Chapter Text
The boy from somewhere has fat on his arms, in his cheeks. One glance tells her that he’s used to eating regularly and she bets he won’t last a month.
But he does.
For almost a year, they're rivals, fighting over scrap and pushing each other out of the way of discovery. She cracks the end of her staff against his head and rips out a handful of that pretty hair and he fights back just as furiously. But then everything changes in the belly of a crash, when he finally gets his knife against her throat the second hers threatens to gut him.
“You know, we’d work better together than apart, scavenger.”
He’s smart, book-smart, but doesn't know a thing about getting a solid deal with Plutt and she’s trade-smart, but a lot of the time not strong enough to pull the heavy, more valuable salvage out of the walls and floors of the Destroyers.
“What’s your name?”
“Ben.”
“Nice to meet you, Ben. Pull your weight or I’ll slit your throat myself.”
Rey’s rope snaps one day in the second year of their partnership and she plummets, leg cracking against the sandy floor, and she knows she’s going to die. He’s going to leave her, she’s a liability, she won’t survive out here; especially since the early signs of the X’us’R’iia were tearing across the desert this morning. If he leaves now, she’s sure he’ll just barely make it back before the storm hits their shelter.
He doesn't leave. He refuses to leave.
The winds howl and thunder booms closer and closer to where they are but he boards everything up as well as he can and they hunker down together; the wind throwing sand in at them and lightning showing through the cracks in the makeshift door. She clings to him, hours into the blinding darkness, and he never lets go. He covers her body with his own when the sand comes rushing in and the lighting forms jagged shards of glass just yards away.
They somehow make it out alive, despite being mostly-buried in the sand and severely dehydrated after spending sixty-seven hours in the heart of the X’us’R’iia. Her leg doesn't truly recover after that, having not been set properly after the break; and she’s afraid he’ll leave her since she can’t scavenge as well as she used to.
But he doesn’t.
He moves into the AT-AT, and he stays .
And for the first time in so long, Rey isn’t alone.
“Why did you come to Jakku?”
Ben goes still where he’s bent over their solar lantern, carefully repairing one of its broken connectors. It flickers to life and he sets it down onto their table, picking up a cloth to wipe the oil from his skin.
“Ben,” she presses, shifting forward on the stool he built last year, “Talk to me.”
“I’m hiding from my past,” He whispers, just loud enough for her to hear over the night winds.
“What will you do if it finds you?”
He doesn't answer that, she’s not sure she wants to know the answer anymore.
. . .
The sun rises behind the X’us’R’iia on the first day of the third year.
“Why do you stay here?”
“I could ask the same of you.”
Their hammocks are now hung together, swaying gently in the wind that leaks in through the door from the storm. If they weren't this close she’s doubt she’d be able to see him, the dust and sand clouding the air from the storm barely being kept back from their lungs by cloth wrapped over their noses and mouths.
“I’m waiting for my family to come back for me.”
His eyes are searching, burning into her own with an intensity that forces her to look away.
“You already know, don't you?” That they aren't coming back hangs between them unsaid. She turns away from him, pulling the blanket farther up over her head.
“They’re coming back for me! It's just taking them a little longer than they thought.”
It comes out far too close to a sob to be the sharp retort she had intended it to be, and she hears him move behind her. He comes around to the side and kneels before her, pulling back the blanket to meet her eyes.
“You don't really believe that. I know you don’t.”
Her face crumples in front of him, eyes squeezing shut and chin quivering, and he leans forward to gather her into his arms. They sit there on the ground for a long time, he rocks her until her sobs subside and then for a little while after.
“Let the past die,” he murmurs that evening, once the storm has cleared and the light of the setting sun spills over the floor, gently pulling the ties from her hair and combing through it with his fingers before he begins to braid, “Kill it if you have to.”
The X’us’R’iia uncovers a yacht half a mile from their home and they get there first the next morning, before the other scavengers. They strip it clean, hoarding it up in the AT-AT to take to Plutt over the next few days, and the pay they get from it is enough to feed them a full portion each every day for the next month.
That night, Rey has a nightmare, the old memories her parents abandoning her rising to the surface again as she rests, and he holds her tight as if he can protect her from them.
They're so close she can feel his heartbeat, can feel the way hers moves to match it, till they beat as one.
They kiss for the first time after that, and it feels right, like the universe has been waiting a thousand years for this very moment.
Like it’s been waiting for them.
. . .
“I stay on Jakku because I can be myself here.”
Rey leans further back into his chest, turning her head to look up at him; her fingers entwined with his own on his raised knees. Ben looks up, into the vast array of stars the galaxy holds, and she can see the tension in his jaw.
“Before I came here, I was at a Jedi school.”
She twists roughly, whimpering as she puts too much pressure on her bad leg, her hands leaving his own to grip onto his shoulders so she can pull herself around more, “You were a Jedi? ”
“They wanted me to be one, yes. It didn't really work out.”
Her eyebrows rise in question, but quickly fall again when her current position causes her more pain. Ben shifts, curling an arm beneath her and standing, gathering up their canteens with his other hand and walking back into the AT-AT. She grins, pressing sandy kisses onto his scruffy cheek and then one to his lips before he sets her down on the nearby stool. Ben lights the lantern and returns to her, kneeling down in front of the stool and carefully beginning to roll up her pant leg.
“For as long as I can remember, there was a voice in the back of my head,” He takes her leg in hand, gently kneading the displaced and strained muscles and tendons, “It said horrible things, things that scared me as a child. It said that my parents didn't love me and that there were others who would .”
He refuses to meet her eyes, focusing only on his work, “I got angrier as time went on and eventually I’d hear them talking behind closed doors about how I was scaring them. They sent me to stay with my uncle because they thought that he could help me manage my anger and my fear.”
He sighs and for a moment his eyes look ancient, exhausted. He sets her leg down when her hands come to hold his face, and lets his head fall into her lap.
“It didn't work, did it?” Rey murmurs, her fingers pulling at the ties on the braid he had pulled his hair into that morning and freeing it from them, “It only made it worse.”
“He sensed darkness growing within me and it scared him. I woke to him about to murder me.”
She goes still, hands tightening in his hair for a moment, before she lets out a shuddering breath.
“I got away that night but the voice kept trying to pull me its way, so once I got here I cut myself off from the Force.”
“Do you still hear it?”
He shakes his head and she leans down, pressing her lips to his hair and breathing him in.
. . .
The fourth year began, and it was like any other, until Ben’s past finally found him.
“Do I know you?”
They're in the marketplace, waiting in line to trade with Plutt, and there’s a stranger there. The muscles in Ben’s shoulders tense up, ready for a fight, and the stranger draws closer.
“I don’t think you do. I’m just a scrapper.”
“No, no, I recognize you from somewhere, I'm sure of it.”
The line shifts forward, they're almost to the front, and she can feel that Ben’s ready to run but they both know that it'll do nothing but make them look more suspicious.
“Unless you come here regularly to sell scrap, I don't see how that'd be possible, buddy.”
Something crackled in the air, she felt it, something bone-deep and alive. She became very aware of every creature and person in the area, everything suddenly sharper, and then it went silent, all except for what the stranger said next.
“Wait a minute, I almost didn't recognize you beneath the dirt. You’re Ben. Ben Solo.”