Archive of Our Own

Rey loved the rain. The gathering of blue-mauve clouds filled her with glee, and she’d sit outside, waiting, her knees tucked up under her chin. Soon the sky would relax and sigh, and the whisper of raindrops would be everywhere, soft and companionable. It rained like mist descending on Salix, and the light of the low moon set off arcs of aurora-like purple-toned rainbows.

Ben loved to watch the rain through her eyes. Rey had that knack of finding the light in everything — in what seemed to him to be a damp, drizzly day. For her, the rain lit up every living thing. It flushed the water-meadows with new energy; woke up the upside-down pluum trees with their broad roots reaching high into the sky; spoke to the delicate damp-skinned creatures that lived beneath the pluum-leaves, washed them clean, gave them life and joy.

The world looked radiant through Rey’s eyes, and she was radiant, half-drowned in the folds of a damp woollen blanket and with water dripping off her nose.

〰️

When they had first arrived on Salix, it had been raining, water skimming across the Falcon’s windows, and she had smiled her truest smile — the one that crinkled the corners of her eyes and crumpled his heart. She had taken his hand and tried to pull him out into the water-meadow, flooding her joy into their bond.

Ben had gone out with her that day — after a bit of play-acted reluctance. It made Rey laugh to push hopelessly at the small of his back, to wrap both her hands around one of his forearms and dig in her heels and try to drag all nearly-two-metres of him to the Falcon’s door. Knowing what strength she could unleash at will — as he could too, and as they had once done against each other — a tussle of their unevenly matched bodies was always a simple delight.

“Ben, this is why I wanted to come here when you mentioned it — look! Will - you - please - move!”

“But Rey. It’s raining.”

He pretended to sulk, but knew that she could feel his amusement in the silly poetry of Rey and rain, and that she could feel her delight in him too.

“Well, in that case.” With a step and a swoop he had her lifted in his arms. “You mustn’t get your feet wet.”

She scowled in mock protest but then couldn’t stop laughing so he’d carried her out into the long dripping grasses, and towards their new home in the middle of the meadow.

Of course, by the time the front door had lurched open and he had ducked inside, clutching her giggling frame closer to his chest as he stooped, both of them were completely soaked from head to toe, inside and out, and there was only one thing to do next.

〰️

That had been the first day, and many happy ones followed it. They weren’t hiding, Rey told herself, they were living.

The remote building had been a sort of royal summerhouse many years ago, and though the doors still opened, the lamps still glowed and the pitched pluum-bark roof still held together, there were were still many leaks to patch and circuits to rewire.

They worked side by side on these everyday tasks, hands busy together, often handing over a tool before the other realised they needed it. At night, their bodies were urgently busy too, both of them beyond words except moans, dizzied by the pulsing of their bond as they found endless hungry new worlds in each other.

As well as home improvements during Salix’s long days, there was fruit to pick and bread to bake, and water to gather. The arm-wide bowls that were the garden’s only artificial ornament were also its water supply, and with their pipes long-rusted by the water-meadow they had to be carried indoors. To lift one from its bed of pale sun-dew blooms and carry it into the house was a hard task using only her physical strength, but Rey liked to feel her muscles work and her heart beat faster, and to see Ben watch her with care as she set the heavy thing down.

The surface of each bowl was skilfully glazed in burnt umber and gold, the planet’s craftspeople knowing how to create a vessel that would sing with colour when the rain fell from the lilac clouds. As it fell, Rey would sit near and watch water spill over the bowls’ gilded edges, drenching the grateful flowers below. She would reach out and feel all the life in the forests; she would look up into the rain at the tumbling clouds; and she would not think about the blackness of space that lay beyond them.

Ben did not join her again in the rain, but busied himself indoors with some repair or other, pausing sometimes to watch her from one of the long windows.

Rey felt instinctively that she must not ask him why he stayed out of the rain, either in words or in thoughts. There was something there he was not ready for, and she could have guessed it easily if she had dared to try... but apparently she wasn’t ready either.

And so they went on happily — not hiding but living — never apart in mind or body for a single moment, except for when it rained.

〰️

With a moon that never set, it was easy to feel as though time wasn’t real on Salix, and yet with all the time in the galaxy they might never have been ready.

But the Force has a way of moving things forward — of closing a gap, of nudging an imbalance.

And so there was a storm.

