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Rey’s alive, but she’s barely living, she dreams but she’s hardly sleeping. Eating takes effort and cajoling, the muscles in her face retain the memories of smiling, but she can’t bring herself to do it anymore. Half of her is missing, and what a shame she spent most of her life not even knowing about it. A dyad. An absolute joke of the cosmic force that for a few minutes Rey felt it, the full power and potential of what they could be, before it was cruelly yanked away from her. Some days she wishes she never felt how powerful they were together, if only so she wouldn’t miss it so much. The way she misses that pales in comparison to missing Ben though. It’s all a steady constant ache within her chest, a beat that doesn’t match the rhythm of her heart.
Rose forces her through the motions, and Finn drags her through too-bright cantinas and too-loud city streets, sure if she sees life again, she’ll remember it. Poe lets her have her silence, even if he won’t let her have her peace as he sits next to her wherever he finds her on the days it’s his turn to make sure she’s still breathing. Chewie drifts in and out of her life in a pattern she never cares to try and recognize other than as another blow that she’s alone. Sometimes he will seek her out if he’s around, but even Finn says he’s around less and less.
The void that’s left by Leia shudders through them all at some point, but it echoes in Rey. She’s got so many questions now and no one can answer them. Rey hates that she never asked before, that she thought there would be more time. Time to understand, time to translate all of the texts she’d scavenged, time to really listen to what Leia was saying instead of focusing more on training.
Leia had seen them before, Force Ghosts, she had told Rey. Rey had merely grunted in reply, but now she aches with curiosity, who, and how, and why he never visits. She’d give anything for him to visit.
Her new saber comes together in fits and starts. She’d taken apart and put back together the ones she had borrowed, learned how they work, but building her own is different, it saps her energy. Not because it’s hard, but because she misses him. As her hands pick up and place components she wonders about him, how he built his own, then broke it to build it back up again. She knows he would help if he were here, and that’s the part that stings the most. When she finally finishes it, she lets it sit on her workbench for a week. There are no battles left to fight, and the peace seems able to maintain itself without her there.
She’s lost.
Chewie grimaces when she mentions Tatooine when he stops long enough for her to say more than two words to him, but she ignores him, sliding into the pilot's seat and displacing a porg. He stares at her for a while, glaring is a better description, but she holds his gaze until he gives in and starts the ship.
It’s only once she’s there, in the middle of arid dunes as far as the eye can see that she realizes she was wrong. There’s nothing here but hollow forgotten things, of memories best left undisturbed. When the old woman catches her trying to leave she’s startled. Rey can’t figure out where she came from or where she’s going, but she knows what it takes to survive a desert.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen someone here, you moving in?” The woman asks and Rey glances back at the sand drifted home.
“No. I used to know someone—” she trails off and looks back to the woman.
“What’s your name?”
She feels them before she sees them. A faint pulse in the Force and then they materialize. Luke and Leia, both looking young and healthy. Rey licks her dry lips and takes a breath. “I’m Rey, just Rey.”
“Milla,” she says touching her chest then continues, “I’m a bit to the east of here if you ever need anything.” she gestures with a hand to the hazy horizon and Rey inclines her head.
“Thank you,” she replies and they stare at each other for another moment before the woman moves on. Rey watches her go, and wonders if events hadn’t unfolded the way they had and if that would have been her on Jakku. She shakes off the thought with a shudder, no, he would have found her one day or one of his puppet clones.
“What are you doing here, Rey?” Luke’s voice floats to her through the force. It sounds real enough but warbles in a strange way like it’s fighting to reach her.
Slowly Rey turns to them and she feels helpless all over again. “I don’t know,” she confesses, looking back at the small moisture farm and pulling the twins’ lightsabers from the small pouch she packed them in. “I was going to—” she gestures at the sand with them and then tucks them away, “but I changed my mind. It feels wrong here.”
Leia studies her in silence while Luke’s mouth works before he gives up and sighs. Rey stays. Just a girl and her ghosts.
“Where’s Ben?” Leia asks after the moment stretches on in silence too long.
Rey feels numb in her fingertips. “What do you mean?” she asks, choking on the words. “I thought he was with you.” She blinks back the tears until they spill over and the twins turn blurry. “He’s supposed to be with you,” she heaves out the words, they slice through the air, uselessly accusatory as if they have any control over anything.
“He’s not here,” Leia whispers, just before they disappear.
Rey shoves the heels of her palms against her eyes and takes deep, gulping breaths of air trying to calm down, to stem the flow of her grief. It doesn’t work. Instead, she kicks at the sand and screams until her voice goes hoarse and she can feel electricity dancing over her hands. She remembers herself then, the one she met, the one who gave in. She won’t give her past the satisfaction.
The walk back to The Falcon feels longer than the one she took to get to the farm. She chalks it up to the weight of the knowledge she now carries in her heart, that Ben is gone, not ignoring her, or unable to manifest, but gone. When she steps on board the ship and hits the button to close the doors Chewie shuffles into sight and wraps her in his arms.
