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Ben is no stranger to the concept of his parents throwing money at him in place of time and attention, but he’s also old enough and angry enough to take what’s given to him with both hands and then ask for more, because they’ve been terrible at denying him anything for years. And if they can’t be bothered to act like actual parents, Ben isn’t going to be bothered about wasting their piles of cash. So when they offer to send him to Europe as a graduation present, he accepts immediately and talks them into paying the way for a friend as well. Leia hates Hux – and to be honest, he’s not the greatest friend to Ben – but Ben hadn’t had the guts to ask Rey if she wanted to go along, and Poe had already shipped off to basic training with the Air Force, so it left Ben with few options as far as friends went. And if nothing else, Hux will be perfectly willing to leech off the alcohol and good food that will go along with Ben Solo’s extended European pity party.
They stop in London for a short layover, going almost immediately to Romania, where they would start and meander their way south and westward over the course of a month. Thanks to very expensive, top-notch schooling, Ben and Hux have a handful of languages between them, so they manage not to fumble interactions with the locals too badly. Ben loves Romania for the dramatic, violent histories and Hux finds something to entertain himself with – Ben doesn’t particularly care what. Hux’s Greek is so much better than Ben’s that Ben actually ends up spending most of the three days there laying around near the coast and seeing how sunburned he can get, because Hux has fucked off to go have a great time with his own self and his ability to navigate the damn cities. His burn turns to a tan before they hit Italy, and Ben nearly gets adopted as a native for his new-found swarthy complexion, dark eyes and hair, and fluency. He even manages to get laid there and mercilessly rubs it in Hux's face. He doesn’t mention any of that in his texts to Poe and Rey, but Ben does send him pictures of winged lions and her pictures of every intricate mask he finds in the street shops.
It’s straight north to Germany from there, stopping in Austria for a day, and they both have an equally good time getting completely plastered on the best beer they’ve ever tasted. Ben wakes up abruptly the morning they’re meant to catch a train to France, spitting fabric out of his mouth where Hux has whacked him across the face with a pillow. They have to scramble for the train, hungover as hell, and only barely make it onto the platform before the departure announcement goes off. Panting in their seats, Hux throws Ben’s phone at his chest, saying Ben owes him. There’s a parade of unsent texts, due to the lack of service from his phone being switched to airplane mode. Every one of them is horrendously misspelled and increasingly more embarrassing. They start innocently enough – reports to Poe and Rey of having a great time, complimenting Germany’s brewing companies. And then they get bad.
The first text that would have been tragic is actually to Finn, asking why Rey likes him more than she likes Ben. Then there’s a nearly identical, equally misspelled text to Rey asking the same question. From there, it descends into a mix of telling Rey how great she is and how much he likes her, and telling Poe how much he wants to see Rey naked. Those are somehow not as incriminating as the ones later in the night where he tried to tell Poe he thinks Rey is perfect and he wants to marry her and adopt puppies together. The texts to Rey are…horrific. Sappy and atrociously spelled and just plain bad, or otherwise so graphically dirty Ben’s embarrassed of himself.
By the time he gets through them, Ben is appalled and sure he bears a passing resemblance to a stop sign, and Hux looks something between smug and disappointed.
“You’re welcome,” he says, reaching over to click Ben’s phone back off of airplane mode. Ben deletes every single text as fast as humanly possible.
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Kylo Ren was born with a title, a name to uphold and land to call his own, which was a far-cry more than anyone else he knew had. Among the English nobility, his parents were unusual in that they did not care to distance themselves as far from their vassals as much of the nobility did. Among their peers, they were whispered about – his mother in particular for marrying a man with half-Irish blood, the bastard child of an English noble, elevated to his own nobility for his wartime service. With such parentage, it was more imperative than ever that Kylo marry a suitable woman who wouldn’t further muddy the bloodline. It was equally more challenging to interest him in doing so, given his parents made only a passing effort to keep him from befriending the people who worked their land and kept their castle in order.
As a boy, he was given the proper lessons, but also permission to practice fencing with the stable master’s boy, a perpetually dirt-covered, grinning child with messy curls and some Spanish blood. The friendship was allowed to flourish as Kylo learned both Latin and Spanish, showing an impressive talent for fencing when he was challenged to best a friend nearly as competent as himself. As they grew into less boys and more young men, they of course grew more distant, his friend needing to work the stables with his aging father while Kylo was called to memorize histories and manners and the keeping of books for the manor.
Tall and slightly gangly for his age, Kylo met the woman he would come to love when he was all of fifteen years old and had only barely begun to realize he would one day have to marry a woman with the proper name and parentage, and keep her. In contrast, the girl he met at fifteen was devoid of any sort of surname at all, only her Christian name given by the priest who raised her among the few orphans under his charge. She was, however, in possession of a strong arm and an even stronger sense of justice. Kylo was introduced to both when he mistakenly drank from what turned out to be blessed water on a particularly warm afternoon when his formal clothing was oppressive in the summer heat.
