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“...There are only so many times you can utter ‘It does not hurt’ before it begins to hurt even more than the hurt."
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
In the thick of a snowstorm on a planet not her own, Rey rediscovers how much she relishes a fight. Beyond the pace of battle or the thrill of the chase, a small part of her soul sings when she pins down an enemy and poises to strike. The Jedi in her winces at the realization.
But Ben understands. He feels it, too, just like he feels her rage. Their anger compounds, feeding off each other even as he spins away from her side. Together they are four arms of the same body. Together their targets stand no chances.
Slice, parry, swing. Her movements are almost routine; her opponent’s reactions, predictable. Another mission for General Dameron, another success for the Galactic Federation. With Ben at her back, Rey is unstoppable. Pity the fools who stand in their path.
Today they fight on Vallt, against two assassins wielding swords that must be cut with cortosis, for they withstand the lightsabers’ barrage of blows without cracking upon contact. Sparks fizzle as Rey's blade intersects with her opponent's, thawing the snow that crunches underfoot. Despite the cold, sweat beads under Rey’s hood, but still she presses her opponent back until he scrabbles for footing on an icy patch at the cliff’s edge. Here she corners him, caught between her fury and a ravine so steep she can’t make out the bottom.
Surrender is imminent—and then he lunges. For a moment, the cliff teeters under Rey’s feet before she moves to pivot out of reach. One swing and they’ve reversed positions. Two swings and Rey finds herself fighting to keep both feet planted on the slippery ground. Through the eddying snowflakes, she spots the electric blue of Ben’s lightsaber locked in combat with another figure; he’s too far away to assist her.
When her assailant queues up for a third swing, Rey launches herself at him, saber outstretched. Her blade rips through his chest, just as his sword tears through her thigh and travels down, searing through bone and muscle. She doesn’t feel the tear so much as hear it reverberate through her body. Her knee buckles; she crashes into a snowdrift not deep enough to cushion the rocks below.
Her opponent falls, too. The harsh winds of Vallt whip away his howls, and soon he is still.
Heat radiates from Rey’s toes to her chest. Then the heat becomes pain, searing and gnawing through bone. It leeches the color and terror from her vision, replaces it with a blank, blinding calm.
In the distance, Ben yells, but Rey can’t cry out from under the soft bright avalanche sweeping her into oblivion.
The med droids repair most of the damage, or at least that’s what Poe tells her when she wakes. As they speak, Ben paces at the foot of her bed, hands fisted and brow twisted in a grimace so deep that Rey almost worries more for him than herself. He almost bumps into Poe, who looks on from the door with a frown. In voices devoid of sympathy, concern, or anything remotely human, the droids inform her that they cannot heal all of the damage.
“What do you mean?” growls Ben, hand finding the hilt of his lightsaber. He doesn’t let go at Poe’s warning grunt, only when Rey nudges his consciousness with a quiet plea. She’s met with fear that feeds off of her own. Silence reverberates around them, drowning out the med droids and Poe and the beeps of the lightpad.
For a moment, their world is reduced to Ben’s labored breathing, the drip from IV bag to vein, the questions their heartbeats pound out in tandem.
You’re hurt, he probes.
I’m fine, she insists. The alternative she can’t consider.
I’ll call for better droids. There’s a doctor my mother knew on Chandrila who—
Ben, she prays. Ben.
He quiets then, letting the tendrils of their connection wend around their fear and choke it unconscious. Cautiously, hopefully, Rey pulls away, focusing all of her energies on the droids in the cramped med room. Inhuman though they may be, they still eye Ben skittishly. He glowers so menacingly that Rey wonders if they might combust under his watch.
“The left knee shattered on impact,” one droid explains. “We replaced it with durasteel, but it takes weeks for the tendons to grow back around it, even with the aid of bacta. Humans as young as you reject regenerative implants at higher rates than other demographics. It is our professional recommendation that you stay off your leg to promote healing, or increase the chances of your body rejecting the replacement.”
At this, Poe shrugs apologetically, refusing to look in Ben’s direction. “You heard them, Rey. I have to pull you from the field, effective immediately.”
She doesn’t know if the cry that follows his decision is ripped from her throat or Ben’s. Half-rage and half-mourning, the keening sends the med droids clucking.
