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The first time it kicks her ribs, Rey weeps. It never took much to make her cry before Ben’s death. Now the tears flow freer, sometimes without warning. Like when Ben Solo’s child wakes her with a wriggle so tangible it feels like someone’s shaking her awake. But when she opens her eyes, she’s alone in bed, just her and her swelling belly that feels foreign to the touch.
In some sick twist of fate, the Force granted her prayers. “Be with me,” she whispered one too many times over Ben’s crumpled corpse in the shadows of the Sith citadel. Little did she know that a part of him had already embedded itself into the fabric of her life, joining the single blue thread weaving their hearts together before he disappeared into the world beyond worlds. The result of one harried fumbling in the dark, rushing before their connection through the Force flickered out and left them alone on opposite sides of a war.
Rey’s always ended up alone, a fact as reliable as the sands covering Tatooine. She returns there to bury the Skywalker sabers before she knows that a fragment of Ben’s soul has buried itself in her belly. Outside of the Lars homestead remains, she throws up in the sand and chalks it up to grief as the true nature of her losses sets in. Han, Leia, Ben—dead. Her parents a lie, her grandfather a monster. Her friends all moved on after destroying the First Order.
She finds out she’s pregnant during a medical droid examination of a gaping wound on her thigh. Incurred from chasing and cutting down First Order officers across the galaxy, the wound throbs even after she applies bacta on her own. It reminds her that no matter who she kills to protect the galaxy, she can never trade their deaths for Ben’s life. The truth weighs down the Falcon as she pilots it to an outer rim outpost big enough to have a medcenter. The med droid's cold, spindly digits prod her belly until she growls at it to treat only the wound and leave the pregnancy to her. A faint thump echoes from its monitoring software.
“The heartbeat,” the battered 2-1B model tells her. “Do you want to listen?”
“No.” Her harshness should surprise her, but the day holds no more room for surprises. She leaves the outpost clutching her cloak tight around her, as if concealing an invisible truth is enough to make it untrue. She’s pregnant, and Ben is gone. The thin blue thread connecting them has snapped.
Maybe that’s for the best, a treasonous part of her whispers once she’s curled up in her bunk aboard the Falcon. With a traitor for a father, this child would be condemned to a life on the run. A life that Rey would embrace were it just her and Ben, yet a life that she hesitates to pass onto a child without choice.
Panic overtakes her a few months later when her stomach swells visibly, a manifestation of the secret she’s been trying to outfly. Suddenly it becomes too real and she’s left shaking, an abandoned child who doesn’t know how any of this works: pregnancy, parenthood. All she knows is a childhood of sand and scraps and a hunger so raw it threatened to consume her. What can she offer a child without Ben to guide her in the ways of family?
“Be with me.” The words slip from her mouth, rusty from months of disuse. But the universe—so cold, so empty—spits back no reply. Although it heard her pleas months ago and granted her this remnant of the man who gave her back her life, it keeps a silent vigil over her bunk. For an eternity, she lies there, turning Ben over in her mind, imagining the thin blue thread knotting itself back together and pulling their consciousnesses into a liminal world not quite here nor there. A middle ground, though compromise was never their strong suit. She drifts into that world, eyes sliding shut and mind calming for the first time since receiving the med droid report.
Then the child growing inside her kicks her ribs for the first time, startling her from the doze, and Rey weeps. Try though she might, Rey cannot conjure Ben from the dead. But she cannot let his memory die. She cannot have her child grow up believing they were abandoned by their father, so Rey begins weaving stories of the tortured Kylo Ren and the honorable Ben Solo each night before drifting to sleep. The child leaps at these stories, which make up their heritage, and Rey grows to accept—even anticipate—the movement. After they fall asleep, Ben’s legacy sweet on their tongues, Rey dreams of the blue thread stringing the three of them together.
In her dreams, she follows the thread, hand over hand without letting go. She follows it through the dark, the stars, the rubble of Exegol, until she steps into a shimmering silver world that’s more shine than substance. There she hears a familiar voice that she hasn’t heard since she was yanked back to life by a force too big for her to truly comprehend.
“Rey?”
“Ben?” Still she forges onward, the blue thread guiding her through the molten silver sky until a broad, black figure looms on the horizon. He’s clutching the thread, too, inching forward and calling for her until their hands collide. Only then does Rey let go of the thread, reaching for him until he becomes solid flesh and bone under her touch.
“Don’t leave me,” she murmurs as the edges of her dream dissolve into darkness.
His smile glows brighter than the shining sky as he places a warm hand on her stomach. Rey leans into the warmth, certain it’s an illusion, yet willing to give herself over to it. “You’re not alone. I’ll be with you wherever you go.”
And in the morning, when she wakes, she finds Ben nestled by her side, solid and sure, his hand on her stomach and the child leaping to meet it.