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Chapter Text

His dreams are vivid and strange.

He sees something whirling, passing from hand to hand, feels it smack against his side as he stills the twirling – a staff. He is running through the huge, empty corridors of the palace on Naboo, knowing his mother is sad but not knowing why.

He scrunches his eyes shut against the empty gnawing of his belly, and he will not cry, it does no good to cry. He opens his eyes and stares at the empty perfection of the ship’s ceiling above him, his body aching for the warmth of human touch but he will not yield to temptation.

He is lying on a bed, or a cloud, or a soft pile of grass. He turns his head and sees her face, upside down, but so very close to his. She, too, is lying on the softness, upside down to Ben. He smiles at her, soft and sweet and watches her light up with her own, irrepressible joy. “You’re beautiful,” he tells her, and lifts a hand to briefly touch her hair.

She closes her eyes and shakes her head, embarrassed. “You are,” he insists, and nudges forward to press his lips to hers. The movement is so natural, so easy he knows he’s done it a thousand times before.

The minute Ben is out of the bacta tank Rey climbs aboard the Falcon and takes off on some kind of mission he’s pretty certain was neither important nor urgent. Ben doesn’t enquire, even when his mother hints so strongly around the topic that even Uncle Luke looks embarrassed. Poe, thankfully, holds his tongue on the topic, though he visits Ben’s sick bed daily bearing entertainment holos and, once, a prized bunch of silver Perinian grapes. Finn accompanies him once, barely speaking but shooting worried looks at Ben he has no trouble interpreting.

Ben hadn’t expected anything different. It’s not as though Rey having access to his mind, his memories or – stars help me – his subconscious should change anything. He’s just as much of a monster today as he was yesterday. The only difference is that now she can only escape it by going off-world.

She is back a few days later, and Ben feels the sick churning in his stomach ease the moment the Falcon lands. He stops, takes a few deep breaths, and then resumes his efforts. He is testing Kyber crystals for suitability in the lightsabers of future Jedi, and it’s not as simple as it sounds. Especially when he’s not healing.

He feels Luke’s presence before he sees him, and he puts down the crystal gently before he can do something stupid and damage it.

Luke waits.

“I’m fine,” Ben tells him without turning.

Still waits.

“This is exactly what I expected,” Ben says, then grimaces. He is giving away more than he ever intended. “I’m fine,” he says again, more firmly, and more annoyed with himself. He returns to his work.

“It’s unwise to ignore this,” Luke says, but it’s half-hearted at best. He is distracted, also, by the hunt for Hux, who is on the run in the Finalizer and trying to rally what remains of the First Order’s troops.

Ben knows Luke doesn’t actually wish him dead. That being said, Luke is not happy that his new and promising student is now bound for life to a Dark Jedi, nor is he happy that she’s running from it instead of facing it.

He doesn’t see Rey at the evening meal, or in the hallways. It’s not until night comes that he can even fully feel her presence in his mind, meaning that her thoughts are turning, unwillingly, toward him.

He’s been moved to new quarters since his injury, and the death of Snoke. He has a proper room now - the same as everyone else’s in size and amenities, but he can see his mother’s careful hand in the selection of it. The new headquarters are based in a mountainous area of a temperate planet, and the view from the huge window is utterly breathtaking. Sunsets that could make a grown man weep, snow-capped mountains in the distance and the green of grass and forest nearby. Ben spends almost all of his time stretched out along the wide sill of his window, watching the light change.

He has showered and slipped into soft sleep pants before curling up on the seat. There’s a blanket pooled on the floor by his feet, and his chest is bare to give the wound a chance to dry in the open air, as the medics have advised. The toxin Snoke used is still unidentified, and he knows they are worried about the way the wound stubbornly refuses to close.

The base is quiet, almost all its inhabitants asleep when he feels her approach.

The door to his quarters opens with a soft swoosh and he turns his head to see her standing there, blinking and taken aback.

Before she can form words to ask he says, “I coded the doors to admit you weeks ago,” and turns back to his view. There’s a half-moon tonight, huge in the sky, turning the green of the forest to silver.

“Wha-why would you-”

Ben cocks a sardonic brow at her. She stops and swallows, then steps inside. The doors close behind her.

He looks away again when she lapses back into silence, and after a while she moves forward and stands beside him, staring outside. Ben breathes in, content for the first time in a long time, even as he casually shifts one arm to cross his torso and keep the wound concealed. No point in worrying Rey, and almost certainly starting an argument. It’ll heal, or it won’t. He’s alive, which is far more than he’d counted on at this point in the war.

They share the silence as they are for almost an hour – Ben sprawled on the window seat, Rey standing stiffly behind, a ghostly outline reflected in the window. And then suddenly she moves to sit at the opposite end of the window seat, almost defiant. Ben keeps his arm where it is but draws his legs back just slightly. She frowns a little, then draws her legs up to fill the space he made.

Ben returns his attention to the window outside, and pretends he can’t feel her eyes on him.

She falls asleep that way, and only then he shuts his eyes, letting her closeness heal fissures in his soul he hadn’t even realized were there. He doesn’t use the Force often anymore – partly so that no-one realizes how badly weakened he is without her, and partly because it takes too much out of him. But tonight, with their legs tangled so that a tiny patch bare skin at her ankle presses against his leg, he can reach out a hand and call a pillow from his bed. He leans forward, ignoring the catch of his wound as he moves, and presses the pillow gently between her face and the window. She curls an arm up around it and settles in.

Ben reaches down for the blanket, arranges it over their tangled legs, and sleeps better than he has in weeks.

When he wakes at dawn she is already gone, and by the time he finishes breakfast she and Chewie have set off on another diplomatic mission to bring far-flung planets into the new Alliance.

He can hear the sour tones of their voices before he enters the room, and it doesn’t take the Force to know what they’re discussing. Favourite topic no 2, Rey’s mysterious bond with Kylo Ren. Favourite topic no 1 is whether Kylo Ren should be executed for his crimes.

Ben doesn’t even pause on his way into the dining hall. “Surely you can’t imagine she wants to be bonded to me,” he says, and pauses by the bowl of fruit.

There’s silence. He assumes a lot of unhappy glances are exchanged behind his back.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Ben asks, turning with a mostly-ripe jeyn fruit in one hand, casual as you please. “She wanted to save the General the grief of losing her only child. She was the only person there with Force ability, and she did it even though she knew she’d be stuck with me for the rest of her life. I’m not sure what exactly you require as proof of loyalty to the Rebellion but I’d have thought that giving up her future would cover it.”

By the time he’s finished he’s met all of their eyes with a flat, unfriendly stare, and he can see them relaxing, some of them nodding slightly. He’s still the abrasive asshole they all love to hate, but there’s logic in what he’s saying. Not asking them to change their worldview certainly helps to make it easier.

Dameron narrows his eyes at Ben.

“Be grateful none of you were in her position and had to make that choice,” Ben advises, and now he smiles, thin and mean. He bites into the fruit and saunters out of the room.

The next time Rey returns to base she comes to his room earlier in the evening. They still barely speak, but curled up on the seat together, feet and ankles brushing, Ben feels better than he has for three weeks. The wound on his chest has closed a little more by morning, when he watches the Falcon fly away again with Rey onboard. Unfortunately the progress is undone when this time she is absent for nearly two months. He grows thin, which is not flattering on his tall frame, and his mother has an almost permanent line between her eyes.

Chapter Text

Even Rey notices on her return from that absence that Ben doesn’t look well. He is fully clothed, this time, when she comes to his room – winter is approaching – and so he doesn’t have to conceal the re-opened wound in his chest, but she frowns at him from the other end of the window seat.

“You need to eat more,” she says abruptly.

He nods absently. “So Mother tells me.”

“So are you doing it?” she says, impatient.

He shrugs. “I haven’t been hungry.”

There’s a long silence. She is staring at him and finally he can’t ignore it any longer. He turns his head and meets her eyes and is shocked to find them bright with tears.

“Rey,” he breathes, and reaches out a hand to her. She takes it, clumsily, and the sudden rush of memory is overwhelming. Other scavengers, on Jakku, going through lean times because of injury or illness, or when the sandstorms had set in. The sharply angled planes of their faces are vivid in her mind, like the way Ben looks now. And the ones she can’t forget - the ones who didn’t make it.

“I won’t- I won’t starve to death,” he says, and his tongue feels thick in his mouth, clumsy. “Not like- it’s not like that, Rey.”

“It’ll be winter soon,” she whispers, “if you got sick-”

“I won’t,” he promises stupidly.

“Ben, you have to eat.”

“Do you think I haven’t tried?” he demands, suddenly angry. Two months is too long.

Her eyes widen and he drops her hand with a tired curse. She heard that thought, definitely.

“It’s- because of me?” she whispers.

He turns his face back to the window.

“You don’t eat because I’m not here?”

“I eat,” he says, stubborn to the last.

“Then what? And why didn’t you tell me?”

He can’t quite hold back a bitter smile at that one. “When exactly would that conversation have happened, Rey? While I was still in the bacta tank? Or I could send a subspace message, I suppose, for everyone in the Rebellion to see and discuss.”

She looks away, shamefaced.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, eyes back on the window. “It’s fine. The med droids can give me supplements if matters get out of hand. You don’t need to worry.”

He can hear her breathing hitch, and closes his eyes. He has no defences against Rey’s tears. But he can’t touch her, not the way he wants to. They’re both too raw for that, would reveal too much to each other through this connection they barely understand and cannot seemingly control. Instead he reaches out his large, bony hand and sets it on her cloth-covered knee, squeezes.

“I won’t stay away as long,” she offers, a long time later when her tears have dried.

Ben takes the offering with a grateful nod.

Things are awkward next morning, though, when Ben takes a seat in the dining hall and Finn drops into the spot opposite. He eyes Ben’s full plate and his brows go up, though he says nothing.

They are part-way through their meal when Rey arrives, Dameron in tow, and they take seats on either side of Finn.

“It’s good to see you eating, buddy.”

Ben glares at him. “I’m not your buddy.”

“I know you’re not, pal,” he says, unphased, and pushes another roll across to Ben. Finn snickers. Rey watches the interplay with a little frown on her face, eyes wide.

 “If I eat that I’ll be sick,” Ben says flatly. “I have to work my way back up to big meals again.”

“Put it in your pocket for mid-morning,” Dameron replies, “and don’t think I didn’t notice that you just admitted you basically need to be on a post-famine food protocol…”

Ben grimaces.

“… which means that the next time this happens you won’t argue with me and shout at your mother and shut down the med droid. Right?”

“You already had to see a med droid?” Rey bursts out. “Why didn’t-” then she stops and bites her lip. She turns her eyes on her friends, “Why didn’t either of you contact me?”

Finn and Dameron exchange glances. “Rey,” Finn begins uneasily, “I mean, you had to know that leaving for so long wasn’t a good thing, after, uh...”

“I didn’t know this would happen.”

“But you asked someone, right? Before you flew off? You asked Master Skywalker, or looked up the archives to find out about this kind of bond.” Dameron is watching her with an odd mix of compassion and judgement.

She swallows and looks down at her meal.

“This conversation is pointless,” Ben says, and gathers up his plate and utensils. “I’m perfectly fine. Rey and I have discussed-”

“Oh, so you told her about the not-sleeping?”

“Since when do you care about my nightmares?” Ben demands, annoyed.

“Since you saved my life, you idiot,” Dameron exclaimed. “Since you’re my friend, even though you don’t want to be. And since I had to sit here and watch you die by inches just because Rey wants to avoid-”

“That’s enough,” Ben says harshly, slamming his plate down on the table. All around the mess hall people jump and startle, and conversations die away into wary silence as they watch him lean down and hiss at the pilot. “How do you think it feels to have access to my head, to my memories? Would you welcome that kind of warzone bleeding into your mind every second of the day?”

Ben takes a steadying breath and says more quietly, “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, Poe, but your sympathy is misplaced. Rey is the one who is connected to a monster, and if you were in her position you’d be trying to get away from me, too.”

After the food protocol discussion Ben and Rey fall into a rhythm of sorts. She cuts her trips shorter, averaging an absence of two weeks or so. His wound stalls at half-healed, and his grasp of the Force stabilises somewhat. She comes to his room only after the halls are empty and everyone is asleep. They don’t eat together in the dining hall – Ben lets her have the time with Poe and Finn, and the others who are drawn to the new Jedi apprentice – but at night in his room she quietly reaches for him and they touch hands, wrists, arms without self-consciousness. It occurs to Ben during one of her absences that it’s possible Rey, too, sleeps better when Ben is around.

He is on one of his rare forays into the town at the foot of the mountain when he feels it. It’s a malevolent blackness that reminds him so strongly of Snoke that for a moment he is frozen in true fear. I killed him. No, no. I killed h-

He gets a momentary image of a powdery substance in a pouch and an excitement that is sticky with anticipation and dark joy, and then it fades as if it had never been. Ben is left gasping, leaning against the side of a building.

Not Snoke, he thinks. Of course not. Snoke had never felt anything as pedestrian as excitement. Snoke had been all cold calculation. But whoever this is has that same absence of feeling as the Supreme Leader, the same detachment that lets them view other people as things.

Ben straightens, troubled, and hastens back up the mountain to find his uncle.