“Oi!” The shout only barely reached him before the clod of dirt did, breaking quite spectacularly over the back of Kylo’s head into a shower of dust. He choked, dripping water down his front ungracefully. Making a disgusted noise, Kylo whipped about to shout down whoever had dared to assault him, and found a skinny, short thing standing before him. Hair tied messily under a nearly threadbare kerchief, the girl could hardly be older than ten, but her glare was so fierce Kylo actually took a half-step back before he caught himself.
“What in bloody hell do you think you’re doing?” he blurted, forgetting to sound adequately superior in his outrage.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she shot back, thin arms crossing over her chest defiantly. “You can’t drink that.”
“I can drink whatever water I wish to,” Kylo informed her, eyes narrowed. “It’s only thanks to my family’s grace and turned eyes this church even stands.”
The girl’s expression wavered, taking in his now wet clothing and porcelain skin for the first time. Her eyes widened and she bit her lip, almost visibly debating whether to continue trying to chastise him or apologize now that she’d recognized nobility. She finally settled on something in between, dipping her head in deference, but keeping the stubborn set to her mouth.
“Begging your pardon, sir,” she said, voice wavering just on the edge of respectful. “But we all answer to the Lord, even your, ah, lordship. You can take whatever water you like, but it’s your immortal soul will carry it with you if you go around drinking up the blessed water.”
Kylo turned, slightly bewildered, to the structure filled with clear water and realized it must be the little church’s holy water for service. Feeling slightly wrong-footed, Kylo swallowed an apology, reminding himself that his tutor would disapprove quite strongly to hear Kylo apologizing to a child so far below his station as though she deserved his consideration. A Catholic child, nonetheless, and more than poor judging by her clothing and bare feet. Still, his mother had accidentally managed to raise a compassionate son who would one day resent his fumbling ways among proper nobility.
Now, fifteen and hardly on the cusp of becoming a young man with responsibilities, Kylo Ren didn’t apologize, but he did back away from the standing basin and politely asked her to show him where he might find something more appropriate to drink and thanked her for her concern over his soul. Lips pressed thin to hide a slowly growing smile, Regan introduced herself and led the tall boy away.
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France is a mixed bag. Ben and Hux both speak nearly fluent French, so the language is no issue, but it’s far more history and less entertainment than Ben is looking for. Hux seems satisfied with being surrounded by regency grandeur on all the tours Ben’s parents have paid for, and they can both agree that the food is very good, but Ben slips into the true depths of the self-pity that’s been dogging him since his parents announced they would like to ship him off to Europe for a month following his graduation ceremony.
It was a spectacular misstep in a lifetime full of well-meaning missteps. Alone in his hotel room, Ben uses his very expensive unlimited data plan to research grad schools on the west coast. Except for passing fascinations, Ben couldn’t give a rat’s ass about European culture and history. His owns interests leaned much farther toward technology, specifically the kind of technology that was being developed in California. Any other parents would be ecstatic to have their son interested in technological development, Ben thinks bitterly, scanning start-ups in the Silicon Valley. And he was good at it! There’d been a handful of student-run programs that Ben had participated in at school and he’d found himself once or twice taking leadership roles almost naturally.
You would think at least his mother would be proud of her soon taking after her as a leader. But no, Leia only cared about non-profits and liberty and the democratic process being upheld. Her eyes glazed any time Ben started trying to talk about his chosen field, and Han was no better. His father, Ben thinks meanly, was a true luddite. Practically surgically attached to his beat-up Ford from generations gone by, Ben’s father would never run a mechanic’s shop that took electric cars or any model with an actual computer in it. Specializing in the classics as he called them, Han had on multiple occasions outright laughed at the idea of modern technology taking the place of “good, old-fashioned elbow grease”.
Ben had to give his mother some credit for at least trying to send him on an interesting trip. His father probably hadn’t had any more hand in planning it than nodding along when Leia brought it up to him. That was generally how things went, anyway. Han either nodded along or there was bitter fighting, and since his parents had presented this ‘gift’ as a united front, they must not have argued about it.
Ben waffles between moping uselessly in his hotel room, trying to enjoy himself in the French countryside, and trying even harder not to think about his drunken attempts to confess his embarrassing crush to Rey via text, thousands of miles away. That is a much stickier situation. Ben gave up on trying to have a good relationship with his parents years ago, but he can’t make himself give up on Rey, no matter how much he should. She's far better than he could ever possibly deserve, and it still kind of blows his mind that Rey gave Ben the time of day in the first place.
