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The party hadn’t been fun at all. Rey dodged thin spires of rock as she made her way back to where the shelters were set up– well, tried to. Truth be told she’d had at least one or three Dagobah Slug Slingers too many and the rocks seemed to be deliberately trying to get in her way, which she was almost certain they weren’t actually doing. Well, maybe. This was a brand-new planet as of four hours ago, so how would she know?
She tried to dodge around a group of them but misjudged the distance, stumbling into the one at the end, where she leaned for a bit, waiting for things to stop moving that shouldn’t be. She closed her eyes, thinking that would make it better, but it didn’t. It definitely, definitely didn’t, and she opened them again.
What a dumb party. The thought went round and round in her head, so loudly it seemed to be making her ears ring from the inside, and she pressed her forehead into the slightly sand-textured stone, knowing it would smear red dust all over her face and not caring. What a dumb, dumb, DUMB party. She wanted to say it out loud. Why shouldn’t she say it out loud? There was just her and rocks here right now, and the rocks probably couldn’t hear what she said, and even if they could she didn’t care what a bunch of stupid rocks she’d never see again thought of her anyway.
“What a dumb party,” she mumbled, then the urge to laugh bubbled up in her and she couldn’t help but give in to it, first a chuckle, then a giggle, then a full-on ab-crunching laugh that made her lean against the stone. Red dust. Red dust everywhere, on her clothes, in her hair, on her skin. How was anyone supposed to keep themselves clean on this planet? She tried to brush some off but her hand only seemed to shove it further into the fabric of her arm wrap, and that annoyed her so she vengefully smeared the dust around on purpose, then grabbed some more from the sandy ground and dumped it on her pants, smearing that too. She’d regret it in the morning. Distantly, she understood that. Right now, however– right now–.
“Shouldn’t have even come to this DUMB planet,” she muttered vengefully, pushing herself back to her feet. She tottered for a moment then held steady, which she was vaguely proud of, and looked around. The shelters were somewhere this way- she’d come from here on her way there, so she should know- but now she couldn’t remember exactly which this way was the this way she needed. All the rocks looked the same, and they were judging her, she could feel it.
“It’s fine,” she insisted, smiling at them sloppily, vengefully. “I’m not going to be here long.” She threw her arms out, encompassing the whole landscape around her. “Nope. Leaving as soon as I can. Maybe I’ll steal a ship, huh? I can do that. I can steal a ship.” She dropped her arms for a moment, considering. “I’ll steal a fighter, actually. Faster. Cooler. I’ll go straight up and never come back down.” It should have been a euphoric statement but something about it unsettled her, feeling not quite the way she’d thought it would, and she frowned, shaking her head at herself and nearly falling again as that one movement made the world spin. She only stumbled a little, tripping over something round in the sand at her feet that made her look down. A slinger bottle. She’d forgotten she had that with her, and didn’t remember putting it down– or dropping it, as was probably more likely. But it still had some slinger in it so she bent over, very carefully, and picked it up.
“What are you looking at, huh? Dumb rocks,” she muttered to the nearest rock spire as she struggled with the cork before deciding against it. Not the drink, the location; all these rocks were creepy. She hadn’t cared about them before but now she didn’t like them at all. She spied a ridge through them and started that way, circling around the lip of red rock, looking for a way up on top of it.
“Rey,” someone said, a familiar voice, and she whirled around, scanning the spires suspiciously. It had sounded like Ben, but it always sounded like Ben. Every voice did and did not sound like Ben, and that was why she’d started drinking however long ago she’d started. An hour. Several hours. Did it matter?
His voice had seemed to echo; was that normal or was that just what she was hearing right now? She turned her back on it, ignoring the spires and focusing on the rock ledge, started to climb one-handed, the slinger firmly grasped in her other hand. It wouldn’t have been a challenge sober but now she had to use her admittedly shaky grasp on the Force to steady herself, still making it to the top of the ledge without too much trouble. Below her was a desert, not a beautiful, soft, flowing desert like on Jakku, but a depressing wasteland of red rock, jagged and tumbled on top of each other like a massive gravel pit. A gravel pit for giants. Had there been giants here? No, she decided, sitting down with her legs hanging over the edge and working on the slinger’s cork again. This planet wasn’t cool enough to have giants.
“Rey.” This time it sounded close to her. Ben’s voice, always Ben’s voice. She knew it better than any other voice by now, she was depressingly sure, better than Finn’s, better than Poe’s, better than Leia’s, better even than Chewie’s– and Chewie’s voice was one she should have been able to count on blocking out any number of other voices, but it still couldn’t entirely drown out this one. The bond had been fickle lately, fading in and then going away again even when she wasn’t alone, even when she wasn’t thinking about him, even when she was trying very, very hard not to think about him and nearly succeeding, sometimes. Now she heard him all around her whether she could see him or not, waking, sleeping, like waves made of him that rolled in and out with some inscrutable Force tide that Luke’s dumb books could have told her about but hadn’t yet even though she’d been reading them until her eyes crossed.
