Chapter Text
As Rey lies bleeding to death against the cold asphalt all she can think is that the soundtrack is all wrong. A cover of a cover of some unfamiliar pop ballad. An algorithm produced choice that is sorely off for the moment and for Rey’s tastes in general. Motherfucking Spotify Discover is sending her into the open arms of oblivion to a song hastily recorded in a garage somewhere, most likely dedicated to an ex who couldn’t give less of a fuck about the recordee. If Rey were capable of grinding her teeth, they would be pulp. To distract herself, Rey thinks about the soundtrack of the send-off she’d rather have. She would pick the low hum of her mother’s voice, the words of a lullaby laced with the feeling of gentle fingers stroking her hair. Swing low sweet chariot coming for to carry me home. But there’s no option for this, not on Spotify, and not in this immutable moment.
Rey can feel her hands pressed to the pavement next to her head, sticky with what can only be her blood, but she can’t gain control of them. Not enough to push herself up and drag herself off the road or to hit the button on her earbuds that would silence the irritating crooning, just enough to twitch helplessly, fingernails scraping against the bumps on the pavement.
A band of angels coming after me, she thinks over the noise. Rey wishes she believed in angels; it might soothe the sting of dying just a little. Coming for to carry me home, carry me home, carry me home, carry me home. If Rey believed in a heaven where she’d be reunited with her mother, maybe dying would be a more efficient process than the long trail she seems to be trekking towards incomprehension. Mind, if the gods of others exist her mother is likely in hell anyways.
Time loops and knots as blood thumps from the deep laceration in Rey’s head. It pools hot under her face before adjusting to the world outside of her body and cooling to match the frigid air. An arctic front had moved in last night. Unseasonably cold, the woman on the news had reported. There’s a symmetry to dying in June that Rey likes. Her birth month, her death month.
“It’s time to get up, June bug,” she hears her mother whisper before hands are pressing against her shoulders. The hands of course do not belong to her mother. Those have long since turned to dirt and rot in a plot that Rey rarely visits. But the voice is enough to hold on to, real or not.
Shuffling, sirens, lights so bright they blind through eyelids, earbuds yanked out, foreign voices, two fingers at her pulse point, sharp pain to remind Rey that she’s still alive but that hurts enough to make her wish she weren’t. Rey comes to in the ambulance and the paramedic’s words tell her that she’s going to be okay though his face tells her something else. She wakes again to the warm pressure of a blue plastic hand against her face holding her steady as her scalp is stitched back together. Awake but only half there she watches on as nurses rotate in and out of the cream-coloured hospital room, their uniforms’ petal pink, dark teal, navy. The one that sticks her arm wears pale yellow and has a matching scrunchie. Rey means to compliment her but by the time she finds the words the room is dark and the nurse has clocked out. Another nurse comes by in the morning to prod the black train tracks sewn into her skull. One moment the woman is wearing muted lime and the next her face and shirt are slashed with vermillion. The dull ache of the stitches gives way to a sharper pain as they tear, and Rey finds herself sliding in and out of consciousness again. Shoes squeak against the linoleum, hands press hard, whitecoats speak in harsh tones, the overhead lights buzz, her leg thrums and aches vying for attention over her head. Rey passes out again.
The drugs combined with the head trauma collaborate to produce confusing dreams where Rey is an alien orphan in a desert. Her friends and people she might call friends if a stranger asked play supporting roles, each more confounding and further from reality than the next. When she wakes to the dark hospital room she barely knows which way is up and has to check for the IV to make sure it isn’t bacta. Relief when she sees the bag and then sorrow when she realizes she’s alone in the room.
If her friends aren’t renegades and rebels on resistance missions to save a variant galaxy from the hands of tyranny then where are they, and why aren’t they here? No Finn, no Rose, no Poe. Just the hum of unnameable machines and ambient light from the parking lot outside. Tears wet her cheeks as Rey stares down the empty vinyl-wrapped visitor's chair in the corner of the room. She may not be the alien orphan from her dream, but she feels just as abandoned.
Rey’s tears dry as the sun rises and by the time the doctor walks in she’s mostly done sniffling. The doctor adjusts the open box of tissues on the bedside table as she speaks, nudging it closer to Rey with the corner of her metal clipboard. Rey should be listening to what the woman is saying but her eye contact is so direct that it’s distracting. Blue eyes ringed with shimmery black kohl. Icy exosphere against a star speckled night.
“Alright?” The doctor asks, penciled eyebrows knitting over those eyes.
Rey nods, because she feels as though this is the correct response.
“Okay,” the woman smiles. “A nurse will be by in a little while to prep you. Try to eat something in the meantime,” she nods meaningfully towards the tray of food hovering across Rey’s lap. An orderly had brought it by earlier, slotting the table it sits on carefully over her. The once steaming oatmeal is now thick and cold but Rey pokes at it with a spoon as the doctor leaves, trying to recall what it is exactly that she needs to be prepped for. Fragments of the conversation bubble up but they pop before Rey has a chance to grasp them.
Serious, lucky, trauma, memory, brain, major, swelling, death.
Rey scoops up a cube of red Jell-o and watches it wobble along with the tremor of her hand. She sucks it through her teeth and swallows. When she finishes the bowl, she sets down her spoon. The oatmeal looks paste-like in the clear morning light, and it smells no better. When the nurse arrives—yellow scrunchie—Rey is staring out the window at a group of sparrows spinning and dipping through the bluebird sky. They remind her of her dream and the way that she piloted ships that could cut through atmosphere and time and zip between the stars. She can almost feel the controls in her hands, yearns to be the Rey in that other universe, authoritative and fearless. The Rey in this universe has never even seen the inside of a plane. And likely won’t if that death part of the doctor’s deliverance had been anything to go by.
The day passes in a rhythmic flurry that goes something like this: someone wearing scrubs explains something to Rey, Rey doesn’t catch what they say, Rey agrees regardless, Rey finds herself inside of some machine or knocked out for a procedure or with a needle in her arm, rinse, repeat.
By the end of it all she’s exhausted even though she hasn’t done anything but lay in bed, lay elsewhere, or let someone push her in a wheelchair. Her eyelids sag and her heart aches because through it all she was alone. When she asks a nurse about her emergency contact the man smiles sympathetically and gives her hand a squeeze—He’s unable to make it, but I can give someone else a call for you if you like….
The nurse flicks off the light as he leaves, and Rey curls up on her side facing the window. The moon’s full face stares back at her and Rey squints trying to find the man. Tonight, he evades her.
When she wakes halfway through the night to the sound of shuffling feet in the hallway Ben Solo is sleeping in the visitor’s chair at the end of her bed. His body is far too big for the thing, arms spilling over the wooden rests and legs stretched out in front of him. His face is milky blue in the moonlight and his head lolls against the wall at an uncomfortably sharp angle. Less concerned than she should be that her head trauma is now causing her to hallucinate, Rey falls back asleep with ease, shifting her legs under the thin hospital blanket.
When morning comes and Ben Solo is still in the chair Rey is admittedly a little more worried.