Chapter Text
Ben strode through the hangar, ducking out of the way of a shower of sparks that rained from an x-wing’s cockpit, his boots clicking against the duracrete floor. The enormous body of the Falcon came into view. Several metal plates lay scattered in its shadow, blackened by blaster fire. Part of the hull still emitted a thin line of smoke. A head popped up as he stopped to inspect the underside of the ship.
“How is she?” he asked, drawing a loving hand across its metal surface.
Rose jumped down, wiped her hands on her jumpsuit, and pushed her hair out of her face. “She’ll live,” she said and patted the ship’s side. “The Falcon’s a strong one. You can’t kill her.” Rose eyed him. “Which is what I told you this morning, Ben. What is it?”
Ben sighed and leaned back against the hull of the ship. He ran a hand over his face. “I can’t sit still,” he admitted.
He looked up when she put a hand on his shoulder. The touch was still rare enough to surprise him. “They’ll be back soon.” Worry lines creased her face. She couldn’t promise that, no matter how much she wanted to believe Finn would return. “I’m sure you have important things to do, but I could always use a helping hand.”
He took the wrench she offered and put his foot on the first rung of the ladder to follow her up onto his beloved ship, but someone tapped on his shoulder. “Captain Solo, sir, General Organa needs to see you.”
Ben sighed and looked up at Rose, who held out her hand for the wrench. She shrugged. “What Leia wants, Leia gets. Next time I’ll get you covered in engine grease.”
“Thank you,” he said and meant it. He left behind the sharp smell of metal and the grind of gears for the relative quiet of Leia Organa’s command center. He ignored the rebels typing quietly on holoscreens and stopped where his mother stared at a projected map of the galaxy. As he watched, she tapped a small icon and moved it to the other side of a solar system.
“Since you showed up, I assume they haven’t returned.” She took his silence as proof. “How are you, Ben?”
“Fine, mother. You wanted something?”
She turned to scrutinize him. “There’s a Destroyer headed into the Leena System,” she said with a frown.
His blood ran cold and he was momentarily distracted. They had a squadron deployed in the Leena System to deal with some minor issues. “Did you alert the squadron?”
“They’re radio silent. The System is too close to the First Order. The message could be intercepted.” Leia shook her head.
“We have to warn them,” Ben said. He braced his hands against the table and thought. “Send a pilot.”
Leia thought about it. “They won’t clear the system before the Destroyer’s in range.”
“They can move behind the moon of Sinora. They won’t be able to contact us, but they’ll be off the radar until the Destroyer passes,” he suggested.
Leia frowned at the projection, where she had moved the icon behind the moon. “Do you think it’ll work?”
“I did it myself once. It’ll work,’ he said with more confidence than he felt. Hiding one ship, even one the size of the Falcon, was far different from hiding an entire squadron. Leia finally nodded and instructed him to set it up.
“I know you’re not fine,” his mother said to his back as he turned away. “Don’t lose hope.”
Hope was thin on the ground for him. It had been for almost a year. He found a good pilot and relayed the mission. His first choice would have been Dameron, as incredible as that seemed, but he was still off on his mission. Ben normally would’ve gone himself on something so dangerous, but he couldn’t leave. Not now. His task done, he considered returning to Rose and the Falcon to quiet his pacing, but what he really wanted, if only for a minute, was silence, to contemplate what it would mean for him if this mission failed – or succeeded – and let free the pain he kept chained up. He headed for his quarters instead.
A few rebels sent him glances along the way. Those looks had never really gone away, even in the two years since he’d given up Kylo Ren forever and defected to the Resistance. The relief he expected when he closed the door to his quarters didn’t come. He crossed the room and took out a worn box. Inside rested his lightsaber, which he used only rarely now. The space beside it, where Rey’s should have been, was empty.