“I’m a terrible reader,” she said into the bottle as the cork came free unexpectedly, slipping from her fumbling fingers and rolling away into the unknown. Now she’d have to finish the whole bottle or pour it out, and she had been kinda going to finish it anyway, probably, so she stared down into it and tried to gauge exactly how much was left.
“What are you reading?” Ben’s voice asked, soft, nearby, like he was just next to her on the ridge or just down below, behind or in front, it was impossible to say. In her head, maybe, or not, it didn’t really matter. Maybe both.
“Luke didn’t teach me anything,” she muttered mutinously, taking a drink of the slinger. She hadn’t liked the slinger the first time she tasted it; vaguely bitter, herb-y, like she was drinking something green she had no name for. Not great. But she was used to it now, and its smell, and how it felt on the way down, and how it felt when it got to her stomach. What it had to do with slugs or Dagobah, she didn’t know. She’d asked Finn and he’d laughed, the first time, but then she’d said it too much and now she could only say it to herself because everyone else would think it was getting annoying.
“Luke wasn’t a great teacher to start with,” Ben said, and she closed her eyes and pretended he was here, the bottle dropping away from her lips as she tilted her head back, wishing the stars were up above her, but it was still sunset and she wouldn’t have been able to see any even if her eyes were open. Jakku was a much better desert than this– the sun didn’t take nearly as long to set and the stars came out beautiful and clear and so close you felt like you could reach up and pick one and eat it.
“Rey,” Ben said again. He was being annoying tonight. She sighed and opened her eyes, tilting her head back down, and there he was on the rock lip just a little way up from her, sitting wherever he really was, his dark eyes watching her with an expression she was too drunk to comprehend at the moment and she didn’t feel like trying anyway. His expression wasn’t as important as the fact that he was here, really here, for once, not just an echo-y something hidden away in the rocks, or the trees, or the ocean, or the stars.
“Ben,” she said, her voice suddenly hoarse and raspy, like some of the sand had gotten in her throat. “What… what are you doing?”
“Working,” he said, folding his hands together as though they were on a desk. “Or I was, before you started mumbling about dumb parties in my ear and accusing rocks of spying on you. What planet are you on?”
“Nuh-uh-uh,” she scolded, trying to wag a finger at him before realizing that was the hand that was still holding the slinger bottle. Some of it splashed out as she wiggled it, the light green liquid staining the stone a dark red like blood, which she found vaguely interesting and stared at for a moment before taking another drink. “I’m not going to tell you,” she said to Ben when she was finished. “What about you? Where are you hiding?”
“OR-Kappa-2722,” he replied, raising his eyebrows at her slightly. How annoying. “It’s a major First Order-aligned star system, Rey, I haven’t made myself difficult to find.”
She laughed bitterly, taking another drink. She was going to run out of slinger quickly at this rate but she was starting to feel a very, very insistent urge to throw something and the bottle seemed like it would serve that purpose extremely well, but only once it was empty. “'Difficult to find’,” she muttered in a mutinous tone. “Supreme Leader Kylo Ren. Everyone knows where he is. Not me, though. No, you’re around every corner but you’re never actually anywhere.”
“You’ve been hearing the echoes too.”
The echoes. How- how- how Ben, to have given it a name, to be sitting here with her after forever in each other’s heads but never in each other’s sight gathering data, making up theories. It enraged and depressed her almost exactly equally and she fingered the neck of the bottle, not sure which one to express. Maybe mix them together and call it frustration? How many books had Ben read about the Force, anyway? A lot. All of them. She would bet any item of value she could get her hands on that he’d read every damn thing about the Force ever written while she slogged through the few physical books she’d stolen from Luke hour after torturous hour, half reading, half teaching herself all the new and old-fashioned words she’d never heard of before. Who taught slaves to read? Nobody, that’s who. If the Empire hadn’t left so much behind on the Destroyers she used to salvage she wouldn’t know anything about anything, and Ben had probably been reading since he was born, with all his books, and Luke’s school, and now the whole library of the First Order to go through. He should know everything. She thought about telling him so but wanted to throw the bottle now more than ever, so she drank instead.
“Slinger?” Ben guessed, watching her.
“Maybe,” she muttered.
“That’s a fairly strong drink, Rey.”
“Well anything is strong when you’ve been drinking it for a while, Supreme Leader, but I don’t care what you think because you’re not really here. Where are you?”
“I told you.”
“No, why– why are you there?” she clarified, swinging the bottle outward to encompass the distant stars she couldn’t see, where Ben was, whether or not it was in that particular direction. “Why are you all the way over there?” He didn’t answer that and she was suddenly afraid to look around to see what his expression was now, sloshing the last of the slinger around instead, first counter-clockwise, then clockwise. It was enough for two more drinks, if they were small drinks.
“Where are you, Rey?” Ben asked at last, pointedly but not condemningly.
“If I told you would you come here?”
“Yes,” he said immediately, his voice jumping with sudden and urgent sincerity.