Well, she didn’t at first. At first, they’d been in the same literature class for a general ed credit and Rey had shut down his comments on the assigned reading with such ruthless efficiency, he’d thought she must be an English major. Ben found out later that Rey was actually an engineering major, she just had very strong opinions on Dickens. Ben, clueless in regards to interpreting literature as evidenced by his initial attempt, had managed to swallow his pride (barely) and ask her for help with the rest of that semester’s assigned reading. As vicious as she’d been in tearing him down, Rey was surprisingly open to an earnest apology and request for help.
Poe had still been in school to witness Ben’s descent into being completely enamored with Rey, and to mock him unapologetically for it. He’d referred to Rey as Ben’s underage girlfriend at first, given she was still a freshman while Ben was in his junior year and technically seventeen for another month and a half. Nowadays, Poe is close friends with Rey himself, dating her best friend Finn, thought they’re taking a break while Poe goes through basic. It won’t stick, Ben is sure, because Poe is crazy about Finn and Finn is just as embarrassingly into Poe. They’re meant to not be waiting on each other while they both pursue their chosen careers, but Ben knows for sure Poe’s been ruined for anyone else since he met Finn.
As for Ben, his own blatantly obvious crush is thus far unrequited, due to Ben being woefully not good enough for Rey, though Poe insists it’s because Ben isn’t trying hard enough. But why bother, really, when Rey is brilliant and kind and on fast-tracks that Ben only found his way to because of his parents’ names and bank accounts. She’s also younger than him, as Poe so helpfully pointed out, and Ben has no interest in trying to start something with Rey when – even if she somehow miraculously agreed to give him a chance - she’s just going to stomp all over his heart when she figures out where she really wants to be isn’t wherever Ben is, but pursuing an actual life and a career. And Ben wouldn’t even blame her. One of his favorite things about Rey is how she determinedly shapes the world for herself, nevermind the consequences. He’d never want to hold her back from whatever fantastic thing it is Rey is bound to do in the world.
So Ben has been sitting on an enormous crush for almost two years and is determined never to say anything to Rey about it. Poe, he will bitch to endlessly. Hux sometimes has to deal with his ramblings. He even suspects Finn knows, though Ben’s never outright told him. Poe probably has, the loose-lipped traitor. It’s the worst kept secret in Ben’s little friend group, but at least Rey seems oblivious. Hopefully it will stay that way until Ben either moves on or, more likely, dies.
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Regan is the most fascinating person Kylo has ever met, including the stable master’s son and Kylo’s tutor who seems to somehow know everything. Regan doesn’t know everything, but she seems to be aiming to learn as much of it as she can get her hands on. She doesn’t have any great aspirations for all that learning, as far as Kylo can tell, but simply a desire to know. She knows her letters from the priest teaching her to read the Bible, so Kylo smuggles books to her whenever he can. They’re all manner of things, books that won’t be missed about animal husbandry or philosophies from France or the books of poetry Kylo’s mother reads and discards with regularity.
As much as she learns, Regan never seems to think less of those who don’t know what she does. She’s fiercely Irish and unapologetically Catholic and regularly reminds Kylo that, though he can calculate how many eggs or gallons of milk are produced by his people on good or bad years, he’s fairly clueless on how to tell when an egg has gone bad or how long a calf ought to be let to suckle before it’s being spoiled. And any of the simplest farmhands could tell him as much for their lack of book learning.
Kylo learns how to be a proper gentleman from his tutors and visiting relatives with a plethora of disapproving faces and lists of suggestions for his improvement, but he learns a taste of humility from Regan, as well as how to find wonder in a girl who will never dream to be anywhere near his standing.
It seems to be always one step forward and two steps back, never pleasing either his family or his young friend, until Kylo finds ways to be two men at once. With his family, Kylo is stiff and proper, knowing just what to say to visiting lords and ladies, paying his dues to king and country across the thin strip of water between his land and England. With Rey, Kylo reads dramatically from Jonathan Swift’s works and learns where the sharpest thistles grow and teases Regan about stepping around fairy circles, but shouts and falls on his arse rather than let her push him into one himself. When he is nineteen and Regan is fifteen at her best guess (though she is also perhaps fourteen or sixteen), Kylo notices Regan is very pretty under her ever-growing mess of hair and the dust on her arms, and he does something very stupid by kissing her near the stream behind the miller’s.
His parents send him to university in London within the week.
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Ben and Hux are both asleep when they arrive in England, and one of the custodians on the train brusquely wakes them up so he can clean up before the train heads back to France. It’s something like three in the morning, so they spend their first day in England mostly unconscious in a hotel and don’t wake until well past noon. Not that it matters much, given that the pair of them haven’t got any plans beyond finding their hotel, and then dinner later. England is infinitely simpler to navigate than the rest of Europe so far, even if it’s jarring for a moment to be speaking their native language again.