Luke believes him, which is such a relief Ben is taken by surprise at the strength of his own feelings. They travel back down to the town that afternoon, and again the next morning. Nothing.

“It’s possible they were only in town to buy whatever the powder was,” Luke says slowly.

Ben nods. “Yes, I know.” But there are so many other settlements on this planet that it would be almost impossible to search them all.

Luke sets his mouth in a line. “If any opportunities come for either of us to visit other towns, we should take them. Continuing to visit here would also be wise.”

“Yes.” Ben is forcing himself back into that moment in his mind. “I only felt them for that one instant – I think they were… celebrating? The moment they stopped thinking about whatever it is they are planning, they faded back into the background as if they’d never been there.” He shakes his head and meets his uncle’s eyes, “Honestly, our odds of finding them again are not good.”

“I agree. And yet-”

“We must try.”

Ben has more free time than Luke, since absolutely no-one is clamouring for him to establish an academy to teach what he knows, or to visit planets scanning for Force-sensitives, or to participate in any Councils at all.

Instead Ben spends his time working on the background tasks necessary for creating a Jedi Academy, working with Finn on the arrest records for the First Order and ensuring that everyone who claimed they were only a simple stormtrooper is, in fact, only a simple stormtrooper. Once or twice they ask him to participate in an interrogation. He doesn’t use the Force the way he used to – his mother would never ask it of him, and he would refuse, in any case. But often just the mention of Kylo Ren’s name has the accused thinking guiltily about their tightly held secrets, and he can pluck it from the surface of their mind without ever setting foot in the room.

So he visits the town almost every day, varying the times, and then finally, ten days after the first encounter, he feels it again. It’s fleeting, shorter even than the first, but it’s a glimpse of the pouch, a doorway, and that same surge of sick excitement.

He returns the next day with Luke in tow, and they separate to walk the streets of the town in a grid pattern, searching for that door.

Ben, his uncle sends. I have it. North west quarter.

Ben manages not to run to get there.

Luke is talking quietly with a market stall holder at the end of the street when Ben arrives, and he gestures to a quiet laneway between two buildings so they can talk. “I can get a faint sense of it from the doorway itself,” he tells Ben quietly. He moves his shoulders, “You are right. This individual is… deeply troubled.

“Do you think they live here? Or nearby?” Ben asks, scanning the buildings.

“I cannot be sure,” Luke says. “It’s possible, or they may work nearby. Also, the breadmaker here tells me that they hold markets every six days for local artisans, which go on late into the evening with food and wine and dancing. The next one is scheduled for tomorrow. Apart from that it’s a very ordinary street.”

Ben nods. Looks up at his uncle. “I’m staying.”

Luke smiles very faintly. “I thought you might. My new friend here is prepared to allow you to use his storeroom temporarily. I’ll arrange for someone to bring you your things.”

“Thank you.”

Luke hesitates as he’s leaving, and gives Ben a glance he’s coming to be heartily tired of seeing.

“I’ll be fine,” he says before Luke can ask.

After a moment his uncle says, “An unresolved bond is by its nature unstable, you know that.”

“I’ll be fine.”

Luke sighs. “Sooner or later you and Rey are going to have to talk about things, Ben. Even if only so that your medical problems can be properly addressed.”

Ben shrugs.

Luke shakes his head and takes his leave, and Ben settles into the quiet of the mountain village.

Chapter Text

Ben spends the afternoon walking the streets and laneways of the area, and gets nothing. NP9 arrives in the evening with food and a change of clothes, as well as a message from his mother. He sleeps badly, bothered by the oily trace of ugliness left behind in that doorway. There is always another Snoke, it seems, even if this one’s ambitions are on a small scale. Still, touching a mind like that is disturbing.

In the morning the street is suddenly filled with citizens. Temporary tables and tents spring up along the entire length of the street, and the foot traffic triples within an hour. Ben lurks in the storeroom, mostly, meditating in order to calm his mind and strengthen his connection to the Force as much as possible. He ventures out once or twice to inspect the wares, to buy food and a drink of something warm and spicy that comes in a clay pot and makes his eyebrows lift.

He buys a jar of the drink from the grinning vendor, and a pendant of milky green stone that has been polished to a bright sheen and reminds him of Rey’s eyes. He can’t understand a word the vendor says, but they make themselves understood with gestures and bows, and he tucks the necklace into a pocket with a satisfied feeling.

He can feel Luke approach as the sun begins to set. Nothing, he reports to his uncle.

Patience, his uncle counsels. Ben, predictably enough, grinds his teeth.

He can feel a glimmer of amusement through the Force, and then Luke is there, rounding the corner.

Ben takes his leave and retires to the room the baker had set aside for him. He sleeps badly, of course, because Rey is off-planet, and he resolves yet again to ask her about it. He’ll do it, this time. If it’s the same for her.

He is awakened by a rise in volume outside, and when he ventures out he finds the market has turned into a riotous outdoor dining venue, with impromptu dancing breaking out at different points along the street.

Luke is watching the street intently. “I sensed something, just a whisper, about an hour ago.”

“We should split up,” Ben says, and when Luke nods, he pulls up his hood and strides out into the crowd, heading north.

It’s a frustrating way to spend the evening, trying not to react to every burst of raucous laughter, or change in the volume of music. By the time things have quietened down, Ben is almost ready to believe he has imagined the whole thing. And then he feels it again, unmistakable.

Luke, he calls mentally.

On my way.

Ben draws closer to the place where he’d sensed that first trace and there it is, concentrated and close to the surface now. He lets his eyes roam over the crowd, thinning now, and finds himself focusing in on a figure lingering in a dark doorway.

He throws the image to Luke, with some difficulty. His grasp on the Force has him tiring easily nowadays, when Rey is gone.

Ben stays where he is, and watches.

Sure enough, after a few more seconds he sees the shadow detach itself from the darkness of the doorway and move forward smoothly to cross the path of a clearly drunken stallholder. “You all right?” a voice enquires.

The stallholder stumbles slightly and squints. Even his headtails are swinging drunkenly. “Fonn? That you?”

“Yes, it’s me. You look like you could use some help.” It’s bubbling up in him now, the knowledge of what the powder will do, the freedom he’ll have when the Twi’lek is unconscious, helpless and pliable and-

Ben feels nausea rise in him as he gets all the images, the helpless body subjected to all manner of perversions, offered to strangers, and he takes a step forward. Luke is hurrying toward them, but is blocked by a series of tables being carried away as the night market is packed up.

“I don’t feel so good,” the stallholder mumbles, leaning heavily on his supposed ‘friend’.

“Here,” Fonn offers, raising a hand to the other man’s face.

“Stop,” Ben orders, surging forward. He has no idea what’s in that powder, but he’s not willing to risk the other man’s safety on it.

“What?”

Both men turn toward him, startled, and he can feel in his mind when Luke begins to run and push through the crowd.

“Stay back,” Ben orders Fonn, who has his hand concealed inside his robes, and a look of startled rage on his face.

The two of them are still standing far too close together for Ben’s liking, though, and he applies a little Force push, even though it taps his reserves down to almost nothing. He reaches the drunken stallholder and grips the man’s arm to help him stay upright, drawing him further away from his would-be attacker. Unfortunately it means that Ben is completely unable to evade the handful of powder the furious Fonn throws at Ben, instead of his original intended victim.

Ben chokes, coughs, and feels the world begin to turn black just as he hears his uncle’s voice, urgent and just close enough to be comforting.

“-designed for Twi’lek bodies,” he can hear his uncle saying, and then Ben’s body is moving.

There are more voices after that, some he knows, others are strangers. It’s all coming from very far away.

-know how it will interact w…

-lift him

-reckless

-supposed to care

-has to tell her

-stop doing this to m

/not fair to h/

-think he confi

-never here

He thinks time passes in strange jumps, and his head hurts like it’s on fire. He stays quiet. He knows what happens if they know you’re hurting. They come back and see how much more you can take.

Then, “Please,” she says. “Please. Wake up. Ben.”

That’s different. His mother isn’t a part of this. Nor is that name. He opens his eyes.

“Mother.”

“Yes, love. I’m here.”

“You’re not here. Not when it hurts,” he says, confused. He thinks of her, when they hurt him, he thinks of her all the time. Until they make him stop. Until even those thoughts hurt, too.

“Oh, Ben,” she says shakily.

“Mmmm,” he manages, before he drops off to sleep again. “Missed you. Don’t go.”

He awakens as well as can be expected, considering the powder was a powerful sedative laced with paralytics and hallucinogens, and that it triggered something like an allergic reaction in Ben’s body, being based on Twi’lek ingredients.

Rey had been there for the first day, he is told, but was called away again to make contact with a new potential Jedi recruit.

His mother glares at him, exasperated.

“It’s not my fault,” he protests. “I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“You’re a magnet for trouble,” she says, and gives Luke an unimpressed side-eye. His uncle, Ben is amused to note, shifts uneasily and seems to consider about three different responses before opting for silence.

“No more amateur detecting,” his mother declares. “Am I clear?”

Ben smiles at her. It’s nice to hear that protective note in her voice again.

What’s odd is the change in the tone of the base’s general mood toward Ben after that.

He still has plenty of enemies – he’ll always have plenty of those, he suspects. But there is a definite thaw in the ice from a handful of people who nod at him in corridors and in stairways. After a few days he realizes they are all locals who work on the base. He’s not sure why that would happen, and he’s not really brave enough to ask – other than to refer obliquely to it in front of Poe.

“You don’t get why?” the other man says, brows rising.

Ben shrugs. “If killing Snoke didn’t change their minds…” he spreads his hands. Finn, polishing his boots on the other side of the room, makes a noise that seems to signal agreement.

Poe shakes his head. “You guys. Look: killing Snoke is a big-picture thing, right? Shaking the structure of governments, the rule of planets and Empires. There’s also an element of self-defence there, especially for folks who didn’t see it happen. You were in a fight, you killed the guy,” he shrugs in a way Ben can’t help feel is a bit casual, considering how bloody difficult it was to face the Supreme Leader, and what it almost cost him. Should have cost him, if not for Rey.

“This is on a different scale - you didn’t have to get involved. No-one ever would have known if you’d ignored what you sensed.”

Ben shifts uncomfortably.

“You think that creep just started his little activities now? No preliminaries, no practice?”

Ben’s mouth flattens and Finn puts his boots down, frowning.

“I’m hearing tales that there’s a few locals ‘round town who’re starting to wonder about that night when they thought they drank too many of the local brew and couldn’t remember what happened next. Pretty sure at least some of ‘em were his first victims.”

“That’s…” Finn says, and can’t seem to find a word big enough, or bad enough, judging by the look on his face.

“Yeah,” Poe says, very quietly. He looks up at Ben then. “What you did with Snoke, that was good, sure. What you did with this guy? That was personal. And not one of the locals here will ever forget it.”

Chapter Text

The door to his quarters hisses open. Ben doesn’t look up from his screen – the story has reached a hugely exciting part and he has to know what happens next. He lifts his arm and holds it out without looking up, and he hears the soft sounds of Rey settling onto the oversized cushions he now habitually leaves on the floor next to his window. She takes his hand in hers and draws it close, using it almost like a pillow, her head cushioned against Ben’s bicep, his forearm loosely clasped between her two hands. A few minutes later when he’s finished his story he looks over at her, and she is already asleep, hear head has dipped down to rest on the cushion between Ben’s arm and his hip.

Rey awakens in the early hours of the morning, like always.

It’s not something she can help. She’s slept alone her entire life – that she remembers, anyway. Always, inevitably, another person in the room makes a sound or they move, and it wakes her.

It makes things simpler in this instance, anyway. She’s not ready to wake up with Kylo Ren. She takes a steadying breath and looks at him. Not ready to wake up with Ben Solo, either.

It’s getting harder and harder to think of him as Kylo Ren. He just doesn’t act like it. The voice is the same, the power is still there, the clipped cadence of his step. But the rest is so changed. And how can she believe in such a change? If all of this potential for good was in him all along, why did he do the things he did?

She hadn’t even known half of his crimes when he’d first shown up on Kashyyyk. But the other Rebel soldiers had been more than happy to describe the massacre at the Academy, the planets attacked and the villages razed. It had seemed impossible to believe, and yet he’d never denied it. Even the General hadn’t denied it.

Rey slides slowly away from him, amazed as always that he doesn’t wake. She gets enough flashes of his nightmares to know that for the past decade he slept very lightly when he slept at all. Always on the alert for an attack, or shoring himself up against Snoke’s bullish presence invading his mind.

But he sleeps so deeply for Rey.

I coded the door to admit you weeks ago, he’d said, like it was nothing.

She doesn’t understand him at all. She hasn’t invited anyone inside her room – not even Finn, who was her first friend. Not even… she steers her mind away from that, not ready to consider that little secret when she’s in the same room as her bond mate.

There’s no-one she can ask about the mess she’s making. They’re all bound to him in some way – his mother, his uncle, his godfather, even Poe and Finn are his friends, now, too.

She swallows and reaches out to touch a timid fingertip to his face. He doesn’t stir, as always, and so she lets the back of her fingers rest against his cheek.

Who are you, really, she thinks at him. How can I trust you? Why do I trust you?

The man she’s bound to for life sleeps on, and his trusting, open mind gives her no answers.

