Archive of Our Own

The sun’s heat woke him, beating down relentlessly on his face. Forgetting where he was, he pushed himself up on his elbows and rubbed the heel of his hand into his eye, grit grinding against skin. His mouth was dry, and a sickly ache throbbed in his temples. Then he shifted, trying to sit up, and pain bloomed in his leg, turning his stomach and bringing a sour, acrid taste to the back of his throat. He pressed his lips together, held his breath, and called on the force for resolve. He had been in pain before. He had been in pain too much. The constant, vast wellspring of the force was there for him to draw upon to numb the pain, to bolster it, to turn it into fuel.

But when he reached out, there was nothing.

He heard, rather than sensed, the movement beside him. Felt the hand on his shoulder. ‘You’re awake,’ a voice said, high and choked. ‘I didn’t think you’d wake up.’

He squeezed his eyes shut tight, spots dancing against the darkness in his vision. The pain in his leg was building, becoming more nauseating, sending shivers through the rest of him. Where was the force? He tried to slow his breathing and reached out again, putting all of his focus into it. Nothing but silence, the feeling of the hand on his shoulder. The hand that now pressed down, easing him back to the ground.

‘Sorry,’ the voice said. ‘Your leg - I think it’s broken.’

He forced his eyes open, squinting up at the pale grey-blue sky. His memory returned. The fall, how he hadn’t been afraid of it - Snoke had thrown him over sheer drops before, it was nothing new - and the landing, of which his leg had been the biggest casualty. The slow, agonising climb back up, how the rocks had torn his fingers to shreds, how he’d had to stop and wipe sweat and blood from his eyes with the cuff of his shirt. It had only been an inconvenience. He was long past the stage of thinking of the things that happened to his body as traumatic. They were just annoying. Another thing to overcome on his way to his endpoint. He had the force with him; he could do anything. He could climb the walls of a chasm with a broken leg because the force allowed him to parcel all of his pain away and re-process it as sustenance. He could do it because he had no choice. He could do it because Rey had needed him.

Then the unexpected had happened. He had felt it, first, without really understanding what it meant. Felt the stab of it in his chest. The void of it; the starless, sunless patch of it. The place where she had always been - the place that was always so reliably vibrant, so strong, so there - and how it had become nothing, how the background hum of the galaxy had flooded in to replace it, how it had all become white noise. Her death had been a gutting. Her death had been suffocation. Her death had been darkness.

He’d climbed the rest of the way anyway, because even if she was dead, she still needed him.

Rey’s pale, pinched face blurred into view. A rivulet of blood trickled down her forehead, down past her eye. He reached up to wipe it away with the pad of his thumb, winced when the movement brought fresh waves of pain to his leg. She caught his hand and held it tight, the skin over her knuckles going white.

‘Do you remember what happened?’ she asked.

Crawling through the ash towards her body, holding her in his arms, calling out to the force for help - calling for his mother, his grandfather, anyone. Knowing he was alone. Knowing what he had to do. He remembered.

But if it had worked, how was he still alive?

He lifted his head, tried to take in his surroundings. There was the TIE Fighter he’d flown in on. The controls had been corroded by salt water and given out a few minutes before landing, so he’d brought it down hard, leaving one wing permanently damaged. There was her X-Wing, a trail of footsteps leading to and from the cockpit through the ash. A small part of him wanted to ask her about the ship. It was a vintage model, the sort he’d always wanted to fly. Where had she got it? Why did she have it? What had compelled her to fly all this way alone, no backup, not even an astromech?

‘I turned on my ship’s transponder,’ Rey said. ‘Someone will be here for us soon.’

He reached for the force again. Again it was absent. It was like losing a sense, as if he’d woken up without his sight or touch. The force had always been there. The force gave him a double-vision that let him anticipate what would happen, let him move faster, hit harder, push himself past the limits of what should be possible. Without it he felt small, brittle, defenceless. He was conscious of how fragile his body felt. How he was entirely at her mercy. It hadn’t been too long ago that they’d fought on the ruins of the old Death Star. He felt he’d made the precise depth of his feelings clear, but she had every reason not to trust him, to walk away and leave him lying in the ash.