〰️

The clouds that gathered then were a dark deep grey, and piled high and ominous. Ben and Rey were out in the forest where they had been climbing trees to gather rope-making materials from the high roots of the pluum trees. As he hoisted their coil of vines on to his shoulder, Rey looked behind them and said, “Ben.”

Storms on Salix were infrequent but famously powerful, and Rey and Ben ran full pelt through the thick leaves and back towards the house as the first drops began to fall, fatter and faster than usual. Above the water meadow as they ran, a jagged scar of lightning opened the sky, blinding white.

Thunder boomed as the front door whooshed open to let them in, as though it felt some of their haste. Dropping the vines, Ben worked to seal the door shut as best its mended circuitry would allow. Then he turned towards Rey, expecting to see her with a damp nose pressed against the window, longing to be out under these new clouds.

But even as he turned he knew things were wrong. She stood frozen in the narrow hallway, clutching her staff with white fingers. Her face was impassive, but panic and horror were flaring inside her.

Ben knew why. Of course he knew — and only the hurry he had felt to get her safe and indoors had pushed the knowledge down.

The lightning.

And Rey, looking at Ben’s pale shocked face, with water streaming out of his hair and into his eyes, knew with certainty what she had been blocking out until then.

That being dripping wet and soaked to his soul like this took him straight back to Kef Bir, when the air was filled with salt water and saber blades, and his mother had — and she had —

We haven’t talked about any of it, she whispered into his mind.

We didn’t need to. Ben clenched his fists in an old habit. It’s over. It’s done.

How is it possible that we haven’t talked about it?

We don’t — need to, he thought back again, his jaw tense and his eyes fixed on hers. I know everything about what you felt. The Light and the Dark. You know me too. The same. There’s no need. Rey, we can forget it, what the Dark did—

“But we are so much more than Light and Dark!” Rey was pushed into speech and it unfroze her a little. She dropped her staff against the corridor wall and took a step towards Ben.

Then she paused, and wrinkled her nose in thought. “Actually. That’s not... That’s not what I meant exactly.”

Despite the violent storm raging outside and inside, Ben thought he might die of love for her, again, all over again. He flickered a question into her mind, and (even while concentrating on puzzling out her meaning) she answered, Always, and so he pulled her into his arms. Resting his chin on the top of her head, his hair dripped slowly on to hers as she tried to untangle her instincts.

“Oh. This is what I meant,” she said, her voice muffled because her face was pressed into his wet shirt. She gripped his back tightly for a moment, and then brought her arms around to his front to thump her fists gently on his chest.

“We’re people, Ben. We are not just light or dark, or whichever of them pulls us the strongest...”

Voice breaking a little, Rey dug her fingernails into her palms to try to stop seeing again, again, a crackling cross-bladed lightsaber, and her hands swinging in a furious thrust. Desperate not to hear again the deep-down dark-red voice that had suddenly whispered to her, “Revenge.”

She tried again.

“I think there might be space in the middle of them. Between Light and Dark. Where we are... people.”

Rey wriggled her head slightly so Ben would move his and let her look up into his eyes, and in them he was startled to see desperation.

“And people say that they are sorry. Out loud. Ben, I am — so sorry.” She repeated it across their bond too, a torrent of it.

I am so sorry. I am so sorry. I am so sorry.

Ben understood what she needed.

“I forgive you,” he said, even as with his mind he told her with his whole being:

I had already forgiven you. There was no need to. We are one soul made two. I know that blow did not come from you.

She shook her head in a way that was refusal and acceptance at once, and then buried her face, which was almost dry of rain but now wet with tears, back into his chest.

A pause.

Stroking her hair, Ben thought through what she had said about the space in between.

“If you’re right. That we should talk... I think you’re right. If we speak it —” Struggling to take his own advice, he finished the sentence silently. Maybe we can stop hiding from everything that happened.

At this, the very worst possible time, the windows flashed and everything was lit electric-white as the storm threw another bolt of lightning down. Rey’s sudden sob was lost in the thunder but he felt her knees giving way and slowly lowered them both to the floor until they were sat, legs tangled together, in the puddle of rainwater that they had brought in.

She sniffed and smiled a little. “Ben, we’re soa—”

“Rey. I see now. We have to face it. I can’t see you like this. I can’t.”

She shifted to face him, and he felt her drawing all her strength together, her whole body tensing, ready.

She locked her gaze on to his.