Ben closed his eyes and fought the rising pain, like a stab to the heart. When he’d finally cleared all the interrogations and skepticism of joining the Rebellion, Leia had assigned him single quarters, so no one would kill him in his sleep, although spare few had single quarters. But Rey had soon solved that problem by effectively moving in only weeks later. Evidence of her presence still lingered around the room: that cloak she threw over the chair that drove him mad, her staff in the corner, a pair of boots still pushed halfway under the bed. He’d never had the heart to move them.
Ben sighed and dropped his head to his hands. Almost a year. Almost a year since Rey had gone missing on a mission. That had been bad enough. Worse was finding the Falcon wrecked on some moon and her hastily scrawled note pinned under the controls. He pulled out the wrinkled paper, so worn it had almost fallen apart and the words were barely readable.
Ben,
I know you’ll search for me and I know you’ll find her. The First Order shot me down (replace the calibrator), they’ll be here in a minute. The data is in the smuggler’s place. I’m sorry. Don’t look for me.
I love you.
He clenched that stupid note in his fist. The protesting paper crunched and creased, and he hurried to smooth it out. He hadn’t listened. He’d been searching for her ever since.
Ben remembered stepping down from the Falcon when he returned from his first mission alone, during which he’d been cornered by some stormtroopers and almost killed. There was a decent crowd gathered to witness his return from his first solo mission, but he saw only Rey’s furious face. She marched right up the ramp and slapped him across the face. He held his burning jaw as she yelled at him.
“How could you risk yourself like that? You idiot! You could’ve been caught! And then what?” He waited through her whole speech until she finally fell silent, grabbed him by his shirt, and kissed him before the whole rebel alliance. It was the first time she’d ever kissed him in public. The entire resistance gasped. He’d received death threats for weeks.
A knock at the door brought him back to the present. He whirled and pressed the button to open his door. Poe Dameron stood there, chest heaving.
Ben glanced over the pilot to make sure he was unharmed before grasping him by the shoulders. “Rey?” Poe nodded.
The pilot filled him in as they practically sprinted down the hall. “It was almost too easy…yes, we’re sure we weren’t followed…we haven’t gotten much out of her. She’s confused and dehydrated. Yes, the healers are attending to her now. Finn and Rose are with her.”
Poe stopped outside the door to one of the medbay rooms and gestured for him to enter. Ben hesitated. It had been almost a year since he’d seen his bright, beautiful Jedi. He took a deep breath and entered. Finn and Rose sat huddled together, the former clutching one of Rey’s hands. Healers and Med-Droids bustled on the other. And Rey…
She looked so small between them, bacta patches plastered over bruises and superficial cuts, new scars peppering her pale face. Her eyes were closed, sleeping. Ben felt his knees buckle and braced his hand on the doorjamb to keep from falling.
“Rey,” the word escaped him involuntarily, but her eyes snapped open at the sound of his voice. Her hazel eyes locked onto him where he hesitated in the doorway.
And then she screamed.
Rose and Finn jumped to hold her back as she thrashed against them and tried to get up. “Monster,” she screamed. “I’ll kill you!” The force bent around him and one of the windows shattered.
He stared at the twisted anger of her face, so unfamiliar now. She had said those words to him before so many years ago. She continued to fight to get to him, to throttle him where he stood.
Ben left with his heart in more pieces than before.
~ ~ ~
“It appears that her memory has been wiped, sir,” Rey’s lead healer said to him. Poe sat with his head in his hands. Ben paced and tried to check his rage. Rose and Finn were present too, now that Rey had fallen into a fitful, bacta-induced sleep.
“How much of it?” he asked.
It’s unclear right now. When she’s more stable, we’ll run some memory tests and see what she can recall,” the healer said. Ben couldn’t remember her name.
“She remembered us,” Poe offered. “Even Rose.”
Just not me , Ben thought. Or at least everything that had happened in the last two years. He shook himself. “How is she otherwise?”
“Her current wounds are superficial and the bacta will heal them quickly,” she said in a measured tone.
Ben stopped his pacing and fixed her with the type of stare that set most people running. “Her current wounds?”