‘How did we get here?’ he asked. His voice was thin and scratchy. His memory ended at the moment he saw her eyes open, heard her whisper his name. She had survived. He’d done what he’d meant to do. He hadn’t expected to wake up again, much less wake up outside of the temple, the sun shining down on him, the skies clear.

‘Ben,’ she said, sounding a little bemused. ‘I carried you.’

The ship that came to rescue them was the last one he wanted to see. The old Corellian corvette was unchanged from his childhood memories - perhaps a few more blastermarks on the hull, and he thought the comms dish might have been swapped out at some point - and the sight of it made him feel claustrophobic. He half-considered telling Rey that it was fine, they’d just wait for someone else, but that wouldn’t be an option. Besides, he really was in a lot of pain.

With the force, he might have used the pain to sharpen his senses, to harden his resolve. Now, the force still unnervingly absent, the pain was useful for the way it made everything blurry and softened all the edges. He was barely aware of the ship’s crew, the men and women who bundled them aboard. Conversations faded in and out of his awareness. The lights all seemed very bright. He was dimly aware of someone binding his leg straight, probing the skin of his inner arm for an injection. When the painkillers took hold, he realised it was Rey.

‘Who’s looking after you?’ he asked her.

She shook her head, lips pressed together. The cabin was empty. Rey had set a medkit on the holochess table, bandages and little packaged medications strewn across the checkered surface, as if she’d had to take the whole kit apart to find what she needed.

‘I’m fine,’ she said eventually. ‘Don’t worry about me.’

But he saw the way she winced when turning back to the table, and put out a hand to stop her. ‘Here,’ he gestured for the medkit. ‘Let me.’

She passed it over. He soaked a balled-up strip of gauze in sterile solution and held it up. She leaned in, eyes closed, and let him dab at the dried blood on her temple. To his relief, the wound was shallow, but he remembered how much they were alike, and knew that she’d be masking her real pain.

‘I can’t feel you,’ she murmured, close enough that he could feel her breath on his hand. ‘In the force. There’s just…no sense of you.’

He didn’t try to reach out again. He was injured, he was exhausted; surely that was disrupting his connection to the force, he told himself, even though it had never stopped him before. It had been a very, very long day.

‘I’m here,’ he said.

‘I worried you were dead,’ she went on. ‘You gave so much of yourself to me. You were gone from the force. I didn’t…’

She trailed off. He wondered if he should tell her that when he’d given her so much of his energy, he thought he’d be dead too.

‘I’m glad you’re here,’ she finished.

Her head rested against his. They were close enough to kiss. He remembered, almost a year ago, standing by her side in the elevator on the way to Snoke’s throne room. They’d been close then. He’d wanted to kiss her, would have, but everything had been so finely balanced. There hadn’t been the luxury of stepping out of line. But what if he had, what if he’d been capable of turning to the light then, what if he’d gone with her instead of…

What if he kissed her now?

‘I hope I fixed you up okay. None of them wanted to treat you,’ she said, breaking away and inclining her head towards the cockpit. ‘I’m sorry. I hoped they’d understand.’

It was unsurprising. Inconsequential. Tears welled up in her eyes, and he reached out for her hand. It didn’t matter to him what her Resistance allies thought, or did. They had no reason to help him.

‘It’s fine,’ he said.

Rey rubbed her eyes and took a deep breath, then lowered herself down to sit on the floor, her small hand still held in his.

‘I’ll stay,’ she said.

Her hand was warm. A raw, fiery scrape went across her knuckles, the skin around it pale and white. It should not have been her responsibility to care for him. Not when she needed just as much care. Not when he didn’t deserve it. He chewed the inside of his lip, wondering if there was a way to say thank you, but mean I love you.

Rey’s head dipped forward, her hand going limp. He could tell by the steady movement of her shoulders that she had fallen asleep.

The ship wasn’t quiet. Not really. There was the ever-present deep hum of the engines, consoles beeping, the burbling of a droid, somewhere. But he was not used to the new quiet that existed in his head. For most of his life Snoke had been there, and laterally something he still wasn’t sure how to define. If they weren’t speaking, he was still conscious of their presence in the force, even half a galaxy away. His mind had never truly been his own. It was easy to see that now that it was silent. There would be no more whispers, no more commands. It unnerved him; what was he to do with this much space, this much freedom?

