Chapter Text
So I went down to the river of insufferable sins
Lord I tried but the water wouldn’t let me come in
Too many lives have been broken
There’s too much blood on my hands
There ain’t no water in this world could turn me back into an innocent man
Ben wakes lying face-down in the mud, his hair and skin and clothes oily.
He looks at his hands.
They are covered in blood.
When he laughs, it is humorless. When he laughs, he coughs up a little bit of bile, sputters it out until he is sitting up and staring across the river.
The other side is as barren and brown as the side he’s sitting on. The trees are twisted and leafless, the grass is so dry that it’s crackling and when the sky hits the horizon, it, too, is more brown than anything else.
You satisfied? Kira asks and he glances over his shoulder. She’s standing there, her brown eyes fixed on him, the cotton mask he’d made her months before tied primly around her long face.
He doesn’t reply, he just gets to his feet. He’s a bit shaky. He’d clearly been under the water for long enough that it’s affected him. He can’t decide if he hopes that the pollution will poison him or not. Then he won’t really have survived it. Then he’ll have given his life back to the world he helped destroy.
“Not really,” he sighs, resting a hand on her neck. She lets out a huff, and he can see her lips blowing back and forth beneath the cotton. He leans his face against her mane.
You’re getting me dirty, she complains.
“I’ll give you a nice long brush tonight,” he replies.
Yes, but that won’t get the oil out.
“Vain now, are we?”
We’ve always been vain about hair. And yours is a mess. I told you this wasn’t going to solve the problem.
He runs a hand through his hair, shuddering. It’s sticky and he groans when he realizes that his fingers will probably turn his hair into grease-covered valleys and mountains. “Where’s my helmet.”
Where you left it, Kira replies.
“Helpful,” Ben growls at her. “And how far down the river did I actually make it.”
Kira flicks her tail. Far enough. Then, clearly because she’s feeling generous: Hop on.
“You sure?”
You promised me a good brushing later, so make it count.
“I’m not imposing on her majesty’s--”
Oh shut up.
Ben climbs up.
He tries not to ride his daemon unless he truly has to. She is not a pack mule. Some people think he’s eccentric for it, but he has always assumed that they focus on it so as not to focus on the other things about him that should, by rights, give them pause.
He looks down at his hands. Oily, greasy, dirty. But there is no blood on them. There never is. A product of his guilty conscience whenever he wakes, and nothing he can do can wash them clean. At least, that’s what Kira thinks.
She waits a whole five minutes before starting again.
I still think seeing if you’d drown was excessive.
“Yeah, well, it didn’t work, did it?”
That water’s too dirty to wash away your sins.
“They’re not sins. I didn’t commit them against god. There is no such thing as god.”
Then whatever you want to call them. Crimes don’t get washed away by a river.
“It’s a cursed river,” Ben points out.
No, it’s a polluted river. Curses aren’t real. Not like that, anyway.
“Are you really well-actually-ing me?”
Yes, I am. Because you’re an idiot. Some extremely oily and not remotely potable water is not going to be able to remove the guilt you feel about killing your father, turning your back on your mother, murdering hundreds of innocents, and helping the First Order destroy the world. Especially when you knew I wasn’t going to let you die.
“You would not have.” He loves her dearly, but his vain daemon would certainly not get herself covered in the grime of the river if she could avoid it. And she had, clearly, avoided it. He had not drowned.
I most certainly would not have. I value my own life, thank you very much. And you value yours, even if you won’t admit it. So let’s put this little venture behind us, shall we?
Yes, he does value his life. Enough to have fled his uncle’s house and never come back, hang the consequences. He shudders, and pats her neck absentmindedly. “Nice to have someone worrying after me.”
He stares back out across the river.
He’s never been in this part of the world before. He’d taken eighteen days to get here because of what locals said about the river. The devil only spits out those too evil to take. If there’s no god, then there’s definitely no devil, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from thinking what they think about the river.
It is a churning river, fast flowing and lots of rocks to make the water wild. It sort of glistens rainbow from the oilslick on the surface. Its own sort of beauty, he supposes.
Uh-oh , Kira says.
“What?”
Your helmet’s gone.
“My--” he sits up straighter and looks ahead. Yes, that was the treestump he’d rested it against. His bag is there too and it had been torn through, clearly someone looking for value. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” he mutters, dismounting and jogging over to the dead tree.