They still haven’t talked about it.

Ben tries not to invade her mind at all if he can help it. She didn’t realize what would happen, after all. She never wanted any of this. But he doesn’t have to read her mind to know that she doesn’t want to talk about why she couldn’t just let him die.

In truth, most days he’s terrified that he somehow influenced her and that’s why she did it. He’d had a vague sense of Rey in the back of his head ever since Starkiller. Who’s to say he wasn’t channelling something back  to her the entire time? Making her feel like he was somehow vital, like he was a part of her mind she couldn’t let go of.

No, Ben isn’t going to be the one to start that conversation.

There is a new arrival on the base, since the death of Snoke. Her name is Mareesak, and she comes from a watery planet Ben has never heard of. He can feel her presence from quite a long way across the base, not because she projects her anger, but because her hatred is a razor sharp blade meant only for him.

She has come to advise the newly formed Council on legal matters relating to trade amongst a specific coalition of planets, Ben understands. And every time she passes him in the hallway she spits in his face.

He says nothing, begins to carry a cloth in his pocket to wipe away the evidence, and tries wherever possible to avoid running into her. It’s not difficult, their respective tasks keep them fairly far apart.

Finn is with him, once, when it happens. She continues on after as if nothing at all had happened, the way she always does. Finn stares, mouth open, and Ben wipes his face and says, “Don’t worry about it.”

“Don’t- are you- what?”

“Finn,” Ben says firmly, and grips the other man’s arm. “Don’t. Worry. About it.”

Finn stares at him, troubled.

“This is my problem,” Ben tells him. “Leave it be. Tell no-one.”

There are jeyn cakes at least three times a week now, in the dining hall. Not once does Ben turn up to find the plate empty.

Poe smirks at him, but it makes Ben uncomfortable. They shouldn’t… like him like that. He hasn’t earned these small kindnesses. He’s not sure there’s anything he could accomplish that would make him feel like he had earned it.

He avoids their attempts at conversation. It doesn’t seem to bother them one bit. The small treats keep coming, his boots are mysteriously repaired and returned to his room overnight, and one day he realizes that his facilities never run out of hot water anymore, the way they used to.

Chapter Text

Of course, it had to happen that Mareesak passes him just as Rey emerges from a hallway on the left. She spits in his face and keeps walking, and Ben takes a quick, shaky breath and wipes his face, half-hoping Rey missed it.

As if Ben Solo has ever had that kind of luck.

“What- what the h-”

“Rey,” he cautions. “Leave it.”

“Leave it? Are you joking?” Rey takes three quick steps to where Mareesak has paused with one foot on the bottom step, one hand on the railing.

“I’m asking you to leave it,” Ben repeats.

“I’m not going to just-”

“She has good reason,” Ben says quietly, coming up behind Rey.

Mareesak’s eyes flick to his. They are flat and dead, and he feels his gut roil at the sight.

“I don’t care what-”

“She had twin sons,” Ben says.

Rey stops talking. He can see the colour leave her face.

He has to force the words out. “I killed them.”

Rey swallows.

Mareesak turns to Rey, waiting, but Rey drops her eyes. Without another word Mareesak begins to climb the stairs, leaving them behind in seconds.

Ben is deeply asleep when the Falcon lands. It’s the only possible explanation for why he doesn’t sense her sooner. As it is, he is barely awake when the door hisses open and he can feel in that strange way that now seems so natural, that the Rey-shaped hole in the room is no longer there.

She slides onto the bed beside him, beneath the covers, and lays her head on his chest.

Ben makes a drowsy, enquiring noise. They’ve never done this before, snuggled together in bed, but he certainly has no objection. His arm comes up to curve around her back and pull her close, and he feels the long exhale of her breath against his chest. It takes him another moment to register that the sound contained within the breath is close to a sob, and when he reaches carefully for the bond her emotions are a raging, chaotic mix.

Ben’s eyes snap open. “Rey?” he begins, already turning to try and see her face.

“Don’t,” she says, low but fierce. “I don’t want to talk.”

He blinks himself awake and realizes in a rush of adrenalin that she is shaking. “What is it- are you hurt?” He runs his hands up and down her sides, automatically checking for wounds.

She shakes her head wordlessly, fingers twining in his shirt. “Don’t,” she pleads. “Please, just. Let me.” And then she turns her head and presses her face hard against his ribs, breathing shakily.

For a long moment his mind is blank, torn between fixing whatever is wrong (hurting whoever upset her) and making her at least look at him so that he knows she’s all right.

And then he realizes that she’s not all right. She’s already made it clear she’s not all right. But she obviously didn’t come here for revenge or for him to fix whatever’s wrong.

Of all the people who care for her, she came to him.

Ben draws in a deep breath and wraps his other arm around her, tight. “What do you need me to do,” he murmurs into her hair.

“Can you- talk?”

“What about?”

“Anything. Just. Your voice. Makes me feel better,” she chokes out haltingly.

Ben blinks.

“I. Yes, I can-” he stops and swallows. “So. It’s uh, snowing. You probably already noticed. Nobody realized that Finn’s never really uh, well, the way he put it was that he’s seen snowy planets before -  I’m going to assume he means from orbit. But he’d never actually been out in the snow before. Poe, of course, took it upon himself to educate- well, educate’s a strong word for what went on after lunch today…”

He’s rambling. His parents would never believe it. But his mind is a complete blank apart from the ridiculous hour of snow play he’d witnessed this afternoon. So he does with it. And if the slow relaxing of Rey’s body is anything to go by, it’s working. He’s getting flashes now of what she’s witnessed recently, and it is horribly familiar. Hux’s work, no doubt, families slaughtered and towns left in a smoking ruin. Ben swallows and pushes through the guilt.

“…it was all down the inside of his clothes, stuck to his eyebrows – well. I’m sure someone recorded an image or two, you’ll see it tomorrow.”

His fingers are running slowly through her hair, crown to nape, and he hears her exhale damply against his shirt.

“Better now?” he asks very quietly.

“A little.”

As usual, she’s gone when he wakes in the morning, though he can feel she’s still on-planet. The relief he feels at that is staggering.

Ben takes a careful, measured breath, dresses and heads to his mother’s quarters, collecting breakfast on the way.

She doesn’t question his spontaneous visit to her quarters, she had reinstated family access for him quite some time ago. Even before the death of Snoke, he suspects, which was reckless in the extreme, but there’s not a lot of point having that argument now.

They sit together quietly, eating. Ben is turning things over in his mind, and he can feel his mother waiting patiently.

“I didn’t know,” he says softly, slowly.

She looks at him questioningly.

“I didn’t know that I could make her feel better. I always feel better just being around her, but-”

It hadn’t seemed possible that it could work the other way around.

When he looks up she is giving him a soft, sad smile, full of pride and mingled sadness. “Ben,” his mother says slowly, lowering her cup, “you need to understand that Rey is probably one of the most alone people you have ever, or will ever meet. I know your life in the past few years hasn’t been… easy,” she falters. He touches her hand briefly, understanding. “But. From what little she’s told me, Rey lived entirely alone. Almost no interaction with any other living thing.”

He frowns at her.

“What I’m saying is, of the two of you, Ben, you are the one with relationship skills.”

He recoils automatically.

“Yes,” she says, sharp and wry, “just imagine.” And Ben is suddenly reminded that his mother had, as a young woman, captivated a smooth-talking ladies man like Han Solo, and stood toe to toe with him for decades to make their relationship work. Leia Organa Solo takes no crap from anyone, and she’s seen more of it than most.

“But if you think about it for two seconds you’ll understand the truth of this situation. You had parents. You had an uncle, a godfather, and childhood friends.”

He swallows and looks away. “Yes,” he says, his voice low.

“This isn’t about you, Ben,” she says, warningly. “You can’t start your usual spiral of how you had it all and threw it away. Think about her. About how she was alone, no family or friends, and she stayed that way. She doesn’t understand the ebb and flow of relationships.”

Naturally, this would be the day that someone notices Rey leaving Ben’s quarters in the early morning.

By mid-morning the general air around the base is a combination of chilly and business-as-usual. There’s a fair proportion of people who have either decided to forgive on the Kylo Ren issue, or have decided, pragmatically, that the results of his efforts are worth tolerating his continued presence on the base. This news barely impacts them. The others, though…

No-one dares to speak badly about Ben to the General. Those who try to start an angry conversation with Luke find themselves talking in circles about deep philosophical concepts and the nature of the Force. Poe cuts down every objection with a charming smile and a steely none-of-your-business.

But Rey. Rey doesn’t understand what they’re doing, the conversations that stop when she enters the room, the sneering remarks and the way people are suddenly declining her assistance and spurning her company.

She doesn’t understand, and she doesn’t know how to handle it. She tries to hold it in, but Ben can feel the low churn of hurt and confusion and why in the back of her mind.

For the first time in over a year Ben finds himself kindling a black rage that feeds itself without any conscious help from him. He is stalking through the corridors with no clear destination in mind when Poe steps out in front of him.

“You need to cool down,” the older man tells him.

“They have no right-”

“They have every right to feel whatever damn fool thing they want. They also, unfortunately, have the right to act like idiots, if that’s what they choose to do.”

“She doesn’t deserve-”

“Ben, listen to me. I understand your chivalrous instincts, but you have to let this go. You’re not doing Rey any favours by jumping in to Force-choke people when they have an issue with her. She needs to learn how to cope with this stuff in her own way.”

Ben gapes at him. “You’re saying I should just-”

Poe gives him a warning look. “She can stand up for herself in a fight?”

He grinds his teeth. “Yes.”

“Then she can figure out how to either argue back, or stop letting it bother her.”

“Except that it’s happening because of me.”

“This time. But the next time it’ll be because of politics, or because someone wanted to ask her out and she said no, or because they think she shouldn’t be piloting the Falcon anymore because she’s a Jedi now. There’s always gonna be something, buddy. You can’t protect her from every disagreement, and just ‘cos people are enemies of the First Order doesn’t automatically make ‘em good people. We got our fair share of a-holes, too.”

Ben looks away, jaw clenching.

“Let it be, Ben,” Poe says again, more softly. “Let her learn this one on her own. At the very least wait until she asks you for advice or help.”

He takes a huge breath.

“Fighting her battles for her is more likely to escalate this than help, you know.”

Ben grimaces. That, he understands all too well. But it doesn’t sit well with him to do nothing. He takes another, steadying breath, and remembers suddenly the moment he’d realized, the night before, that she hadn’t wanted him to do anything. Does he have to learn everything the hard way, twice over?  He grinds his teeth. This actually feels more like punishment than anything he’s endured so far. He could almost accept it as something he deserves, if it didn’t involve Rey, too. He blows out a breath, surrendering.

“All right,” he says. Then he shakes his head and glares at Poe, because he has to glare at someone.

“Wow, really?” the pilot says, blinking as if confused.

Ben raises his eyebrows.

“Huh. I …thought that’d be harder. Uh.” He shifts from foot to foot and then lifts his voice, “It’s okay, Chewie. You can go.”

There’s a derisive bark of Wookie laughter from around the corner, /finally, he listens/ and then the sound of giant feet stalking away.

“You thought Chewie could talk sense into me if you couldn’t?” Ben demands, gaping. “Chewie?”

“What? Oh, no, of course not. No, Chewie was waiting to just, uh,” he shrugs, “pick you up and carry you away if you wouldn’t listen.” They fall into step, Ben shaking his head at Poe as he adds, “I figured he was one of the few people you might be reluctant to get into a fight with, or use the Force on.”

“You are unbelievable.”

Poe shrugs. “Be grateful I decided to have faith in your capacity for compromise. Finn suggested stun grenades.”

Ben barks out startled laughter, and Poe knocks their shoulders together.

Chapter Text

He destroys a number of practise droids over the next week or so. He also hikes down the mountain into the local villages to avoid watching Rey struggle with stupid social infighting, and stumbles upon the extended family of Daarvi, the stallholder Ben had rescued from the drug.

He barely manages to leave their home without their every possession and their eldest daughter, who was, Ben had been told numerous times, of marriageable age, and very taken with the handsome stranger who had stepped in to help her brother.

Rey enjoys the story well enough, though not as well as Poe and Finn, who end up actually weeping with laughter by the end.

When he stands to leave the table he hesitates, then slips a hand into his pocket and brings out the milky green stone he’d bought, days ago in the village market. He presses it into Rey’s hand as he passes her on his way out, feels a faint trace of her surprise and pleasure in it as he passes out of the room.

“Thank you,” she tells him awkwardly, the next time she sees him. “For the…”

“I found it in the village,” he says, dismissive. It’s technically true.

“Well. Thank you just the same.” He thinks she is running her fingers over the smooth surface, inside the pocket of her tunic, and he warms all over at the thought that something he gave her remains with her all day.

Another day passes, and another, and the hostile edge begins to wear off most people’s interactions. Familiarity and time are wonderful things, Ben thinks, but he sees the way Rey keeps a wary distance from the ‘friends’ who had withdrawn from her, and he curses them.

Rey has few enough people to rely on. Damn them for making the list any shorter.

Weeks go by and they are suddenly close to finding Hux.

Killing Snoke did achieve one thing, which is that no-one tries to keep Ben out of briefings anymore. He’s made it clear he’s not interested in trying to be a part of the leadership council, either political or military, but he’s still a resource they can use for planning missions.

