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The thing is, Rey can’t really pinpoint the moment she recognises Leia is actively dying. She just feels this wave of overwhelming peace rush over her head and out the window, gently rustling the leaves on the willow tree in the front yard, and knows that time is running out.
She looks up from her book, (an old collection of sonnets found in Padme’s study), and surrounding Leia is this, aura of sorts - a manifestation of pure energy the colour of a crisp February morning. Rey watches it ripple, entranced for a moment, watches how it ebbs and flows like the lake outside her first home, the one opposite the Organa-Solos'.
Leia is still breathing, when she checks, but there seems to be a distinct lack of purpose behind it now, like she’s preparing herself for the journey ahead.
When the time comes you have to let me go, my darling girl, promise me you’ll let me go.
Leia’s hand on her cheek had felt so solid, not two weeks ago, but the cancer had spread at an overwhelming rate from her lungs into her bloodstream, like one it had been discovered it had no qualms about being discreet anymore.
Leia Organa had once commanded a room’s respect with the blink of an eye, now all she commanded was pity and condolences, and it utterly disgusted Rey.
A wave of vicious anger washed over her as she took in the frail shell of the women asleep in front of her, this wasn’t right – but then cancer didn’t care. Cancer didn’t care that the people needed Leia Organa, that Rey, who’d attached herself to this family as a scrawny fifteen-year-old with a fierceness they had raised their eyebrows at but ultimately hadn’t questioned, and had refused let go since.
Promise me you’ll let me go.
The aura shifts slightly, and in the icy blue Rey saw the eyes of Luke Skywalker, and knew that the cancer, for all its vindictiveness, was reuniting a family that had been separated for such a long time. For all her fierceness, Rey knew it would be harsh of her to deny them that after all they’d done for her.
She puts the book down, listens to the willow for a few seconds longer, and realises with a heart-wrenching pulse that she needs to start getting Leia’s affairs in order, and that means – in simpler terms, that means it’s time to call Ben.
The wind picks up outside and catches on her damp cheeks.
*
When the doctor had given Leia the terminal diagnosis – 2 weeks, a month maybe at most – she had nodded at him with an air of grave understanding and expectance, almost?
Rey, of course, felt as if she shattered into a billion splinters of glass on the hospital floors. 2 weeks. 2 weeks before the last of the only family she’d ever known was gone, forever.
At first, she was angry. Angry that everything she ever cared for wilted from her touch and then was brutally ripped from her grasp, angry that this family seem to be poisoned by a tragedy at every corner. Mostly, she was angry at Ben.
He should be here. She thought, channelling every ounce of spite she could into the thought of him denying his own family, something she’d never had the luxury of taking for granted. Leia shouldn’t have to settle for me just because B en can’t be bothered to get on a flight.
As if she could see straight into her mind, something which Rey had no proof of her being unable to do, Leia let out a dry chuckle, reaching out to tuck a limp curl of Rey’s hair behind her ear.
“You look like my mother, when you’re angry.”
The anger had subsided then, just a little, but enough, at the thought of Padme and the tragic fate that had befallen her at the hands of her own husband, and Rey just wanted to cry and cry and cry.
She felt like a child, in the midst of a tantrum, clutching onto a toy and screaming it’s not fair!
Nothing about this was fair.
*
At first, when Leia had chosen to live out her last days at her mother's estate in Naboo, Rey had been wary.
It was such an upheaval to travel there from the city, so far away from the doctors, and the journey was sure to push Leia to exhaustion - but the woman was dying for Christ's sake. So, Rey had nodded, packed their things without a word, and promised Maz a lifetime worth of favours for driving them up there on her day off.
She quickly realised it was the absolute right decision as soon as they arrived on the doorstep. Time almost seemed to come to a complete standstill in Naboo - almost. It seemed forever caught in a memory of a wistful summer evening, and as the smell of the honeysuckle climbing up the exterior overwhelmed her senses, Rey got lost, for just a moment, in a dream where things never had to change.
Then Leia had dissolved into a fit of coughs that ultimately knocked her out for the rest of the day, and like everything else in Rey’s life, the dream ended.