“After — after the lightning... and after we...” — she looked down, suddenly almost shy, and then gave him a quick kiss to show what she meant. Ben smiled his widest smile back — it seemed it was alright that some things couldn’t be put into words.

“After we kissed. The vision. I couldn’t bear it, what we had to do. You... had to go after him. And I had to leave you in that place! To wait until you called! But I had just found you!”

She was struggling, the pain of returning to that realisation written all over her face. Ben nodded gently and took over.

“I didn’t want to leave you. But I knew I had to. I chased him, through the Force, through the galaxy, through black and white dimensions I didn’t understand.

”I knew you would also do what we had seen you had to. Bury the sabres, cleanse that cursed place. So his spirit had nowhere else to go. He would have to go to Moraband.”

They both knew all of this already, had felt every emotion of those journeys twice over as it echoed between them, but he could feel something dark and fearful unpeeling inside both of them as they spoke and knew this needed to be done.

Rey caught a deep breath but still spoke in a whisper. “I felt you arrive there. That place... it was thick with anger, and malice. I could feel it almost choking you. I flew as fast as possible. I was so afraid — that there would be nothing left of you!”

Ben interlaced his fingers with hers and held on hard. “Without you... maybe. But we faced him together. That place together.”

Two hands on one emitter, one of them flesh and blood and bruises, and the other all concentrated spirit. A golden-yellow blade, blinding like a sun. Two halves of the Dyad, one on each side of the curtain between life and death. An ancient spirit that had looked for shelter in that desolate place — but was now trapped from all sides, all dimensions, and dazed by the duality and complexity of their power — finally burnt up by the light until it disintegrated into furious shreds.

A breath of relief that felt like it came from all the stars.

“And then you came back to me.” Suddenly Rey’s face was shining with the memory. “I still don’t know how.”

“We sealed up a hole in the universe, Rey. You and me. But I slipped through before it closed. Or perhaps it wouldn’t have closed until we were together.”

Suddenly there had been two warm hands clasped together around the lightsaber, one completely enfolding the other. It was last thing they had seen in their vision.

Then faces pressed together with planet-splitting urgency, and speechless wonder at what the Force had gifted them. A habit of nervous quietness, they now realised, that they had carried on too long.

They had been afraid to speak of their miracle in case somehow the galaxy noticed what had been allowed to happen, and snatched Ben back to its liminal dimensions. And so they hadn’t let themselves talk.

Their bond had allowed them to grieve and mourn and celebrate together without words, but it had also locked them in place, like a moon and its tides, washing back and forth across an open wound. Such things needed speaking, to turn them into stories, into memories.

Their bond was humming now, not with a shared tangle of pain and relief as it had done before, but with one single feeling, easily put into words.

“I love you,” they both said, in perfect synchronicity. Ben’s voice was thick and deep and flooded with emotion; Rey spoke simply with ease and joy, as natural as breathing. Each thought the other’s smile was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen.

I know, they both thought back. We know.

〰️

As the huge moon rose higher the storm passed on, moving away towards the horizon and the pluum forests. The front door had refused to let them out until Rey had thumped its control panel. She made a note to repair the circuits properly.

It was still drizzling over the water-meadow, and they stood together under a hov-brella, Ben behind her with his arms crossed over her front. His broad shoulders didn’t really fit under the hov-brella’s span, Rey noted with amusement, but he didn’t seem to mind the drips.

“Look at the trees, Rey.”

The now-distant storm was tracing bright lines of lighting down to the upturned roots of the pluum trees. As each bolt hit, the roots shivered and glowed as bright white sparks jumped from every tip.

Rey gasped as she felt the rightness of it in the Force. This was how the trees spread their pollen, with energy from the electric bolts. They had been waiting for the storm all this time, and now the forest would live on.

“The storms are part of their balance,” she whispered, and felt Ben nod above her head, and then his low voice rumble through her.

“Everything is connected. I guess we’re not so special.”

Rey could hear the laughter in his voice, but was still a little startled when he spun her around to face him, his other arm reaching up at the same time to turn off the hov-brella and throw it aside with a grin.

Misty lilac rain surrounded them, and in an instant both were damp and sparking. They were brimming over with everything they wanted to say to each other, and knew that there was a whole life ahead to say it all.

Eyes bright and hair dripping, they kissed in the rain with the delicious slowness of two lovers who have all the time in the galaxy.