This time, however, he ends up actually participating in a mission.

They are only a step or two away from Hux. They have a lead on the Hutt who has been keeping Hux’s small band of mercenaries in supplies. They have a day and a rough location for the next supply drop, but it’s going to take either Luke or Ben to identify the right intermediary, since they have no description, no name, nothing to go on. Rey’s control over the Force is improving, but she doesn’t have enough experience yet to read the minds of a crowd and pluck out useful intel.

Ben powers down the speeder and nods at his uncle. The harsh light is fading at first sunset begins. It will still be a few hours before second sunset, when the planet reaches full dark.

“Nothing?” Ben asks, swinging down from the speeder.

“Not so far,” Luke replies. His uncle casts another glance back at the settlement. “I’ve been focusing on the southern side. It seems more like the kind of place.”

Ben nods.

Luke swings his head back. “Rey will likely join you later.”

Ben can’t hold back his jolt of surprise.

Luke waits for Ben to object but he simply swallows, shrugs and gets on with his task, which is to arrange a rough brown cloak and hood so that it conceals his face but not his vision. The natives of this planet are barely of a height with his mother, which means that Ben needs to stoop as much as possible to avoid attracting attention as he patrols.

He walks the designated quadrants for an hour or two, as the quality of light changes from the blinding glare of two suns, to the soft sunset of one. By the time night has fully fallen another set of steps is matching his.

“Master Luke says it’ll be good practice,” is all she says.

Ben nods. “It would be wise not to use each other’s names if we need to speak,” he says after a moment. He doesn’t mention that she has never called him anything but Kylo Ren, aside from that one slip when he’d made her cry.

She, too, nods.

“You can be Scorpion,” Ben offers after a moment.

There’s a hitch in her step, a sliding sideways glance. “Fine,” she says crisply. “You’re Helmet.”

He can feel himself grin, but ducks his head away so she doesn’t see.

The Force feels strong in him tonight. Maybe it’s Rey’s nearness, maybe it’s all the time he’s been spending in mediation as they travelled here, trying to avoid encountering the thoughts of the individual in this Rebel contingent who hates him with a poisonous focus. Either way, his senses are razor sharp, and it’s only an hour later that he says, “I have them.”

He pauses in a doorway and waits, letting Rey reach out.

“You feel that?” he murmurs. “That… tension in their thoughts? It could be simple crime, of course. Smugglers, maybe. But they are certainly up to no good.”

“I- yes,” she says after a moment. “It’s a small group…” she adds, uncertain.

“Yes. We need to get closer to see if we can overhear something more solid, in case it’s a co-incidence and these are just local riff-raff.”

She nods, lifts her radio to her mouth and lets command know their location and the name of the cantina their group have just entered.

The moment they step inside Ben realizes their mistake. Out on the street he had been better able to conceal his size. In here, he is like a giant amongst all the seated customers, and his is going to attract attention if he’s not smart about it.

He moves swiftly, sweeping through the crowd while sending out a gentle wave of don’t-notice-me so that barely a head turns. There, by the back wall, is a small table half tucked into an alcove, and he slides into the seat and behind the table.

Rey follows in his wake, less certain, and he is sorry all over again that he does not have the right, or the permission, to speak into her mind.

“I’m drawing too much attention in here,” he murmurs, leaning close. “Too tall. Better if I sit.”

She nods once, and slides into the seat across from him.

Ben turns his focus on the group. There’s something odd about them.

“What was that thing you did? When you came in?” Rey asks uncertainly.

He glances at her, startled out of his concentration. “What?”

“You…” she gestures vaguely.

“Oh. It’s.” he hesitates, not sure how to explain it. “I’m too conspicuous, sometimes. In certain environments.”

She glances around the room, noting the small stature of almost every other species here. Nods slowly.

“I… it’s hard to explain. I think about not being noticed… and I… sort of. Push it out.” He spreads his hands, unable to explain it any better. Snoke had never noticed this trick of his.

“Master Luke’s never mentioned it.”

“I don’t think he’s ever really needed it,” Ben shrugs. “He can generally blend in. Also…” he hesitates, then shrugs again. “I didn’t realize I was doing it, at first. When I was still at home, I mean. I used to want to be invisible a lot. I’m pretty sure I was doing it long before I ever went to the Academy.”

“Why would you want to be invisible?” she says, frowning.

He freezes for a half-second, then turns his gaze carefully toward the group they’re monitoring. “My family is very high profile, obviously,” he says, very quietly. “It wasn’t always a comfortable thing, as a child, or as a teenager, to be stared at by huge crowds, asked endless questions about my parents or my uncle by everyone I met.” He hesitates. “I was a gangly, awkward boy who was more at ease with Wookies than any of the children around me. Sometimes it was nice not to be noticed.”

She’s frozen in her seat and Ben gives a mental shrug. He should have known she wouldn’t be interested in the life and times of Ben Solo, teenage outcast. Better to keep this strictly business.

“I could teach you,” he offers, then freezes himself, hearing the echo of the desperate offer he’d made on Starkiller base, pressing and pressing on her mind, knowing that he needed her close and not understanding why.

Then one of the group they’re watching shifts, lifts his head and scans the bar with unmistakable intent. Ben catches an image from his mind and his eyes widen. He ducks his head and swears softly under his breath.

“Scorpion,” he mutters, urgent. “On your feet, quick.” She is still wearing her robe. It will be enough, surely, to shield him. “Can you see what’s in the mind of the Chriss over there?”

Rey rises, and Ben reaches out, cursing inwardly that he has to do this. “Sorry,” he mutters, then wraps a hand around her waist and… manhandles her, like he has a right to do so. He’s copying something he vaguely remembers seeing in a cantina like this one. His big hand spans her side and he drags her close, to stand between his spread knees, his face so close to her torso, her small breasts almost brushing his face. He keeps his hand on her, proprietary.

“Sorry,” he mutters as she straightens, not fighting him, just… uncertain. She draws her shoulders up, eyes staring blindly over his shoulder at the wall. “Sorry,” he says again, into the soft fabric of her shirt.

She manages to keep her focus despite their sudden proximity. “I, uh. I’m getting-”

Then she stiffens, and he knows she saw what he saw. Her hand comes up to rest on his shoulder, further obscuring the sight line of the red-eyed man scanning the room, and she shuffles closer, body language changing as she gets the full picture of their situation. Ben curls his body in, lessening his height and bulk. Rey, too, swears.

The group know Ben is here. They are searching the town for him.

Rey slides her mic out from under her cloak with her free hand, and Ben turns his head just enough to be able to breathe a warning into it. “We need a distraction, and quickly,” he says. “Send Luke down here to tail this group and find out which is their ship.”

They stay as they are, Rey swaying slightly to the music as though it’s a seduction, and Ben closes his eyes and tries to focus on anything but the bright clean scent of her, the rightness flowing through him at having her so close.

Chapter Text

He bursts through the door and stalks forward, the small group of Rebels falling away from him on sheer, animal instinct at the rage he’s projecting.

The soldier is waiting, face set in a cold sneer and no sign of remorse in his thoughts. He’s clearly not expecting Ben to barrel into him and keep walking until they slam, hard, into the far wall of the Rebel ship, Ben’s fists clenched in the front of his shirt.

Ben leans in, stares into the other man’s eyes, close enough to resemble a kiss. “You hate me,” he says, conversational.

“Yes,” Naplo snaps back, no hesitation.

“You hate me, and so you fed the First Order the news that I would be here, hunting for Hux.”

“You’re a murdering bastard who deserves-”

“What about Rey. Does she deserve everything I should get?” Has her reputation taken such a hit that they hate her now, too?

“Wh-what?”

Ben bares his teeth. “Did you forget that she came on this mission? She was in that bar with me tonight. You think they’d have captured me and just left her behind?”

The man’s face loses some colour. “I didn’t know she- I never meant-” his eyes flick past Ben to the rest of the room.

“You never meant. You forgot that all of the remaining Jedi in the galaxy would be here, on this planet, and that you would also be tipping off the First Order that we were close to finding Hux. You forgot all of that?”

“We can’t trust a monster like you.”

“No, Naplo. I’m afraid you got that exactly wrong. We can’t trust you,” Ben murmurs, and shakes him, watches him flinch.  “Rey was known to Snoke, you know - he wanted to take her under his wing. Tell me what you think they would do to her, if they captured her.”

Naplo swallows and turns his head away. Ben doesn’t even know if he’s choking the man, doesn’t care.

“I’ll tell you what they’d do.” Ben’s voice is quiet and shaking and vicious. He bites out the words and he knows Naplo can feel the rage trembling through his entire body. “They would hurt her in ways you can’t even imagine. They would tear at her soul until there was nothing left. They would make her into another me.”

“Wait,” she says from behind him, and her voice is so soft. “Please. Stop.”

Ben turns his head toward her, but doesn’t let go of his prisoner.

“You’re pleading for his life?”

“Please,” she says again. “Don’t.”

“Don’t, you say. He betrays you to the First Order, and Hux slips through our fingers, and you-”

“Please,” she says again, and lays a hand on the small of his back.

He rears back from Naplo and puts some room between them.

Now she reaches out to Ben, touches him voluntarily, publicly. For this waste of space. He can feel the bitterness coil inside him.

Ben takes one long step back, and he can see the man slump in relief.

Then Ben raises a hand and makes a quick, hooking motion. Naplo jerks, eyes fling to meet Ben’s angry gaze. “Do you feel that?” Ben asks, low.

Naplo swallows and raises a shaking hand to his head. Nods.

Rey makes an inarticulate noise, half warning, half hesitation.

“It will always be there,” Ben says, “Every day of your miserable life from now on.” Then he steps in again, close, and whispers in Naplo’s ear, “And if I ever sense you within the same sector of space as Rey, I will Rip. Your. Mind. Apart. From the inside. This body,” he taps at Naplo’s forehead with one finger, “will be nothing but an empty shell. Do you understand me.”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe me?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Ben says, then turns on his heel and stalks away.

She doesn’t have the good sense to leave him alone, of course. She follows him, and he’s just as glad of the attention as he is angry about her manipulation. Pathetic.

“You scared a lot of people back there.”

“I certainly hope so,” he says.

“Not in a good way,” she returns. “Most of them were ready to accept you as part of the Rebellion but after that-”

“After what?” He whirls on her. “After finding a First Order informant? After exposing the person that has likely cost us Hux? Somehow I’m the problem, and not him?”

“What would you have done to him if I hadn’t come in?”

“Nothing he didn’t deserve for what he did. You don’t understand what it would mean if Hux captured you-”

“I can take care of myself-”

“For most things, yes. Not for this. They are angry, do you understand? They are afraid, now. They have already lost. Anyone with any sense has left the First Order and is trying to build a new life and pretend they were never a part of this nightmare. The ones who have stayed with Hux are fanatics. Worse than I ever was. And there is nothing to restrain them anymore, no goals, no leaders requiring them to meet targets or complete construction. There is only revenge. I know Hux, and I know what he would do.”

“I’m a Jedi apprentice-”

“Do you think I submitted meekly to my training with Snoke? Do you think I witnessed that massacre and just fell meekly in line? Do you think I never longed for home or wanted it all to stop? They have ways to handle Force users, Rey, they have ways of making you not care about anything but making the pain go away. You would break, Rey.” He has to stop to take a breath and says unsteadily, “Everybody breaks in the end.”

“I survived the worst of Kylo Ren,” she retorts. “How much worse could Hux be?”

Ben’s head snaps back as if she’d struck him.

For a moment they just stare at each other, Rey stricken and guilty, and then Ben can’t hold back the incredulous sneer that curves one side of his mouth. “You think that was my worst? That was careful handling of an honoured guest, Rey, it was practically a courtship.” He leans in, furious and hurt, “You cannot begin to imagine Kylo Ren at his worst, you don’t have the vocabulary for it.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean-”

“Yes. You did.” He turns away, sighing. He will never be able to explain this to her. The terror running brightly through him on her behalf is part memory and part instinct, and all of it stemming from his own ugly experiences. She can feel some of it through the bond, he knows that, but he is hiding as much of it as he possibly can.

Because the innocence of Rey’s mind is still largely intact, in spite of being part of a war, in spite of her connection to Ben. And that very innocence means she cannot understand. In truth, he hopes she never does.

“Just say it,” Ben tells her, tired. He can feel half of it through the bond anyway.

“I just,” she says. Chews her lip. “I didn’t expect… to see Kylo Ren in you again.”

Ben feels his mouth twist bitterly. He turns his head to meet her eyes.

“You of all people know, Rey,” he says. “Part of me will always be Kylo Ren.”

He pushes off the wall and stalks away.

He finds Luke easily enough.

“Hux has no way of knowing we’ve found the mole,” Ben begins without preamble. “We can still let him capture me.”

Luke eyes him. Ben sighs. Yes, I’m sure we need to talk about things, he sends to his uncle. But not now. And you’re the only person on this planet that I truly trust with this mission anymore.

His uncle allows this with a wry shrug. “What is your suggestion?”

“How good is the subdermal tracker you implanted?” Ben asks. The med droid back on Kashyyyk hadn’t exactly been subtle.