“Would you come alone?” He hesitated, she didn’t see it but she could hear it, and she smiled bitterly, getting to her feet. The world was swaying much more than it had been before, tilting to one side then the other like she was on a starship twirling around and around in the sky, and she had to use the Force to steady herself. She tried to do it subtly but it was impossible at the moment, with both her head and the whole galaxy spinning, to do anything subtly and her push went rather wild, blowing a bit of sand up into the air. Well, more than up, really. Blowing it so high in the sky she couldn’t see it anymore.
“Where are you, Rey?” Ben asked a third time, then when she turned to glare at him added hastily, “I mean, where are you standing? What are you on? I saw you climbing earlier.”
She considered for a moment whether there was a reason to not tell him that, but even to her swimming, sinking, swirling mind it seemed very unlikely that the First Order would be able to trace the Rebels’ location on the scant evidence of ‘there are rocks here’. Rocks? So many rocks, in the galaxy. So much sand. So many deserts. So many different kinds of desert, she remembered, glaring out at the coarse and unfriendly landscape before her. And this one she hated most of all.
“I’m up on a ledge,” she answered finally. “A rock ledge.”
“How wide is the ledge, Rey?”
What an utterly annoying question. Here she was barely able to stay upright and he wanted her to, what, just start taking measurements of things? She looked down, considering. She was going to give him the measurement in the most annoying way possible, just because she could and she was drunk and she could and she was drunk. She didn’t know why she thought it twice, but it was truer both times.
“The ledge is about…,” she began, drawing it out deliberately. She held a thumb out in front of her as if trying to gauge the distance, squinting, which hardly helped since the rock seemed slightly out of focus even when her eyes were wide open. “Maybe… three porgs wide.”
“Porgs,” Ben repeated in an extremely annoyed tone, standing wherever he was.
“Yup,” she agreed, smiling and nodding to herself and nearly overbalancing again. “Side-to-side porgs, though. Not end-to-end porgs. Obviously.”
“Rey–,” he said, stepping towards her. “How high off the ground is the ledge?”
More measurements, damn him. She didn’t want to glance that far down, and anyway she already knew that it was too far to reliably measure in porg-related units, and also she’d only just noticed that when she turned this direction- away from the sunset and towards the spires- she could barely see the glow from the fires where some of the Rebels were still celebrating. She hoped they were out of slinger. She didn’t want to see or taste or hear of or smell slinger ever again after tonight. Nasty drink. That’s why it was named after slugs.
“Rey,” Ben reminded her, stopping a couple steps away wherever he was.
“I don’t want to look that far down,” she said mutinously, examining the bottle again. “Probably I’ll fall off.”
“Then just remember. Don’t look. Just remember and give me your nearest guess.”
She wanted to roll her eyes at him but she could tell already that it would make her head hurt if she did and anyway she was trying really, really hard not to look at him so he wouldn’t see it even if she could pull it off. “It’s, I don’t know, one Chewie high on this side,” she said, swinging the bottle in a vaguely left direction.
“The side you climbed up from?” he clarified. She sighed huffily and nodded, then drank a tiny, tiny mouthful just because it seemed to goad him and she liked Ben better when he was goaded right now. Not that she liked him at all right now. “Rey, how high off the ground is the other side?”
Much higher. And he wasn’t going to like that when he found out, she could tell, but she didn’t want to say it out loud because she didn’t want to think about it because she’d just discovered that thinking about measurements right now made her queasy. “Tech-ni-cal-ly the rock is the ground,” she muttered, sounding the first word out carefully because it seemed hard to get her mouth around it the right way. He didn’t bother to respond to that but she could sense him frowning at her in a very moody way and sloshed the bottle again, examining the few green mouthfuls that were left. “Probably maybe one-and-a-half X-wings high.”
“Side-to-side or end-to-end?” he demanded.
“End-to-end. Sharp rocks at the bottom,” she added. “Well, rough rocks. Very mean looking rocks that I don’t like.”
“Which are different from the rocks that were spying on you earlier that you didn’t like,” he pointed out sarcastically. “You don’t have to tell me you’re in even more danger than I thought just to get my attention, Rey. How are you going to get down?”
It was a question she hadn’t thought of, which she didn’t like, and a good question too, which she also didn’t like, so she decided to ignore it. “If I told you where I am, would you come find me?” she asked, studying the ground.
“I doubt I’d make it there in time to keep you from a drunken fall to your death,” he snapped. “How are you going to get down, Rey?” She said nothing and he made a sound like a sigh but with a growl on the end, a growl that became, “Alright, where’s Poe?”
“Poe?” she asked, surprised into looking up at him. He was very slightly blurry but he did seem serious, which was a shock even to her addled system.
“Yes, your General, Poe,” he confirmed in a very serious tone. “He is in charge now, isn’t he?”
He was, but that didn’t seem like it meant anything in particular at this particular moment and she tilted her head at him, uncertain. “Yes, Poe’s in charge,” she said at last.
“Well, good, this time; is he near enough to hear you if you call him?”