*
Rey was not a nurse, by any degree, but she’d gotten a carer qualification when Ben Kenobi had gotten sick, and took over his end of life care when it was clear it wouldn’t make it past the end of the summer.
He'd gone peacefully under her care, in the end, the night before her nineteenth birthday.
As his ward, the house and everything in it had gone to her, but when all the funeral guests had left the rooms had been too quiet, too big, and she couldn’t stand the memories that were trapped between the books on the shelves and the overwhelming silence that seeped through the glass windows.
Ben was sitting at the edge of the lake as she made her way down, still in her black dress and cardigan. He’d been crying, she could tell by the redness around his eyes and the dampness in his normally , beautiful long lashes.
Rey sat down next to him, without speaking a word, and they watched the sun set over Lake Tatooine, her head on his shoulder and his arms around her, tight in a suit that was too small.
*
Her carer qualification had come in handy more than once, as it turned out. First with Han, then Luke to a certain extent, but he was here and gone in a matter of days, hours even, that it hardly counted – and then finally, with Leia.
She thought it a funny twist of fate, that she’d finally been given the chance to repay these people for everything they’d done for her, by harbouring them to their death.
Han had laughed at that, gruff and mischievous , right to the end.
You’re no angel of death, kid. You don’t have the constitution for it.
She found it easier though, to retreat into her training – scientific names and medical procedures couldn’t hurt you the way seeing a loved one fade before your eyes could. It helped, to a certain extent, but Han had been right – she was no angel, and sooner or later the emotions always caught up with her.
*
Padme’s house was filled with ghosts. The sun bled through the floor to ceiling windows and caught gold detailing on a dress as it floated down the corridor, or the breeze seemed to bring voices with it through the open doors, and laughter seemed to get stuck in the domes of the high ceilings. Rey didn’t mind at all, it seemed to calm Leia, and she herself felt a level of contentment buzzing from the walls of the house from being occupied again.
Leia had braided Rey’s hair on the second or third day of the second week. She'd had a wave of energy that Rey was sure had come from the house, and had warmed her bones with a fleeting moment of hope that bloomed across her consciousness before she could warn herself against it.
Leia had finished the braid with a playful tug, and Rey pulled it over one shoulder with a smile, turning to face the older women from where she sat in the ridiculously sized bed.
Leia took her in for a second, her eyes glazing over slightly. She cleared her throat and Rey saw the moment exhaustion set in again, and with it the coldness sunk back into her own bones.
“You should rest, Leia”
The woman nodded, her eyelids already dropping. She visibly gathered all her strength to reach out and caress the braid, a weak smile taking over her once radiant features.
“The house likes you,” her hand falls and her eyes shut, “I think you remind it of her, you belong here.”
Her breathing evens out soon after, and Rey gets up as gently as possible, dimming the lights and checking the morphine levels before going downstairs to tidy up.
She doesn’t take the braid out, even after she’s gone, can’t quite bring herself to let go
*
In the end, Leia only wakes once more before she goes, and it’s with a distant sense of finality with which she looks at Rey.
-and all Rey can think is, not without Ben, please not without Ben.
Her gasps are feverish, her pain apparent in the lines of her face, and Rey gently gets up and adjusts the morphine levels until they smooth out again .
“Sweet girl,” she says, already slipping under, Rey reaches out and grasps her hand in a last urgent attempt to hold on to a sinking ship, “- the sun shines the same on him here, shines on you both like angels, my angel boy.”
Her eyelids drop again and Rey feels the aura give one final pulse, and then she’s gone. There’s no coldness, no pain, no sadness really, just peace. Peace and the sunlight on Rey’s hair and the sound of the wind in the willow tree, filling the room with the scent of the honeysuckles.
*
It's probably about 6 or 7 when she hears the sound of tires on the gravel outside. Rey freezes from where she’s carefully folding the last of Leia’s clothes, and goes to open the front door for him. He’d missed the ambulance by 20 minutes, and the unfairness of it slaps her harshly round the face.
The thing is, she knows she looks a state, with her bloodshot eyes and greasy hair still in the braid and a tatty old cardigan, but Ben, Ben always looks beautiful.
