Chapter Text
Rey hunkered on a bench in the Millennium Falcon’s lounge and tugged the blanket tighter around her shoulders, as if the fabric could ward off his words, could somehow melt the frost gnawing at her bones. After Jakku’s sunburnt sands, she never quite adjusted to frigid space, climate controlled or not, but this sensation was altogether different, like ice expanding in her soul. She shivered and gathered her knees into the shelter of her arms, rested her chin on their bony summit. The hyperdrive’s drone and the warble of her friends’ voices lulled her toward that thin place between waking and sleeping, that place where memory lived.
“Because he saw what you would become. You don’t just have power; you have his power.” A masked Ben prowled toward her on the destroyer’s flight deck, feline restraint in his measured steps. His body thrummed with controlled energy.
No! She couldn’t bear to hear it again. Her head snapped up. She flayed her heavy eyelids until they opened, just missing the question Finn lobbed to Poe where they sprawled at the empty game table.
“My mom taught me to fly,” Poe answered. “She was a pilot in the Battle of Endor, you know, was there when Luke Skywalker escaped the Death Star.”
Finn rumbled a reply, too quiet for Rey to make out.
“That’s what I hear,” Poe said. “Half-sunk in the oceans of Kef Bir. Disrupted the entire tidal system. Guess we’ll see for ourselves in”—he consulted his wrist chrono—“about six hours.”
Only six hours remained? How long had she sat here, revolving his words over and over, her boiling anger somehow numbed with shock and cold with fear? She should sleep while she had the chance, but to withdraw to the Falcon’s stateroom was to risk confronting the horror alone.
“You’re his granddaughter. You are a Palpatine.” Ben stated it as bald fact, no judgment, no deceit. “My mother was the daughter of Vader. Your father was the son of the Emperor.”
Had he ever lied to her? Why would he now? What did he want from her? To seduce her to his side because they were alike in heritage, had even more in common than she originally thought? She pressed her knees harder against her chest and pinched her eyes closed as if she could somehow become one with the Falcon and fade away from this awful reality.
Yet she recognized it as truth even as he spoke. It explained so much. The Force lightning, the creeping shadows, that apparition on the dark throne. Now she had a name for the black ice that glittered in her veins—Force only knew what she was capable of. She was right to be afraid.
Poe’s volume flung his words across her stormy reflections like a lifeline. She flailed to catch hold and pull herself to safer shores.
“No, actually, my mom did that too. Served as General Organa’s pilot for a time. They had scads of adventures together.” Poe grimaced. “But I was young, didn’t see her much.”
Rey didn’t know that about Poe. His mom flew for Leia? No wonder Poe had become her protégé, almost like a second son. Did he know Ben, then, as children? They must have been near in age. Poe had never mentioned it. Even after being interrogated by Kylo Ren, he never gave any indication Ben was an old acquaintance.
Ben.
“What Palpatine doesn’t know is we’re a dyad in the Force, Rey. Two that are one.” His vocoder struck a sinister tone, yet it was belied by the longing that bled through their bond—a shadowed inversion of hope. What should have repelled sang to her, set her blood pulsing to a melody that had echoed in her heart as long as she could remember, left her nearly breathless with its haunting call of home.
“We’ll kill him together and take the throne.” He removed his mask, exposing the stark planes of his face, pale and solemn. Hunger manifested in the intensity of his soulful gaze—she felt it as a palpable ache in the depths of her being. He wanted this. He wanted her. Desperately.
“She and my dad,” Poe’s incongruous voice jarred Rey back to the Falcon, “they retired on Yavin 4. Planted a koyo orchard and harvested its fruit.” Poe went on, explaining life on the Dameron farm to an inquisitive Finn. How could they continue chatting, as if the entire axis of the galaxy hadn’t shifted, as if the shape of their future didn’t rest on her shoulders?
Ben’s face reappeared, determined to claim her attention even in memory.
“You know what you need to do. You know.” He extended that gloved hand. Again. It consumed her vision.
She saw past the black sheath to the strength of his palm within, to the gentle touch of his fingers across a fire on Ahch-To, to the absolute certainty of Ben Solo. She wanted to join him. She wanted to take his hand. She could almost feel the slide of supple leather against her skin, her grip swallowed in his, the profound sense of rightness, of fulfillment as their hands linked at last. She wanted… him.
Ben was not just the persistent glow flickering at the heart of Kylo Ren; he was everything she’d been missing and waiting for all her life. That longing to be complete, to be whole, was nearly unbearable. If this was what it meant to be a dyad—to be two that are one— Maybe this was it. Maybe he was right. Maybe destroying Palpatine would require their united power. What if, in the mystery of the Force, taking his hand now would prove to be his path back to the light?