They’d gotten his food, his canteen, his first aid kit, and all his credits. But most valuable of all is the helmet. It’s got air purifiers in each of the inhalation channels that’ll keep the grey, smoggy air out of your lungs and keep them from going black.
“Right,” he mutters.
Well.
“It’s not like I wanted to live anyway,” he tells Kira dryly.
Oh shut up and make a cloth mask, she retorts hotly. You’re not ready to die. You don’t want to die. You just think you deserve it after everything you’ve done.
“I do deserve it after everything I’ve done.”
Then why don’t you go into the middle of a village and tell them what you’ve done and let them put you against a wall for firing then? Kira snaps.
“You’re really fucking annoying, you know that?”
So are you, she replies, sounding far too pleased with herself.
Ben sheds his jacket--First Order standard, black and heavy and tugs his shirt up over his head, then takes off his sweat-stained undershirt. He wrinkles his nose at it. The scent of his own sweat is tangy in his nose, but he supposes he’ll get used to it. He wraps the undershirt around his face, but knows better than to say the frustrated I’d rather take the smog than my own sweat that creeps across his mind out loud because then Kira will huff at him and she’s already going to be insufferable about this for a long while. Not for the first time, he is glad that she can’t read his mind, and he can only hear what thoughts of hers she chooses to share.
It’s as he’s bending down to put his discarded shirt back on that he hears someone shouting from behind him.
“Need a ride?”
Ben turns.
The speaker is sitting on a long steel boat. Little dark puffs are coming out of the top of a small smokestack, and the deck is covered with all sorts of...well…
Junk seems a kind word for it.
Times are hard though, so people cling to what they can.
“Where are you headed?” he asks her, his voice muffled through his undershirt. He still hasn’t put a shirt on. The speaker is watching him from under goggles to keep the soot in the air out of her eyes. She’s decently tall, with dark hair and that’s about as much as he can make of her. She’s wearing dusty brown clothes that are not the right size for her, and the bottom of her face is covered by a long strip of sweat-stained cloth, rather like his own.
“Here and there,” she says. “South’s next. Tarrytown. Then Bunta Ridge, probably. Gastown at some point. Where are you headed?”
Kira makes a huffing sort of noise and Ben glances at her.
“Will that thing hold my daemon? She looks ten minutes away from sinking.”
“She’s sturdy,” the woman replies. “We had the head of a tank on here a few weeks back. She kept on just fine.”
“The head of a tank?” Ben asks, surprised. “Wouldn’t that get you into trouble with the First Order?”
The woman shrugs. “They don’t come round here much. We’re too much in nowhere. What are you doing here anyway?” Her eyes flick down to his jacket then back to his face. No hiding it now, he supposes. He definitely looks like a deserter.
Satisfying a megalomaniacal curiosity, Kira snorts. Ben elbows her.
He stares at the woman for a long while. He could very easily pick up his jacket, dust it off, and drag her into the regional office for selling First Order supplies for scrap, which violates regional protocol.
But his jacket is in the dust and he hadn’t died in the river and there’s no blood on his hands.
“What’s your name?” he asks her instead.
“My name?” She sounds surprised at the question and he sees her eyes--he wonders what color they are behind those goggles of hers--narrow slightly, distrustfully. What’s she doing suddenly getting distrustful? She’s the one who offered me a ride on her fucking boat. “Rey,” she says. “I’m Rey.”
“Why are you offering me a ride, Rey?”
“Who are you, First Order?” she snaps at him and he can feel Kira’s eyes on him.
Rey’s daemon appears on her shoulder, a grey furry thing with dark spots at each eye and a long snout. Ben’s never seen one before. Its little paws have developed enough to be able to grip her shoulders like a monkey, but it’s not a monkey. It’s watching him very, very intensely.
“No,” Ben says. “I’m not. But you can’t blame a man for not wanting to trust a stranger in these parts. Can you?”
Rey relaxes. “No,” she says. “Kylo thought I shouldn’t offer you a ride.” A hand drifts to the top of her daemon’s head and she pats him. He looks annoyed at her, and Ben smiles under his mask, sure that she’s getting an earful right now.
“Why are you, then?” he asks her again. He can hear the smile in his own voice. Can she hear it too?
Coming on a bit strong, aren’t you?
Kira can, it seems.
“You looked like you were having a bad day,” she says, nodding to the pack. He can see the way her eyes are dropping down over his chest now, down his stomach to his hips, then back up again. He smirks under his mask.