The healer winced. Sweets. That was her name, he remembered suddenly. “She has older wounds as well that we’re working on healing.”
His insides twisted. Hux’s famous cruelty. “What wounds?”
Healer Sweets swallowed hard. “There’s evidence of torture, sir,” she choked out as if afraid he would pull his famous lightsaber and temper from nowhere. “Some burns, scar tissue, bones broken and reset repeatedly.”
He fought to contain the rising bile and anger in his throat. He recalled her at the hands of Snoke, twisted and tortured and pleading for his help. She’d had so much hope, even then. Hope that he would see the error of his ways and return to her and the light. At the time, he’d failed her, as he’d failed her every time before that. But it hadn’t taken him long to realize his mistake, the one he once thought irreparable. That old wound opened in his chest again and ached like a lance through his heart. He’d thought those moments behind them. He’d thought he’d never again have to see the look of hatred in the glances Rey sent him.
He would have traded every one of their good memories to free Rey from that kind of torture.
As it turned out, Rey remembered a lot of things. For instance, she remembered Finn, but she also remembered Poe and Rose, whom she hadn’t met until after Snoke’s death. She remembered his lightsaber through Han’s chest and leaving him scarred in the snow. She even remembered Crait and Sorice, the outer-rim planet they’d been stationed on before this hunk of rock.
What she didn’t remember, it seemed, was him. At least, anything positive about him. And she certainly didn’t remember him joining the Resistance. Or loving her.
The healer—a different one this time, he’d recognized her as the head medic—had told him that Rey had to remain unaware of their prior relationship. “It’s what’s best for her,” she’d stated with a matter-of-fact tone and a sympathetic look. “She has gaps in her memory from the last year and is trying to deal with the trauma and readjust to life here. It’ll confuse her if we tell her she loved a man whom she thinks is her enemy now.”
Ben winced at the word enemy but nodded. “I get it,” he growled at the innocent healer. “Don’t tell her.”
She patted him on the shoulder, which he thought was very brave of her, and said, “I know this must be very difficult, but don’t give up on her. There’s a chance she could regain some or all of her memories with time.”
A hollow chance. They both knew this wasn’t amnesia. It was too selective for that. No, Hux had purged her memory of their good times and left only the bad. To hurt him, to punish him, to cripple him and the rebellion. To break her. He could have killed her, but his malicious brain had decided it was worse to send her back to him in pieces. And Ben thought maybe Hux was right. Maybe it was worse to see that strong, radiant woman shatter. Rey had survived so much on her own, but he wasn’t sure she had survived Hux.
“Do whatever’s best for her,” he snapped as he turned away from the healer and shrugged off her comfort. “I don’t care what it costs. If you need something, ask.”
He closed the refresher door behind him, dropped his shirt, and punched the wall. The sterile metal buckled where his fist connected with it and he swore as the pain radiated from his knuckles. The water of the ‘fresher’s shower cascaded down his back as he stumbled into it and leaned against the wall. A memory sprang before his clenched eyes unbidden.
~ ~ ~
The force connection that had sprung up between them had come as a surprise. A breeze had ghosted his back and his shoulders stiffened as the fresh wind carried the sense of her into his stale rooms. It took him a long moment to turn around and confirm that she really stood there, half in his chambers like a phantom. Her hard eyes surveyed him unflinching, her feet braced apart as if ready to run or fight.
“I thought the connection was closed,” he said softly. He didn’t try to put his mask back on. She’d seen it slip from his face already. Surprise registered on her face.
“Me too,” she admitted. With a heavy sigh, she came and sat down in his stiff-backed chair. He suddenly wished he’d gotten a better one as her shoulders slumped. His snide comment got lodged in his throat. He sat down across from her on his bed.
“Why’d you do it, Ben?” Her voice was quiet, as if the words had slipped out despite her best intentions. “Why couldn’t you give it up?”
He thought he understood what she couldn’t say. Why’d you choose the power over me? He didn’t have an answer. “You couldn’t either,” he reminded her, although he knew it was petty.