By either happenstance or Ben’s mother having a strange sense of humor in her planning, Ben and Hux spend the fourth of July in London and wind up having a grand old time. The English seem to find it endlessly amusing to have a couple of Yanks in their midst on the American independence day, and they’re dragged into a party in some park near Notting Hill where Ben promptly hands his phone to Hux when it becomes apparent the Brits mean to get them as hammered as possible. Ben almost sets his hands on fire with sparklers at some point and is surely on a few facebook pages belonging to total strangers, and he manages to set aside the wallowing he’d indulged in in France.
England, and London specifically, feels more Ben’s pace than anywhere else they’ve been in the past three weeks. It feels like a modern city with enough life and variety to keep his attention and keep his maudlin bullshit at bay. When they do finally leave for their last destination, Ireland, Ben expects it to be just the opposite. A quiet, blandly emerald isle with no interesting bustle to be found. He’s wrong, of course, as ben is wont to be. Dublin is plenty busy, though it certainly has a different flavor than London or Paris, and even more bafflingly, Ben finds himself kind of enjoying the atmosphere. It’s partially that Hux fits right in with all the pale redheads, which is endlessly amusing for how often tourists ask Hux for directions. He can’t give them, of course, and it’s always hilarious watching Hux, who inherited his British accent from his immigrant parents, explain to some American or Japanese or Spanish person that he hasn’t the faintest idea how to get to Kilkenny as this is the first time he’s ever set foot in Ireland, ginger or not.
The castles are something worth seeing as well, not as bleak as Romania and somehow more subtly charming than England’s grand estates. Ben had booked a ghost tour of castles on the off-chance that haunted Irish estates would be more interesting than the non-haunted kind. There’s a ticket for Hux as well, but he decisively informs Ben that he has no interest in having some tour guide be mistakenly buddy-buddy with him, all the while tromping around Ireland in some rickety bus. So he goes to some obscure film thing that happens to be going on instead and Ben makes sure his phone is charged so he can record it if he sees any ghosts.
The first couple of stops are ones he’s vaguely heard of, possibly from offhand watching some ghost hunting show or another. The tour guide is decent at story-telling as well, so he passively enjoys hearing about the Red Lady and her knife, the little girl and her father who haunt and guard the grounds of their land, respectively. The description of something called the Elemental actually manages to give him pause for a moment, and Ben has to make a mocking post about it on twitter to try to laugh it off before the next stop. This one is a castle and a story he hasn’t heard of at all, owned by a lesser lord in the 17somethings, some English guy in charge of a bunch of Irish peasants as the stories have generally gone when it’s any later than the thirteenth century.
“Lord Ren,” the tour guide starts in her lilting accent, “was not so remarkable as far as lords go, but no one can determine exactly why he comes back so regularly.” Walking backward to lead their group down the hall toward a ballroom. “The current owners have brought in mediums who say his spirit is not malevolent, but he won’t be removed from the ballroom. On summer nights like these, many staff members have reported seeing Lord Ren dancing with a mysterious young woman.”
The ballroom is mostly empty, clearly not in any use beyond being a tourist trap and maybe serving as an exciting spot for a fundraiser every once in a great while. The candelabras at the edges of the room can’t be authentic, but they’re close enough to add to the ambiance of the room. In the setting sun, the marble floor is painted orange and red, deep shadows in pockets around the room at intervals. The group crowds around the ledge to look down onto the open dance floor, the younger kids pushing forward to see if the ghost of this lord will appear suddenly. It’s doubtful – none of them have shown up before now at the other stops either.
“We have portraits of Lord Ren and his wife,” the guide goes on, “but all the witnesses say the woman seen dancing with Lord Ren looks nothing like her. Because of this, some think the woman is his mistress, eternally dancing with the Lord cursed to relive proof of his unfaithfulness.”
They move on afterward, and as this is the last stop of the night, the group is given a few moments to wander and take pictures, asking questions of the guide and generally preparing to head back to their various hotels. Ben wanders, taking pictures of the castle and the grounds, sprawling and carefully manicured by whoever owns the land now. The crumbling stones haven’t been touched any more than necessary, and Ben remembers the marble floor of the ballroom and trucks it back to the room to see if he can catch the last rays of sunset before the floor stops looking like it’s on fire.
He’s just missed it when he gets there, the fading glow only just touching a few feet of marble flooring, so Ben sneaks down the stairs to take a picture before it goes. He’s not sure he’s allowed to be on the ground level, but better to beg forgiveness than ask permission when time is of the essence. He snaps a few photos, nothing as impressive as it had been earlier, and Ben shivers lightly as night sets in with a chill. That’ll have to be good enough.
When he turns, Ben doesn’t actually believe what he’s seeing for a moment, but when his brain catches up with his eyes, there’s definitely a tall, dark-haired man dancing with a brunette woman, and neither of them appear to be entirely solid, or touching the floor at all as they rotate slowly in place, eyes locked on each other.
