second and glanced her way, she smiled and spoke softly, “When she wakes up, I think it’s time for peace talks.”
Ben turned his head so hard, his neck cracked. “Peace talks? What are you talking about?”
Leia didn’t answer, but instead looked through the window into the room where Rey lay in the tank. She’d figured it out a long time ago. “It’s done. She wakes up, we end this war the right way. Then you two… well... it’s obvious that she needs you and you need her. The war is, as of this moment, tentatively over. I’m proud of you, Ben.”
Kylo Ren wasn’t one to show any emotion, but he’d be damned if he wasn’t a Solo in this exact moment, his jaw dropped so low it could be on the floor. He was still speechless as Leia turned and began to walk away. “Say whatever you need to the Force to hurry up and heal her, I want grandchildren!” she called behind her, laughing as she turned the corner, leaving her son flabbergasted and spluttering indignantly.
When she was out of sight, he banged his forehead against the glass window and sighed. “Woman, you better hurry up and heal, I’m not dealing with this bantha shit alone…Please.” He thought, sending yet another prayer into the Force. Somewhere in that void, Rey felt a familiar warmth blanket her psyche.