Chapter Text
The wrappings on Rey’s arms serve one purpose – to cover what is written there, and what sometimes is not. She didn’t understand it at first, the shifting names on her skin and what they meant. She can’t remember now who told her about Names, but it was almost certainly someone old, someone whose Name was a scarred shadow. Information was rarely given freely, and Rey can only imagine the teller must have taken comfort in the thought of unloading a bit of their loss onto new ears.
It’s a person who is yours, she remembers someone saying. Someone who completes you and makes you more.
Rey would like to believe that’s true, and she does, in the same way she believes her family will return one day. It’s a thing that needs to be real, for there to be hope and kindness in the galaxy, but it will do nothing to change Rey’s life. And, if she’s honest, she doesn’t understand it.
For the first thing, she doesn’t have one Name, she has two. And for another, they fade and reappear, like nothing she’s ever seen before. She has the scars of Ben and Kylo Ren trailing up and down her arms, beginning at her wrist and travelling upward. She knows she had Ben first, only because his name appears as a delicate, near-invisible white scar below her right wrist, where Names are meant to be. Kylo Ren is an almost equally faded scar on her left, in the same location, and there’s no rhyme or reason to it from there.
They come and go in different handwriting, Ben starting out precise and even, slowly becoming more spiky and hastily scrawled as Kylo Ren stays on her arm, black and solid, for much longer than any repetition of Ben ever has. There are nearly a dozen of both Names, though Kylo Ren is the one that has stayed on the inside of her right elbow for a long time now.
She remembers, vaguely, a short time when Kylo Ren’s Name had scarred over and Ben’s hadn’t shown up to replace it, and the panic she’d felt watching her Name go white and withered. A few weeks later, it had been Kylo Ren’s Name that returned, somehow looking almost carved into her skin though it sat like the ink of a tattoo as it always had.
Now, Rey has given up trying to reason out why her Names are so odd. It’s been years since she dreamed of Ben or Kylo Ren coming for her, taking her away from Jakku. It will happen or it won’t, and that’s the end of it. The chances are astronomical that anyone in the galaxy would meet their perfect match at nineteen anyway.
-
Of course, she meets him. And of course, Rey doesn’t know his name at first. He fails to invade her mind, and she never gave him her name, so it’s doubtful he knows precisely who she is, but Rey knows the instant Han Solo shouts his name across the expanse of the crumbling oscillator facility. Ben! She knows with unshakeable certainty that this man, this monster, has her Name on his wrist.
She and Finn watch with bated breath as father and son meet in the center of the cavernous building, voices raised, but the distance too far to distinguish what they are saying. Her heart beats in her throat as Kylo Ren holds out his lightsaber, offering it to Han’s grasp. She has a weightless moment of dizzying hope that it will end here. That the Name against her elbow will scar and leave Ben in its wake forever. That Leia’s son will be returned to her, the First Order crippled so that the fight can truly begin.
She couldn’t stop herself from crying out if she tried, watching the man who is meant to be hers kill his own father, who could have been to her the father she never knew. It’s difficult to determine which hurts more; the loss of Han Solo or the knowledge that, though her mind screams she can never forgive this, she can. She could. She very well might. In that instant, Rey wants nothing more than uncertainty. To not know who Kylo Ren is beyond her enemy, beyond the ragged hole he’s torn in her heart.
Her scream is echoed by Chewie, and Kylo Ren looks up at that. She doesn’t want to see it, doesn’t want even the possibility that this man will find a way into her heart, but she sees his face before it closes off, before Chewie shoots him. It is pure anguish, and Rey’s chest burns, stomach roiling. How dare he? How dare he realize just too late what it is he’s done?
The shot catches him in the side, probably a gut shot, and Rey refuses to be anything but glad. He deserves it, he deserves all of it and more, and her thoughts are a swirl of hatred and sorrow as she and Finn run from the shaking building to the sound of explosions.
-
Untrained as she is, Rey doesn’t draw from a particular light or dark side of the Force when Kylo Ren so helpfully reminds her of it. She closes her eyes and feels the currents flowing around her, plucks what is strong and useful, polishes it in her mind so that it shines. Like anything she has found in her life, it is grey and uncertain as she turns it over for the first time. The dust falls quickly, though, revealing a path so certain she can feel it in her limbs. There is no alliance here, only survival, and when her eyes snap open once more, she knows she will win this fight.
Kylo Ren is a flickering, uncertain thing in her mind’s eye, billowing red and green from his side where he’s still bleeding, silvery blue gathered at his back, and all the eddies crashing together. In contrast to his chaos, Rey can feel the Force steady as steel in her arms, and she slips under his guard like water.
From there the fight is not long. She brings him to his knees once and hesitates, torn between being rid of him and giving him a chance he doesn’t deserve. He staggers upright, refuses to stay down, until she moves more out of instinct than anything, forcing his saber from his hand and swinging her own across his face. Panting, she watches him rise again, if only barely, and can see the wound already cauterized, splitting his face across the bridge of his nose and between his brows.
Good, she thinks. Let him carry a few more scars. He has some catching up to do.
The planet cracks beneath her feet before he can do something foolish like stand again, and Rey doesn’t hesitate to run when there is a chasm between them. Finn is still lying in the snow behind her, and they have to get off this planet before it’s too late.
-
On the trip back to the Resistance, Rey excuses herself for a moment and takes the privacy to indulge in the painful exploration of her arms. Unwrapping them slowly, she lets her eyes pass over the most recent location of his Name, tripping down to her wrist. Ben is picked out as reliably as ever beneath her palm, and Rey holds onto her own wrist like it will let her hold on to the promise of what could have been. She doesn’t quite cry, but she does work her way through a few shuddering gasps, mourning both Han and Ben Solo.
When she gathers herself to look over her arms more carefully, there is a new constellation of names circling the skin above her elbows. Both Ben and Kylo Ren written in cramped, tiny writing, all of them scabbed and healing. She counts at least three repetitions of each Name. The newest bracket the outsides of her arms, halfway between elbow and shoulder on either side. They’re both written in faint, almost apologetic text, Ben, Kylo Ren, and Rey almost wishes the sight surprised her.
Someone who completes you. Who makes you more.