Luke doesn’t even bother looking embarrassed. “The best we could obtain on short notice.”

Ben gives a short nod. “So, let him capture me, track where they take me, and we’ll finish the job.”

“And how are you planning to escape? It could well be that Hux will decide to go down with his ship. He must know his days are numbered, and he has already chosen not to disappear, or surrender himself.”

For one long ugly moment Ben is tempted to give his uncle an easy lie, something about his familiarity with the Finalizer and the location of its escape pods. He’s tired. So tired. And he knows that tonight he will be dreaming of the past, a mixed-up jumble of Rey saying I survived the worst of Kylo Ren, and the pure white fury that had overtaken him at the thought of Rey in Hux’s hands.

That kind of anger makes everything so easy. The world brightens, his path becomes so clear. It’s how he had survived as Kylo Ren for so long, despite the many nightmarish aspects of that life.

Then he looks his uncle in the eye instead and says, “No idea.”

Luke shakes his head slowly. “Ben,” he says.

He sighs. “I don’t know,” he says. “I’ll try, of course I will. But they know my skills and they know how to ensure I can’t use them.”

Luke’s mouth tightens.

“You know I’m not suicidal.”

“No,” Luke concedes, and now he is glaring. “Just criminally reckless with your own life. For all you know Hux will kill you the minute he sets eyes on you.”

There’s no real answer to that. Luke’s right.

“What would happen to her?” Ben asks, hating himself a little. Even as hurt and angry as he is, he can’t stop caring about Rey. “If I died?”

Luke shakes his head. “I’m sorry, Ben,” he says softly. “I genuinely do not know.”

Ben nods. He stares at his boots for a few minutes, then says, “Do we have a med droid with us now?”

So he’d been right about them knowing how to secure him. What he had been wrong about was the Finalizer. Apparently Hux’s fortunes had not been faring so well since the death of Snoke. Ben is still unconscious when they make the transfer from the cargo ship, and he awakens not on board the flagship, but on one of the mid-size shuttles usually used to transport the Supreme Leader and his guards. It’s hardly larger than the Falcon.

The loss of his ship alone would have enraged Hux, let alone the rest of it – Ben’s defection, Snoke’s death. Ben’s fairly sure the room they’re holding him in now was some sort of supply cupboard, originally. He pictures stormtrooper helmets lined up in crates and almost laughs.

“Hux,” he manages to say, his tongue thick in his mouth. He hates this drug. Has always hated the disorientation and the blurred vision, that sense that the Force was just there, if he could only reach through the fog in his mind. “It’s just as good to see you as ever.”

That’s what he means to say, anyway. He’s not really sure he managed to form the words in the correct order. In the back of his mind he is ticking over what he knows about these ships, their systems. How he might turn it to his advantage. Nothing is leaping to mind right now.

“Kylo Ren,” Hux murmurs, silky-quiet. “Or I suppose I should call you Ben Solo now, is that right? Since you were bearing a Rebellion tracker in your arm. We removed it, by the way. You’re quite alone.”

Ben shrugs. He reaches clumsily for the Force, strains instinctively against the bonds holding him to the metal grating. Nothing. He is in so much trouble right now. No surprise there.

“Quite the transformation you’ve managed.”

Oh this is going to be bad, Ben thinks blurrily. Hux is incandescent with rage. Maybe Ben can help things along. Hux might lose his temper and kill him by accident, which sounds better right now than being tortured to death.

“Snoke, too,” Ben slurs out. “He’s much quieter now. And shorter. Total transformation.”

There’s really no point trying put it off. Hux wants very badly to hurt him, and the normal constraints of trying to keep a prisoner coherent enough to give information don’t apply. Ben closes his eyes and concentrates on holding back his screams for as long as he can.

Chapter Text

It goes on for a long time. Possibly forever. It’s nothing Ben hadn’t expected. Doesn’t mean it isn’t effective. Some things you can’t train away, and the body’s automatic response to injuries, especially those creatively applied, is one of them. It doesn’t help that the wound from Snoke’s blade has reopened under their careful attentions, and they’ve poured something into it that make’s Ben’s chest feel like it’s been filled with liquid fire.

At some point Hux leaves. Probably sleepy – torture is surprisingly exhausting work. It’s possible he’d been gone for quite a while before Ben was coherent enough to realize it. When he does notice, he grits his teeth, literally, and bites down on the implant the med droid had placed in his cheek. The stimulant floods through his system with a surge that takes him completely by surprise, and he is straining at the bonds before any conscious thought has occurred. As a bonus, it seems to be interfering with the drug Hux dosed him with, the one that cut off Ben’s connection to the Force. He can feel his Force ability stirring to sleepy life as he works desperately at his restraints.

His grip on the Force is still muddy, but combined with the surge of strength it’s enough to create a small gap in the clamp around one arm, and he drags his wrist through the space with an agonized gasp, leaving a fair amount of skin and soft tissue behind. He fumbles his way through the rest of the retraints, choosing to detaching the clamps from the large metal grate they’d used as an improvised rack, rather than trying to free his hands and feet. It’s lucky they didn’t have proper interrogation facilities, but they managed to find nice strong restraints anyway.

It’s not exactly simple to access the panel, but he bludgeons it open with the clamp still attached to his other wrist, and yanks on enough wires to put together a general alarm which will trigger some automatic signals to the nearest starbase or outpost. Standard First Order protocol, he thinks, grinning.

If the second subdermal tracker the med droid had concealed beneath the scar Snoke left in his hip is still transmitting, it will be enough for Luke and the others to find him. If not, maybe they’ll hear about the First Order ship transmitting a distress call.

He slumps against the cell wall for a while, listening to the urgent shuffle of feet in the corridors, sharp voices issuing commands, and waits for Hux.

He could try to break free of the cell, he knows that. But hours of pain have turned his muscles into one aching mass, and he can’t currently trust his vision or balance, plus his left wrist is losing blood at a rate alarming enough that he has to use his right hand to stem the flow. This ship is small enough that he’d have to commandeer the whole thing in order to escape, and it sounds as though the small number of escape pods have already been used. It seems safer to stay in this quiet room and wait for whatever happens next.

The door opens, and Ben squints toward the change in light.

“Still here,” Hux says, but the light, teasing tone is gone. “I suppose we have you to thank for the fleet of ships that just dropped out of light speed at our location?”

“Hope so,” Ben slurs. “Because if I’ve accidentally signalled the Hutt fleet this is going to get very embarrassing, very quickly.” It occurs to him that he is sounding very much like his father, and he can’t help the small smile that comes with the thought. He feels close to Han Solo at this moment. The whole day turning out to be a series of disasters will do that, he thinks wryly. All he needs now is to find out the ship’s hyperdrive is down.

“What a pathetic picture you make, Kylo Ren.” Hux saunters forward and crouches in front of Ben, who thinks idly how nice it would be if he were steady enough to Force-choke the man. How many times had he dreamed of doing just that? He tries for the Force, but it slips away from his control. The surge of power from the stimulant has faded, leaving him tired and exhausted and powerless once more.

He can feel a shudder run though the ship, laser fire hitting somewhere close by, and he pictures Poe out there in space, no doubt talking non-stop to his fellow pilots.

“Just do it, Hux,” he says tiredly. “Even your gloating is a second rate copy, and I’m tired of hearing it.”

That flash of anger flies across the redhead’s face even as he draws his blaster, “Still trying to pretend you’re in charge,” he challenges. “Look at you now. Bleeding on the floor at my feet, no power, no weapon, and no Knights of Ren at your disposal. What do you have to boast of, Kylo Ren?”

“I have my mother back. Maybe one day my uncle, too.”

Hux sneers.

“And I’ve made a friend,” he says, after thinking for a moment. “That was nice. I didn’t expect that.”

He won’t mention Rey. Won’t take the risk that Hux might survive this skirmish and go after her.

“A friend.” Hux lets out an incredulous laugh. “You- you’re serious.”

Ben smiles, every part of his body aching, and the ringing in his ears intensifying. He’s hearing things, voices in his head. That’s not usually a good sign. “It’s all right, Hux,” he says, almost kindly. “You wouldn’t understand.”

Then there’s a horrible high pitched metal screech, and a chunk of the ceiling drops down to land between them. Ben tips his head back, and there, silhouetted in smoke and lit by blaster fire, is Luke. Hux raises his blaster to shoot and it flies out of his hand at an absent gesture from the older Jedi.

“Heyyy, Uncle Luke,” Ben says. “Good timing.”

“I try,” Luke says drily.

Ben doesn’t pass out during the transfer from one ship to the other, but he really, really wishes he had. Then one of the Rebels jolts his still-bleeding wrist as they lift him and he doubles over gasping. He hears Rey’s voice distantly, shouting, and then the world washes white.

His mother is crying when he awakens.

“M’sorry,” Ben says without even opening his eyes. The instinct is pretty well ingrained at this point. If Leia Organa Solo is crying, Ben caused it, somehow.

She takes a couple of hitching breaths, then straightens and lifts her head. He can almost see her don the mantle: Princess/Leader/General. She has had to be so strong, his mother, for so very long. When all the men in her life let her down she never quit. She is the only one who has always stayed.

“You have to stop this, Ben,” she says, firm and heartbroken.

“I’m not doing it on purpose,” he protests. Also, this seems a little unfair. He’s fairly certain he hasn’t had any treatment beyond a cursory cleaning of his wounds and a low dose of painkillers. Probably they don’t have much in the way of facilities on whatever tiny ship they’d used to pursue him. He’s not at his best and he’s going to say something stupid.

“You’ve paid enough,” she says, utterly ignoring him. “You don’t owe the Rebellion your wasted life, or your continual pain and suffering.”

“Better me than someone else,” Ben mutters, then winces. He hadn’t meant to say that out loud. This is what he’d meant by stupid.

“No,” she says, and her mouth quivers. “No, Ben, it is not.” Her hand tightens on his, which is nice even though it hurts like blazes.

“I didn’t mean-”

“Yes you did, yes. You. DID.” She doesn’t shout but the intensity of her voice is like a steel blade. “I’ve allowed it to go on this far, but no more. I know you have guilt. We all do. But I cannot keep doing this, Ben,” and now she’s speaking in an agonized whisper that hurts worse than anything Hux could ever do.

“Mother,” he says, and forces himself upright with a grunt, pats her hand clumsily, “I’m sorry. I am, I’m, I’m sorry. I’ll be more careful.”

“You’ll be in that bunker under the Firdian Sea if you’re not careful,” she snaps, angry at the loss of control.

He can’t help but smile at her, then bites back a moan as the burns on his chest flare hot and painful.

He presses a hand over the wound. It really doesn’t help. “Can I help it if both my parents were stupidly brave?” he says. “I come by my recklessness honestly.”

“Oh, now’s a fine time to trot out that silver tongue,” she says, but he can already tell the storm is passing. She presents a fine veneer of refinement, does Leia Organa Solo, but she’s always been just as fiery as her vagabond husband, and incapable of holding a grudge. Just as well, or his parents would have murdered each other before the first year was up. Sometimes Ben thinks her temper must be the only Anakin Skywalker trait that was left after her upbringing in Alderaan.

He reaches for her hand. “I promise,” he says, very softly this time. “I really don’t do any of it on purpose. It just made sense to let myself be taken.”

“Made sense because you were too stupidly overprotective to consider letting me be the bait,” Rey snaps from behind him, “or maybe both of us.”

Ben’s eyes go wide. He hadn’t sensed her at all. Damned aftereffects of the drug. “You know I couldn’t-”

“-I know you think I’m weak-”

“-of course I don’t-”

“-all that talk of how I can’t imagine what Hux is capable of, like Jakku was some sort of paradise-”

“-I know you’re not weak, you took me on even when you’d never touched a lightsaber before and you very nearly beat me-”

“-got this picture of fragile little Rey, as if-”

“-have you thought for one minute of what it would mean if they had both of us? If they could use you to make me comply? They would have Kylo Ren under their thumb again in a heartbeat,” Ben shouts, “I know you think I’m a monster-”

“-I don’t think that stop saying that-”

“-but I’m not such a monster that I could stand by and let them-”

“-haven’t called you that for-”

“-they wouldn’t even have to actually harm you, all they’d have to do is threaten you and I would do anything they ordered me to, you idiot-”

Rey stops talking abruptly, and her mouth snaps shut.

A second later, Ben hears the echo of his own words and snaps his own mouth closed.

“Be-because of the bond,” Rey says unsteadily.

Ben sighs. Slumps back against the bed. “Obviously,” he says, voice low. He keeps his eyes locked on his mother’s hand, still loosely clasping his.

“Because of the bond,” she repeats. She sounds even less certain.

“It’s bad enough just being parted for weeks on end,” Ben says after a long moment, and hopes she doesn’t notice the subject change. “I’m sure you can imagine how much infinitely worse it would feel to be on the other side of a door while your bondmate is being tortured.”

Her eyes flash, “Yes I can,” she says. “And I don’t have to imagine, actually.”

“Oh,” Ben says softly. “I didn’t realize. Sorry.”

“Sorry, he says.” Rey turns her exasperated eyes on Leia, who simply shakes her head, smiling.

Rey takes a seat at his side and presses him to lie back. Once he’s lying down again she reaches for this other hand, grudging.