She looked toward the light from the Rebel fires, considering. Was Poe even over there anymore? Maybe. He was much better at drinking than she was. She was terrible but she'd had no practice, so she’d be better eventually, probably. Poe might still be at the dumb party, and it was easier to try and judge distances right now when she was looking straight out instead of down, so at least that was a bonus to Ben’s dumb game. “Poe is three AT-ATs away,” she decided. “End-to-end, but if they were on their sides with their legs straight out. So more like top to bottom. Body to feet-things.”
“That sounds like a long ways, Rey,” Ben said, doing a very bad job of pretending his patience wasn’t running out very quickly. “Is there anyone else near you?”
“I don’t know,” she replied snippily. “I don’t know this planet. Maybe there’s tunnels. Maybe the rocks are all hollow. Maybe there’s invisible people. Maybe there’s something in the sky watching me right now.”
Ben actually closed his eyes- physically closed his eyes- as though he needed to not look at her for a moment or he was going to lose his temper completely. She watched, oddly fascinated by this phenomenon. She never saw him when he wasn’t seeing her also, and now she could study his face, his scar, the way his brow creased when he was mad at her, pulling the corners of his lips down, lips she focused on longer than she meant to, so that she was still staring at them when he opened his eyes again and saw her.
“Stop it,” he said immediately.
“I like your scar,” she told him, gesturing at his face. She’d forgotten, again, that that was the hand with the bottle in it, and ended up sort of swinging it skyward in an odd slinger salute. That made her giggle- a slinger salute. Slug Slinger. Slug Slinger saluting Supreme scars. S words. Four, no, five in a row. That was an achievement of note, she thought, when still figuring out reading.
“Good, since you put it there. You need to get down from the ledge now, Rey.”
“The ledge is pretty,” she said mutinously, not sure if it was or not. There was more light on the ledge with the sun still setting, and all the rock spires below were slowly descending into murky shadow and that made her like them even less than she had before, and she hadn’t really liked them at all as far as she could remember, though that wasn’t very far.
“The ledge is dangerous.”
“If I told you where I am, would you come find me?” she asked a little more plaintively, stepping towards him. If he were here he’d be just about within arm’s reach.
“Rey, I would bring the whole damn fleet down on you and you know it,” he accused.
“But what if you just came by yourself? To find me? Just– just to see me.”
“I’m not going to pay you a courtesy call just to make sure you don’t slip off of cliffs with a bottle of slinger in your hands,” he said in a harsh tone, a harsh tone she was finding she didn’t like very much, didn’t like very much at all. He was being deliberately hurtful. And yes, maybe she was not very nice tonight and maybe she’d annoyed him and maybe she was up really high and the ground was especially nasty here, but now he was the one being nasty. His tone was nasty. He was just being mean on purpose.
“Well fine, Supreme Leader,” she muttered around the sudden tear-like soreness in her throat that had come out of nowhere, lifting the bottle to her lips and draining it. It wasn’t a very impressive movement, since she’d forgotten that there wasn’t much left, but she didn’t care what he thought about it so it didn’t matter. “We don’t want you around here anyway,” she added, lowering the bottle and wiping the back of her hand across her mouth. It smeared dirt across her lips- she could taste it instantly- but she didn’t care about that either. “Who would want you around? Nobody. Not me. Nobody.”
He stared at her, completely taken aback, and a beat too late she realized that might not have been something she meant to say, or something she meant at all, and she wished she hadn’t said it but she had so she turned away from him, back towards the sunset. “We’re all fine here,” she muttered, shame only making her throat that much sorer, thickening her words. “Especially me. I’m the most fine. I’m super-duper fine.”
“Rey,” he said softly.
“You’re never coming, are you?” she said, cutting off whatever he might have been about to say next, staring at the sunset. The sun was finally almost to the horizon; it seemed extra bright now and she stared right into it. It made her eyes tear up. That was what was making her eyes tear up. “You’re not coming to this dumb planet or to any other dumb planet in a whole galaxy of dumb planets. Nope. You’re cozy over in OR-277-whatever dumb star system.” She swung the bottle out and back, testing it’s weight. She’d meant to throw it overhand but now she knew for sure she’d fall over herself if she did, and it didn’t matter. Distance wasn’t the point– she wanted to see it shatter. She wanted to hear and see and feel it shatter. Not even because she hated the slinger, or the bottle, or the rocks below, or the sky above she still couldn’t see the stars through; but some sort of melodramatic, vengeful, grieving thing inside her thought that something else should shatter for once and she was the one that was going to make it happen, she was going to break something here and now, tonight.
She swung out again, higher this time, and let go of the bottle. It glinted in the pink-tinged light of the sunset, cartwheeling through the air, dipping down towards the ground, picking up speed until it hit the rocks. The sound of the glass breaking apart also broke through the warm suspense of the moment, high and sharp, the last few drops of slinger turning the rocks red like blood.
“What would you do, Rey?” Ben asked softly as she stared, something rushed and desperate in his tone, as though he hadn’t meant to say it but couldn’t help himself. “What would you do, if I came to find you right now?”