His car, unsurprisingly, is also beautiful. Black and shiny and all wrong, it should be the falcon sitting out there -
He gets out the car and Rey, her heart just shatters again and again. The sunset catches on his brown eyes and scowl, and she swears she hears the wind pick up, gearing up for a storm.
He walks towards the door, barely even looking at her, and stops just in front of her.
“She’s gone, then, -”
He speaks softer than she expects, but the words rip into her just the same, manifesting her guilt into a fiery ball behind her eyes.
“- you should’ve called sooner.”
Then he’s pushing past her into the house, and the guilt slips to anger as she whips round to face him.
*
“I know you are hurting, Ben, but you cannot pin this on me.” she hisses at him through her teeth, pulling the cardigan closer round her body in the increased winds, “We both know the reason you weren’t here.”
He’s standing by the fireplace, breathing heavily and watching her with fiery eyes, and then the bastard has the audacity to scoff at her.
“Please do enlighten, oh perfect one , as to why it is my fault that you got to say goodbye, and it didn’t.”
His voice cracks at the end, and Rey softens, as always, shutting the front door gently and approaching him with glittering eyes. There’s no malice in his gaze up close, just raw pain, and Rey, Rey can’t do anything but push up onto her tip-toes and cradle his head into her neck as he sobs and clings on to her for dear life.
-And through it all, through the whispered apologies and the arms around her waist, she can’t help but notice that the last whispers of sunlight seem to curl around them like petals, delicate and untamed all at once.
The sun shines the same on him here.
*
It crashes over Rey, then, in the fractures of the sunset spinning itself off them like gossamer, how much she loves him, how much she has always loved him.
*
He probably hasn’t eaten in days - in fact, she just knows he hasn’t. When Ben gets stressed, eating just simply, slipped his mind. He took after his mother, in that way.
He doesn’t look gaunt, exactly, not in the way Leia had in the last few days leading up to her death, but there was a succinct haunted air to the way he looked around the house, the way he seemed to flinch at the empty corners.
The sun had set, finally, and with it came a wave a purpose to Rey. He needed looking after, and that – if nothing else, she could do. She left him in his room, his eyes wide and briefly anguished as he took in the space that had served as his own when he was young.
For a moment, a fleeting moment, when she turned back on her way towards the kitchen, she thought she saw him at seventeen – all gangly limbs and overwhelming awkwardness – but then she’d blinked and he was 24 again and hulking over his duffle.
She shivered, and went to shut a window that had blown open in the corridor. Outside the winds were raging, cocooning the house in its own personal tornado.
She reached the kitchen, and before her brain could catch up with her fingers, she was calling Maz.
“It’s over, then”
She picks up on the third ring, forgoing any greeting, successfully managing to shock Rey out of her trance.
“Yes - yeah, she’s gone,”
Her voice is timid, and automatically her eyes snap in the direction of Ben’s room, turning her body away from the corridor and moving further into the kitchen.
“-Maz there was this, this energy field around her, at the end, and it looked like, it was like it was Luke standing by her,”
The woman hums, tinny through the phone.
“Time and memory don’t obey the same rules there,” She pauses, thinking of the right words, “- a person's life is not a linear line from birth to death in Naboo, they are everywhere and nowhere at any given point,” she pauses, letting the words sink in, and then clears her throat. “-have you called him?”
Rey takes a shaky breath, her eyes flittering back to the empty corridor, the lights flicker momentarily but stay on, harsh against the darkness outside the windows.
“Yeah, Ben’s here,”
Maz makes a surprised sound in the back of her throat, and it unsettles Rey, to surprise Maz.
“Be careful child, the house changes when he’s there – it, it seems to sink into him,”
“What is this place, Maz”
Rey laughs harshly, the sound catching on the back of her throat as her eyes begin to sting – she felt as if she herself was sinking into the house, being buried alive under the roses in the garden.
“It is everything, the house is all of it, it is all of them,”
*
Maz agrees to begin arrangements for the funeral back in Coruscant while Rey and Ben pack up the house over the weekend, it occurs to Rey that she hadn’t remembered Leia mentioning any staff to keep the house running while she was in the city – and yet when they’d arrived it had looked lived in and clean as a whistle.