Chapter Text

His mother leaves to transfer to another ship, a larger vessel that is holding the prisoners. She has to take care of some detail about Hux’s imprisonment and eventual trial. Ben and Rey sit in silence in the tiny ex-First Order shuttle that had managed to clamp on to the outside of Hux’s ship and give Luke a way in.

“Do you know how many people have ever seen me cry?”

Ben blinks at her and tries to sit up more. Thinks about it for a moment. Luke, probably. Perhaps his mother. “Uh. Only a few?”

“Only one,” she says. “Only you.”

He stares at her some more. “I don’t, I- I don’t understand what that means.”

“Did you ever wonder why I can just get up in the middle of the night and leave your room and you never wake up?”

“I-yes, I have wondered about it.” He’d come to a remarkably sentimental conclusion about it and had refused to think about it further in case he blushed himself to death.

“Perhaps it’s for the same reason that I can stop myself crying in front of anyone else, but not you.”

Ben’s breath catches in his throat.

“Why was I able to save you that day?”

Just when he thinks he’s ready for her, she switches topics and blindsides him again.

“I saw you bleeding in that cage and I panicked and then I could just feel you there, in the back of my mind. But it wasn’t a new feeling. I realized that a few weeks later. You were already there, weren’t you? In my mind.”

He lowers himself back against the pillows and lets out a slow breath. “Yes.”

“Why were you already there?”

“Because of Starkiller,” he tells her.

Ben has the sensation of standing at the top of a tall hill, staring down the slope. If he takes this step he’ll tumble all the way to the bottom. But perhaps it’s time for that fall. Perhaps it’s what has to happen.

“Starkiller?”

“When we… fought.”

She blinks at him.

“Did you think that was normal?” he asks. “Did you never ask Luke about it? Yes, Jedi can influence susceptible minds and they can sense emotions from others, especially if they project or have weak shields, but. What we did that day was… unprecedented. You had no training, you barely even understood what was happening but you dove into my mind like it was the ocean, like it was your plaything.”

She stares at him, clearly replaying their past interactions in light of this new information.

“Didn’t you ever wonder why you couldn’t just see into Luke’s mind the way you could mine?”

“Yes,” she whispers. “I did wonder. I thought- he has better shields.”

“Yes, he does have good shields,” Ben tells her. “But not better than mine. No. It was because our minds were compatible. So compatible. Generations ago they would have matched us up as children, encouraged us to grow together, train together.”

“Why?”

“To see if a bond would form. A Force bond.”

“And that’s what we have.” Had no-one ever even named it for her? They really have made a mess of this, he thinks sadly.

“Yes.”

“And what does that mean?”

He has to take a long slow breath before he can answer. “It means whatever we want it to mean.”

She sits for a long time. “You said. More than a marriage, you said.”

His breath catches. “I’ve seen marriages end,” he says quietly. “This never will.”

He’s actually released from medical fairly swiftly. His stats are stable, likely because Rey was with him for hours on the flight home, and the types of wounds he’s bearing the Rebellion medics have, sadly, had plenty of experience at treating. He cleans up, changes into something that isn’t torn and bloodstained, and goes looking for Rey. They can’t leave the conversation where it had ended on the ship.

He finds her in the maintenance hangar, of course. She can’t seem to stay away from the deconstructed ships, and he finds himself smiling for no reason. She’s in the midst of a good-natured argument with some of the mechanics and so he waits until she’s done, and then falls into step at her side. He’s not sure how to say what he wants to say.

Then Rey stills. It’s so absolute that Ben stops, too, and glances down at her in surprise. She is always moving, his little scavenger. She is staring at something dead ahead, and Ben glances, tensing all over for the threat.

Just inside the hangar is a Nagai male Ben doesn’t recognise and a Rebel pilot he hasn’t seen since well before Snoke’s death. He can’t remember the name-

“Tema,” Rey says, the word emerging as if it’s involuntary.

The pilot smiles at her, broad and warm and sure of his welcome. “Hey, Rey-girl.” He starts toward her.

Ben goes cold all over. He’d been right about the threat, then. Just not the physical kind.

“I-” the sound emerges half-strangled from Rey’s throat, and it doesn’t take much for Ben to reach out with the Force and read the waves of affection from Tema, and the waves of guilt from Rey. In an instant he understands, and he shifts his gaze from Tema’s broad, smiling face to that of the Nagai standing beside him. The Nagai is staring straight at Ben, intent and triumphant.

Ben nods once at him, acknowledgement of a move well made in a chess game he hadn’t known they were playing. He can’t remember encountering any other Nagai in the recent past, so the male is probably kin to Rothea, who died all those years ago in the Academy. Not that it matters. There have been plenty of victims of Kylo Ren, over the years.

“I’ll leave you two to catch up,” Ben says, when Tema is only a few steps away.

Rey whirls toward Ben, eyes wide, face flushed. He offers her a small smile, and he knows none of the ice he’s feeling shows on his face – there is enough of Kylo Ren still in him for that - but he has no idea what she can sense through the bond.

Ben backs away, meets the Nagai’s eyes once more, and then leaves the two lovers to their reunion.

She comes looking for him, hours later. Slinks into his room with her mouth set in a straight line and her hands wringing endlessly.

“It’s fine,” Ben says before she can say anything.

“I didn’t know how to-”

“You were seeing him before – before Snoke?” he falters a little. Before the bond.

She nods miserably.

He shrugs. “Don’t look so sad, Rey. You haven’t done anything wrong.”

She looks at the floor and bites her bottom lip. “Yes I have. I know I have.”

Ben sighs. “I would have preferred you told me, that’s true. And if he doesn’t know about the bond yet, it would be smart to tell him yourself before someone else does. But we made no promises to one another, Rey-”

“I just, I didn’t know what to do.”

Ben remembers, suddenly his mother telling him she has no experience of relationships. “Yes,” he says, “I can see it would have been difficult.” She hadn’t planned on the bond, after all, and hadn’t really known the entirety of what she’d committed to. Suddenly her trips away make a lot more sense. The more she’d stayed, the stronger the bond would have felt, which must have felt like disloyalty to Tema. And yet, Ben’s physical condition had demanded she keep returning.

He swallows, feeling a little sick at the thought that Rey has basically been his hostage all this time.

“He’s- he’s nice. You know?”

Ben’s eyes find his feet and his stomach starts a slow, rolling churn. Nice. Not something anyone will ever accuse him of being. Even Ben Solo is not a particularly nice guy.

“He’s nice to me, I mean.”

Unlike the man who tortured her and invaded her mind, Ben thinks.

“And I-I didn’t really know how to- I mean, he wouldn’t get angry.”

Every word is like a flogging.

She adds, “About the bond, I mean. He wouldn’t lose his temper, he’s not that kind of-”

“Rey,” Ben breaks in, “I’m sorry, I just.” He forces himself to take a deep breath and then says evenly, “I value your friendship, and I’m grateful for the bond, for what you did. I hope you know that. But I-I cannot be the person you confide in about him. I’m sorry, but I can’t do that.” It’s skating so close to an admission, but his mother is right. Rey is unschooled in relationships, especially of this kind, and she doesn’t understand what he is really saying right now.

There’s a short, awkward pause.

“I-oh. Um. Yes,” she says. “Sorry.” And she takes a few steps toward the door before whirling back to face him. “I can feel what you feel, you know,” she blurts in a rush.

Ben freezes. His skin prickles all over like he’s been dipped in hot water.

“I know you care about me.”

Ah.

He careless shrug from somewhere. “It’s hard not to care about the person who saved your life,” he manages. “But you also know for certain that I’m not angry with you. You can feel that, can’t you?”

She nods, and he dips his head in a farewell, unable to meet her eyes as she shoots him a curious, hesitant gaze before the door closes behind her.

He lets out his breath in a rush. She doesn’t mean she can read everything he feels, she doesn’t know what he holds hidden inside that touchstone in his mind. She means that she can tell when he has a sudden surge of affection for Rey, or when he reacts positively to her return.

His secret is still safe.

But not from Poe, of course.

The other man must have been waiting for Rey to leave. He is at the door barely a minute later, and he takes one comprehensive look at Ben and lets out an explosive breath.

He sinks down to sit on the bed at Ben’s side.

“What do you wanna do,” he says after a long moment.

“Nothing,” Ben says dully.

“You wanna go flying?”

Ben shakes his head.

“Want to hit things?”

Ben shrugs.

“Want to make fun of the guy’s dumb haircut?”

He blinks. Glances sideways. That wouldn’t have occurred to him, but... “I, actually, yeah, I do, a little.”

Poe manages a half-hearted smile. “I mean, it’s like a bantha rolled in it or something.”

“Or like he held a Corellian fern for too long and the static charge got him,” Ben offers.

“Yeah.” Poe jostles him with one shoulder, and they lapse into silence once more.

Ben has to swallow twice before he can say, “He’s …a good person?”

Poe winces. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “Yeah, buddy, he’s a good guy.”

“Good,” Ben says, nodding. “Good, that’s. Good.” He can’t seem to stop nodding.

Poe turns to give him a long look. “Six hours,” he says suddenly.

Ben frowns in confusion.

“I need six hours rack time and then I can fly again. I have to make a run to Yavin some time this week to evaluate some new pilots, and you’re comin’ with me.”

It’s not a question. Ben finds himself nodding. “Yeah,” he says, “yes, okay.”

Chapter Text

Rey leaves Ben’s room and wanders the corridors blindly for a few minutes.

He’s not angry with her. He’d said it, and he was right, she can feel the truth of that. There had been no trace of anger in him. But earlier. In the hangar – he hadn’t been fast enough to conceal the flash of pain that had gone through him at that moment of realization, as Tema had said her name and given her that slow, intimate smile.

For a moment she had been all agony, and it had taken a good half-second before she’d realized that she was feeling that through the bond, she was feeling it from Ben.

His face hadn’t shown a single thing. Part of her is completely uncomprehending how he can look so stoic, so flat when she knows he’d been reeling from a body-blow. The other part of her is remembering all the scars visible on his body when he’d been suspended in the bacta tank and the raw sound of his voice as he’d said they have ways of making you not care.

He’d been right, when they’d argued over the worst of Kylo Ren. Rey flinched again at what she’d said, without thought or care for his feelings. She had no way of understanding the kind of torture he’d talked about - the kind that separates you from your feelings because it’s the only way to survive.

Sometimes I wanted to be invisible, she thinks. Even before Snoke, Ben Solo had been learning how to keep a stoic face for the curious crowds, hungry for stories of his legendary parents, his uncle the last Jedi. All the times he’s baited her, been deliberately rude… suddenly all of those remarks look like a different type of camouflage.

Rey runs a hand along the railing, and she could smile at the irony if it weren’t so painful. On Jakku, she had been invisible. A nobody, a scavenger. Clothes designed to blend in to the desert, her home made inside the wreck of an Empire long past, just like the wrecks she scavenged every day. No-one had noticed her, and she had never understood how badly she wanted to be seen until she’d been stuck in a chair staring into Kylo Ren’s stunned, wondering eyes.

She spends a long time up on one of the observation decks, staring out at the mountain view that’s almost as good as Ben’s, thinking about the villagers and the local workers who emphatically do not care about Kylo Ren. Her thumb runs over the pale green stone he’d gifted her as she thinks.

“Tema,” she says when the door to his room slides open. “Can I come in?”

“Of course,” he says, smiling. He sweeps out an arm in welcome. “I was wondering where you’d disappeared to.”

She sinks down onto a chair and then rises again, knows she has to be on her feet for this. “Yes, I. I had to- there was someone I needed to-”

She stops, frustrated and presses her hands to her head for a second. Eyes on the floor, she says, “I haven’t been honest with you.”

Tema shifts, she can hear his boots on the floor, and then he sinks down onto a corner of the neatly made bed. “All right,” he says slowly. “About what?”

“About where I go when I’m not on a mission, for a start. About why I come back here so often.”

There’s a pause and then he says carefully, “You sound like you’re about to tell me you’re seeing someone else.”

She makes a wordless, frustrated sound. “No, I’m not. But I am, I suppose. Argh, this is so-” she closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. Opens them and looks him in the eye.

“The man I was walking with today, when I saw you?”

Tema nods warily.

“That was Ben Solo.”

His eyes widen, “That was Kylo Ren? That guy?”

She nods once, though it feels wrong to agree to that statement, that name. And when had that changed for her, she wonders?

He blinks a few times and looks away, thinking. “O-okay.”

She waits, knowing he needs a few seconds to process. He’s been so patient with her – with her many hang-ups, her need for distance, her need to take it slow. She owes him this much.

“So that’s the guy you’ve been training with.”

She winces. “Yes. We have been training together, lately. Not in the beginning, though.”

His eyes narrow. “You said-”

“I said Master Luke wanted us to train together,” she finished for him. “That was true. But until recently Ben would never come to training when I was there.”

“What aren’t you telling me, Rey?”

She swallows hard and says it all in a rush. “I’m- we’re- I’m Force-bonded to him, to Ben. Not-not the whole time, it happened when he killed Snoke. He- he was dying, Snoke had-”

“Force bonded to Kylo Ren?” Tema interrupts, sounding stunned. “How? What does that even mean?”