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When Kylo returned from England, he was finished with university, he was twenty-two years old, and Regan was far more than simply pretty. She was also deeply vexed with him and wouldn’t speak to him for the first two weeks after he returned. It’s partially his own fault for not once visiting his family and lone remaining friend when he was only a matter of hours away by ship, but Kylo still felt that decision was best. With some measure of distance and maturity under his belt, having seen for himself how men of his rank ought to behave in polite society, he presented a much more satisfactory image to his mother and father. His old tutor had nodded in satisfaction, Snoke’s unmeetable standards finally met after all these years. Kylo Ren was a proper gentleman, ready to take on being lord of the manor, and the thoughts preoccupying him were of a young woman barely out of girlhood who refused to meet his eye as his carriage had passed her tiny church. Yes, it was best he hadn’t come back until he was finished, or Kylo feared might never have left for university again at all.
When he finally did get Regan to speak to him, it was through a dirty underhanded trick. He dipped his unworthy Protestant fingers into the basin of holy water and flicked droplets at Regan’s turned back when she whipped around to face away from his approach. Her back stiffened immediately, once-thin shoulders hiking up to her ears under a sand-colored dress with the sleeves rolled up. Her hair wasn’t under a kerchief for once, styled into three piles at the back of her head to keep it out of her face, presumably. Her face was livid and lovely when she turned to face him, hazel eyes set over a small nose and furiously thinned lips, a smear of dirt across one high cheekbone.
She dropped her armful of weeds in a huff, stomping over to Kylo like the eleven (or maybe ten or twelve) year old girl prepared to chastise him properly for his transgressions and Kylo’s heart tripped and stumbled in his chest. He realized before she slapped him that he loved her, and instantly after that he both deserved it and did not regret his actions at all. Regan was breathing hard as he recovered from the powerful meeting of her palm and his left cheek, color in her face. Lovely and livid.
“I missed you,” Kylo blurted before she could work up a proper lecture, and watched the wind go out of her sails. Regan blinked, snorting in a terribly unladylike way, and folded her arms, waiting for him to go on. “Regan, I -”
“I go by Rey now,” she corrected.
Kylo nodded. The name had gone out of popularity as a girl’s name even before the priest named her, so it made sense she would choose to shorten it, especially given the trouble he remembered her always having with the local boys accusing her of being a boy herself. They couldn’t make any such claim now, but Kylo was familiar with how the nagging problems of childhood could follow one through to adulthood. He’d have to get used to the new name instead of using the one he’d been thinking of far too much in London.
“Rey,” he started again. “I’m sorry for not keeping in contact while I was away. You understand my studies were of the utmost importance, and I hardly reported to my own mother and father with any regularity. I wouldn’t have if they hadn’t pestered me to do so.”
Her brow stayed where it was, one cocked up higher than the other in an unimpressed expression.
“It wasn’t meant as a personal slight to you,” he went on a bit weakly. “I did miss you.”
“Well, isn’t that grand?” Rey spat, clearly still annoyed. “And here I was weeping my eyes out daily over a lack of regular letters. You could have written once. Or come home just once in all these years. And -”
She bit off whatever next bit of venom would have been tossed at him and looked away, one hand toying with her own wrist nervously. Kylo restrained the urge to reach out and still the action, unsure of his welcome as well as knowing it was grossly improper to touch her at all, even if it was welcomed. That small knowledge – his inability to brush fingers over her wrist – yawned and stretched to cover the stunning giddiness of realizing he loved her. Eclipsing it came the realization that it didn’t matter.
“You can’t just kiss a girl and then disappear for four years,” she said, finding the courage to bring up what Kylo had alternately hoped she’d forgotten or dwelt on as fondly as he did. “It’s not…gentlemanly.”
“It’s not,” Kylo admitted, swallowing down the bitter tonic of reality. He never should have kissed her, and never will again, not unless it’s in secret, stolen away and hidden from society. And Regan – Rey – would never have it. “I apologize for a boy’s insolence. It was not my place to act on impulse. I never should have – I am sorry, it won’t happen again.”
“It certainly won’t,” Rey agreed vehemently. “You’d be a fool to run off to England every time you act on some silly impulse. You have too many of them for that to be a proper strategy.”
Helpless against it, Kylo laughed. God save him, but it would be agony knowing he felt all of this for her and never being able to act on it.
“You still know me so well,” Kylo said under his breath. “Now, can we go on as we were? And forget my less than graceful departure?”
“Yes,” Rey said finally, after making him wait for nearly a count of thirty for her reply. “But only if you’ve not become too educated to help me with these.” She gestured loosely at the abandoned pile of weeds pulled from the church’s herb garden. Kylo winced and looked around, but few wandered out to the church except for Sundays, fewer still now that the priest was rarely well enough to be called upon outside of his regular sermons. Satisfied that no one would be around to witness their soon-to-be lord bending in the dirty with the church orphan, Kylo began removing his jacket to preserve it.