“Better now,” he replies. “Thanks--I’ll take you up on that ride.”
He grabs his shirt and shrugs into it, but leaves the jacket in the dirt, along with the pack.
He doesn’t need them anymore.
**
Her ship is packed to the bursting point, and bigger than it looks from the outside.
“Help me move this,” she says of half a car frame that they tilt onto its side so that Kira has a place to stand. Rey’s daemon--Kylo--is chattering at either Kira or Rey, but not at Ben. Never at Ben. Ben runs a hand over Kira’s head, stroking her.
“I’ll brush you down once we’re on the way,” he promises.
You’d better. This seems like a bad idea. You’re having a day full of bad ideas.
“This is better than the last one.”
That’s not fair. Everything’s better than the last one.
He smiles and rests his head against her neck once more before following Rey into the cabin.
She has an air purifier in the cabin and strips off her mask and goggles the moment they’ve shut the door behind them. Her eyes are hazel, and her lips are wide and a deep sort of pink. They’re chapped and as she looks at him, she tugs at one of the bits of flaking skin there with her teeth. “You don’t have to wear that,” she nods to him, and he tugs his undershirt off his face. “I also have some better cloth. If you want that layer back.”
“Thanks,” Ben replies. This place is…
Well, he’d call it a mess, except that it has a water purifier too, which she has working on filling two bottles with fresh, distilled water. He licks his lips, staring at them and a moment later, Rey is handing him one of the bottles. He downs the whole thing, and sighs when it’s empty, handing it back to her.
“You’re being very kind,” he says slowly. “That doesn’t happen much.”
“No,” Rey agrees. “And I’m not usually kind.”
“So why--”
“You tried to drown yourself,” she says bluntly. “Or nearly drowned. No one swims in the river unless they’re trying to get away from something, and you were trying to get away from something. You left your uniform behind, and your pack. You’re trying to make something new for yourself.”
Ben doesn’t say a word. For some reason, every instinct in his body isn’t telling him to fight her, wrestle her to the ground, bind her arms and legs, bring her in for insubordination or just throw her, bound and gagged, into the river. He would have done that once. He should do it now. She’s clearly got no respect for order or authority.
But Ben doesn’t know that he does either at this point. So he doesn’t.
More curiously, though, he doesn’t want to either.
“Thanks,” he says.
“What are you trying to get away from?” she asks gently. “All of it? Or something specific?”
He swallows, but doesn’t reply. What could he say to that? There isn’t anything he wants to say to that. He remembers that flash of green, that shout of Ben, no! and blood. So much blood.
He looks down at his hands.
There’s oil and grime, but none of it’s rust colored.
“What about you?” he asks her. “How’d you get this ship anyway? You steal it?”
“Nah,” she replies. “I rent it. Unkar Plutt lives over in Gastown. He has scavengers and seekers and peddlers to bring him back what they can scrounge of value. I rent the boat, he pays me for what I bring back.”
“Doesn’t sound like much of a life.”
“Well, there’s not much out here, is there?” she retorts, cocking her head. He doesn’t like her lips drawn tight like that. They should smile. They should sing and sigh.
“Sorry,” he mutters. “I didn’t have much of a life either.”
“Does anyone these days?” she asks. It packs a punch and he looks down at his bloodless bloody hands.
“You got family?” he asks, regretting the question immediately because she’ll probably send it right back at him, and then what is he supposed to say?
“Nah,” she says. “I--I thought they’d come back for me. Part of me still hopes they will.”
She doesn’t say more, she’s looking at him with a slight jut to her jaw as though daring him to push more, but he can get everything he needs from it. You were left behind. You didn’t want to be. And now you have to do this.
She’d probably have to do it anyway if they’d stayed, but the alone part hurts.
The alone part always hurts.
“What’s Kylo?” he asks.
“Excuse me?”
“The animal. I’ve never seen--”
“A raccoon,” she says with a smile. “Useful, since he’s got hands. That’s about all he’s good for, except keeping me warm at night. Sleeps right on top of my chest. Must be nice to have one who can bring you around.”
“If Kira lets me ride her, it’s because she’s taking pity on me. She’s not a pack mule.”
And Rey laughs, her lips spreading wide across her face, light seeming to dance in her eyes. Ben stares at her, and stares at her, and he wishes he could still drink the water because his mouth goes dry.