He tightened his grip on Rey’s hand, a part of him still waiting for the voice that would never speak again.

They were separated on landing, ostensibly so the Resistance doctor could check in on Rey, even though she kept insisting she was fine. He caught a brief glimpse of the planet through the ship’s viewport as they landed - a lush sprawl of greenery - and found it pleased him, knowing how important it was for Rey to be somewhere so verdant.

He was not allowed to linger and see it up close. They landed in a cave, where two of the ship’s crew led him, limping, into the belly of an old corvette. The path through the ship had evidently been cleared in advance, because the corridors were empty.

He was taken to a small internal cabin that seemed, until recently, to have been a storage space. The shelving that lined the walls had evidently been cleared with some haste, small fragments of flimsiwork or broken bits of plasteel left behind. A folding chair was propped against one wall. He was locked inside without so much as a word.

He unfolded the chair and sat down, leg stretched out. And waited. Then got up, and tried to pace around the room, but couldn’t make it more than a few steps. His good leg prickled, then went numb. Sitting became uncomfortable. The room felt smaller and smaller with every passing second, until it seemed that the walls brushed up against his shoulders.

He had just gathered up all the scraps of flimsi and begun to fold them into small, solid pieces, when they came to interrogate him. There was no exchange of names, no formalities. The questions came thick and fast. What were the current movements of the First Order fleet, what comm frequencies were they using, who was in command? Which ships had gone to Exegol? What orders were they following, now their Supreme Leader was slumped on a rickety chair in an old storage closet in Resistance command?

He responded to each of them, feeling a little stupid, that he didn’t really know. He’d effectively been a deserter since the moment he left for Kef Bir, and much of the time preceding that registered as little more than a blur in his memory. But, he said, he could volunteer what he did remember. Locations of bases, comm codes, the names of the senior staff that were still alive when he’d left - stopping short of mentioning their real commander, the undead thing in the temple on Exegol. Too much of that was Rey’s story to tell, not his.

A gnawing, pervasive sense of dread grew in his stomach as the interrogation went on. They quoted dates to him, showed holovids of planets, scan data of destroyed ships. Evidence of where he had been and what he had done. Only some of it stirred his memory, the rest felt surreal. He remembered so little of the past few years. Snoke had pointed and he had sleepwalked to his master’s orders. But it was all him. The evidence was clear.

After the interrogation, he was taken to see the Resistance’s doctor, who told him it was too late to do anything about his leg, which they didn’t really have the proper facilities to treat anyway.

‘It’ll heal,’ she said, rebinding the splint while he grit his teeth and tried to blink away the blurriness in his vision. ‘And you’ll walk, of course, but you’ll probably have a limp.’

She tied off a strip of gauze and sat back.

‘You need rest. Couple of months at minimum. We might be able to spare some crutches for you to get around. Try not to put weight on it. And don’t do any flying. Although,’ she busied herself with organising a stack of flimsi on her desk. ‘I don’t imagine you will be doing any flying.’

‘I doubt it,’ he said.

Her face flushed. She pushed her chair back and went over to her dataterminal. Earlier, he’d had his blood taken, his pulse checked, and his limbs and torso scanned with a quaint handheld imaging device that he was sure predated the Battle of Yavin. To his unease, the doctor had performed all of the tests herself. Snoke had always preferred to hand off any medical procedures to an every-changing lineup of droids. The basic surgical droids used by the First Order were not programmed to be sympathetic to patient pain, he’d said, and thus would provide the most efficient treatment.

‘Your vitals are alright,’ she said, tapping the interface. ‘But I’m concerned by your imaging results. I’ve seen Clone Wars veterans in better shape than you. Historic evidence of multiple fractures, extensive deep scarring - and did you know you’re missing a kidney?’ Her eyebrows rose as he shook his head. ‘No? Have you ever been offered longterm bacta therapy?’

‘No,’ he said. Snoke had not approved. Snoke preferred the old methods. Snoke preferred things bleeding, raw.

‘I can put in a recommendation. Might help with some of the superficial injuries, even the old ones. Of course, we don’t have a therapy facility here, and it’ll be up to command, so…’ she trailed off.