“You need me out there,” she protests, wincing as a fresh wave of pain surfaces in her joint. She bites back the sting, realizing that she can’t ask for more neuroprenaline while begging for a return to normalcy.
After years working alongside her, Poe can read the set of her jaw, the pallor of her cheeks. He isn’t fooled. “We need you,” he agrees, “in your best shape. You have to heal before you can help the Federation.”
Another wave of pain leaks into the snap of her voice. “Even like this, I’m better than half your team.”
“Not right now you’re not. You can barely lie down without wincing every time you shift. Right now, Rey, you’d be a liability in the field.”
“Poe, I—”
“As your leader, this is my call. Rest up for a few months and then you can head back out.”
“But my training,” she wails, panic settling around her shoulders like a thick blanket. “I’ll lose everything I’ve worked up to.”
“So train after you heal, and then come back out.” Here he softens, spotting the tears she can’t choke back. “The Federation needs you, Rey. But it needs you whole.”
She’s learned this lesson before. To survive a callous Jakku, a vicious First Order, the loss of one family and the formation of another, she has swallowed her weakness, replacing broken parts with determination forged under a dry desert sun. Wholeness has been her only option for survival. Broken things are discarded, picked over for parts and left to the mercy of the sands and scavengers.
The Resistance turned Galactic Federation has no need of a half-Jedi with a busted knee. Suddenly the blankets cocooning her are too hot; she kicks them off with her good leg. She won’t look up at Ben, not like this, but he senses her shame anyway. Kriffing Force sensitivity.
“Then I’m out,” he says, breaking the burgeoning silence. “We fight together or not at all.”
Relief floods Poe’s features. “Good, good,” he assures them as if the idea had been his own. “See that she heals, and the two of you can return when she’s ready.”
The Galactic Federation is strapped for fighters, keepers of the peace and protectors of the weak. Yet Poe offloads Ben with all the casualness of ordering a cometduster at a cantina. Proof, according to Rey, that the Resistance doesn’t trust him yet. Rightfully so, she hates to admit. A year of service doesn’t make up for the horrors incurred at his hands.
“Where should we go?” Ben asks her when they’re alone in the med room. Perched on the foot of her bed, his head no longer grazes the ceiling.
Rey won’t turn to look at him, can’t bear the visual confirmation of the pity and worry that radiates from his soul. So she keeps her eyes fixed on the tiny viewport, stars flickering through the smudged transparisteel. “No snow.” Her voice is flat. The soreness has dulled; along with it, her rage. “Anywhere green.”
“Chandrila?” he proposes, although the idea seems to pain him somehow. Through their connection, Rey feels the twinge in his throat as if it was her own.
“Farther away. Out of sight.”
“Hm.” They stay like that, Rey curled around her pillow and Ben curled around her feet, until the med droids return with a wheelchair and escort her from the infirmary.
Ben sets the course for Ajan Kloss. Rey can’t muster up the energy to protest nor propose an alternative. So they land in the clearing that Rey used to park the Falcon. Already overgrown in the year since the Resistance left, ferns crumple under the landing gear. She remembers running down the dock, dashing into the arms of Leia, now fragmented into a thousand whispers from the Force. She remembers arguing with Poe, and the thrill of being right; Finn’s worry melting into relief each time she touched down; Chewie’s roar of dismay as he inspected the Falcon after every landing.
It’s too quiet here, despite the rustle of the underbrush. Ben keeps quiet as he wheels her from the Falcon to the deserted bunker, doors buried in two feet of ferns. But the code that Rey remembers still works, and with a groan, the doors wrench open. An odor of metal and decay washes over Rey as Ben pushes her inside. An involuntary shiver wracks her body, and Ben bends over to tuck in the blanket wrapped around her legs.
This is it. This is where she’ll rot as the galaxy moves on at the pace of lightspeed, and she can’t run to keep up.
She grows to dread the way he notices when the aching in her leg intensifies. He brings her tea, massages her tender muscles, lets her sprawl across the bed without leaving enough room for his frame. She worries that pity stains her pathetic in Ben’s eyes, no matter how many times he whispers otherwise in the shell of her ear as he holds her at night.