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Ben forgets all about his camera in the moment because, well, it couldn’t possibly be real. You don’t just see ghosts on a ghost tour, it’s a tourist trap. An interesting one, but a tourist trap nonetheless. And yet, there is no other explanation for what he’s seeing.
There’s no tech that could produce an image that clear as a projection, not without some serious work-up, and they wouldn’t bother with this level of quality for some hidden-away castle in the Irish hills, especially after the tour went through.
The ghosts – because that’s what they must be – aren’t even properly dancing, honestly, just spinning together. The man looks intense, long hair pulled away from his face where he stares intently at the young woman in his arms. Her own expression is radiant, her hands alighting on his shoulder and palm as though she might float away in her obvious joy at any moment. The man, who must be Lord Ren, has a secure grip on her waist, nearly too much, like he’s afraid she will float away from him.
Watching them silently, Ben thinks the chill might be from them. It’s not even dark yet, the sun still setting on a relatively warm evening, so there’s no reason for his arms to be covered in goosebumps. Ever so slowly, the couple makes their way around the room, moving away from Ben and the chill dissipates slightly, though his breath still comes short with awe and what might be shock.
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They went on as best they could, pretending nothing had changed. Rey knew as surely as Kylo did that he had a duty as lord to marry a woman of an acceptable station and that nothing could be between them. Stubborn to her faith, Rey had also always been a girl who did not share well, and she never made another comment or move to acknowledge Kylo’s affection for her, though he worsened at concealing it.
In the public eye, it was quite simple, as Kylo had been playing on his duality for years, but he was a terrible liar with Rey and things slipped out. In small actions and almost-caught comments, he failed to show Rey the feelings he’d had as a younger man had faded at all, and rather made a case for himself as being closer to hopelessly in love with her than any other thing he ought to be. For her part, Rey deftly ignored his failings and did her level best to conceal her own feelings. She wasn’t nearly as poor an actor as Kylo, but something about how she looked at him – he believed she would have loved him in return, if it had been possible.
He couldn’t be surprised or even disappointed when his mother began a concerted effort to find Kylo a wife. Perhaps, he thought with a heavy dose of doubt, Kylo would even meet some woman who he would love, and forget his affections for Rey. It was possible, if not so far foreseeable.
Like something out of a tale, his mother organized a ball to welcome Kylo home to stay, though it was a bit belated. It served as only a thin veneer over her true purpose – to lure the eligible ladies into their home so she might campaign one of their father’s to begin negotiations for an arrangement. It’s also a lovely excuse for Kylo’s own father to really show his roots and get more drunk than is advisable, so his mother was slightly too busy corralling her husband to notice the young woman who does not belong to any notable family – or any family at all, for that matter.
Kylo believed he must be hallucinating when he saw her. Dressed in a simple and outdated dress, Rey must have scavenged it from an old wedding dress donated to the church. Flowers stood as her only decoration and jewelry, strings of tiny white and pink and blue blossoms at her throat and the edges of her plain dress. Rey’s hair was neatly combed for the first time in Kylo’s memory, twisted somewhat haphazardly at the base of her neck in a passable imitation of a fashionable hairstyle. She was, instantly, the only woman he could see in the room.
“Rey,” he hissed, going to her immediately. “What are you doing here?”
“Having a night for myself,” she answered defiantly, chin stuck stubbornly forward as Kylo took her arm and ushered her to the edge of the ballroom, where the shadows might conceal her if his mother should make a reappearance.
“You’ll be punished if anyone sees you.”
“How?” Rey asked hollowly, turning to face him fully, and it was only then he saw the redness around her eyes, small signs of time spent crying. “What can be taken from me? He – The priest. He passed this morning,” she went on, stumbling a bit. “Soon you’ll be taken up with being both a lord and a husband. I’ve no one else. If they made me leave, I’d have nothing less than I have now.”
Kylo was silent for too long, he knew by how Rey’s posture slumped and then stiffened, clearly thinking he was going to make her leave and prepared to fight him. Instead, he sighed and resigned himself to following one of his inadvisable impulses. Moving slightly back from her, Kylo offered Rey his hand, getting a bewildered frown in response.
“I’m fairly certain my father is too intoxicated to recognize you,” he explained. “And my mother probably doesn’t even know what you look like, so you’ll have to fake a pretty accent if she asks after your family and tell a good lie.”
“What…?” Rey trailed off, slowly resting her palm in his despite her confusion.
“Did you come here to dance or didn’t you?” Kylo asked impatiently, embarrassed and annoyed with himself. This was a terrible idea.
