Chapter Text
She’s screaming. A visceral, yet empty sound, a punch at the air with no strength behind it.
Kylo Ren’s TIE fighter Silencer smolders before her in a twisted heap of melted metal and steaming rain-licked flames.
She has already flung every small rock or pebble within her reach, her hands now resorting to ripping great fistfuls of wet grass and dirt from the ground around her and flinging them at the smoking TIE, each clump punctuating another frustrated yell.
She is soaked through, and would be freezing if she could feel anything but the consuming tearing inside her, the feeling of her own soul being tugged and shredded by great fingers---old, shriveled, claw-like---scraping in time with the pounding of her heart against her ribcage trying to break her very bones. Her blood is boiling and raging, fire in her veins burning her from the inside out. Her throat is worn raw from screaming, trying to force the fire out through her mouth, her breathing now coming in ragged gasps and sobs. Her muddy fingers jerk to her hip, grasping the cold metal of the lightsaber’s hilt. She glares at it. I’m not your hero.
Her dirty fingernails scrape along the casing. No one wants her, no one cares about Rey from Nowhere. The Jedi, the Resistance, all of them. They just wanted a hero, a vessel for their hope. But that isn’t me. They all must have thought it all so prodigious, finding a desert scavenger, a no one so empty and ready for them to fill with all of their problems, their expectations, their hope. But they didn’t realize that she had her own soul, one that was now forced to the furthest corner of her being, trapped and ignored. Alone.
The loneliness of the desert was nothing to this feeling. She knew why Kylo Ren’s saber raged and flickered so wildly. He felt like this all the time, conflicted, abandoned, lost. It was a desperate feeling, an isolating force. She understood his explosive anger. How could anyone keep such pain inside indefinitely. They couldn’t. She couldn’t.
She winds her arm back ready to fling the saber into the heart of the fire, but a tug in her gut, a steadying hand reaching through the Force, freezes her on the edge of motion. His voice brushes through her mind before the sound of it reaches her ears.
“Wait.”
She wants to be angry, even angrier than she is now, something that feels quite impossible. She wants to turn all her anger back against him and lash him with it, striking over and over until he leaves her alone. Because everything is too much. She wants to scream at him to go away, to kill her, to...to...do something. Something to make it all just stop.
But she doesn’t speak. Doesn’t strike. Doesn’t run. Doesn’t move.
Rey can feel him approaching, his heavy boots sinking into the muddy Ahch-To soil. She doesn’t bother asking how he found her. She had stolen his TIE to get here so she wouldn’t be surprised if it had a tracker of some sort. But beyond that, he always seemed to find her, despite his claim that she was hard to track down. It was irritating and inconvenient and right now, strangely comforting.
He stops a few feet behind her. She wants to hide her red eyes and tear stains. She wonders if he heard her screaming. She knows he must have. She wants to be embarrassed, humiliated even. But there is nothing. His presence has burned out the fire of her conflict for the moment. She feels empty, drained. Nothing, you’re nothing. And she thinks for a moment that maybe it is better to be nothing.
But not to me.
Rey doesn’t turn to face him, she doesn’t appear to have heard his whisper through the bond. She is too lost in her own conflict. The gravity of her pain tugs downward and she sinks to her knees. Mud stains her leggings, seeping through to join the chilly rain percolating against her skin. Her hands, still clutching Anakin’s saber, fall to her lap.
He can feel every emotion in her, each one a shard of glass, shrapnel embedded in her bones, her mind, her spirit. The sorrow and confusion, the frustration, the anger--- all of it radiates off of her in waves, an overwhelming tide pressing against Ben’s mind through their bond.
He is glad she has not tried to attack him yet. With his saber now at the bottom of the sea he doesn’t foresee a duel with an emotionally compromised, lightsaber wielding Jedi playing out in his favor. Yet it is disconcerting, seeing her like this. He knows Rey does not belong on her knees before anyone, him least of all .