Shatter. Maybe. Maybe not. She stared at the fake bloodstains on the rocks, unable to tell what she felt. It was all a jumble, all a mess, and that wasn’t just because of the slinger. Everything in her head had been a mess since Ben had been shoved in there and she could drink slinger every night until she passed out and that would make no difference either way to the fundamental problem that was Ben’s voice, and Ben’s face, and Ben’s scar, and Ben’s lips, and Ben’s everything. “Be with you,” she said slowly, sounding it out, trying the words on for size to see if they fit. They sounded right to her.
“We tried that before. I suggested that before.”
“No. Be with you really,” she disagreed, turning towards him. The pink sunset light made his scar look darker than it was, and made his hair and clothes black as the farthest, coldest edge of the galaxy. But Ben wasn’t cold. He pretended to be, but he wasn’t really. “Finn and Rose are getting married,” she said abruptly, surprising both of them so that for a moment they could only blink at each other in confusion.
“I don’t know who Rose is,” Ben replied after a long moment, slowly, carefully, as though she was using some sort of code he might be expected to understand.
“She’s Finn’s- she his- you know, his person,” she said, gesturing vaguely between herself and Ben to illustrate. “His person.”
He waited but she had nothing more to add so he said, “I have absolutely no idea how to respond to that.”
“It’s exciting,” Rey tried to explain, glancing away into the sun again before looking back at him. “I don’t know what– I’ve never been to a wedding. Slaves don’t– you know. We get sold, sometimes. Or maybe Unkar Plutt would have made a deal with another owner, for the extra money–.”
“Stop,” Ben all but snarled, sudden realization flaring in his eyes, in his whole body, rage and pain striking like lightning in the bond and the part of her mind that felt the most extreme bits of what he was feeling, his hand twitching in the Force as though he’d had an instinctive and barely-resisted urge to call his lightsaber to him from where it hung on his belt, to fight what had threatened her, to cut down a past she’d been safe from for years. “Don’t, don’t say it, don’t even think it. You’re not a slave anymore, Rey.”
“Well, I mean, barely,” she said, watching him with somewhat bleary interest. “I think I technically would be, but if I get captured I’ll be executed instead of returned, so–.”
“I will never let that happen,” he said in a flat, dangerous tone, hand now on his lightsaber hilt as though he at least needed to touch it, to know it was there. “I will kill anything in the galaxy that tries to hurt you. I’ll go to Jakku and kill Plutt and every other slave trader I can find. I’ll cut them into pieces myself.”
This was a shocking declaration, coming from Ben, and not because she thought at all that he didn’t mean it or hadn’t meant it somewhere within himself before saying it just now, but because he meant it so incredibly fiercely, his emotions roiling in the Force, every part of him tight with intended malice. In some ways it was the most dark she’d ever seen or felt him, and to experience that first hand, and have the view into his mind showing her the fear and pain it came from, would have been dizzying at any time. Now, with the slinger souring her thoughts and her movements and even blurring the edges of her words like running watercolor, it was far beyond what she could even begin to try and comprehend.
“Ben,” she said- asked?- appealed?, but he was staring away from her now, down and into the middle distance, everything in him contained savagery, his expression so remote it was like this Ben was just a picture and the rest of him had withdrawn to the stars again. “Ben, I meant- I didn’t want- I wasn’t going to, I mean, say what- I wasn’t trying to make you mad.”
“I’m not mad,” he ground out, entirely contradicting everything in front of her, but she knew what he meant.
“It’s going to be a nice wedding, I think,” she mumbled, at a loss for what to say next. She longed for him, that was the problem, soaking her thoughts and days and waking and sleeping hours like water in soil, holding her together, washing her apart, feeding her slinger after slinger after slinger at parties where he was and wasn’t, in a life where he was and wasn’t; she was sick of it. Of it and with it. “Rose is- was- a slave like me, so she doesn’t know anything about weddings, and Finn says the First Order doesn’t have weddings either, so we’re all just kind of making it up. Leia’s helping a lot.”
“Good,” Ben said briefly, and she could feel him struggling, within himself, in the Force, struggling to calm himself, to speak to her softly, to contain what he was feeling and stay here and talk with her.
“But it’s, it’s just that… it’s hard too, sometimes,” she said equally softly, trying to help him, if she could, but also trying to say what she was feeling herself. “Because I don’t know if we could- I mean, for me- well, with not being a slave anymore, kind of, I still don’t know if that will be a thing, for me.”
He took in a long breath, let it out. “Planning weddings?”
“Having weddings. Well, a wedding. I mean, I assume just one wedding. If that’s, you know, if you could. Do that. If you wanted to. Someday.”
His eyes finally flicked back up to find hers, his expression dazed, as if he’d had a bit of slinger himself and it’d hit him all at once. In the bond he’d gone suddenly blank with shock. “'If I wanted to someday',” he repeated.