Snoke had taught him that pain was the key that unlocked his full potential in the force. Snoke embraced pain. Snoke encouraged it. Snoke caused it.

The doctor went back to her notes. He pushed his palm down on his knee, felt the wave of nausea that followed, saw the stars at the edge of his vision. Instead of sharpening, his mind fuzzed at the edges. In the absence of the force to draw upon, he thought that batca therapy sounded very appealing.

‘What can I do for now?’ he asked.

She shrugged. ‘Rest. As much as you can. It’s not like you’re going anywhere. I’ll give you something to take for the pain. We’ll do another checkup in a few weeks.’

It hit him slowly, the weight of it slowly pressing down on his shoulders. He was a prisoner now. It was the cost of going to Rey, even if he hadn’t realised it at the time. She had never been willing to leave the Resistance behind, and they would never have welcomed him with open arms.

He tried to sit up straight. The cabin seemed airless, and he suddenly felt very, very tired. The ship might be his home for the rest of his life. He thought about how easy it would be, with the full power of the force, to break the lock on the door. Throw aside anyone who got in the way. Find a ship, get out, go. It was a challenging prospect unarmed, but a trivial one if he still had a lightsaber.

But no, he told himself, watching as the doctor measured out a quantity of pills, placing them into a container that he supposed would be given to his keepers. He had chosen this path for Rey. He could not afford to destroy it like he had destroyed the others. Besides, where would he go? What would he be? Without the force - and he was beginning to question whether it would ever return - what was he but a broken, tired man?

It was too exhausting to think about. The doctor dispatched him back into the care of the same guards who’d taken him to his cabin - no, cell - earlier. Then it was back through the corridors, back to the closet, where someone had thoughtfully left a thin blanket and a bottle of water on one of the shelves, and then it was lowering himself down to the floor, settling his weary body down on the hard metal and then, for the first time in years - falling into an uninterrupted, dreamless sleep.

Someone had left a tray of food for him when he woke up: a shallow, stone-cold bowl of cooked grains; a hard, underripe piece of green fruit; a thermal flask of strongly-brewed caf that had the consistency of thin tar. He crawled towards it, uncapped the flask, and took a sip. It was bitter, somehow gritty, but still lukewarm, and so he drank it all in one sitting. It gave him enough of an appetite to devour the congealed bowl of grains and the overripe fruit, neither of which could quite get rid of the bitter taste.

The pain in his leg had faded, but everything else ached. His back complained when he levered himself fully upright, and his neck twinged when he experimentally turned his head from side to side. His eyesight was sharp, his hearing good enough to pick up the sound of someone walking past the door, but the force was still, frustratingly, gone.

If he’d still had the force, he might have reached for Rey. Neither of them had ever quite worked out the mechanics of their force bond - it seemed better left that way - but he found that they always connected when she was on his mind. It wasn’t always convenient. Often he would just catch a glimpse of her before the connection closed, feeling the disquieting sensation of being watched before turning and seeing her sharp, freckled face. She appeared everywhere: sat at the table during First Order command meetings; perched on the wing of his ship; crouched on the floor of his quarters, hard at work on some mechanical project he could never quite see on his side of the bond. He supposed it was the same for her. How often had he visited this Resistance base already without knowing?

There was a polite knock at the door. He didn’t respond. He was a prisoner; surely they didn’t need permission to enter. Someone had clearly come in when he was asleep to leave the food. But then the door slid open and it was like a sunbeam falling on his face, an instant, warm brightness. Rey stepped inside and shut the door behind her, as if their force bond was still active, as if he’d summoned her just by thought.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asked.

He nodded to his splinted leg. ‘Fine. What about you?’

Rey made a face that seemed to communicate everything about the last few days. He’d felt some of it through their bond before the force had left him. Spending her life waiting for her family to return, then believing they had abandoned her, and then finding out - a realisation that had been disturbing enough to him, he wasn’t sure he could begin to grasp what it was to her - that she was, instead, the last remnant of the galaxy’s darkest legacy. She had also, he reminded himself, lost her mentor, her surrogate mother - his own mother - a loss that neither of them had yet processed, so sudden and faraway as it had been.

‘I’ve been better,’ she said.