But then Rey understood his meaning and smiled like the sun breaking through clouds, and Kylo became too breathless to continue chastising himself. He led her to the floor, at the fringes of the other dancers, and guided her through the steps clumsily. Rey was hardly a practiced dancer, having gained all her knowledge from his instruction as children, but here on the edge of the room, half-hidden in the long shadows of the setting sun, hardly anyone noticed her awkward steps.
Caught up much more in looking at her than in trying to teach her to dance well, Kylo let their steps devolve until the were simply spinning together, Rey’s hands on his shoulder and in his palm, his own hand spread over her back, almost too low so that the curve of his palm rode at the top of her waist. They would be the center of gossip for weeks if the wrong person saw, but Kylo couldn’t bring himself to care. Like this, with the evening fading in and turning the marble floors from flames to starlight, with the woman he loved in his arms for this brief, fleeting moment of perfection, Kylo could almost taste the possibility.
If they were different people – if she were from a good family, or he weren’t, or if Kylo wasn’t born into a bloodline already disgraced by father’s parentage, maybe they could be….something. They could be everything. Rey could be everything he wanted, with her sharp mind and curiosity, her stubborn faith and goodness, the way she forced him to be his best, respect himself and every thing he had power over.
He had promised it wouldn’t happen again, but Kylo was entirely powerless to stop himself from sliding his hand down Rey’s arm, cupping her elbow and turning them into the relative shelter of an alcove, and finally kissing her properly.
-
-
As Ben watches, the ghostly couple makes a circuit of the ballroom, finally pausing in the center of the room, where their rotations slow even further. Finally, they’re still, floating a few inches above the marble floor. It’s minutes past when he first got back to the ballroom, and it’s starting to get dark as only a sliver of the sun sits above the horizon. Inside the ballroom, the nearly translucent, pale ghosts are clearer than before against the growing darkness, and Ben can track every movement as they slide closer together.
The man’s hand moves first, sliding down the woman’s arm until she raises her own arms to settle around his shoulders. Slowly, as though moving through water, his arms come around her fully and his head dips to rest against hers, foreheads together. Ben belatedly remembers his phone, hanging uselessly in his hand, brought along so he could record a ghost in he saw it, but it’s so surreal thinking he’s about to see the ghost of some Irish lord makeout with his ghost mistress, that Ben can’t get his hands to work right and get the phone up.
They don’t makeout, and Ben almost feels bad for thinking about it in those terms, because he can almost feel an ache in his own chest with how carefully the man leans down to kiss the woman. In the crisper contrast as night falls, Ben can see his forehead crease with some emotion, arms tightening around the woman and she tips slightly back and lets him kiss her like it will save his life.
Ironic, Ben thinks, because if he’d kissed her like that in life, it clearly hadn’t done the job well enough.
-
-
Rey pulled back almost as soon as Kylo eased his mouth over hers, looking suddenly frightened.
“Kylo -”
“Please,” he said, interrupting whatever protest she had. “Just this once. I can’t…I don’t want to -”
“Stop,” Rey ordered, voice firm. “This is a dream I can’t wake up from, don’t ask me to try.”
Kylo nodded, letting her go reluctantly, and didn’t stop himself from sliding his tongue over his lips, just in case he could chase the taste of her there to remember. Rey fled after that, and Kylo hated himself for ruining the night when she’d only wanted to have something good. He hated himself so much he didn’t care who it was his mother put before him to marry – a woman whose father owned land in the Americas, blond and uninterested in a personal relationship with Kylo, though she turned out to be a more than competent hostess as well as lady of the house. It was a good match, and she wasn’t repulsive, and it was his duty, so Kylo eventually had children with his wife.
It would have been well enough, but Rey was right. It was a dream he couldn’t wake up from either, and while Rey did her best to build a new life out of the ashes of the old, Kylo held too many cards to make it a fair game. She left the church to the care of a new priest and worked as a laundress and, being blessed with the gift of a good personality and a careful, but open, heart, Rey made friends. She made more than friends, in fact, and Kylo was not so detached a lord that he missed it when a man in town began courting her in the far less formal way of commoners.
Finnegan, the man’s name was, and he probably hadn’t committed any crime, but Kylo had him shipped to America anyway, to work on his father-in-law’s lands in servitude. It was petty and terrible and Kylo didn’t care. He couldn’t bear to see another man standing beside Rey where he so longed to be, and though he hated himself for ruining an innocent man’s life, he did not hate himself enough to keep from doing it.
Rey must have had genuine affection for the man, because the brittle civility that had survived between her and Kylo died with Finnegan’s departure. No one else knew the connection between their lord’s private jealousy and the man’s arrest, but Rey had to know. And thereafter, she would neither look at nor speak to him unless it was unavoidable. When she did, it was with the utmost respect and no hint of familiarity, as if she looked on a stranger – only a man who lived in a castle on the hill and dictated the rules of the land on which she lived. Owed her deference and nothing else.