“I mean, Leia’s your mother, so you know about weddings, probably,” she said, wishing she still had the bottle in her hands if only for something to do, something to fiddle with. Instead she was just running her hands over the fabric of her clothes, making them grimier and grimier while she talked to Ben Solo about impossible things, things she never would have said while sober, things she never could have said that seemed to just trip and tumble out of her now like the words were rushing to get free while they had their chance. “But the First Order doesn’t have them according to Finn, and I don’t have them, still being a slave kind of in theory, so it seems- when I think about it- it seems a little–.”
“I would,” he said, straightening up, staring at her with an expression so changed from his rage and malice before it made her stomach swoop uneasily as though she’d made a hard turn either right or left, throwing her off-balance with the sensation that she was talking to a completely different person than she’d thought. That Ben had been all dark. This Ben was suddenly and completely all light, all glad surprise and gratification and hope, softening him almost as much as the slinger blurred him around the edges, the sunset’s strong desert light painting him in rose and gold, temporarily washing color into all the stark black and white. “Rey, I- I would, with you. For you. If you- if that- do you want it? That?”
“I mean, don’t you?” she asked, temporarily made shy by his response and by how he looked right now, how beautiful, and how near.
“Yes,” he breathed, a rush of emotion within him, within her. “Rey, I don’t- I couldn’t- it’s the only thing I want. It’s the only thing I- if I could only have one thing in the galaxy- if I could only want one thing ever again, ever in my life, I’d want- that. You.”
It was too much. It was too much and too little, at the same time, that he could say that and mean that and feel that, so much that it pushed it into her too, and be so far away, so out of reach, that he could look so here but be there when she needed him, wanted him, dreamed about him at night–.
“Ben,” she breathed, almost exactly the same as he had, a rush, a feeling as much as a word. “When- when I think about that- you know that I don’t, I don’t know anything about this, you know that? About how that works, about weddings, and- and having someone, being with someone, like that–.”
“I don’t care,” he said immediately, finality in his tone, as though that was the least important issue there could be when she was sure, suddenly and terribly sure, that it was the most important and that it had to be said, now, in this moment, while she still could.
“But- but Ben, you’re not thinking, you’re not thinking about this, about me,” she disagreed, hugging her arms around herself even though it was just as warm now as it had been a moment before. “We- slaves- we don’t want all of that. The, the being with someone. Not just because of how it happens,” she added quickly, heading him off as he tried to speak, tried, she was sure, to forbid her to bring that past life up again. “But slaves don’t want children. Because we don’t get to keep them. But isn’t it different now, for me? I mean, I could if I wanted, and if you wanted, now.”
“You could,” he agreed, an undercurrent of nerves and of something else she couldn’t name suddenly clouding his feelings in the bond. “If you wanted that, with me, I would.”
She swayed slightly, studying him. He’d seemed happy when she’d said the thing about the wedding, and she’d thought saying what she’d said about wanting children would be about the same but it wasn’t at all. She wished that she was sober, but briefly, just long enough to understand him but not long enough to interrupt this conversation before she could get it to wherever it was maybe going. “You don’t seem to like that,” she said finally.
“’Like that’?” he repeated, laughing under his breath in a sour way and clasping his hands behind his back, looking down at his feet. “Not really, no. I have no reason to believe I’d be a good father. It seems unlikely, if my past is anything to judge me by. But if it’s something you want I’d be willing to accommodate it,” he added, looking back up at her, a slight frown creasing the corners of his eyes.
She frowned back, weighing that in her mind, then sniffed. “Well, I don’t know what that means at all,” she said huffily. “I don’t know what 'accommodate’ has to do with it. If you don’t want a family with me you can just say.”
“Rey,” he sighed, but now she’d had more than enough of this conversation and turned away, a difficult maneuver to manage on a rock ledge only three side-to-side porgs wide but she managed it without falling down either the drop that was one Chewie from the ground or the drop that was one-and-a-half end-to-end X-wings from the ground, with only a very small Force push to keep herself from slipping. 'Accommodate’? Like… like she’d said something absurd but he’d bear with it for her sake. Well, and how special that made her. She felt tears prick at the corners of her eyes again as the slinger swung her mood like a pendulum, taking her from annoyance to humiliation between one breath and the next as she started down the ledge back to the place where she’d climbed her way to the top before. He would put up with having a family with her. He’d put up with having children if he really just had to, if she was going to pitch a fit any other way. She never should have said anything about it at all.
“Rey,” he sighed again, somewhere behind her, maybe actually him, maybe just an echo now, she wasn’t about to turn around and see which it was. And even if it was actually him, it wasn’t. Real Ben wasn’t much better than just an echo at the end of the day, real Ben just hurt a bit more, and made her sad a bit more, and made her want to kick something a bit more. She found the slope where she’d climbed up and started back down, using the Force fairly sloppily in finding handholds and footholds but still managing. She was more drunk than when she’d gone up, but also had two hands free, so it about evened out. Maybe a foot or two from the bottom she missed a step and slid down the last bit, landing on her backside in the sand, as if she’d sat down. It jarred her hard but the sand on this side was soft and it didn’t really hurt; it did make her bite her tongue, however, and that was enough to start the tears up all over again.
