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He is too injured to stand when Rey brings them back to the Resistance base, too injured to do much of anything other than sit on the ground at her feet and try to cling to consciousness while she argues with her friends over his head about what should be done with him.
It’s an argument Ben should probably be paying more attention to, especially considering the impressive number of weapons being pointed at him as it happens, but he struggles to care very much about his own fate from here. Rey is alive, and he is with her, and he’ll accept anything the future has in store for him now, because it gave him enough time to get to this point. He only hopes they don’t shoot him right where he sits, while Rey is fighting so passionately for his unworthy life, because he knows it would upset her, and he wants nothing more in the universe than for her to have peace for once.
He lets his eyes close for a moment and leans back, resting his weight against her leg, and Rey’s hand comes up to settle on top of his head and sink her fingers into his hair. A gesture more for her own comfort than his, he knows. She did the same thing on the flight back as well, taking a hand from the controls to stretch back and touch whatever part of him she could reach, reassuring herself that he was real and solid and there, no longer just the constant, painful presence at the edge of her awareness that he had been for so long.
He hears a snort from nearby and cracks his eyes open, and he sees the closest Resistance soldier lower his blaster slightly. “It looks more like she brought home a pet,” he says.
It isn’t a good joke, but it breaks the tension. Laughter rumbles through the crowd, and more weapons drift away from their target and fingers ease up on triggers.
One of the leaders Rey was arguing most intently with – the pilot, Ben remembers with a guilty stab of recognition – shoulders his own weapon and steps forward. He looks him over, then lifts his chin to meet Rey’s eyes. Something unspoken passes between them, something Ben is too tired to try and read, but he can feel Rey relax ever so slightly behind him.
The pilot sighs and shakes his head, muttering something that sounds like difficult as he turns to address the rest of his Resistance. “Well, if Rey can keep her new pet on a leash, then this doesn’t need to be decided right now,” he says firmly. “It’s been a long day for everyone, and there’s obviously a lot of new information to consider here. You all know me; I hate to rush in and make a hasty call.”
That triggers more laughter, even an amused huff of breath from Rey, and it’s loud enough to drown out the grumblings of those who kept their weapons cocked and aim true. The pilot looks back over his shoulder, his charming, public-facing smile fading into a frown. “We’ll talk,” he says, quietly, to both of them, and then he moves on to continue dispersing the crowd.
Rey’s hand stays tangled in Ben’s hair the whole time.
The leash isn’t a literal one, but as soon as Ben has healed up enough to be useful, he’s released from restraints in the infirmary directly into Rey’s custody, and he goes wherever she does. The Resistance trust her as much as they don’t trust him – trust her to keep him in check and keep them safe from him, to put him down if he steps out of line. That’s exactly how Poe phrases it, when he and Finn and Rey come to this uneasy, temporary solution to the problem of Ben Solo. A grim twist on the new joke.
It doesn’t bother him as much as he might have thought. Which is to say, it really doesn’t bother him at all. Staying close to Rey is the kindest punishment anyone could have inflicted on him, and if the others are thinking of him as her loyal pet or even just the rabid cur she somehow has control over, then that’s less time they’re thinking of him as the man behind so many of their worst nightmares.
So he sits beside Rey in important meetings, her hand curled gently around his wrist on the table, and gives up everything he knows about remaining First Order bases, leadership, security codes, how and where they’re likely to try and regroup after such a devastating defeat. It warms Resistance command to him by tiny degrees when the information begins to yield results, enough that they start to greet him with curt nods instead of sneers in the meetings that follow.
The rest of his time is spent trailing after Rey with his head down as she restlessly seeks out something, anything, to do, any little way of helping with all the day-to-day necessities of keeping an operation like this running. And she pulls him into it as well, his hands as deep in the work as hers.
He wouldn’t say he becomes a welcome sight around the base – Rey spends a few hours helping with repairs one morning, and the look on Rose’s face as she supervises, clearly struggling to reconcile her image of Supreme Leader Kylo Ren with the one of Ben sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of her, quietly handing tools to Rey with grease-smudged fingers, is almost enough to make him break his careful stoicism and laugh – but he becomes a familiar one. Tolerated, at least for now.
He does not know what will happen at the end of this war, when the political value of his death begins to outstrip the immediate practical worth of his continued life, but if these are his last days, he thinks he’ll be able to look back on them without regret.
“Pets don’t sit at the table.”
Nearby conversation in the mess stops dead, and utensils clatter and then still against plates.
Ben slowly looks up from his meal with a slight frown. He and Rey are sharing the table today with a group of off-duty engineers, not leadership or close friends of Rey and therefore not anyone he recognizes in more than a passing way, but the man sitting directly across from him is definitely the one who spoke. He can tell by the disbelieving stares the others are giving him.
He glances over at Rey, uncertain how to respond. Some of her people joke with her in ways that sound like threats or insults, and the fond roll of her eyes lets him know when not to take it seriously. She greeted everyone here as friendly acquaintances when they sat down, but right now she is looking at the whole group of them sharply, like she regrets even that much. No guidance there, then.
“I’m sorry?” Ben says to the engineer. Being taunted to his face instead of in half-fearful whispers behind his back is such a novelty for him here that he’s not even sure he heard it right. It’s an unexpected consequence of that growing familiarity.
The engineer draws himself up. “I said,” he begins again, despite one of his friends now elbowing him urgently in the side and hissing at him to stop, “pets don’t sit at the table.”
And it’s suddenly very funny. Not the joke, which wasn’t even that amusing the first time when he was still half-giddy from blood loss and head trauma, but the sight of the man’s sneering, brash confidence – the kind that only comes from that particular combination of youth and recent victory that Ben knows all too well – contrasted with the terrified looks and nervous laughter coming from the others on his side of the table. Ben wants to laugh too, but he knows it would be taken as mockery instead of any kind of shared humor, which might escalate things in the wrong direction.