He can see her shoulders shaking, from cold or tears he does not know, but neither are promising options. Ben’s fists open and close at his sides, fingers rubbing together as he wrestles with the strange, not entirely unwelcome, desire to reach out to her.
She feels him move away from her, walking off towards the TIE he’d used to follow her. Her limbs are too heavy, and the pain pulses again, still hot in her veins, chaining her to the ground. She doesn’t even flinch when he approaches again. He stands barely two strides behind, looming over her. A mountain over a tree. She wonders if he might kill her. Her mind lingers on the question of whether or not she would stop him if he tried. She feels him tense, both physically and internally, as this thought flows across the bond to him.
He had not attacked her on the wreckage of the Death Star; not one of his moves during their duel was an offensive strike. He’d executed only the necessary blocks and parries to keep her raging strikes from slicing him through. He hadn’t wanted to fight her. Something she can feel him emphasize with a light brush against her memory now. It is an odd thought, but then perhaps not. He had asked her to join him. To be his ally. To be his...something.
She knows they both felt the loss of Leia through the Force in that moment on the wreckage. Their grief mingles together in the bond now, as it had in the moments after the initial shock. Rey had regretted striking him; she had run him through with his own saber while he was distracted. It was wrong. It wasn’t her way. She had felt wrong for the entirety of the fight, like someone was inside her body twisting her limbs on marionette strings. She had been striking blind, unconcerned with who or what was on the receiving end, like a wild animal lashing out in pain. But the clear voice of Leia whispering her son’s name had cut away the haze of rage, severing the puppet strings inside her, freeing her of the dark influence. But in the aftermath Rey was left soaked and drained, empty and ashamed, her hand on the hilt of the saber that had burned a hole through Leia’s son’s chest and a matching one through her soul.
Anyone else would have died instantly from such a wound. But a fragile thread of life had held him there and Rey had known it must be Leia. And she had never been more grateful. She recalls, again, his face in that moment. He’d looked so lost, so innocent. Just a child who had lost his mother, the same face she had worn watching her parents fly away all those years ago. She could see the ghost of another emotion in his eyes in that moment, even when he wasn’t looking at her. Betrayal, hurt. The same look from the throne room when she had reached for the lightsaber instead of his hand.
The moment she saw his wound, her remaining defenses had crumbled. If she was cracking before, she shattered then. There was no strength left in her to put up walls, to keep him from reading her every thought, her every feeling. Even now she knew he could feel her exhaustion, her conflict, her rage, her grief, her fear, all of it as he could then. Healing him drained her further than she thought possible; she was still unsure how she had managed to stay conscious long enough to reach Ahch-To at all.
The next memory has its own gravity, pressing her so hard into the ground that she has to brace her hands in the mud to keep from falling forward; the lightsaber slips into the grass and rolls away as she recalls how her traitorous mouth had given him the last thing that was hers and hers alone. The last secret she had kept behind her thickest walls.
“I did want to take your hand...Ben’s hand.”
And there it was. The truth.
It was right, noble even, to want to save him, to want to retrieve him from the grasp of the dark side and return him triumphantly to the light. But it was also a lie.
Somewhere along the way her motivations had changed. She no longer cared what side he was on. She no longer cared what side she was on. She knew only that she wanted them to be on the same one. And if that meant going to his side instead of bringing him to hers, there was a part of her that felt that would be just as good. But she had known it was wrong. Wrong to want that. Wrong to be content with such a choice. Yet, even the final straw that kept her from taking his hand was a selfish one. She’d sensed his instability, known that the life he was offering would be the death of them both. Known she would lose the flash of Ben Solo she had finally found to Kylo Ren and then she would be lost along with him. No. That was Kylo Ren’s offer behind Ben’s hand. She would not go along and watch anyone, including Kylo Ren, take Ben from her.
She had been startled, afraid of the sudden possessiveness with which she had regarded Ben Solo in that moment. She didn’t want him to belong to the dark side, not because it was evil or wrong, but because she wanted him to belong to her. With her.