She pushes the thought away with a shiver and turns to the freezer, pulling out a Tupperware of the frozen batch of Shepards Pie – a last ditch attempt to get Leia to eat something. It hadn’t worked, and thus she was left with an excess of leftovers.
She puts it in the microwave with a sigh, and has just pressed the start button when the lights in the corridor seem to swell and the walls seem to relax as Ben walks in. If he notices he doesn’t let on.
“I don’t need to eat anything, I’m not hungry,”
His voice had fallen back into being harsh and he looked at her tersely, stilted, like it disgusted him to have her in this house.
“Who said it was for you?” She shot back at him stonily, but they both knew it was a front, they both knew exactly who it was for.
They stare at each other in a standoff until the microwave beeps, and when she offers the plate of food, he takes it with defeated sigh.
*
They have it out again after dinner when Rey suggests they tackle the loft in the morning, and his eyes burst into flames.
“What’s the point! It’s all just – shit, let it all die with her.”
Her own body seems to set alight, her blood boiling underneath her skin. The house seems to hum around them as they shout, vibrating through her fingertips – how dare he - .
“You are so full of shit, Ben, how could you – this house is everything!” her ears are ringing as she repeats Maz’s earlier words, and she can almost feel the house wrap itself around her, around then both, as she seethes at him. “This house - is all of them, it’s the only thing left – how could you,”
Her voice breaks, and her anger drops to pure grief, the pain lacing through her bloodstream as he watches her with eyes that channel the storm outside.
“This house, - ” he says, in that same stilted way, his gaze boring into her intently as she tries her hardest not to cry, “- is not everything, not to me,”
The tears spill as his sentence drifts, and she can’t find the strength within herself to be angry anymore, not really, but she has so much of it pulsating through her that it seems to possess her.
“Well it should be, Ben,” he flinches at her watery tone, and she wipes her tears fiercely, “- this house is your family, and family is everything – not that I would expect you to understand,”
He scoffs and her malicious tone, and the lights surge around them as the windows rattle from the wind and rain pelting against them.
“I was nothing to them,” he sneers at her, ferocious like a hurricane, “- so why should they mean anything to me.”
She rears up again at his spite but he cuts her off, “Spare me your orphan speech, we both know they all loved you more – they always loved you more.”
She sees then, that under his spite and anger, is a child desperate for their parent's attention where none was given. A child who watched his own parents give it all to her instead. She reaches for him, again, because she could never not attach herself to him in an attempt to take in all his pain and alleviate her own guilt. He mercifully doesn’t push her away as she cups his face, but his eyes are still stormy when he gravitates towards her instinctively, and the house practically sings with it.
“They loved you more than anything, Ben, through it all – it was always you,”
His eyes flicker at the double meaning behind his words, and then he’s surging down and kissing her and she feels everything all at once, and Rey – Rey can’t help but fall into him utterly, and around them the house implodes in on itself.
*
There are glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling, she realises, later.
Ben is sleeping next to her, face finally peaceful, his cheeks splotched red from his tears. His hand is clasped around her wrist like it’s a lifeline, and he looks so young like this, in his long-sleeved navy jumper and his dark hair softly curling round his ears -
-and Rey is only twenty-one. Rey is only twenty-one, but she can’t help but feel tired beyond her years. Tired of grief, tired of losing, tired of seeing people hurting.
Her eyes sting when some leftover tears slip down her cheek and as if he knows, because he knows, Ben tightens his grip and pulls her into his chest. She really should be overheating, still in all her clothes, but he smells like sea air and honeysuckle and he has glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling.
Enough, now , she thinks, let me have this, if nothing else.
*
She just about gets away with it, somehow.
He's already awake when the light outside of the window finally pulls her out of sleep, but she’s still pressed along his side, and when she looks up, he’s looking her hair with a far off look in his eyes, his hand reaching across to pinch the end of the braid.
“This house -” he takes in a sharp breath and drops her hair, “- I've always felt, stuck in a memory here.”