She dreams of running at night, of sprinting through the desert, fighting sand to gain traction, every muscle in her calves screaming red. On dream legs not her own, she leaps higher than the Silencer that runs her down in the distance. Her knees hold when she lands. She wakes, lips bitten raw and cheeks wet. A persistent throbbing tickles her knee, a perverse parody of her bond with Ben, always tickling at the back of her head. Ignore it though she may, it eventually worms its way to the forefront of her consciousness.
Sometimes, somewhere in the distance, she fancies she can make out BB-8’s whistle, but then she remembers he’s halfway across the galaxy and that she’s alone on a planet with nothing but zymods croaking through palm leaves and an injury that stubbornly refuses to heal.
Occasionally Finn calls, his hologram flickering against the bare durasteel walls of the bunker. The blue hologlow casts shadows across the exhaustion lining Rey’s face. Finn’s face is smooth, practically sparkling with energy as he babbles on about the minutiae of reorganizing a galaxy. His enthusiasm wears on Rey, yet he’s the only tether she has to the galaxy beyond Ajan Kloss. She longs for news, no matter the toll.
Whenever Rey mentions Ben in passing, Finn purses his lips. His dissatisfaction continues to smart the more he refuses to outwardly acknowledge its presence. Still Rey pastes on a brave, brittle smile to conceal the sense of loss welling in her chest. Finn returns the smile, high wattage, powered by successes in the Galactic Federation and the freedom he longed for while trapped in the bowels of a star destroyer. When he ends the transmission, mumbling something about a meeting he can’t miss, Rey can’t fight the feeling that she’s the trapped one now.
It starts small. “Where did you put my lightsaber?” she snaps at Ben, reaching under the metal bunk frame and coming up empty-handed. Her growl surprises both of them; for a moment they freeze. She hasn’t touched her weapon for weeks, not since they’ve retreated to Ajan Kloss. Since arriving, the cool metal hilt has only taunted her, begging her to power up and hack her way through the familiar training course just beyond the bunker. Her knee taunts her, too. It buckles on the walk from bed to fresher, and wobbles if she stands too long. There’s no training to keep up with, no use for her saber. But its absence from under her bunk bothers her all the same.
“I haven’t touched it since we landed,” he says too gently. His kindness, well past its expiration date, chafes Rey’s skin raw in ways the Jakku sands never could.
Then she remembers holding it, hating it, hurling it against the wall only to later retrieve it and stuff it under her mattress far out of sight. To his credit, Ben bites back a reprimand when she procures it from the mattress, although he can’t hold back a wash of frustration that laps at the spaces between their minds.
Over a dinner of grassroot stew the next week, a draft snakes between their figures huddled together over their bowls. “You left the blast doors open,” she accuses, bracing herself for his reply.
It doesn’t come in the way she expects. The man she confronted in a snowy wood ages ago would have returned her barb with the heat of his rage. The man who healed her in the pits of Exegol would have stumbled over his reply, uncertain and new.
But this man, this Ben with words too soft for her skin, simply shrugs. He rises, mid-swallow, and pushes the button to close the door even though he prefers the wind to the stale bunker air. As Ben returns to his meal, Rey catches him eying her bandaged knee. The pity stings worse than the kindness. He’s kind because she’s weak, and the revelation only drives Rey to snap sharper.
When he helps her out of bed the next morning, she grumbles under her breath for a beat too long. When he brings back a sunblossom from his morning walk, she lets it sit on the dining table until it withers from lack of water. When he offers to push her chair around the training course that afternoon, she pretends not to hear him over the clatter of pans in their makeshift mess hall. With each episode, his shoulders tense, but he says nothing, continuing to brew her tea or keep her company indoors even as his body thrums with energy. She misses the hard edge to Ben Solo, the honed blade that used to be his body fighting alongside hers.
Worser still, she knows he misses it, too.
The Chandrilan in Ben loves the rain—this much Rey has learned in their time together since the First Order fell. When the spatter of raindrops drums against the roof of the base, he looks up from their Dejarik game. Despite his lead, he powers down the portable board, and gestures towards the blast doors.
“Join me,” he says, boyish glee etched into each syllable.