Unable to stay and face his reaction to the truth her of selfishness alongside everything else warring inside her, she’d fled. Both in the throne room and on the Death Star she had run away.
And he had followed.
Now Ben stands no more than two feet behind her. His presence cast over her, a shadow not reliant on sunlight. Her thoughts and emotions beat away at him, tidal waves against sea cliffs.
The grief of his mother’s loss still hangs around him, clinging to him like his soaked clothes. Her grief mingles with it. He pushes it away, allowing it to stand beside him, separate but not far off. He knows he can’t do anything to help either of them if he lets it hold him too tight.
He watches her thoughts play freely across her mind, the bond open, her will too weak to put up walls against him, just like on the wreckage. He senses the memory of her desire to go with him. He allows it to wash over him, a quiet warmth taking root in his bones.
She had wanted to take his hand. Wanted to join him.
Power was the wrong thing to offer her; he knows it now. Rey didn’t want a galaxy. Rey wanted a home. Rey wanted someone to hold on to her and never let go. She wanted someone to come into her life and take root, grow strong, and stubbornly refuse to be dug up. He’d chosen the wrong angle. Chosen to appeal to her as a hero rather than a human. Yes, Rey was a hero, maybe even his hero. But being a hero couldn’t fix loneliness. Real, marrow-deep, loneliness, the kind etched in muscle and bone, the kind that needed a lifetime of companionship and love to heal.
He gathers from her memories that the temptation of his offer had not been the power to be heroic, to influence, but rather to be by someone’s side. To have someone be by her side. To take a hand, not as a contract of power, but as a gesture of connectedness, of comfort.
He can see now that Rey had, even for the briefest moment, desired to put aside the right thing, the good thing, the heroic thing in favor of the one thing she wanted most. The one thing Ben Solo, not Kylo Ren, had to give. And the guilt was eating her alive.
The guilt of a hero who stopped caring about being one when offered her greatest wish. She had wanted to go with him, light or dark it had not mattered---a thought that caught his breath up and tied almost giddy knots in his stomach. He had once told her she was not alone, and she had believed him. Trusted him, even, to be someone who would not allow her to feel alone. And the temptation of never feeling alone again had almost been enough to make her abandon the fight to bring him to the light.
He could tell that her admission of these things to him on the wreckage of the Death Star was no small thing. The shame attached to the memory, even now, is unmistakable. He finds, strangely, that this sparks the greatest hatred for the Resistance he has ever felt. They had placed her on a pedestal, hailed her as their hero, and added far more than the recommended dose of responsibility. They had put this pressure on her to always choose good over herself. It made him think of Snoke, Palpatine, even Hux. With them there was always some greater cause, something more important than what he felt or wanted. He knew how she felt, probably more than anyone else.
A dyad indeed.
She shivers again.
He steps closer, crouching behind her. He unfurls his cloak, retrieved from the TIE, at least a little drier than the both of them, and drapes it over her shoulders.
He feels her force signature flicker as he waves his hand, tipping her mind gently into unconsciousness. It doesn’t take much. He catches her by the shoulders as she tips forward, and draws her into his arms as he had in the woods after their first meeting. He extends his hand again, summoning his grandfather’s lightsaber and tucking it into his belt before rising from the mud with Rey in his arms.
With a gentle probing he extracts the location of the huts Luke once inhabited and sets off towards them. Smoke from the burning heap that was once his faithful TIE Sliencer curls behind him, a faint echo of some dark voice floats with it. The Wayfinder. He will return for it once Rey is settled and warm. She is his priority right now.
He marches along, long strides carrying him across the muddy hills; he feels Rey’s stir. He pauses, adjusting her in his arms and tucking his cape around her more snugly.
Her hand comes to rest against his chest, just over his heart as it pounds behind his ribs, leaping towards her fingers. He forgets to breathe. But then the fitful expression twisting her features fades slightly, creases of worry smoothing away with each beat of his heart against her fingertips.
No one but the sea catches his smile.