“Are you alright?” Ben asked softly from somewhere to her left. She shook her head, staring at the red stone in front of her, gone gray and murky in the twilight on this side of the ridge where the sunset couldn’t be seen.
“You could just say,” she said bitterly, feeling tears roll down her cheeks, dripping red-tinged from her chin as they picked up bits of this planet’s sand and dust smeared into her skin. “If you don’t want to. Or if you don’t want to with me.”
“There isn’t anyone I would have that with but you,” he replied in a tired-sounding voice, as though he was the one going drunk rock-climbing. “I just can’t fathom why you, or anyone, would think I could be a father.”
“So you don’t want to?” she said, looking down at her hands, dragging her fingers through the sand.
He hesitated then came towards her until he was standing nearly in front of her, still a couple of steps away, studying her as she leaned back to look at him. In the sunset he’d seemed almost like some kind of dream painting; now he looked like a shadow among other shadows, his blurred edges nearly indistinguishable from the gloom around them. “I wouldn’t say I don’t want to, Rey,” he said softly, “but I fear it. Can’t you feel how much I fear it?”
She hesitated, searching for him in the bond. She didn’t feel much fear from him, exactly; she knew what his fear felt like in its many forms, and this wasn’t the same as that, though she couldn’t say why or how.
“See?” he confirmed anyway, as though he could take her agreement for granted. “What would I have to teach a child, Rey? What could I give any son or daughter of mine? With Han and Luke and Snoke for examples in front of me,” he muttered, shaking his head, looking up as though he could see the same sky she saw as the sun finally set, allowing darkness to steal across the horizon. “Why would you want me for your child’s father?”
“You’re lying,” she accused, pushing herself to her feet.
“I’m not,” he replied in surprised tone, looking back down at her.
“I don’t feel fear in you, Ben Solo,” she said, squaring up to him, swallowing the sandy feeling in her mouth and throat that had suddenly come back with a vengeance. Damn slinger, and damn whoever had come up with that foul drink. “A little, maybe, but you just don’t want to.”
“Is that what you think?”
“I feel…” she considered for a moment, her head aching with the strain of it. Where was her bed? She wanted to go to sleep, not stand here having conversations going nowhere with people who weren’t anywhere. “Shame,” she decided. “It feels like shame. And you’re sad. And you think I think things that I don’t think, which isn’t very fair of you, because I’ve never told you what you think even when you think dumb things that don’t make sense to anyone.”
“I’m ashamed that I can’t give you that,” he said, as though he was being forced to say it, as though it was a monumental task to even get out the words. “I’m ashamed that I’m not able to give you that.”
“You- you- Ben, you make things up!” Rey shouted, her voice ringing off the spires, her tears clear as they stained the front of her tunic now that they’d tracked through most of the dirt on her cheeks. “No one’s ever said you wouldn’t be a good father. You’d be a great father! You’d- you’d love your children. You’d take care of them, and protect them, and teach them, and be honest with them and patient with them– I know you would.”
“And how do you know any of that?”
“Well, because that’s you,” she said, befuddled by the question, by the idea that any of what she’d said was something she had to somehow prove to him, now, while she was drunk, and kind of lost, and it was getting so dark that Ben was blending more and more into the nighttime and she half expected him to just fade away into the darkness and become part of it. “That’s what you’re like. I mean, you’re very temperamental,” she added, just in case he thought she was giving him a free pass when she wasn’t. “And moody. And your whole First Order thing is all wrong, and you’re stubborn and the most, most irritating person I’ve ever met, and you never think about other people’s feelings and you’ll probably say dumb things sometimes, but that’s only part of you. And it’s the only part of you you ever see.”
The tears really were falling now, making it difficult to get out what she was trying to say as her mouth tried to screw up on her and her head ached and ached, and her whole front was a blotchy red and white and she was going to have a terrible time washing her things tomorrow, but something about him felt clearer in the bond, lighter than it had been. “Ben, you’re not just the bad things about you,” she tried again. “And you’re not just the good things either, but you’re good when you love someone, or at least you can be. You try to be. And that’s something, isn’t it?”
“Is that what you see in me?” he asked, his voice soft and his eyes soft, two black marks in his face like pieces of the darkness themselves. “Is that what you think?”
“Well, it’s true. I mean, that’s what you’re like with me and you love me, don’t you?”
She’d meant it just to prove her point, not thinking, and the thoughts were out and real and said before she could consider that it was the first time that word had come up, the first time it’d been used between them, certainly the first time she’d ever asked him anything about it. For a moment they just stared at each other, her appalled, him considering, and night bore down on the planet and above her the first stars came out.
“Yes, Rey,” Ben said finally. “Yes, I do. I love you.”
She let out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding, looking away from him and swiping her hand across her face, smudging the tears away as much as she could. “Well, that’s how I know, then,” she said a happy feeling rising in her despite everything, making her smile even though her lips were still trembling, even though a couple more tears fell. “So you have to give yourself a chance, Ben. You have to give us a chance to try things you don’t think you’ll be good at. I mean, it’s not like I know anything about mothering,” she pointed out, turning back to him.