Recently Rey started walking again, tentative toddler steps from the bunk to the fresher and back again. Yesterday she covered the perimeter of the base, twice over. But she hasn’t ventured out of the base without assistance. With the way her muscles protest from disuse, she’s not sure she could make it out to the training course.
Yet it’s raining today, and she’s the reason Ben’s banished to this godforsaken Outer Rim garbage heap, a relic of their painful past. So she reaches for his proffered hand, relishing its warmth and support as she heaves herself upright. The bandages around her knee are softer now; they bend to accommodate her gait.
When the blast doors heave open, Rey realizes how much she’s missed the sweet jungle heat. The rain only intensifies the humidity; it settles atop her lungs uncomfortably, but Ben only breathes deeper. His spirit radiates peace; it burns away the shaking in Rey’s steps. To see Ben this happy, his worry dissipating after dominating their interactions since the accident, Rey would walk across the whole karking planet if she must.
Drenched almost immediately upon stepping outside the base, Rey marvels that the jungle hasn’t transformed into a river. Currents eddy where the ground is uneven, and pool where the ground flattens. Palm fronds bob under the deluge. The jungle has gone silent, save for the bursts of thunder and patter of rain.
Flinching at the boom overhead, she turns from the landscape to Ben. Rivulets of water stream from the tips of his hair. Mud clings to his boots, sucking at each step. Droplets bead his eyelashes and fringe the hem of his coat, but he only grins softly when he catches her gaze and forges onward, strides shorter than usual so she has a fighting chance to keep up.
For a while Rey manages it, hesitantly testing the ground with every footfall, never shifting her whole weight until certain of the ground’s stability. Slow going, but secure. So she grows confident—gets cocky—her scavenger’s instincts dulled by a confidence left over from life before the accident. She steps harder, faster, regaining a rhythm practiced only in her dreams. Ben, so far in the distance, grows closer again as she gains speed.
Then she missteps, trips on a slick fern or maybe a palm frond or, knowing her kriffing knee, maybe nothing at all. Down she goes, landing hard on her hip in a heap of robes and limbs and shame. At her cry, Ben pivots, a fighter even in exile. Contentment flickers into concern. A few strides close the distance between them; then he’s kneeling down to inspect the damage, no matter the mud soaking cold through his pants.
“You’re hurt.”
“I’m fine.”
She watches the urge to argue spark and extinguish in his eyes. “Let me help you up.”
This time, she won’t reach for his hand. Admitting defeat would do more to bruise her than one stupid fall in a stupid storm. Though her armbands are saturated, she still swipes with them at her brimming eyes. It only leaves her face wetter. “I can do it myself.”
“Please,” he says, a little boy begging his father not to leave. A petulant man asking her to stay.
She won’t reach for him—can’t reach for him—can’t stay on this ground, on this planet, in this state. She stays curled in a heap in the mud, until the rain thickens and the clouds darken. Ben hauls her up from under the armpits, a scowl knotted across his brow. He’s crying and she’s crying, and it’s water as far as the eye can see.
Two knights who don’t know how to swim back to shore.
Her fingernails grasp at his quilted jacket, and his hands wrap tight around her biceps and they stand there, holding each other, until the rain washes the tears from their cheeks.
They stand there for a very long time.
I’m worried about you.
His thought ambushes her as she leans over the Dejarik board, studying the holographic Ng’ok at her disposal. All thoughts of victory dissipate as his concern prods at her. I’m not, she snips, glaring over the game.
I know. He won’t look away even as she refuses to meet his eyes. The laser focus with which he approaches the world — which Rey used to admire — now undresses her, leaving her helpless and humiliated. That worries me.
She knows she’s glowering. She knows her fists are wound too tightly to undo. She knows that she’s angry, not at Ben, but she can’t stem the tide of words pouring from the thick dark pit in her stomach. “That’s none of your business. I’m not your project, Ben. Go back to Poe. Get back to work.”
“You can’t hide from me, Rey.”
Half moon crescents bloom at the spots where her nails meet palm. “You don’t understand.”
“But I do.” His voice is a deadly soft hiss, ready to strike for the jugular. “I know all about pain.”
In his voice: the shards of a shattered mask, the fragments of red kyber crystals. In his voice: a fervent acceptance, a blameless understanding. It chafes even as it soothes.