She bites her lip. “I- he was dying. I could- I reached out with the Force and I could feel him, I’m not even sure how it works, to be honest. But I could feel his mind and I just, I knew I could save him, and, and he was telling me not to, he said don’t do it, Rey but I couldn’t just let him die and so I just, I just grabbed on to him with my mind and I didn’t let go and now we’re… stuck with each other,” she ends miserably. “Permanently.”

“Permanently?”

She nods, biting her lip. “It’s for life. I’m pretty sure it can’t be broken.” Master Luke definitely would have brought it up by now if it could, he had not been pleased to arrive on the scene and find her clinging to his nephew’s hand, white as death.

Tema lets out a long breath. “And you didn’t think I might want to know that?”

She grimaces. “I knew you would. But I-”

She makes a wordless, frustrated gesture. “I’ve been so confused. I didn’t know what to- I mean, I hated him. He, he killed his father and I watched it, he tried to tear the map out of my mind-”

“But you saved him.”

She throws her hands up, “I know! That’s just it- why did I- why did I do it? Why save him? He’s hurt so many people, but I just couldn’t let him die. And if I couldn’t explain it to myself, I just, I had no idea how to explain it to you.”

Tema nods slowly at this, like it makes some kind of sense.

Even that small bit of acceptance has Rey flushing red as the sun. “Uh, I’ve been so cowardly. I didn’t want to think about it, so I ran away as soon as I knew he wouldn’t die. I just wanted to forget it had ever happened. I didn’t talk to him, or to Luke, or to anyone. I just ran. And then I just… the weeks kept passing and I still hadn’t mentioned it, and I…” she trails off helplessly.

He sighs. Rubs his hands along his thighs. “Well. That definitely wasn’t something I was expecting to hear.”

“I know,” she says, and winces. “I’m sorry.”

He nods, “Yeah, I can see that. And I guess I understand you wanting to- leave it behind. But, that was months ago, Rey. That’s a long time to keep a secret like this from me.”

“I know,” she says, lower. “I know.”

“And he didn’t know about me, did he,” Tema says. He’s clearly recalling this afternoon’s glimpse of Ben. “Because I was conveniently flying blockades in the Gevni system.”

She shakes her head. “I know I was wrong,” she says. “I knew it the whole time, but. I didn’t want- I didn’t know how to tell you I’d done something so stupid.”

He nods. There’s a long silence and then he says, “I think I need a little time to process before I’ll know what to say.”

She nods, mouth wobbling.

“Hey,” he says softly. “It’ll be okay. Okay?”

When she stands, he rises too, sighs and pulls her into his arms. She collapses against him, fighting back tears. He’s been such a safe space for her. Someone totally outside the tight little group she’d stumbled into in the Rebellion, someone gentle and kind and patient. “I’m sorry,” she manages again, against his chest.

When she leaves, her feet take her not to her own quarters, or the temporary ones assigned to Tema. They take her to Finn.

“Hey, Rey,” he says with that beautiful, easy smile of his. “Come in.”

Finn’s view is different to Ben’s. Not the huge sweeping vistas of the mountains for him. After so many years living on solely ships, he’d told her the mountains were too much. Instead he’d asked for something smaller, more intimate. His window looks onto the garden that is tended by the local workers, growing small fruit and herbs for cooking. There is a woman working there now, picking small white berries from a climbing vine.

“What can I do for you?” Finn asks quietly. She can see him reflected in the window.

“I don’t know,” she says shakily. “I’ve made a mess, and I’m not sure anyone can help me with it.”

He’s quiet for a moment, then says, “So you were still seeing Tema. I wasn’t sure.”

She swallows her guilt. Again. “I was.”

Finn nods, takes a deep breath and says, “I heard he’s here.”

She nods, unable to form words around the thickness in her throat.

“Do you want advice? Or just some peace and quiet?”

She manages a half-laugh, turning, and it becomes almost a sob. “Do you have any advice for me?”

There is a tiny, gentle curve at the corner of his mouth. “Not really. You know I’m no better at this stuff than you are. Neither of us was really raised for all these… complications.”

She looks him in the eye, lets him see the worries she’s been carrying, her guilt. Long before she’d met Tema, or before Ben Solo had shown up on Kashyyyk. She could tell Finn… liked her, as far back as Starkiller and Han Solo. But her all-consuming obsession with the Jedi, with finding Master Luke, and then with her training – it had left her no room to think of anything else. So she had ignored Finn’s feelings, and pretended they weren’t there until one day… he’d given up.

And now he is looking at her with patience and kindness, no blame at all. It’s far more than she deserves.

“I’m not good at these things,” he says again, “but I think I can tell you one thing I’ve learned from the people here. There are a lot of people here struggling with loss and guilt, and not sure how to move past it.”

She shrugs. “At this point, I’ll take anything. Tell me I should consult an oracle and I’ll jump in a ship and go there.”

“No oracle,” he says, a half-smile on his face. “Just this.” And he reaches out to take her hands in his. “Think about the last time you were truly troubled and alone. Upset, or sad, or frightened.”

She blinks at him.

“Close your eyes and think about it,” he says. “Remember what it felt like.”

She does so, obediently. There’s been so much upheaval in her life recently, it’s almost as though there are too many too chose from, and then she suddenly remembers feeling so alone, on that planet, Chewie ferrying the injured to the nearest starbase while she remained behind to search for any survivors Hux might have left. The rage in her heart had frightened her, picking her way through the wreckage of such senseless destruction.

“Maybe you wanted comfort,” Finn says. “Someone by your side. Not necessarily to help. Just to be there.”

She nods slowly.

“Who was it you wished for, Rey?”

Her eyes fly open and meet his.

“Oh,” she says. Finn lets go of her hands, and smiles.

She flings her arm around him and hopes she is giving him some measure of comfort, the way he does for her. “Thank you, Finn,” she whispers. “Thank you so much.”

She skips the evening meal and finds herself back at Tema’s door as the base settles into the stillness of night.

“Hello,” he greets her, tone calm as ever. For a moment she is overcome with affection for him, for how good he has been to her, and she surges forward to wrap her arms around him.

He tips her chin up with a finger and kisses her slow, easy. There’s forgiveness there, so easily, and she knows she doesn’t deserve it. Rey pulls back a little and says, “Before I- I should tell you the rest of it. So you know, well. Everything.”

“All right,” Tema says, and ushers her in. The doors close behind her. “Tell me.”               

Chapter Text

Ben and Poe are loading their gear into the ship at the first light of dawn when he feels Poe stiffen and a brief instant of flashing alarm flares out from the pilot’s mind.

Ben turns quickly, thoughts of an ambush never really far from Kylo Ren’s mind.

Tema is standing at the base of the ladder.

He and Ben lock eyes for a moment, and then Tema turns to look at Poe. “I need a minute with him,” he says.

“Uh.” Poe glances between them.s

“It’s fine,” Ben says, just as Tema says, “I’m not looking for a fight,” with such obvious sincerity Ben feels like a duplicitous creep just being in the same hangar as the man.

“O-kay,” Poe says, and backs away, his eyes switching between the two of them. He shoots a worried look at Ben, who feels a half-second of wounded hurt before he computes that Poe is worried for Ben, and not about what he might do. He manages a reassuring nod as he starts down the ladder to where Tema waits.

“You’ve probably already figured out that she told me last night,” Tema says, once Poe is out of earshot. “About the bond.”

Ben nods once and waits.

“You don’t deserve what she’s given you,” Tema says.

“You think I don’t know that?” Ben says, flat and harsh. “Believe me, I know.”

“And now she’s stuck with you.”

“It doesn’t have to take over her life,” Ben says. Presumably that’s the point Tema is most interested in. “We don’t even have to live on the same planet.”

Tema eyes him thoughtfully at that. “I thought you starved to death without her or something. Pining.”

“There are limits to the separation,” Ben says. “Nothing insurmountable.”

“Interesting,” Tema says. He tilts his head and surveys Ben for a long, long moment. Then his lips quirk and he says, “You are one hell of a lucky bastard that she hasn’t yet realized you’re in love with her. But she’s not dumb, just unpractised at romantic relationships, so she is going to figure it out.”

Ben actually takes a half-step back at that. It had been one thing when Poe said it. Staggering enough, and an invasion of his closest held secret, but Poe had been no threat to Ben. He can barely get the air to speak. “I-”

“I mean, you’re not even particularly subtle.”

“You don’t know me,” Ben begins, “You don’t know the first thing about-”

“Don’t get me wrong, it’s a relief.”

Arrested, Ben says nothing to that. He meets Tema’s eyes, and they are thoughtful, measuring.

“I mean, she told me you told her not to bond with you. That you were dying and you told her not to go through with it.”

“And?”

“And I assumed it was some kind of mind game, but you actually meant it, didn’t you. You do actually wish for better for Rey.”

Ben just stands there, paralysed. He has no answers for these kinds of questions. Accusations and abuse he knows well. Not this.

“Huh. Okay. Well. There’s not a lot else to say, is there.” He shakes his head, a wry smile on his face, and turns to go.

“What are you going to do?” Ben finds himself saying.

“Will I tell her, you mean?” Tema turns back and eyes him up and down. “No, I won’t tell her. In fact, I’m not going to say one thing to her about you. I really just wanted to see you for myself, see if you were playing some kind of game with her. You’re not. Knowing that, I can… relax a little.” There’s a tiny twist to his mouth, then, something Ben can’t quite read. Regret, maybe? Something tight and unhappy. He shrugs, “The rest of it’s really nothing to do with me.”

Ben watches him go, feeling flayed open and sick to his stomach. Poe had been right. Tema is a good guy. And there couldn’t be more of a difference between the kind of man Rey chose, and the kind of man she got stuck with.

He’s gone for six days. He’s tired, and heartsick, and more than a little awed at how patient Poe is with the trainee pilots, but it was a good distraction and he’s glad he went. He spent a little time travelling the moon for possible training sites for Luke’s trainees. There had been a promising series of caves-

Rey is sitting cross-legged in his bed when he steps into his room. Ben freezes.

There’s a single tear tracking down her cheek as the door closes behind him. “Is this how it felt for you, every time I left?”

Ben lowers his pack to the floor slowly. “I- I don’t know.” His voice sounds unsteady to his own ears. He wasn’t ready for this, ready to see her. “How was it for you?”

“Like I was hollowed out from the inside.” The words break out of her like a dam bursting. “Like you were supposed to be around every corner but then you just weren’t, and like nothing tasted right or sounded right or-”

“Yes.” Ben broke in. “Yes, that’s how it was.” He hadn’t realized it could work in reverse. He’d wondered at the lack of symptoms on his part, and had thought perhaps they were finally past some kind of adjustment period.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Ben shot her an incredulous look. “Rey. Why would I try to make you feel bad about wanting to get away from me when you didn’t ask for any of this in the first place?”

“So you were just going to go on and suffer this in silence forever?”

He shrugs and crosses to the window, drops to sit on the sill. “I’ve suffered far worse for less cause.”

For a moment there’s silence. Gods, he aches to hold her. It wouldn’t even have to be sexual. Just to wrap warm arms around her body and offer that simple, basic comfort.

“You left because of Tema, didn’t you.”

Ben stills. “Poe offered to let me accompany him,” he says slowly. He doesn’t look at her. “I thought maybe things might be simpler if I weren’t around. Easier for you to break the news.”

“No,” she says. “That’s not what I meant and you know it.” There’s something different about her, he’s noticing slowly, warily. She’s calmer, more settled. She seems older.

“Not what-”

“Don’t,” she says, so quiet, so defeated. “I’ve been ignorant and afraid and I know I’ve messed things up for both of us. But please. Don’t keep pretending.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

She raises her eyes to his. “You said you couldn’t be the person I talked to about Tema. Why?”

He swallows. “I’m bonded to you. I could hardly be objective.”

“That’s why?” her eyes are very clear, unwavering.

“I’m also not very… experienced in relationships. What sort of advice could Kylo Ren possibly give.” It’s a nasty dig, and he’s sorry he said it the moment it’s out. Rey doesn’t blink an eye.

“And that’s why? That’s all?”

Ben forces himself to breathe in and out evenly. “No,” he says after a long moment. “Those aren’t the only reasons. There’s one more. But.”

“But?”

“But I’m not sure either one of us is ready for that.”

Perhaps it’s a cowardly answer. Perhaps it’s the only one he could possibly give.

Again she regards him with those hazel eyes, the ones that started all of this. He has a sudden flash of memory of that child, screaming out her terror and making him long for Rey. Or- not just for Rey, if he’s honest. For a life that was more than violence and terror and taking.

“One day I’m going to ask you that question again,” she says, “and when I do, I’ll want the truth.”

Ben swallows. “I… I promise to answer. Next time you ask.”

She nods once and unfolds her legs. When she stands, she hesitates. “Tema’s gone,” she says, awkward and girlish once more.

Ben just nods.

“No, I mean-” she sighs. “We- It’s finished.”

Now he’s honestly shocked. “What?” The pilot hadn’t seemed angry, or vengeful.

She just watches him, dry-eyed.

“Rey, I’m sorry,” he says, helpless. He’s had almost a week to grapple with this, and he’d felt like there, at least, he was on firm ground, wishing her happiness with a deserving partner. He was also horribly jealous, of course, but since he’d never for one second believed she might be his in that way, there was really only the shock of knowing it had already happened, and accepting it.