“These are my friends, Ben,” she said, and her voice was rough. “The only friends I’ve ever had. The only home I’ve ever had. The people you’re with don’t care about you.”
“How would you know?” he snapped and hated how childish he sounded. All hail the Supreme Leader. “I’m not soft. I don’t need your compassion.”
Rey didn’t flinch at his tone. “Your eyes are lonely. Everybody needs someone.”
He wanted to deny her words but found he couldn’t. He’d been Supreme Leader for two months, but his days had gotten no easier, his nights no quieter. He jolted from sleep at least once a week to the image of his lightsaber through Rey’s chest, the words, I’ll destroy her , ringing in his ears and burning like acid on his tongue.
“I can’t go back there, Rey,” he said finally.
“Why?”
“I can’t face them after…” he swallowed hard. “After what I’ve done. I don’t deserve their forgiveness or yours. They won’t accept me, and they shouldn’t.”
Rey got up and moved to sit beside him. “I’m here, Ben. I’ll convince them.” Her eyes were earnest. He wanted to believe in the hope in them. “I’ll tell you where we are. You can come to us.”
Ben stared at her. What he could do with that information…a dying flicker of Kylo Ren wanted to use it to break open the Resistance. To show her how misplaced her trust really was. “You would trust me with that? Why?”
Rey laid her hand over his. “I feel the good in you, Ben. Stop fighting it. Come home.”
To me. He heard the unspoken promise ring between them. It sounded so tempting. Home. With her to welcome him. Finally, a place to belong. Peace. But he shook his head. “I can’t. Not yet.”
“Why?” Her voice bled her disappointment. She pulled her hand from his shoulder, and he belatedly regretted the loss of contact.
“There are things I have to do here first. For the Resistance. I can take them down from within.” He’d been considering it for a while, as the lack of her presence grew harder and harder to bear. And top of that list was killing Hux.
“You don’t have to prove yourself, Ben. Not to me,” she said.
He clenched her hand in his and felt it as she began to fade. “I need to prove it to me.”
She left him with the ghost of her hand in his and four words, “come home soon, Ben.”
Almost six months later, he felt her presence again. This time, he was in the hold of a small ship in an attempt to get some privacy and meditate to re-center himself. Rey’s presence rushed in like a spring breeze brushing his face, an odd sensation in the sterile hold with nothing outside but the emptiness of space. Her hand rested on his slumped shoulder.
“Ben,” she said. He caught her hand in his.
“Rey,” he breathed. Her name came out like a prayer.
She circled him until she could see his face and he hers. She placed a soft hand against his cheek, pale in contrast to her tanned and calloused skin, and traced the deep circles under his eyes. “Ben, you have to stop this.”
“I’m almost done,” he tried to protest.
“No. You’re going to kill yourself,” she insisted with tears in her eyes. “Please,” she whispered. The word tugged him deep inside. He remembered his own desperation when he had uttered the same word to her.
“It’ll be worth it.”
She braced her hands on either side of his face. “Nothing is worth this.”
“If I don’t kill Hux,” he said, closing his eyes. “He’ll haunt us until we die.”
“Let him try,” she said with resolve. He opened his eyes to see the stony set of her face. “We’ll deal with him together. You’ve done enough.”
Ben met her eyes and felt the same resolve settling into his bones. “Where are you?” It was the first time he’d ever allowed himself to ask. A small smile flickered over her face.
“Sorice,” she said. A planet on the outer rim. But this ship was fast. He could be there by midnight on her planet.
A wave of unease turned his stomach. “You’ll be there?”
In answer, she stretched up on her toes and kissed him. “Come home to me, Ben.”
The Force pulled her away again and left him with the ghost of a kiss he hadn’t had time to return and renewed determination. He pulled his lightsaber from his belt and stalked towards the cockpit.
~ ~ ~
Ben felt the water droplets strike his skin and wished fervently that he had stayed to complete that mission long ago. If he had killed Hux way back then, maybe Rey would have come home too.