“Stop treating me like glass!” she shouts.
His eyes narrow intently, scanning the flush of her chest, the slump of her shoulders. “Training course. Five minutes. Bring your saber.” When she doesn’t move—just stands there agape—he repeats, “Five minutes,” and sweeps out of their quarters without so much as a backwards glance or parting word.
Five minutes and one frantic scrabble for her saber later, Rey meets him on the path. His grandfather’s lightsaber is already drawn, a blue halo sparking in anticipation. Blade swinging as she steps forward to greet him, he nearly catches her square in the chest; only a quick flick of the ignition saves her. Yellow crackles blue, and Rey bites back a yelp. So this is how Ben wants to fight.
Already sweat beads his brow and his hair hangs tangled around his cheeks. He snarls his approval when she lunges forward, catching his blade with hers. The blades lock, repelling each other even as their masters push them together. Energy hums through Rey's hilt, vibrates throughout her arms. Just holding the lightsaber motionless prompts an unsteady shaking. Driving it against Ben’s sets her muscles ablaze. Out of practice for too long. Not that Ben seems to notice. He pushes back with the same intensity that christened their first duel in the snow on a crumbling planet.
The forest here is too sparse, and the air too warm, but as Ben launches an offensive that leaves her scrambling backwards, Rey finds herself imagining a black cloak swinging from his shoulders. They’ve traversed entire star systems chasing each other down, and it always comes back to this: the clash of lightsabers, the burnt copper haze in the air. No red plasma leaps for her throat this time, only the gleam of Skywalker blue and a color all Rey’s own—not Palpatine, not Skywalker, not scavenger nobody from Jakku.
Swords swing and spark and the underbrush that chirped so loudly upon their arrival startles into silence as the sparring progresses. A twinge blooms in her left knee, spreads along her thigh and ignites an ache that lingers in the small of her back for three days. Never once does Ben slow his flurry of swings; never once does he miss a parry. But afterwards, once their lightsabers are sheathed and their sweat wiped from the hilts, in the privacy of their own room, his hands find that ache and knead it until it dulls.
They meet again on the abandoned training course under broad palm fronds and a sun too hot for Rey’s comfort. It almost reminds her of Jakku, except for the cloying heat gluing her tunic to her back. Even the air is wetter here somehow. It settles thickly in her lungs, but she’s grateful for the absence of sand and wind-chapped skin.
She envies the grace with which Ben fights. A man his size could rely on brute force to win each battle, but he thrusts and twists out of reach in equal measures. She used to be graceful. Now she has to coax her legs to action, has to anticipate the delay between her desire and resulting movement. Luke built this course, left the fate of the Jedi in her hands; thank the Force he can’t see her blundering through the underbrush now.
Ben wears the heat well, hair hanging free and biceps exposed. The humidity lends a sheen to his bare skin, a new fluidity to his motions that Rey attempts to mirror. He lunges for her, pivoting when she dodges the first swing and attacks again with a downward chop that Rey blocks with a grunt. Sparking, colliding, and then they’re spinning apart, only to meet again.
The tips of his ears flush scarlet in the heat of their crossed blades. After a quick feint that sends him reeling, Rey allows herself a small grin. They only get that red when—
He elbows her stomach as he swings around, and then she’s falling, the sight of his ears replaced by the fern-littered ground. Kriffing Ben Solo and his kriffing red ears.
Dirt cakes the roof of her mouth. She spits clods from her teeth, and pushes up on one elbow only to fall back again. Lightning spindles from nerves through joints, calling to mind some of Han’s favorite curses. She can’t hiss them under her breath without swallowing clay, but repeats them in her mind, a prayer as she tries rising up.
Flexing her knee after her second failed attempt generates a keening so fragile it lights Rey’s cheeks afire. Three months ago, she could’ve fought until the sun crept below the horizon, no tearing sensation threatening to rip thew from sinew. But now she can’t, and her yelp sets Ben’s brows into a thin line. He hooks his weapon onto his belt. Then his thick hands envelop hers, pressing on the hollow of her wrists, the meat of her palms. They descend to her hips, her thighs, her tender knee. How he manages to reach the spots crying out the loudest, Rey doesn’t know. (A whisper of their connection tickles the back of her mind. He knows her, and can feel her, too.)