His thumb traces her lip and she inhales shallowly, scared to move in case he scares off again. She speaks quietly, her lips moving against the tip of his thumb.
“I can feel the house in my blood, feel the ghosts stuck in the walls,”
He still smells like sea air, and she feels the cool air from the open window hit the back of her neck, and his eyes sparkle in it as he leans into her slightly.
“Don’t be scared, I feel it too.”
She thinks distantly, as his lips brush against her hairline, that the storm had miraculously cleared overnight, and the house seemed to be smiling at them with an apparent air of content smugness about it.
*
She finally washes her hair out that morning, watching her tears fall down the drain as she feels it fall out of the braid under the shower. She lets her hair air-dry and leaves it down, allowing it to curl at the ends where it falls mid-way down her back.
She finds Ben standing at the mantlepiece in the living-room, she can smell coffee but forgoes it to go and stand next to him instead. He’s looking at a picture of his grandmother, at this very house, her own hair curled delicately and shimmering in the sunlight. Her face is caught mid laugh, and her hand is just below her abdomen, slightly rounded under her shift dress.
He doesn’t look at Rey immediately, but he moves to accommodate her next to him as she takes in the photo, relaxing his shoulders when the smell of her shampoo settles around them, the same coconut scent she’d always used.
“This is the last photo taken of her, before she died.” his voice is soft and Rey can’t help but think there’s a familiarity of her in him, can’t help but think maybe that’s why the house dotes on him so.
“She’s beautiful,”
She means it, confused as to why Leia always insisted that she looked like her. Padme was transcendent, and Rey was plain and nowhere near as graceful as the woman in front of her.
Ben drops his gaze to look at her, his fingers running along one the curls at her back.
“Yes, -” he murmurs, his voice barely discernible over the sound of the birds outside the window - his eyes, solid and intense, never leaving her face, “- yes, she is.”
*
Rey can’t go into Leia’s room. She can’t stand the way the emptiness creeps over her and spreads through her bones like ice settling in the winter.
She stands at the threshold, taking in the stripped bed and the coldness that permeates and creaks through the wooden floorboards. The willow catches her eye though the window, gently swaying in the breeze, and it’s with a soft hand at the small of her back she realises Ben is standing behind her.
She leans back against him for a moment before pushing her thoughts away with a sigh and moves into the chill of the room, approaching the tasks at hand with a clinical mind and as harsh a detachment as she can manage.
Ben moves straight to the window and opens it, letting the sunlight stream in and curl around her, melting away some of the ice that had settled under her skin. He turns and watches the room as she packs away the things that had accumulated in the short while Leia had inhabited the space. When her eyes flit up to him, stock still and frozen by the window, he is staring at the bed – empty, as if his mother was never here.
He snaps out his trance to look at her face, and for a moment her heart drops, his jaw is tight again and she thinks that this could very easily lead to another shouting matching, their tempers ebbing and flowing to match each other's as they always had, like two tides of the same pond. He surprises her, in the end, by speaking gently into the space between them.
“I’m glad it was you, at the end – for both of them,” he takes a breath as she continues to stack books, her eyes dropping from him, “-I know it wasn’t fair, to burden them on you, but I'm glad it was you,”
She tapes the box shut, staring at it while she thinks of a reply. Nothing about this had been fair at all, and she knew this was Ben’s way of apologising and thanking her at the same time, in the best way he knows how with his father’s communication skills, or lack thereof. She picks up the box and stops in front of him – still at the window – as she passes, a tentative smile puckering her mouth.
“I am too, Ben.” the ghost of a smile shyly flitters across his face as he gently takes the box from her, the backs of her hands sparking from where his fingers brush against them. “They spoke of you – all of them- at the very end, if that helps,”
His expression falls, and he starts to blink furiously, and she could hate herself focusing him more pain, but it was something he needed to here, something she needed to say.
“Not really, no,” he swallows, arms tightening around his mother’s things, “-look Rey, I-”
He breaks off, and she pauses while folding one of Leia’s cardigans that had been left up here by mistake, even after all this time her name in his mouth shattered and rebuilt her heart on a never-ending loop.
