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The hardest thing about this life is...wow, I went off thinking about how different all of this is and forgot what I wanted to say. I realized I don’t really remember what it was like to live on Jakku - or to exist there. “Live” seems like a stretch.
Remembering the force changed so much, but I don’t think that having the force in a place as dead as Jakku would have made all that much difference. It’s the LIFE that erased everything that came before. I mean, living amid all of this life all the time makes it hard to remember what it was like before. And it’s the life that is hardest I think. They can be so loud sometimes, all of the lives.
Ben is teaching me how to tune them out in the force, but he’s shit at dealing with the live sentient beings around us. I mean, he says he’s shit. But he still knows more than I do about how to be around other people, how to be a friend. I can see that in his memories sometimes, the ones he lets me see when he is awake and the ones he can’t help sharing when he sleeps.
He shows me the bunch of them, all so young, all in identical sand-colored short robes. Ben talks about how they hurt him, how vicious he could be in his anger. But I see the friendship he must have taken for granted. A smile exchanged, the warmth of knowing that the padawan behind him was on his side in the game they played, some deep conversation while there was food in front of them, like there would always be enough to share.
I love having friends. I just don’t always know what to do with them. Or for them. Finn says it is about trust, and Rose agrees. They talk to me about growing up around other people. They try to explain how love and competition exist together, and it makes sense. I just can’t always feel it. Competition feels threatening sometimes, and I overreact to little things. They stay with me anyway, or let me come back to them when I can be with people again.
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Ben speaks in poems sometimes. He says I make him think of the words he strings together because I am (so many things I can’t rewrite without blushing). But the words I come up with are all rocks, small hard ugly stones. His are polished and bright, and his word strings shine and burn and make me feel and want. He whispers them to me in the dark, lips to my ear but nothing else touching, and I can feel the way he smiles when I twist and cry for more of him.
I want to do that to him with my words. He says I do the same to him with my lightsaber, but it’s not the same.
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I used to hate this exercise of using words to pull my thoughts from my head and force them into shape. It is hard, and I don’t like all of the thoughts I have. Fighting with the Resistance, and before that, just surviving, my thoughts weren’t such a big problem. Then Kylo happened - someone else seeing everything I thought, and the shame of that. Then he came home, and it was like I didn’t think a single thing for weeks (except Yes and Let Me and More and There and Be With Me and Us).
The thoughts got really bad after my appendix burst, when Ben wouldn’t let me out of my bunk for three days. I had already been thinking more and more, remembering things, wondering about things. Meditation was kind of a nightmare. But then when I was still all that time, and alone, it’s like my thoughts woke up to torture me.
Ben came running in with a terrified look on his face. “What is it? Where does it hurt?” And all I could do was shake my head and cry harder, until he sat down beside me and pulled my head up so that I had to face him, even though I kept my eyes closed. He said my name with so much sorrow, “Oh, Rey,” and I knew he could tell that I didn’t have any words, so I opened my mind to him, just meaning to let him see a sliver, to reassure him. I didn’t have much control around him then, though, and a jumbled flood of feelings and memories and fears burst out.
There was so much, I thought it would drown him, overwhelm him, or at least push him back out the door. But instead he had that smile - the trembling, adoring, grateful one - and his warm hands wrapped all the way around my head. He just said, “Tell me. With words.” Then he pulled me into his lap and listened.
After that he found me this tablet, with things he wanted me to read and this program so I can write. He became a bossy pain in the ass about making time to read and write, but he never made me show him what I was doing. He said, “your thoughts belong to you until you want me to know.”
But now. Now he has thoughts that he doesn’t want me to know and I don’t feel the same generosity.
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There are days when I miss Jakku. Not the heat, or the hunger. Not the tedious waiting or the anxiety of a trading visit to Niima. But the simplicity of it. The knownness of it.
Really, it’s the nights that make me miss it most. Ben walks out with a silent kiss and that inward look, wrestling with something he won’t show me. He isn’t sneaking out, exactly, but there is a feeling of hiding, of wishing not to be seen, that fills up the space between us before he goes. I know he is coming back in a few hours. He always does. But something deeper in me knows in a different way that he won’t come back. And even if he always does, what does it matter when for those few hours I am as alone as I ever was on Jakku? More alone, really. That part of me that tangles completely into Ben when he is here is still grasping into the space he just left.
Until I can sleep, I lie here trying to figure it out: would I be better off with the boredom and heat and hunger and certainty? Or do the hours with Ben and the hours without him add up to something better than that? I haven’t found an answer yet. Nothing feels better about those dark hours alone.
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It isn’t that different from my appendix, I think. He has been stuck inside - in the Falcon or the bunker - for most of two months now, since the last missions we were allowed to run together. I stay with him when I can, but there is still work to do, and honestly half of it is fighting to keep Poe from coming up with some new way to hem him in.
He used to go out some nights, when things were especially bad, but now that is every night. He is still hungry for me, ready to plunge home with single-minded greed as soon as we can find our way to the same private space. But he hardly comes down afterward before he is gone again into that hiding place he has in his mind.
Last night he went out in a better mood, and came back early with one of his gifts, nuts he had roasted just to the perfect point of almost-burnt in the embers of Pava’s Name Day bonfire. I could smell them before he came inside, and I lunged for them and ate one while it was still hot enough to burn my tongue.
He was angry, exclaiming “Careful, Rey!” while he went through to find me a glass of cold water.
He sat down, stood up to take my empty glass away, sat again, then stood and headed toward the door. Something was bad, much worse than when he’d gone out earlier, but he did not want to share it. I could feel anguish, sharp and fresh, but nothing specific enough to help me understand.
I tried to break through it, “You are not alone, remember?”
He smiled then with just his lips, and turned away as if I would not notice the tears in his eyes.