She sat beside him, shoulders sagging forward, one hand cradling the elbow of her other arm. A bacta patch on her forehead looked stark and sterile above her shadowed, tired eyes. He shifted self-consciously, pulling at his shirt, still filthy with ash and dirt from Exegol. It was strange, he thought, that after all they had been through, this was the first time they’d had something resembling a normal, everyday conversation.

‘What did they ask you?’ she said.

‘I didn’t tell them about your parents, if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘Thanks, but - I mean, what did you tell them?’ her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘They’re already talking about a trial, and some of them just want to lock you away, but some…’

‘I gave them information about the First Order.’

‘I know there’s things you have to answer for, but you can’t do that if they…’ her hands twisted together, knuckles white. There was a faraway look in her eyes. ‘I’ve been trying to talk them round, and Finn’s helping, but…’

She paused, tilting her head towards the corner.

‘Talk them round to what?’ he asked.

Rey wrinkled her nose. ‘Thank you, Master Skywalker,’ she said, in a loud, clear voice. ‘But please go away.’

He followed her gaze to the corner, which was occupied by nothing more than a a build-up of dust.

‘Is he…’

Her eyes flitted back to his. ‘You can’t see him?’

‘No.’

‘He just-’ she glanced back over her shoulder. ‘He’s gone. He keeps trying to give me advice, and it is probably useful, but…’

He set his hand on his thigh, palm up, and after a moment, she placed her own hand on top of it.

‘You can’t feel the force at all, can you,’ she said. A statement rather than a question. ‘I can feel it. Stronger than it was before. I can sense every person on this ship, including you, but not - you. Ben,’ she added, in a low voice. ‘What did you do? What happened before I woke up?’

‘You died,’ he told her. ‘I just did what you’d done for me on the old Death Star.’

‘But that’s…’

His chest felt tight. ‘I didn’t expect to survive it.’

Rey sank against him, her head resting on his shoulder. ‘I didn’t know I was dead.’

‘I felt it in the force. It wasn’t for long.’

‘Whatever you did to bring me back must have disrupted your connection. We’ll fix it,’ she said, and her fingers threaded through his. ‘I’m sure we can fix it.’

They sat like that for a moment, his skin burning in all the places it touched hers. Without the force, he was hesitant - an unfamiliar feeling, when he’d always charged into things in the past. Their bond hadn’t just carried their physical presences across the galaxy, but the nuances of their emotions too, the vague shape of their thoughts. Now, he could tell that Rey was tired, that she was frustrated, and that she wanted to be close to him - but what beyond that? What if she didn’t want what he did? It wouldn’t have been the first time.

‘There’s someone outside the door,’ she muttered. ‘Listening in. I better go.’

‘Will you come back?’

Rey smiled, squeezed his hand. ‘As soon as I can. I’ll talk to them. I promise.’

She stood and made for the door, nodding to the Resistance guard outside. The door snapped shut, and he was left alone in his new, unfamiliar silence.

Rey had mentioned his uncle. A force ghost now, he presumed. He imagined Luke standing in the corner, staring down at him, the corners of his mouth downturned in disgust. Still accusing him. He barely remembered the days after the Temple was destroyed, but that wasn’t a surprise. He had trouble remembering a lot of his life, as if all the times Snoke had burrowed into his mind had scrubbed some of it clean.

He knew he hadn’t done it. Or if he did - it hadn’t been intentional. The night was a blur, the days that followed a half-remembered nightmare. Nobody would believe you, Snoke had said. And nobody did, except for Rey.

He went through the next day like he was sleepwalking. Another meal was left inside the door while he slept, another lukewarm flask of caf and bowl of stodge. He was allowed out, briefly, to wash and accept a change of clothes. The garments were worn, gone soft with repeated washing, and smelled pleasantly of soap. The only thing he kept was his shirt, which still had a perfectly circular burn mark just below his ribs. It felt important that he kept it. It was a reminder of how things could have gone.

There was another interrogation session, then a break, where he got hot caf, freshly brewed. The questioning resumed and went on until what he thought was night; hard to tell inside a ship. The force was still gone. He was beginning to accept that it may never come back.