“I know, Ben,” the sunlight glowed around his head like a halo. My angel boy. “I know.”
And she did.
*
She doesn’t bother to try and pretend she’s not going to sleep in his bed, simply changes into some leggings and a ratty old t-shirt and crawls into the space he makes next to him under the covers.
He’s sitting up reading, something to do with First Order, no doubt. A wave of disgust washes over her at how Snoke still has his claws under Ben’s fingernails after everything, after all this time. As if sensing her anger, he puts the form down with a soft chuckle and slides down the bed, gathering her into his chest and ignoring the affronted sound that falls from her lips.
“I’m quitting First Order, -” his speaks into her forehead and she tries her best to stay still, to not react, “- that was a letter from my lawyer, Snoke’s not going to give me up without a fight it seems,”
At that, she lets the anger take over her, she pulls away and sits up, looking down at him, the moonlight hitting her back and diffusing round her to fall on the angles of his face.
“Why now?” her voice is louder than she anticipated in the night air, and she drops her volume, “What made you so graciously see the light now?”
He sits up to meet her, hands reaching for her wrists, his hair glowing blue in the light streaming through the window.
“I realised, that life is too short to be fighting battles that aren’t worth winning,”
When the time comes, promise you’ll let me go.
She watches him with a sceptical expression until he sighs, defeated, lying back down and shutting his eyes for a moment while he breathes out. She doesn’t move.
“I don’t know if it’s the house, or you, or both,” his eyes are sparkling as they look up to the ceiling, “-but you just seem to make everything so clear, always have,”
He laughs sardonically when she still doesn’t change her expression.
“What do you want me to say Rey?” he huffs out a breath, “-I don’t know, when I’m with you I want to believe that not everything in life needs to cost a part of me to obtain.”
She gives in then with a silent nod, thanking him for his honesty by tucking herself back against his side, drawing shapes onto the material of his t-shirt.
There are a few beats of silence where the room is filled by only their breathing and the distant sounds of the night chirpers down in the garden.
“It’s the opposite for me,” she says softly after a moment, he hums in question, lifting his head to look down at her. “- when I'm with you, you don’t clear my head, you fill it entirely and cloud everything else, you make me feel like I’m standing in the middle of a hurricane,”
He laughs, pure and raw, and she’s just turned sixteen again, driving around with him in The Falcon eating ice-cream.
I love you,
She projects into the space above them, letting it sink past the floorboards and into the foundations, his arms tighten around her and she thinks that maybe, just maybe they’ll get away with it.
*
She realises, with a slight air of humour, that they hadn’t talked about the kiss on Friday night, and now being Sunday morning, she was beginning to wonder exactly where they stood.
His side of the bed is empty when she wakes up, but she can hear the shower running next door, so she gets herself up, opening the balcony doors to let the morning air in as she makes her way to the kitchen.
She's making coffee when the smell of his body wash imbues her senses, and she can just tell, without even looking at him, that he’s gearing himself up to talk to her. Her hands slow for a moment but she quickly resumes getting the mugs out of the cupboards. He clears his throat and when she turns to him, he’s leaning against the island, his hair still damp, and she knows that they’re talking about Friday , and they’re talking about it now.
“Firstly, you need to know that, in my head, you’re still fifteen,”
She raises her eyebrows at him, and his eyes bulge as the realisation sets in at his words -
“-In that I find it hard to forget you’re not a kid, that we’re both not kids anymore,” she smiles at him, and that for all his appearances he’s still the same awkward kid he always was.
“- but at the same time Rey, Rey you’re so young still, and you deserve so much more than who I am,”
She almost laughs at him, almost, he looks utterly sincere, as if she’s some pure thing that he will tar irreversibly by looking at for too long. It makes her want to laugh, then it makes her sad, and then it makes her angry.
“Who you are is not what you’ve done, Ben,” his eyes are so intense on hers when she places a coffee in front of him, “- I wish you would stop placing us in opposite absolutes – I'm no angel, and you’re certainly no evil, not to me,”
He blinks at her, then smiles and shakes his head.