He headed straight outside and I didn’t see him again until I woke up beside him this morning.
I think about Jakku, and wonder if all that solitude wasn’t a blessing in disguise. It is impossible for me to feel the way I did then because there are too many distractions here - friends and work and love. Ben learned how to feel alone in the midst of everything, learned how to take in love as a kind of punishment for sins no one else could see. Even though so much is different for him now, it is like he has fallen into a dance he knows from memory, the one where he is a terrible unlovable monster.
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Something, something is very wrong and he won’t let me in to understand. He was still sleeping when I came home to see if he would spar with me this afternoon, so I reached for him in the force, just enough to see if he would let his dreams tell me what he could not. But all I found there was exhausted anguish and the roiling oily darkness that used to surround him, Kylo, all the time.
He did talk when he woke, but his mind was far away. He said something about a task he needed to finish then told me he could not talk about it. “Yet,” he added. He gave me a look then, a pleading look, wanting me to understand and hope for him. So I did.
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Yesterday morning, I woke to an empty bed but could feel him close by when I reached out. He was stretched across the entire deck of the lounge, fully dressed, shoes on, dead to the world. The anguish had receded. He was simply exhausted.
When I came back at midday to make sure he had eaten, he was reading. The Jedi texts were out but pushed aside in favor of the holoreader he palmed while he scratched out archaic notes with his other hand.
“You’re in deep,” I teased.
He looked up, eyes blank for a moment as he came back to the present. “Research. It is. Deep, I mean. I’m digging deep…” his words drifted off as he fell back into the text in front of him. He seemed focused, and it felt calm, not roiling, so I left him to it.
But this morning, his sleeping face was troubled again, and I decided it was the right day to fix a few leaks before the rainy season began for real. I might have made more trips past where he slept than strictly necessary, but it wasn’t really my fault that he had decided to sleep in the middle of everything, so I did not feel guilty when he groaned and rolled over as I passed through on my way on my third attempt to find the exact wrench I needed.
Fixing things always puts me in a good mood, a problem solving mood, and his grumpy sleepy face was somehow more approachable than the closed-off blankness of the Master of the Knights of Ren face that he’s been wearing lately. Those are the only reasons I can think of for failing to respect his space any longer.
He huffed when I landed on him with my thighs straddling his hips, and turned his head away when I pushed both shoulders to the deck so he was flat beneath me. “You have two problems right now, Solo. Whatever it is that’s eating you up, and me. Which one do you think is a bigger threat?”
He kept his eyes closed, and I could feel him willing me to leave him alone. But I willed him to stop leaving me alone, and the clarity of my will - and maybe some of the pain I was feeling - seemed to reach him.
“Tell me,” I demanded. “With words.”
So he did. Or, he began with words, before the things he needed to share became too complex and too painful.
It took more words than it should have to remind me about the medbay attendant who had nursed me after my appendix. Ben said they called themself Shadow, and that was what brought a clear image to mind. Ben had tried to describe them physically and listed all the other places where I would have seen them, but when he said their name I remembered luminous eyes watching from the shadows.
Those eyes, Ben told me, had seen a ghost.
Ben had mentioned the other Jedi learners before as a group, but never by name, so he had to stop and tell me about Hennix and Tai and Voe before he could tell me more about the ghost. There were words for that, for why he had killed them, and what he had done before and after. But I learned more from what he didn’t say, what he felt in the spaces between his words, the heavy weight of his memories that only got heavier as he spoke, as if they were coming to rest.
He told me what he was trying to do, the clues he had found in the histories and then the section of the Jedi texts he had found that described the work of healing a crystal. He had tried it the night before, felt it begin to work. But the restorative tasks did not come easily to him. The light side of the force still shied away from his efforts to guide it.
It was afternoon when he finished telling me everything, and I had made him eat and drink while he talked. I led him to our bed then, and stripped his clothes off and laid him down on his side so I could slip in and pull him close and ease him back to sleep.
I have been retracing his steps in the research since then, to understand what he is trying to do. The task of healing the kyber is not simple, but it is not impossible, either. Like so much of the kyber work, it is more effective if it is done by the force user for whom it is most harrowing and difficult. Of course.
I left the doors open so that I could watch him sleep as I worked, and I am looking at him now, the murderer in my bed. The murderer who took the lives of people he loved so that he could gain power and destroy more people and worlds. I know his mother wanted to believe that all of the real evil was Snoke’s doing, a malevolent dark seed that blew in from somewhere else. But Ben never saw it that way. He made his choices and never tried to escape the consequences.
Ben wouldn’t want to escape this work, either. But the texts make it very clear that utter exhaustion, even death, can result from extended effort in the force.
He needs to do this, but I don’t know how to let him.
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He walked back up the ramp to the Falcon as the sun was setting yesterday, and he has been sleeping ever since. He was filthy. His pants were caked with dirt, there were crescents of black beneath his beautiful fingernails, and streaks of sweat and grime etched his face, He reeked of something sweetly poisonous, as if it were coming out of his pores, so I stripped him and enlisted the force to help me lift his limbs so I could wash it all away. He’s still getting in the fresher before I let him touch anything else.
He’ll be hungry. We might need to burn the sheets. If anyone saw him out during the day we’ll never hear the end of it.
And I will happily cook, clean, burn and answer for his sins because he is here and whole and open to me again, as open as he has ever been asleep anyway.
I hope he is as open when he wakes up. I hope he will teach me the steps of that dance he fell into so I can go in with him and bring him back sooner next time.
I want to be here when Ben wakes up, but I really want to go find Shadow and thank them. No one had seen them yesterday when I asked around, but I came back to wait for Ben before I could look up which shift they were on. I should have time to go do that before he wakes up.