Beside him, Rey is growing steadily angrier, muscles tensing like she might leap across the table if it comes to that.
It’s not usually up to Ben to defuse a situation, and he only has one bad idea on how to manage it.
He brushes his knuckles gently against Rey’s wrist to draw her attention, then abruptly stands up. And he does not want to be feared anymore – he spends most of his time now keeping his head down and trying to appear as nonthreatening as possible – but he won’t pretend there’s no small thrill of satisfaction at the way the engineer immediately shrinks back in his seat. He fights to keep the smirk from his face as he calmly picks up his dented tin plate with his half-eaten meal, circles around to Rey’s other side, and sits down on the floor beside her at the end of the table. He leans back against her knee and hopes she’ll follow along.
Rey hesitates for a moment, still angry, clearly unsure of what he’s hoping for with this, but ultimately her hand drifts down to rest on top of his head.
The engineer is entertainingly speechless as he watches all of this, and Ben takes a pointed bite of his food and stares back at him until he awkwardly looks away and back down at his own plate. He and the rest of his group finish their meals quickly and in silence, then get up and leave while doing their best to avoid meeting eyes with either of them.
Ben counts it as a win, though Rey’s hand in hair is tense enough in its grip to actually hurt a little bit.
Rey is still agitated when they return to her room within the Resistance living quarters, dropping her staff and bag on the floor gracelessly and then immediately turning to pace back and forth in the narrow space between their beds. Hers is bolted to the floor, a permanent fixture of the barracks, while Ben’s is a roll away cot someone dragged in and shoved against the opposite wall once it was decided that he needed to stay within Rey’s sight and under her control at all times.
He knows, from easily overheard whispers, that about half the base thinks she cuffs him to the metal frame each night for her own safety, while the other half just assumes they must be sleeping together and that’s how she has him so tamed. (Their earlier display in the mess is probably going to result in a new theory combining those two in the coming days, which will at least add some interesting variety to the Resistance rumor mill.)
The truth of it is much less exciting. They have each slept in their own bed every night except the first, before anyone thought to dig up the extra cot.
That first night when he lay beside Rey in her too small, too narrow bed, feeling like he had to curl himself all around her just to fit. His knees bumped her shins, and he kept his arms folded awkwardly to his chest, where he could feel his heart beating far too hard. And Rey was staring at him with something akin to wonder in her eyes, like she couldn’t believe they had actually made it here. She reached out and set her hand against his cheek, fingertips grazing his hair, like she had just before she had kissed him.
That was something they still needed to talk about – one of many, many things, but that was the most pressing to his mind right then. He wanted to make sure she knew that he did remember it happening, even though he had lost consciousness almost immediately afterward. And he wanted her to know that he’d quite like to try it again sometime, now that he was in much better shape to actually reciprocate.
His jaw worked silently for a moment, trying to force some of those words out, but in the end all he managed was a mumbled apology for taking up so much of her space.
Rey frowned and pulled her hand back, told him it was fine, and he closed his eyes and wondered why he was always so very bad at trying to talk to her, either giving nothing at all or pushing out entirely too much in a desperate, jumbled rush of emotion. And then he just couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t understand.
He sits down now on his own bed and watches her pace for a moment more before reaching out to catch her wrist as she passes by again. “You’re upset,” he says, unnecessarily.
Rey pauses in front of him, still looking on edge. “I just don’t think the joke is very funny,” she says. “Why would you go along with it like that?”
Ben shrugs. “It made him more uncomfortable than he was trying to make me. He won’t do it again.”
That seems to settle her down slightly. Though she is still frowning, she leans back against the edge of her bed and taps her fingernails against the metal of the frame, a decent step down from the pacing. “Doesn’t it bother you at all?”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “I don’t mind if they think… I don’t mind what they think of me.” Which isn’t exactly true, and the blush across Rey’s cheeks tells him he wasn’t very successful in keeping the original intent of his words from reaching her anyway.
I don’t mind if they think I belong to you.
Rey turns her head until the pink fades from her cheeks, and when she glances back at him, it is with a small, almost shy smile. Then she shakes her head, and the anxiousness settles back over her expression. She sighs. “It’s just… It isn’t fair.”
Fair starts and ends with his neck on the executioner’s block, and they both know that, so he doesn’t bother saying anything. It isn’t really what she means, anyway.
He looks up at Rey looking down at him with those sorrowful eyes, with that incredible compassion that he was so startled to be on the receiving end of, that he didn’t know what to do with, and he finds himself struggling with words again. Words to reassure her, to tell her how grateful he is for these extra days, how little he minds spending them under her firm and gentle hand, how much more content he is now than he can ever remember being, no more war raging within his heart, only Rey.
He hadn’t needed to say anything on Exegol, just ran to her side and met her eye and they both understood. Maybe he’s just better with actions over words.
Without looking away from her, Ben slides himself off the end of his cot and sinks down to settle on his knees at her feet. The blush comes back to her cheeks immediately, but she doesn’t turn away this time.
“Rey,” he says, reaching out to place his hands over hers, leaning in so he has to tip his head back to look up and keep meeting her eye. “I don’t mind.”
And with another sigh and small smile, Rey finally relaxes, the tension leaving her shoulders, her weight settling back fully against the bed with a soft creak of the springs. She gently pulls her hands free, leaving his resting against the metal frame on either side of her, and settles them at the back of his head.
He bows under the touch, resting his forehead against her hip, and lets his eyes close.
No, he won’t regret these days at all.