“You say that, but you have the audacity to stand there and look like that -” as if on cue she feels the vines of sunlight wrap themselves up her legs and blossom up behind her head. “-you said the house was everything, but it’s not – you are,”
*
The thing is, Rey doesn’t really know how to reply to that. It makes her want to cry, a little, at first. That after all this time he feels the same – but she’s had enough of crying.
The second thing she thinks is, it’s just not fair.
It’s at that moment though, that she decides to let go of her childhood spite of the world, and instead, to hold on to this moment. This precious moment of Ben opening his heart to her and the house and the sunlight blooming around them like the daisies on the windowsill.
The sun shines on you both like angels.
*
The drive back to the city brings with it the onslaught of pain that was seemed to have been kept at bay in Naboo.
The house seemed to resist their leaving with a ferocious vehemence, so much so that the weather had descended back into a rotten state by the time they’d finished loading up his car.
The flowers outside had seemed to wilt with each box of things they removed from the house, and to Rey at least, it felt as if a red string had knotted itself around her pinky fingere and the house was desperately trying to keep her in close range .
In the end, it was a final look over to check all the windows were locked that she said goodbye, and a single white lily placed on top of the box of Leia’s things.
Ben was sitting on his mother's bed when she walked back downstairs, but she stopped herself from disturbing him, finally letting him say his own goodbyes in peace. When he came down with red eyes, it was with a soft smile and a soft kiss to his shoulder that they made their run for the car through the rain.
It was only a 3-hour drive back to the city, but the time seemed to stretch and warp in the way it often did when returning back to real life from an extended break from it, especially so in Naboo.
The rain kept up its downpour the whole way, headlights sparking up spots behind Rey’s closed eyelids and Ben stared straight ahead; his hands tight on the wheel.
*
She woke up to him gently tucking her hair behind her ear, and she sat up with a start, disorientated for a second as she placed where they were.
“I don’t know where you live, so I just came back to mine – if you just give me your address I can-”
His hand was still in her hair, his eyes shy and the tips of his ears pink through his hair. Rey shook her head, covering his hand with her own.
“I can stay, it’s late.”
She was certain it wasn’t past 7, but the smile that briefly spread over his face and the relief that settled on his shoulders let her know it was the right thing to say.
She gave a last little yawn and stretched her legs out like a cat, squealing when his hand dropped to pinch her waist, doing her best to ignore the stab of guilt in her stomach at the wave of happiness spreading over her.
Leia would want her to be happy. Leia would want them both to be happy.
The lily still sat solitary on the box of things as they carried their stuff up to his little brownstone. The rain had stopped at some point but the temperature had dropped significantly, and they were still dressed for Naboo weather. Ben went straight to turn on the heating when they got in, coming back to rub her hands between his to warm them up, a small smile on his mouth at the size difference between his giant hands and her own, childlike in comparison.
The apartment is mainly bare, clinical almost, but sitting on the dining table is a copy of the same sonnets she found on Padme’s shelf, the cover worn with use and the lily-of-the-valley's faded on the spine.
I think, she tells herself, thumbing the spine as Ben places a steaming mug of tea in front of her and a kiss to the side of her head, that we might just get away with this.
*
The funeral is intimate, just her, Ben, Maz and Chewie – whose grief looks as if it has ripped through him like a bullet wound.
Maz sighs a little at their joined hands, but says nothing, just reaches up to kiss Rey on the cheek and cup the side of Ben’s face in silent apology, a distinct expression of took you long enough on her face.
They don’t speak before or after, her and Ben, just a squeeze to the palm every now and then.
It doesn’t rain like Rey expected it would, but the birds are silent and the wind drops almost entirely, give or take a few rustles in the Willow tree by the gate of the graveyard.
Rey feels a prickle on the back of neck and turns to see a whisper of the twins, ice blue eyes and long brunette hair, swears she hears their voices for a moment, feels their hands on her and Ben’s shoulders, but then the breeze blows through her hair, left curled down her back, and with it the scent on honeysuckles surrounds them, and the whisper is gone.
She squeezes Ben’s hand three times to get his attention, and when he looks down at her his eyes seem to say - I feel them too.
***
fin
***