“You’ll be an exceptional mother.”
“Not necessarily,” she sniffled, but he smiled at her, a soft, genuine, Ben smile that seemed to make the world brighter, better, warmer, the stars shining down on them like a blessing from wherever he really was.
“Should I tell you what you’re really like, the same way you told me?” he teased gently, taking a step towards her. “You’d love our children too. You’d give them your strength, your fearlessness, your determination. You’d teach them all the things I can’t; how to care for others, how to stand your ground against anyone, how to trust and how to heal and how to love. Because that’s what you’re like with me and you love me, don’t you?”
“Well, I’m thinking about it,” she muttered as he stopped just shy of her, making her look up to see him. “I might be able to accommodate it, you know.”
“Loving me?” he clarified, his smile breaking into a knowing grin, the blurriness of his outline making him and the night sky blend together above her so that the stars seemed for a moment to be a part of him, threaded into his hair and resting on his shoulders, a silvery, gleaming, impossible man, on the other side of the galaxy but also loving her here.
“Maybe,” she allowed, smiling back, rubbing her arms as the night’s chill began to steal over her, making use of the wetness of her tunic to remind her that it was time to find shelter.
“Do you love me, Rey?” he asked, as softly as the sky, as the breeze, the stars themselves asking as they gilded him and turned him into one of them.
“Of course I love you, Ben,” she replied, just as softly. “Of course I do.”
They stood there like that, together, silently, staring into each other’s eyes as the bond between them filled with a pure and nameless emotion, a shared mix of gladness and need and love and wonder, wonder at each other, wonder at a galaxy in which this could exist, in which two people could find one another and feel so much, care so much. It seemed almost as though it shouldn’t have been possible, as though it shouldn’t have been allowed, this precious thing they shared, and in the bond their wonder transformed into a profound gratitude, each to the other and both to the universe for giving them this.
“Marry me, Rey,” Ben said at last, whispering, as though he feared to say it too loud and disrupt this perfect moment.
“I’ve already asked you,” she whispered back, grinning.
“And now I’m asking you. So say yes.”
“Yes,” she agreed.
“I will give you anything you want,” he promised, and it felt different, like a promise made right now, in the midst of this feeling, with the stars as their witness, was as much an act of binding together as the Force bond itself had been. “And if a family is what you want, I will give you that in the best way I am capable of. I don’t know what that is, or what that means, but if it’s what you want from me, it’s yours.”
“We’ll learn together,” Rey promised back. “I’ll help you, and you’ll help me. We’ll be together, Ben. We’ll be together and it will always feel this way. Always.”
“I don’t know how,” he admitted.
“We’ll make it real,” she told him, sure, entirely, as if a Force vision had told her so, as if she could see the inevitable path of their lives, coming together and staying that way. “We’ll find a way.”
He looked at her, his face inches from hers and somewhere far away, the desert night coming down to earth to become hers, to fill her heart with all this emotion, to fill her life with all this love. Not just his love– hers. She’d never loved, really loved, anyone or anything, until she’d known Ben. And he looked at her and Rey could tell that he knew.
“Where are you, Rey?” he asked.
“If I told you, would you come to me?”
“Not tonight,” he said, smiling. “But soon.” And then, between one blink and the next, he was gone, and there were only stars and empty sky in the place where he had been.
Rey swayed, surprised by the sudden absence, almost stumbling but catching herself in the next moment. The planet was quiet around her; the Rebel party, which she’d forgotten about completely, was still going strong, and she realized that as long as her time with Ben had felt it hadn’t been that long at all. Just one sunset, one sunset and a little nighttime, and that had been all it took to say so much, to feel so much, to cry and to rage and to agree to marry Ben Solo, and hear him agree to marry her.
There was no point wondering about the how’s. Useless. A waste of time. She turned, wending her way towards where she thought the shelters were, thinking, thinking, thinking, through the blur of the slinger and the headache that kept pounding at her, tripping up her steps. If she thought about how’s she’d only give herself bad dreams so instead she thought about when’s, when she and Ben would be together, when she and Ben would have a family, when she and Ben would get to feel like this for real, in the same place, every day, every night, and all the hours in between. Would the bond still exist then? Or would it fade when they didn’t need it anymore, when their nearness and their love and their eternity together meant they were never apart, never far enough away to ever miss each other like they had before?
She found the path at last, stumbling over it between one spire and the next, a tamped-down track glowing faintly silver from how tightly the sand was packed here, running on to where she needed to go. She looked up, studying the stars with narrowed eyes, but their twinkling light was all innocence. If they were guiding her home they didn’t seem to want any credit for it. The spires, however, leaned toward her as suspiciously as ever, their faceless heights smug with everything they’d seen.
“You just keep it to yourselves,” she muttered to them in a warning tone, turning towards the shelters and her bed. They didn’t respond, but she liked them better that way. The stars, however, kept her company as they always had. It was still a terrible kind of planet, but these were desert stars, as close and as familiar, as far and as real, as the man she was going to marry someday.