There was never any reconciliation, as the storybooks would have Kylo believe there might be. There was no fairy godmother, as in the tales he read to his daughters before tucking them into bed. No glass slipper. No pea under a mattress to prove her worthiness. No true love’s kiss that would transform him from a beast.
And so Kylo Ren oversaw his lands, and was generally seen as a fair if strict lord, married his daughters into prestigious families, and died four years after his wife had passed. And then, quite unexpectedly, he came back.
-
-
The kiss lasts a handful of seconds, and then the woman pulls back, smiling softly up at Lord Ren, and brushes her fingers over his cheek before she starts to fade. Standing where he is, Ben can see the man’s face as she goes, a viscerally brokenhearted expression crossing his features. His throat works, barely visible, as one hand reaches uselessly after her, the woman already only a shifting mist in the air where she was once almost solid. Alone, the ghostly lord stands with his hands outstretched to the empty air, agony written on his face.
He pulls back his empty hand as if the action itself is painful, clutching his fist to his chest, and the ghost collapses all at once. Ben can’t tell which happens first – as the man drops to his knees, his image shatters and the room is suddenly empty again. At his back, the sun is gone, soft darkness covering the grounds. Ben can hear the distant voices that are probably the tour group looking for him – he’s been gone a while now.
Stiffly, like waking from a dream, Ben walks backward out of the ballroom, vaulting the low stone wall separating it from the garden as he picks up speed the further he gets from the room. The tour guide is annoyed and not shy about it when he gets back to the group, and Ben mutely accepts her nagging, mind stuck on what he’d seen. He hadn’t even recorded it, and now he’s glad he didn’t. It had felt too private to post on youtube.
And something…something about that ghost lord’s expression was – oh, ha – haunting him. Not like he’d thought a ghost would haunt, with a creepy feeling or something. Instead, Ben feels anxious, picking at the threads of his fraying jeans at the knee on the ride back to his hotel. Hux is already asleep when Ben gets back, so he can’t tell Hux about what he’d seen, but he doubts he’d want to anyway. He fidgets uselessly for a while, opens his computer and closes it without doing anything, and eventually finds it’s late enough that it’s a reasonable time back home. Rey will be off work by now, he thinks, unbidden, and Ben knows with that same anxious instinct that he has to call her.
She doesn’t pick up at first, and Ben starts to stutter his way through an awkward voicemail, not actually knowing what he’d called to say in the first place, and then his phone beeps to let him know he has a call. It’s Rey, of course, calling back before he can even get past uselessly leaving his name like she doesn’t have caller ID.
“Hey,” she says, sounding a little breathless. “Sorry, I was upstairs. What’s up? How are you liking…where are you know, England?”
“Ireland,” Ben says automatically. “England was a couple days ago. Listen, do you have time to talk?”
“Yeah?” Ben can hear the confusion and slight apprehension in her voice. “What’s the matter, Ben?”
“Nothing. It’s…” He sighs, rubbing at his forehead in frustration and squeezes his eyes shut while everything comes pouring out. “Look, I don’t know why I’m doing this now, but you’re really great, you know?”
“Ben, are you drunk?”
“No, shut up, I’m sober, I promise. What I’m trying to say is I’m really- I just think you’re amazing and beautiful and so far out of my league, but I lo- I. I like you anyway, and there’s a ton of reasons why you shouldn’t want to go out with me, but I want to ask you anyway. Because. There’s no chance at all if I never ask, right?”
There’s silence over the line for so long Ben actually pulls the phone away to make sure the call hasn’t dropped.
“Rey?” he says uncertainly after too long listening to dead air. He can hear her breathing a little bit, so she’s definitely still there.
“God dammit, Ben,” she says finally. “I’ve been wanting to kiss you for two years and thinking you don’t want anything to do with some kid and now you – When you’re thousands of miles away, Ben? Really?”
“Is that, um.” Ben licks his lips, everything suddenly a little too dry and tight. “Is that a yes?”
“Well, you didn’t actually ask,” Rey points out, annoyed, but Ben can hear the smile in her voice. “But if you had, it’d be a yes. So I guess when you get home, you have a question to ask me.”
Ben’s laugh is strangled and weird-sounding, and he coughs to cover it even thought Rey has already seen him embarrass himself too many times to count.
“You have terrible timing, Solo.”
“Yeah,” Ben admits easily. “But I didn’t want to wait any longer. I didn’t…want to spend my life wondering what if.”
-
It doesn’t change much. There is still a ghost who dances with the memory of a woman and breaks his own heart over and over as the sun sets on a hilltop in Ireland. But somewhere in New York, Ben Solo steps off of an airplane and Rey is there to meet him, and he doesn’t have to wonder.