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“But why?”
Rey suppresses the urge to sigh, though Ben probably hears it anyway now that their bond is alive and well once more, growing stronger by the second ever since Ahch-To.
“I had to go there anyway, to bury Mast- to bury your family’s sabers, and once I was there it just felt… right,” she tells him with a shrug, sneaking a sideways glance at him in the co-pilot seat. Rey doubts she’ll ever get used to the sight of Ben piloting his father’s ship, but thankfully the experience has been rather painless. He’d boarded the Falcon with an air of awe and reverence, tinged bittersweet by all that has happened since he was last on this ship, but it had taken practically no convincing at all for him to agree to fly his birthright with her.
He catches her eye, and it’s almost too cute for words, the slight scrunch of his nose as he contemplates her explanation for taking up residence on Tatooine. “Right? Rey, that dust ball is nothing but sun and sand and–”
She sees it, the exact moment it hits him. He grows still and falls silent, and then, ever so slowly, turns to her with the softest look in his eyes as the bond between them grows heavy. “Rey.”
It didn’t feel right, she tells him as she reaches for his hand, unable to give voice to the words, to infuse them with the complex mix of feelings that had driven her to stay on Tatooine. This way, through the bond, she can let her memories and her feelings do the talking.
Ben takes her hand, laces their fingers together. It’s still so new, so novel, even after everything – being able to touch him again, being able to touch him at all. There was a time, not so long ago, when none of this had been possible, when the entire galaxy stood between them.
And now here they are, after war and evil and death, in a brave new world.
“Moving on without you,” Rey whispers, drawing strength from the warmth and weight of his hand in hers, “Building a new life in a world where you no longer existed… I couldn’t, Ben. I couldn’t move forward, couldn’t move past that moment.”
Past you, and us, and all we could have been, all we should have been.
He tugs on her hand, coaxes her to rise from her seat and slip into his. It’s a tight fit, but there’s nowhere in the galaxy she’d rather be than in his arms, now and forever.
“All that we will be, all that we will have,” Ben promises her quietly, lips brushing the shell of her ear as he holds her tight, as they both quietly marvel at the second chance they’ve been given.
Rey sighs and winds her arms around his neck, rests her head against his chest and listens to the beautiful, miraculous, impossible sound of his heartbeat. It’s a perfect moment, one of the very few she’s experienced in her life, until–
“I can’t believe Luke tricked you into burying my grandfather’s saber in Tatooine,” Ben huffs, his voice laced with amusement, and it takes her far too long to realize his chest is shaking with laughter. By the time Rey looks up, all that remains of his chuckle is a painfully familiar smirk.
“Tricked me? What do you mean?”
Everyone knows the Skywalker family is descended from Tatooine; with all of them gone and no rightful descendant left to wield the family sabers (at the time, at least), it had seemed only right to bury them in the closest thing the family ever had to an ancestral home. What part of Luke’s instructions could possibly have been a trick?
“When I was…” Ben pauses, but the word flits across both their minds before they can stop it.
Dead.
He sucks in a sharp breath, and Rey digs her nails into his shoulders, and the both of them take deep, synchronized breaths until the pain fades. “When I was gone,” Ben finally says instead, measured and careful, “I had the chance to meet some people. My grandfather, as it turns out, hates sand just as much as I do. The day you buried the sabers, he ranted about it for a good hour or so.”
She’d laugh with him, but her mind is filled with questions. Where did you go, when you left me? Rey doesn’t ask, very carefully doesn’t think. What was it like, who were you with, was it easier, were you happier? She’ll ask him someday, eventually, but for now… for now she can’t bear the reminder.
Ben doesn’t seem to be in a rush to share all the details with her either, and slowly they lapse into a comfortable silence as her head returns to its spot on his chest and his arms wrap around her waist, two halves of a soul finally reunited and drifting among the stars.
Time passes, though she can’t figure out how much of it, only that they’re nearing Tatooine soon. Just as she’s about to get back to her feet and return to her seat to prepare them for landing, though, Ben tightens his holds on her.
“I did… I did meet some other people, when I was away,” he says slowly, hesitantly, as if he’s still considering his words even as he gives voice to them.
Rey slowly pulls back to find his eyes, even as she remains in his arms. “Oh?”
He stares at her for the longest time, until resolve glints in his eyes. “Rey, I met your parents.”
It hurts less than she’d expected, to know for sure that they’re gone, that they’re… there.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I don’t want to hurt you, but I need you to know–” He sounds so anxious that a knot begins to form in the pit of her stomach, dread weighing heavily on her shoulders. And who can blame her, really? Nothing she’s heard about her family or from her family in the past, oh, fifteen or so years has ever been good news.
But Ben… Ben slowly starts to smile at her, for reasons she can’t even begin to guess at until he says–
“They weren’t Force-sensitive, Rey. Neither of them were.”
It takes the longest time for the meaning of that, for the implications of it, to sink in.
“But you said–”
You have his power, Kylo had said to her, and it echoes all too loudly in their minds now.
Ben winces at the memory. “I was… Rey, I was so wrong. Palpatine, he was so convincing – kriff, I think he himself was convinced – when he spoke of inheritances and bloodlines and legacies but… but that’s just not how it works, Rey. That’s never been how it works.”
He lets go of her this time, when she pulls away from him to get to her feet and pace the cramped quarters of the Falcon’s cockpit. “What do you mean, that’s not how it works? Of course that’s how it– I mean, look at your family–”
“My family is the biggest statistical anomaly of the galaxy, Rey,” Ben tells her with an odd mix of frustration and amusement in his voice. “There are Force-users out there who seem to inherit their abilities, but it’s never worked that way for the Jedi and Sith. Hell, if it did don’t you think some other Sith lord would have tried to establish a dynasty long before Palpatine?”
Rey stops pacing.
It makes perfect sense, everything he’s saying, but… but Palpatine’s claims had made sense too. Because if not from him, then where, how, why–
Ben reaches for her hand, and she allows herself to be pulled closer, to stand between his legs and look him in the eye. “That’s not how it works. Palpatine did not inherit his powers, and neither did your father… and neither did you. Your power is yours, Rey. All yours.”
All this time.
All this time since Exegol she’s warred with herself, with what she carries within her very soul, torn between hatred and acceptance, torn between wishing she’d never been born with this curse and knowing that it had given her Ben.
Relief bubbles past her throat in a sob, and Ben catches her when her knees give out.
“I thought– I was so scared of myself, of this thing inside me, Ben, I hated it, knowing a part of him was–”
“Not him, Rey,” Ben says gently, running a soothing hand up and down her back. “It was never him, just you. Just you, Rey, and you’ve always been so strong, stronger than you know even now. It’s all you.”
If he’d seen her after Exegol, after him, he wouldn’t think so.
But now is not the time for that.
Now Rey lets Ben hold her, and lets relief course through her veins, and finally lets go of that dark day and all it had revealed about her.
They stay that way until the navicomputer lets them know they’re breaking atmo, until Ben looks over her shoulder and whispers in her ear, warm and reverent, “Rey, look.”
She turns around in his lap, holds his hand, and smiles at the sight welcoming them home.
It’s sunrise on Tatooine.