Time elongated, split her heart wide open, squeezed the backs of her eyes. His fingers twitched, the Force tugged, and the thread connecting them tautened like a climbing rope.
Then Finn’s Force signature blasted through her, and the Falcon’s engines shredded her fleeting hope into the gossamer fantasy it was. Kylo Ren was not for her. Ben had chosen his path, just as she must choose hers.
But it frightened her, how very close she came to succumbing. Finn pressed for her confidence. He wanted to understand, but no one could—no one could understand how she was being torn apart from the inside, this agonizing choice between yielding to and sacrificing her heart’s desire. She back-pedaled, circled the words in her mind, and examined them with a scavenger’s meticulous care, searching for flaws, assessing their soundness. It was certainly a day for painful truths and staggering revelations.
Because she loved him.
She saw that now. Not clutching and coercive, not the same way he tracked her from one side of the galaxy to the other, but clear-sighted and compassionate. She had no illusions about who he was. She loved his shackled and weary soul, in all his brokenness and for all he was yet to be, because she had looked into his mind, because he was… who he was. But, oh! To see him free, unfettered, and fully alive—
She sighed. For Ben to have any chance, she must turn her back on temptation and march away, even if it meant withstanding his efforts to stop her. Even if it meant fighting him again. And again. Until the last battle. Until one of them must forfeit or die. The conflict within her, the pull and clash of opposing forces—how long until she fractured from the pressure?
But loving him and knowing her heritage didn’t change what she must do. She would destroy Palpatine, grandfather or not—she must. It fell to her. Since Ben rejected the Skywalker legacy, she would assume the mantle and finish what Anakin started and Luke thought complete. That for which Leia had trained her. A measure of peace descended in the wake of renewed resolve.
“Like I said,” Poe’s laughter vied for her notice, “I was no end of trouble.”
“Was?” Finn raised disbelieving eyebrows and echoed his humor. “You know General Organa calls you ‘General Nuisance’ behind your back?”
Poe’s mouth quirked, but he was not deterred. “Our homestead overlooked a river. They’d cleared the hillside to plant koyo trees,” he swept his hand down to illustrate, “but jungle still lined the banks. I wasn’t allowed because of the anglers and armored eels, but I’d sneak down anyway and pilot the vines like an X-wing over the water.
“One time I found this canteen floating in the current, fished it out and ran all the way back to my mom. I was so excited that she couldn’t stay angry. There was a message inside, a scrap of flimsi with this stupid little verse.” Poe shook his head in fond recollection.
“What’d it say?” Finn leaned forward on the deactivated Dejarik table, brows hitched in eagerness.
“She sang it to me at bedtime. She didn’t—she didn’t”—his voice cracked and he cleared his throat—“live very long after, but the sound of her crooning that ditty and the smell of soil under her fingernails when she rubbed my back—” Poe’s gaze drifted down the decades far beyond the Falcon’s hull.
Rey watched them, mesmerized as Finn must be, trying to imagine the comfort of a mother’s loving caress.
Then Poe drifted into song, and the lullaby twined around her heart, trailed across her brow like fingertips brushing her hair, rocked her tenderly. Breath tingled at the back of her neck, warm and humid on her skin.
You are my sun, my moon, my star—my beacon from afar
The voice deepened and broadened, murmuring into the whorl of her ear, setting her aquiver at the unexpected intimacy.
Wherever I may roam, your steadfast love will light me home
“You did not just sing to me,” Finn guffawed and shoved back from the table. The fragile moment collapsed in on itself like an unstable wormhole to the past.
Poe blinked, bemused, and then he too scooted away. He glanced at her, probably checking to see if she’d witnessed his vulnerability. “Still cold, Rey? You’re shivering. Want another blanket?”
“I’m fine, but thanks.” She poked her fingers through the gap under her chin and waved his concern away.
He and Finn resumed their conversation as if nothing had occurred.
But Rey still trembled to Ben’s timbre in her ear and his heartbeat against her back. You are my sun, my moon, my star—
Like a message in a bottle. She would write to him, commit it not to the sweep of a jungle river, but to the tides of the Force. She had failed to turn him as she intended in Snoke’s throne room. In every encounter since, their collision of wills—and her anger at his choices—clamored too stridently for reason. But she could hope and trust and pray that maybe, when an eddy in the current of time carried him to the confluence of decision, maybe then her words would find their way into his hands and her love would light him home.