Healing warmth flows from him, eliciting an involuntary sigh from Rey. Nothing has felt better, she’s sure of it—not bargaining for an extra portion from Unkar, not gunning the Falcon into hyperspeed, not tasting relief and a lonely longing on Ben’s mouth in the shadows of the Citadel. More intimate than the Force knotting their consciousnesses together, more sturdy than the nights they share together, the energy trickling from Ben’s soul lays Rey open before him: all of her frustration, terror, and hunger splayed wide for him to touch. It frightens her, concealing nothing. He doesn’t shy away, keeping his grip on her long after their energies cease to mingle and the sky streaks orange with the promise of a clear night.
For the rest of the evening, Rey dares to hope. Perhaps her pain has been taken away. But she wakes with familiar knife-tingles running the length of her shins, and she curses herself for her greediness. Temporary relief should be enough, yet she still can’t shake the feeling of weakness driving her from their bed and back onto the course.
Although her footwork is rusty and her parries clumsy, she drives back Ben, making him pay for every inch he stole. When he’s pinned against the spine of a broadleaf tree, she holds the blade to his throat and watches the yellow drown out the brown of his eyes. His lightsaber shuts off, clattering from hand to dirt. Surrender.
Still she pushes. “Say it.”
He shrugs, the ghost of his father’s grin flashing across his face. “Dropping my weapon isn’t enough for you?”
“Say it.” Her lightsaber thrums in time with her pulse. “I beat you.”
“You beat me,” he concedes, inclining his head to meet her stare. “Only took you three weeks to do it.” Something in the hulk of his shoulders, in the twist of his lips suggests that he might reverse their positions in seconds if he didn’t relish her victory too much. But a scavenger never walks away from a prize, even one unfairly gained. So Rey nods, ignoring the way he towers above her and deactivating her weapon before pressing her lips to his.
“We’re done for the day,” she murmurs into his smile.
Groaning, he extricates himself from her embrace and bends to retrieve his grandfather’s sword. It thrums to life; she jumps back. “Show me again.”
“I just—”
“You beat me once. Do it again,” he commands, every inch Leia Organa’s son.
“But I hurt!”
He doesn’t deny it, but he doesn’t let her back away. “The Rey I met chased a Sith Lord through a forest fighting for vengeance with a foreign weapon. You’re stronger than you know.”
Her kriffing pride won’t let her rest, even as her limbs scream for mercy. The power button twitches beneath her thumb, and they spar until she can replicate her success thrice over.
Rain rattles against the durasteel roof, but the outpost’s bunker holds against the deluge. He brings her rootgrass tea, foraged from the forest and dried in their bunker. Thunder heralds Rey’s first sip. This time, she doesn’t flinch at the sound.
When Ben joins her on the couch, she wriggles under his arm and swings her aching knee to rest. He places a cold compress atop the bandages, fussing until she stills his hands with hers. “Thank you,” she says, long overdue.
“I pushed you too hard,” he says by way of apology, but a grin slides crookedly from the corners of his mouth. His hands hover over hers, smothering and soothing all at once. Rey lets him hover, and watches the way the wrinkles fade from his face the more she leans into him. The stiffness in her joints recedes as he bends to kiss her.
“Keep training with me,” he says once they break apart. A question shrouded in statement. “It’s the only way to prepare to return. You’re almost ready.”
Return. The bunker, the thunder, Ben’s protective embrace—all of it disappears before Rey, replaced by Poe and Finn and a galaxy craving stability. Before her sprawls a future edged in diplomacy and lightswords, missions and bureaucracy in the name of safety for all. That future, even with Ben by her side, sits uneasily, throbbing like a phantom injury when she thinks about it for too long. Tucked away in a forgotten jungle base in the Outer Rim, she and Ben have found a rhythm and flourished. In their isolation is freedom, and so much greenery, more than she had ever dreamed of back on Jakku.
Rey has intimately acquainted herself with waiting. She’s waited for parents, for water, for a life to call her own. Maybe she could stand to prolong this wait. “Not yet,” she says. “Let’s stay out of sight just a little longer.”