Chapter Text
Moon dew on roses,
Carried on the breath of dawn:
The scent of water.
***
The only thing worse than real sand is phantom sand.
There’s no ridding himself of it. He can’t brush it off, can’t wash it off. It follows him everywhere with no relief in view.
Ben rallies every last ounce of his hard-won self-control to sit through meetings, to pretend he’s paying attention, to ignore the temptation to itch and scratch.
Wherever Rey is, she’s been filthy with grit for what feels like eternity.
He rakes gloved fingers through his hair as he storms down the gleaming hallway toward his quarters, desperate to escape the crawling sensation on his scalp. Phantom sand pinches his toes in his boots, grinds under his heels, scrapes his forearms, trickles down his chest, and tickles his neck. Not to mention grating in his pants, as if the rest weren’t bad enough.
How many times has the Force connected him to Rey when he can’t do a kriffing thing about it? Rey on the other side of the command deck, Rey in the middle of a Supreme Council meeting, Rey across the hangar bay, among his crew on the command shuttle or when he’s training with his Knights.
On the upside, the mysterious trails of sand that keep appearing all over the Steadfast have confounded and vexed General Hux no end. Ben bites back a grin.
Plus there’s that night he dreamed Rey was in his sleeper. She snuggled into his chest while he curled around her form—and woke to silt between his sheets. He’s never slept so soundly. If he traced his fingers through the dust and savored the elemental knowledge that those very same grains of sand had tumbled from her body, if he reveled in the knowledge her Force-presence had really been there, who’s to know?
Although, why couldn’t the Force project her on any of the thousand nights he’s suffered insomnia?
Ben’s not going to be caught at an inopportune moment again. He’s had enough. He’s taking the initiative. This time, he’s going to pull the thread, he’s going to make her come to him, and they’re going to put an end to this torture.
Even knowing it’s only a figment of their Force-bond, he removes his boots when he enters his quarters and shakes them upside down. No dirt mars the illuminated white tiles. He strips as he crosses through his receiving room: gloves, cowl, belt, surcoat, doublet, undersweater, trousers. Until he’s standing barefoot in his undershirt and shorts. Enough skin's exposed for the cool air to convince his confused nerve endings that sand’s not swarming over his flesh like a thousand stinging ants.
“Rey,” he bellows, mostly to vent his annoyance. She won’t hear him.
They’ve never connected intentionally, at least not that he’s aware. The bond that should have died with Snoke, had he done what he claimed, has only grown stronger in the months since the Battle of Crait. He and Rey appear more frequently to each other. He’s begun to suspect it’s only their mutual desire to cut the connection that limits it to fleeting and fragmentary glimpses, shared memories, and flashes of Force-vision.
Sometimes unshielded thoughts brush up against the other, tangle together, and fuse so deftly that it’s a wrestling match to sort out and pull back behind their respective mental walls. As if the barriers are artifice and their minds were crafted for union.
Time to test his theory.
Ben plucks the strings of light and dark that stretch between them, taut and finely tuned as any instrument. Harmonic notes sound and resonate across the Force. Surely she can’t miss that. He might as well ring the chime beside her door.
He’s caught enough of her stray thoughts and feelings to gather Rey is as fascinated as she is frustrated with him. He knows the feeling. Whatever rage arose at her rejection on the Supremacy has long since given way to, well, longing. He can’t stop thinking about her. It helps that she’s always with him, a bright presence in his being. Comfortable. Warm. Welcome. Unless he’s actively trying to push her out, which he did at first, until he tired of the effort.
“Rey,” he calls again, gentler in invitation. Like a heat sink, the conditioned air in his quarters has drawn off the steam from his irritation.
What they share far surpasses any Force-bond he’s ever studied, and he’s been studying extensively. Exchanging physical sensations—hence, this blasted sand—shouldn’t be possible. No, this is something else. He hasn’t figured it out yet, but he will.
Ben closes his eyes and seeks Rey’s bright star in the Force. In his darkest hours, he could always sense the light’s call, perhaps especially then. Even as his father fell, Han’s love and forgiveness flared in the Force like a supernova. Dad. There’s nothing—nothing—he regrets more in his entire life. But Rey’s light shines into the darkness of this memory too. The draw to her brilliance overwhelms, like a tractor-beam he’s powerless to withstand.
If the pull between light and dark is a tug-of-war in his soul, he’s been losing ground even as he resists, his dug-in heels sliding ever closer to the line of demarcation. His capitulation seems as inevitable as it is inexorable. Heck, he rarely thinks of himself as Kylo Ren anymore, not without Snoke to bludgeon him into submission. He remains who he never ceased to be, for all his cruel master’s lies and intentions otherwise. He is Ben Solo, creature of light and dark.
Rey hasn’t responded. Interesting. Either he failed to flag her notice or she chose not to react.