He doesn’t ask, and she doesn’t tell, but he holds her tight as fresh tears dampen his fur until there’s nothing left in her to give. She doesn’t protest when he shuffles her off to bed and she doesn’t ask where they’re going when she feels the engines roar to life around her.
When sleep claims her, her dreams are a disjointed mess.
The lush greens of Takoanda, the hint of grains of sand in her mouth that every portion of food on Jakku always had, BB-8 dancing with R2-D2, her parents old and grey and happy, Palpatine with hooks for hands digging into the shoulders of a handsome young man Rey had never met. She jolts out of sleep when it’s Ben, the hooks buried in his skull.
The blankets stick to her sweat-dampened skin as he breath comes in short pants. She’s got a headache, and nausea roils in her gut. “What the kriff,” she mumbles to herself, stumbling out of the low bed and towards the small sink in the room, sticking her face under the faucet and turning it on, gulping down water and getting soaked with the rest.
Rey shrugs on fresh clothes, lets her fingers linger on a sweater that’s already losing the scent of the man who wore it, and then heads towards the cockpit feeling more off balance than usual. Chewie brushes her off when she offers to take over, and ignores her when she asks where they’re going.
When a porg settles in her lap she absently pets it, the soft feathers a balm to her anxious heart.
Green. It’s like she’s traveled back in time, but a quick glance next to her proves her wrong. No Han, just Chewie. “Where are we?” she asks, leaning forward, arm circling the porg so it doesn’t go tumbling from her lap. His answer is short: Endor.
Rey’s heard of it and familiarized herself with the battle and victory that happened here, but she has no idea why Chewie would bring her here.
He gets a hero's welcome from the locals. Ewoks, Chewie tells her just before they disembark, as well as a warning not to touch them. Easier said than done, Rey realizes, once she sees them all. They look perfectly cuddly, but they’re all wearing a weapon of some sort, so she knows they’re not as soft as they look. After a brief exchange that leaves Rey mostly standing behind Chewie and forcing a smile, they’re led deeper into the forest.
Rey follows dutifully, trusting Chewie to not be leading her into a trap, but she still lets herself reach out with the force. It’s beautiful here, much like Ahch-To the first breath of life is almost overwhelming until it all balances out. She can sense all of the porgs back on the ship and the scattered signatures of the Ewoks throughout the forest that match the ones in front of her. In the distance ahead of them there’s something else, their signature bright but flickering, she’s never seen anything like it. She wonders if Chewie brought her here to help.
All around her, the forest echoes with the ghosts of battle, but there’s peace here, profound and deep. It would be a lovely place to stay for a little while. It takes Rey a shamefully long time to notice that the Ewoks leading them are slowly branching off and heading back towards what she assumes are their homes until it’s just Chewie leading her.
“You sure you know where you’re going?” she asks, narrowly avoiding tripping over a large root.
Chewie huffs then growls, offended before telling her he knows. Rey rolls her eyes behind his back and he snorts like he actually saw her, but she’s sure it’s more that he’s familiar with her than anything.
“This isn’t going to turn into somewhere sacrificial ceremony is it?” Rey jogs a few paces to catch up with him, then continues, “Because I don’t think I’m dressed for the occasion.” Chewie elbows her in the side and sends her stumbling to her left a few steps before finding her way back to the chucking Wookiee.
Slowly the trees thin and Rey can see smoke snaking up into the darkening sky, then the vague outline of a building, rough and uneven to better blend in the the forest, but discernable all the same. Light spills from the windows and the door is ajar. Rey glances up at Chewie once more who only smiles. It doesn’t feel like a trap, but she feels unsteady on her feet. The rhythms in her chest clashing enough to make her stumble into the Wookie before they fall into sync for the first time in months.
With a sweating palm she pushes off of Chewie and staggers forward, picking up speed until she’s running full tilt towards the small house. Her feet pound up the stairs and she just barely catches herself on the doorframe and the doorknob as she leans into the house. It’s almost stifling inside, but she’s not sure if it really is, or if it’s the way the Force is vibrating over her skin like the alive thing it is.
The ceiling is high, arched branches joined together at a peak at a height Chewie can’t even reach. There are darkened doorways that she’ll discover later, but as her gaze sweeps around the entirety of the large room it stops, snagging on the man hovering between the kitchen and the living space. His hair is longer, his frame is slimmer, and he’s leaning heavily on a crutch tucked under his arm, but she knows him, her body sings in harmony with his once more, as though they had never been apart. His eyes are busy drinking her in as Rey takes a full step into the house.
Her footsteps are staggered now as she approaches him. He stays still, drawing up and away in apprehension, she can read it in his face, knows it like it’s a part of her. Rey sniffs, stupid, idiot, nerfherder of a man. She doesn’t crash into him, even though she wants to more than anything. She wants to tackle him, hold him close and ask him anything and everything, but she doesn’t. She stops just in front of him, so close that if either of them took a deep breath they would be able to touch. He tilts his head to look down at her, lips twitching just enough to hint at a smile.
Rey thought she was all cried out, but discovers she’s not as fresh tears roll down her cheeks. The word trembles as it escapes her, “Ben.”