Rey had hinted that the Resistance might not treat him favourably, but it was obvious from the interrogation. He knew it was, genuinely, his fault; I don’t know wasn’t a suitable answer, even if it was the truth. He didn’t try to elaborate. Who would understand him if he said he’d had a voice in his head since he was a child, one that was now only gone because Rey had murdered it? Who would understand him if he explained that Rey had died, that she was only here, now, walking around the Resistance base, because he had poured all of his energy into reviving her?

It didn’t matter anyway. His sins were innumerable. They had been counted, and he had to pay for them. He could have saved a thousand Reys and it wouldn’t have balanced them all out. The longer the day went on, the more he believed this, and when he was returned to his cell, he lay down on the floor beneath the thin blanket and stared at the ceiling, thinking about the life she might have if they did lock him away. If they exiled him. If they executed him. She could be happy. She could be unburdened.

The lights flickered. Hurried footsteps sounded from the corridor outside. He eased himself upright, taking care not to move his leg. The footsteps faded, and in the silence, he was conscious of a faint ringing in his ears. His vision seemed to blur at the edges, making his small world soft, indistinct.

With a soft hiss, the door slid open. The corridor outside was dark. It was Rey, her grimy white clothes exchanged for a dark flightsuit and jacket, a bag slung over her shoulders. Her hair had been tied into a loose knot at the nape of her neck, a few tendrils springing loose around her flushed face. Her breath came in short, sharp bursts, and she steadied herself against the doorframe.

‘Do you want to get out of here?’ she said, and stretched out her hand. His tired eyes blurred, almost losing her against the darkness. Perhaps he was dreaming.

He took her hand, and she eased him to his feet, offering an arm for him to cling onto. The first few steps forward were agony. He remembered, as the pain faded, what it had been like to walk across the ruins of the temple towards her body.

Rey led him through the corridors of the ship - slow going, with his limp - which were all deserted, although he heard faint conversation or the sounds of machinery at work behind closed doors. With all sound so distant and the lights down, rendering everything into shades of grey, he began to wonder if he really was dreaming. His senses were all muted. The only thing he could be certain of was the warmth of Rey at his side, the occasional sound of her breath close to his ear.

They paused at the junction between two corridors.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

She said, ‘I'm not sure.’

They continued on, eventually arriving at an airlock. He knew the corvette was docked in a cave, but the route Rey had taken had brought them out by the engines, which jutted out into bright, dazzling sunlight. He held his hand up to shield his eyes, surprised to see that it was daytime. The structure of his time had convinced him it was night.

Rey steered him towards the ship’s hull, into a patch of shadow. Further inside the cave, he saw a group of jumpsuited Resistance techs gathered at dataterminal.

‘This took more planning than I thought it would,’ Rey said. ‘Had to spin a whole story about a coolant leak. Lots of mind tricks. Rose helped cover for me too. Oh, but you don’t know her,’ she added absently. ‘It was nice of her to help.’

They crept through the shadows, Rey looking over her shoulder from time to time, as if to check he was still following. In time, they came up on a makeshift landing field, occupied by a hodgepodge of ships he would have called rustbuckets, if he’d been feeling charitable.

‘Had to reprogram the droids,’ Rey said, continuing her commentary. ‘But these ships are less of a priority anyway, I can get away with taking one of these. Do you have a preference? No? I know that one’s fuelled, so I think that’ll do nicely.’

She indicated the landing ramp of a nearby freighter.

‘We’re leaving?’ he said.

Her eyes darted to the ship, then back to him. ‘Well, yes.’

Everything still seemed soft and muted. It took all of his power to make it to the top of the ramp, into the cabin, into the first seat he found. The ship had seen better days. The faux-leather seats covers were peeling, the spongy material inside the cushions bursting through rips in the fabric. The cockpit’s control units were rusting, antiquated, overly simplistic. What he could see of the ship’s interior cabins beyond was bare, stripped for parts. But when Rey took the pilot’s seat and fired up the engines, he felt the power of them reverberating through the floor at his feet, and his senses regained some of their sharpness.

The comm unit crackled with static. A voice came through, curt and urgent. ‘Haruspex One, you’re not cleared for takeoff.’

‘I know,’ Rey said to herself, dismissing the comm.