Time for the next step, so easy it’s almost frightening: to simply let go, to stop resisting, to succumb to the pull and yield to the light of her presence. There’s a whoosh, his inner ear registers a change in air pressure, and when he opens his eyes, she’s standing before him. Or at least this pillar of sand-colored cloth must be her.
Hands reach to pull the scarf down from her mouth. “Ben? Did you just—” She coughs and splutters. “How did you?”
“We need to talk,” he wheezes, illusory dust choking his throat too.
She shoves her goggles onto her forehead, and sand cascades down her face. “Kriff!” Her fingers fly up but stop before rubbing her sealed eyes.
Ben squeezes his own lids against the vicarious burn. He steps forward and catches her hand. “Come on. I’ll take you to the ‘fresher.”
He navigates her halting steps up the stairs to his bedchamber, past his sleeper, and into the well-appointed ‘fresher. The gentle ping of sand pattering on tile follows her. At the sink, he turns on the tap, guides her fingers under the flow, and shares the sting as she rinses her eyes. When she straightens, her golden skin is streaked with mud. He passes her an ebony hand-towel without comment and she pats her face dry.
They stand, staring, in his ‘fresher, though he has no idea what she sees on her side of the bond. The air frizzles with tension, but it’s quite possibly the least conflicted or fraught moment they’ve ever shared.
“Thanks,” she says and offers the soiled towel back to him.
He accepts and twists the cloth through his fingers. Even with dirt tracking down her cheeks and her eyes rimmed in red, she’s— Beautiful? Dazzling? Any single word seems too small, too trite to encapsulate the essence of her loveliness. She’s fresh, open, unvarnished. Gloriously alive with all the promise of sunrise, yet even that falls short. It’s been too long since he’s had the opportunity to study her countenance, to relish the spark in those luminous hazel eyes.
“Ben?”
He’s staring. Kriff. He clears his throat. “Rey, I don’t know where you are—” She starts to interrupt and he raises a palm to silence her. “—and I don’t need to know. But you’ve been covered in sand for weeks—”
“One week,” she corrects and her lips twitch.
“Well, it feels like more,” he mumbles. “Look, could you just take a shower? Please?”
She unwinds her head and neck scarf, scattering sand on his ‘fresher floor with each revolution. “Bothers you that much, huh?”
“You could not invent a more perfect torment.” He shouldn’t be this forthright, not when she could use it against him, but he hasn’t been able to confess his misery to anyone—and really, he’d say anything, do anything, to find relief.
“Good thing the Force didn’t connect us while I was still living on Jakku.” Rey chuckles. The grin lurking about her mouth widens into a smile that rounds and dimples her cheeks.
“I’m not amused,” he says, a touch petulant at being teased.
Memory gusts and he’s sucked into the sandstorm of her experience before either realize what’s happening. Sand. Sand everywhere. Steep dunes for trudging up and surfing down. Sinking fields that swallow starships whole. Shifting landscapes that mask her tracks. A black lake of pure glass. Blowing, grating, drifting. In her mouth and hair and boots. Sand that filters into the AT-AT she calls home, that gums up her speeder, that spoils her hard-earned portions and fouls her last sip of precious water, even if it’s already reeking and stale from her canteen. Underneath it all is not self-pity but the soul-deep savor of loneliness and longing.
She snatches back the memories with a flare of her nostrils. She didn’t intend to expose so much.
That life—the grueling, scrimping life of a scavenger—has made her strong and adaptable and who she is.
“If the Force had connected us sooner”—his heart cinches with all she has endured—“I would have come for you.”
She tilts her head as she begins unwinding an arm wrap. “What possible use would Kylo Ren have had for a little girl?”
His throat goes dry. A child. She was just a child, abandoned on a desert planet. Anger rises, scarlet and savage, at the parents who dared to leave her. “I would have come for you.” Vehemence cracks his voice at the edges. “I would have cared for you and kept you safe.”
“And trained me in the dark side, no doubt.” She drops the arm wrap and it disappears from sight. Her lips firm into a straight line as she holds his gaze. Unintimidated. Unmoved by the forceful passion of his words.
He doesn’t reply. Isn’t that what Snoke did to the padawans who followed him after he razed Luke’s Academy? Broke them and forged the ones who survived into Knights of Ren. Isn’t Ben’s ultimate goal to persuade Rey she’s destined to embrace her darkness and rule the galaxy beside him? Yet he can’t fathom taking her as a child and warping her light into something shadowed, not when that’s what Snoke did to him, twisted all that was good and bright in his life until he clung to darkness as his only refuge. He could never make her suffer. He couldn’t do it to her as a child, no more than he can now. He won’t.
“It’s okay, Ben.” Her fingers ghost across his bare forearm and he jolts at the contact.
“I wouldn’t,” he asserts.
“Wouldn’t what?”
“Try to turn you. To the dark side.”
She studies him for a long moment. “You used the light side of the Force to connect us, didn’t you.”
It’s not quite that simple, but he nods. It feels like they’ve reached some unspoken concordance, crossed some irrevocable boundary, but neither says anything further.