He rubbed his eyes and blinked, as if shaking off sleep. The ship began to ascend, clearing the landing pad. A brilliant beam of sunlight shot through the cockpit window, momentarily blinding him. All he could see was Rey’s silhouette, the curve of her body against the light.

‘What were they going to do to me?’ he asked.

She didn’t turn around. ‘I don’t trust them.’

The comm cut in again. ‘Haruspex One, this is command. Who’s piloting?’

The ship rose further, clearing the tree canopy. Rey busied herself with the hyperdrive controls, calculating a route. In the background, the comm became more frantic. ‘Haruspex One, come in. Haruspex One, you are not cleared for takeoff. Return to base immediately.’

Then, ‘Haruspex One, fighters dispatched.’

They climbed. He was only just aware of their progress, exhausted from the walk, his broken leg a dull, constant ache. The sunlight streaming through the cockpit windows was warm on his face, a heat that seemed to reach right down to his bones. It was how Rey had always registered in the force: a patch of warmth; a burning flame. Her presence was like the light of a star he orbited around.

The ship dived to one side seconds before blasterfire strafed across the hull. One shot, perhaps two, struck the shield, and the cabin shook. Rey swore under her breath and pushed more power to the engines.

‘I think they figured out where we went,’ she said.

Outside the window the sky faded to a deep blue, then black. The comm cut in again, a new voice this time: ‘Rey, turn this ship around now-’

Rey pulled a lever above her head and the ship lurched into hyperspace.

‘Well,’ she said, a bitter edge to her voice. ‘That’s done.’

He leaned forward in his seat. She took a deep, shuddering breath, tucking a loose strand of hair behind one ear. Her bag, abandoned at her side, gaped open, spilling ration packs and pouches of water onto the cabin floor. The twin lightsabers she’d brought to Exegol stuck out of an inside pocket, the hilts charred and tarnished. Without his connection to the force, they seemed inert, like any other blaster or vibroknife.

‘I didn’t think they’d shoot at us,’ she said. ‘All I asked was for them to keep you here, on the ship, until we talked it all out. I didn’t ask for much.’ Her voice trembled, and she wiped the cuff of her jacket against her eyes. ‘They didn’t even want to give you a trial.’

And so she’d engineered his escape, used the force to mind-trick her comrades, stolen a ship, disobeyed her orders. Severed her connection to the Resistance, perhaps forever.

‘You didn’t have to do this,’ he told her. His face burned. He had not earned the freedom that she’d bought by gambling with her own life. ‘Not for me.’

‘Of course I did.’

‘It’s not worth it-’

‘It’s worth it to me.’

She got up from the pilot’s seat and knelt in front of him, hands outstretched. The blue light of hyperspace glittered in her eyes.

‘I know you’ve done things you regret. I know you need to put them right. We can do that together. It’ll be okay.’

Her hands slipped into his.

‘You saved my life,’ she said. ‘I can’t ask for anything more, not for me, but - there’s a whole galaxy out there that could use our help. We can begin to make things right.’

He nodded. The voice of his master long gone from his head, his sense of the force depleted, he felt as though he stood at a distance from his old life, able to finally see the full shape of it. The decision to try and save Rey’s life - even at the risk of losing his own - had been an unconscious one. What if he could do it again?

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘For everything.’

Her lips pressed against his; warm, soft, careful, everything their kiss on Exegol hadn’t been. His hand went to the back of her neck, pulling her in closer and, in response, her hand grasped his shoulder. She pushed forwards, mouth moving against his, her other hand twisting through his hair, leaning her weight on his thighs - and then she broke away as he winced, pain shooting through his leg.

‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m not used to being injured. Not like this. With the force, it was…’

He trailed off, knowing she’d understand what he meant.

She kissed him on the forehead. ‘I’ll take care of you.’

On their journey back from Exegol, he’d wondered if there was a way to tell her thank you but mean I love you. Now, on their stolen rustbucket ship, with the press of her lips still a ghost of feeling on his, he realised that everything she had said and done - carrying him from the temple to the surface, patching up his injuries when nobody else would - all of that had been love. She had always loved him. His mind had been too clouded to see it before.

Now his thoughts were quiet. Now the force was gone. She had given him a future, a purpose, a second chance.

Ben smiled and took her hand, understanding, for the first time, what it meant to feel peaceful.