“Are you?”

“Yes,” he says firmly. “I would never want you to lose something that made you happy, especially because of me.”

Her head tilts, the tiniest amount, and a kind of knowing look enters her eyes.

“You don’t have to worry,” she says, “or feel bad. It wasn’t because of you. It was because of me.”

Ben falters. “You?”

“Mm,” she says, maddeningly. And then she leaves.

Chapter Text

When Ben rises next morning he goes for another long walk. He is finding the process calming, almost like mediation. He’d done a lot of walking on Yavin, this past week. He avoids the villages and other small settlements this time, and makes his way sideways around the mountain instead. Today his steps fall into a rhythm that he hopes will point his mind toward clarity and calm. He is well aware of the things he cannot control. He is well aware of his own weaknesses – his pride, his quick temper. He walks and let his feet connect to the world around him, his breathing steady. About an hour after he set out he rounds a gentle grassy mound and stops, staring.

Cut into the side of the mountain is the start of a stone cottage. He circles it, frowning. He can see the foundations on two sides, overgrown with grass, and on the other two sides the walls are knee-high, the shape of the thing clear.

He steps over the half-finished wall and paces the length of the place. Walks forward to the grassy gap that had likely been intended for a front door and gazes out at the view.

Whoever began this positioned it perfectly. It nestles at the head of a valley, and he can stare straight down the line of it, heavily forested slopes to the left of him and gentler, grassy slopes on the right that run all the way down to the sea. The beaches are black ribbons along the edge of the water, and far in the distance, he can see the green mound of an island.

He takes a deep breath and sits himself down in the centre of the cottage, closes his eyes and lets his mind clear. He runs through one of the early meditations, one he learned at the Academy. It still feels strange to allow himself this memory, but the quiet conversations Luke keeps inflicting on him are making some progress toward integrating his old training as Ben Solo into the man he is now.

He has sunk deep into the breathing pattern when he realizes he is not alone.

For a moment his body tenses and he almost opens his eyes, and then he understands that the company he senses is in his head.

Ben?

Rey, he says blankly.

Sorry, I’m- intruding.

No, it’s fine. You’re… welcome here.

There’s a sense of gratified confusion, then she says, I think we were using the same pattern.

Ah.

Should we…

Continue. Yes, that’s… yes. He can feel a stupid flutter behind his heart and quells it ruthlessly.

From the beginning?

Yes, Ben says aloud, and he can feel his shoulders drop, hopes ardently that he’s not actually smiling all over his face the way he suspects he is. Like an idiot, sitting alone in an abandoned ruin.

They don’t speak of it. But at breakfast the next day, Ben drops one of the gray rolls onto Rey’s plate when she sits down opposite him, and she ducks her head, smiling a little.

Poe nudges him discreetly with an elbow. He, too, is smiling. In approval, presumably.

Ben rolls his eyes.

He walks to the cottage again the next day. This time, he examines it more closely. There’s no fault he can find with the foundations, and even the half-built walls seem strong and weatherproof. He brushes away accumulated dirt and grass and paces around what would have been the space set aside for a garden. He stumbles across some timbered beams stacked one atop the other, now concealed under a layer of moss.

Someone started building their home here and then they just- stopped.

For fun, he levitates a few similar stones onto the half-built walls, spends some time getting them aligned vertically. It’s a good exercise in precision. It’s a good excuse not to think about Rey, and Tema, and the bond.

They are all training together, days later when, “Why does it feel so bad when we’re apart?” Rey says, out of nowhere.

Ben freezes mid-action, the rest of the defensive pattern forgotten. He turns to stare at Rey, who has already finished her own sequence and is standing straight and proud in front of Luke, her hands clasped before her. The new grass is springing up under her feet, and the forest behind is thick and green with new life.

“Your bond is incomplete,” Luke replies, as if they’re discussing the weather. “Unstable. There are consequences.”

“But it- when he left, it felt terrible. It never felt like that for me before. I mean, if I’d known…”

“Yes,” Luke says. “The two of you really do need to work on your communication. But to answer your question, Rey, Ben has certainly suffered in your absence, though I think he would agree that the times when he was not injured or ill were far easier to bear.” He glances at Ben.

Oh, I’m a part of this conversation now, am I? Ben thinks at his uncle, sour.

“It was never unbearable,” Ben says shortly. “I was fine. Shorter separation was better, obviously.”

“So it’s different every time?”

“Your own physical and emotional state contributes to the effects,” Luke agrees. “And it is easier for the one who does the leaving rather than the one remaining behind. I’d imagine that’s a holdover from when two Force bonded Jedi might need to separate for a mission. One remains behind to guard the temple, or the base, and can probably afford more… distraction, so they bear the brunt of the effects. The one who leaves is likely heading into danger, and so the bond compensates for this to ensure they are able to perform adequately and return home again.”

“The bond can think?”

Ben, too, is gaping.

Luke tilts his head side to side in a maybe, maybe not kind of way. “I think a better description would be that the bond is …aware of your situations. It doesn’t have autonomy in and of itself, but it reacts to your proximity, and to your own actions and reactions, both conscious and unconscious. Rey, you were generally heading off to strange planets to meet unknown contacts. Your thoughts and actions were more wary, you were on alert. Ben, on the other hand, was within a safe environment, and the bond could sense that he was better able to bear the negative impacts.”

“And you never thought to mention this to either of us.”

“Neither of you has asked me a single question about your bond until today.” Luke returned calmly. “If you had, I would have answered, or referred you to the archives. But you are both adults, and can make your own decisions, and it would be unwise in the extreme for me, or anyone else,” his eyes flick to Ben in a way that clearly says your mother, “to attempt to interfere in the bond. Since neither of you was in danger, I elected to leave you to find your own way through this.”

…and hope that you would, in the end, be sensible about it, Luke finishes in Ben’s mind. It’s the most uncle-like statement he’s heard from Luke since he left the First Order. On impulse Ben sends back a mental image of himself as a seven-year-old poking out his tongue.

Luke’s lips twitch.

“So if we stabilise the bond it’ll be easier to be apart?” Rey asks.

Ben feels his chest tighten. Of course she wants to find a way to escape him again.

“Yes,” Luke says. “Once the bond is established there should be no negative consequences if you need to part. However,” he adds, his eyes on Rey, “never forget that the bond is permanent and you are bound together for life. While you can gain some measure of distance, you cannot live completely separately.”

Rey flushes, “No, I, that’s not what I meant.” She goes even more red, and Ben would actually sacrifice a hand to know what she’s thinking right now. Luke seems to get on all right with a mechanical limb.

Chapter Text

“So how do we stabilise the bond?” Ben asks as they are walking back from the training ground to the base.

He could swear his uncle bites back a smile. “It’s not complicated. If you are both truly at peace with the bond, it will be easy. If you are fighting the bond in any way, you will likely make yourselves ill and-”

“I’m at peace,” Ben breaks in.

“What exactly do you mean by ‘at peace’?” Rey asks at the same time.

Ben looks away. Ouch.

“If you are wishing the bond hadn’t happened, for example. If you harbour the desire to undo it or find a way to break it. There is no point in taking the next step if either of you are uncertain.”

Ben frowns for a moment. Put like that, he’s not sure he is ready. He sighs a little, wondering if he’ll ever get out of that habit - always jumping in without forethought.

The fact it, he does regret it, he regrets the ruin it is making of Rey’s life. And surely by that measure, Rey will never be at a point where she is fully committed. He tries to picture the rest of their days lived like this, the bond strong but unsettled, their movements restricted by it.

“And if we are both ready?” Rey asks.

“You enter into mediation together, meet one another in your minds, and drop your shields,” Luke says, as if it’s that simple.

“Drop our shields,” Ben asks, then, in horror, “Completely?”

“Entirely,” Luke agrees.

Ben swallows. Beside him he sees Rey take a deep breath, and it’s somehow comforting to know that she, too, is taken aback.

Ben would rather peel his flesh off his bones than drop his shields completely. He would have no camouflage at all, there would no memory, no past mistake, and no emotion he could possibly hide from Rey in that circumstance.

“So until we are both ready for that-” Rey soldiers on as the base comes into sight

“You should try not to be apart for longer than a few days if possible. You might also think about avoiding fights, drugs, ambushes, kidnappings-”

“Hilarious,” Ben says sourly, and strides away, leaving his uncle’s soft chuckle behind.

Ben walks to the cottage again the next day. This time, Finn accompanies him. Their duties are considerably lighter now that the prisoners have almost all been processed and either taken away for a trial, or released. The base gets more and more empty every day as soldiers and pilots return to their home planets and try to find a way to survive the peace now that they have managed to survive the war.

“You’re sure you don’t mind?” the ex-stormtrooper asks him again as they make their way down the side of the mountain.

“I don’t mind,” Ben says. He doesn’t know Finn well, but they’ve co-existed peacefully for months now. He’s a friend to Poe, and to Rey. If Ben can’t get along with Finn, it’s not a good sign for the future.

“I just feel like I haven’t even gone outside of the base in months. And it’s finally getting warm again.”

“Not a fan of snow?” Ben asks innocently.

Finn makes a harrumphing sound. “You’re hilarious.”

Ben smirks down at the ground.

“Where do you even go, anyway?”

“At first I was just walking,” Ben says after a long pause. “It’s soothing.”

“Soothing?” Finn asks, steadying himself as his foot slips on some mossy rocks.

“If you don’t fall down the mountain, of course.”

“Poe said you were funny,” Finn remarks, and shoots Ben a flatly unimpressed look. “I don’t see it, myself.”

Ben allows another small smile at that. “It has a rhythm, it’s regular. It’s good exercise, and it can help to clear the mind.”

Finn nods slowly, “And your mind is clear now, huh?”

“Like my conscience never will be,” Ben murmurs.

“Hey. Hey now,” Finn says, and reaches out to clasp Ben’s arm. Surprised, he turns.

“You’re doing good things now. We’re both doing good things, now.”

Ben gives him a warning look. “Come on now, Finn. You of all people know better than to compare my story to yours.” He starts walking. “It’s a kind impulse, but illogical and inaccurate.”

“Illogical and inaccurate, huh?”

“Kill them all,” he grates out. “You do remember that, right?” Ben’s not sure why he’s suddenly so angry with Finn, of all people. He is climbing faster and faster.

“Yeah,” Finn says quietly, “Yeah, I remember that.”

“I gave that order, and I walked away without a backward glance while it was carried out. And I gave many more orders just like that one in my time.”

“And you knew I wasn’t going to carry out that order, didn’t you.” It’s not defiance in Finn’s voice, or not only defiance. It’s curiosity too. “You looked right at me, that night on Jakku. The first instant I heard the order and I knew I couldn’t do it, you were standing right there. With everything I’ve seen you do since then, I know you had to have sensed my emotions.”

Ben stops for a moment, drawn back to the memory of it. Dust and smoke in the air, and one lone stormtrooper, his helmet streaked with blood. The man’s mind had been alight with how wrong this all was, how much he could not do it.

Ben had looked right at him – Kylo Ren had looked right at him – and walked away.

“Why did you let me go?” Finn asks, voice quiet.

Ben stops, turns his head and stares up toward the peak of the mountain. It’s not visible from here, it’s always hidden, always just a little further on, over the next small rise, and then the next.

“I don’t know,” he says, and the words rush out of him. “I really don’t. I-I wasn’t-”

He stops and forces himself to take a deep breath. “I was Kylo Ren. I was, truly, that creature I had been for years, the First Order’s creation. There was only the mission, and the grace of Snoke’s training keeping me free of the Light.” He shakes his head, remembering, and the words emerge slowly. “And then I felt you, what you were thinking- feeling. I could see it happening. I didn’t care enough to stop it, and I didn’t-”

He stops, blinking into the distance. “Looking back I think I- I was afraid to look too closely at what was happening to you. It cut too close to everything I was fighting not to feel. Instead I told myself that you weren’t… important. That someone would notice, Phasma would notice, and they would take care of you in their own time.”

He turns his head, “It wasn’t anything heroic, Finn. You were just beneath my notice.”

Finn, too, is staring into the distance. “That’s one way to look at it, I guess,” he says.

“You have another way to look at it?” Ben asks, weary.

“Seems to me that if you were completely Snoke’s creature you’d have Force-choked me into unconsciousness or sent that blaster bolt straight at me instead of into the ground.”

Ben blinks at his matter-of-fact tone.

“It would have taken you about ten seconds and then you could have kept on going with your important mission.” Finn turns his head and offers Ben a singularly sweet smile. “You might say that you were afraid or you were too self-important. Maybe it’s even true. But I think you didn’t want to cut off someone else’s chance at escaping the trap you were in.”

“That’s… a very generous interpretation.”

Finn shrugs. “Apparently I’m a generous guy.”

Ben almost smiles. “Apparently.” He and Finn watch one another for a moment, and then Ben says, “Come on. It’s only another four hours of walking.”

“Four hours,” Finn cries, but falls into step anyway.

“Three and a half if we hurry,” Ben adds. It’s less than an hour, but it won’t hurt Finn to think otherwise, and Poe will laugh when Ben tells the story.

When he sees the view from the cottage doorway, Finn lets out a long, low whistle. “Man. That is amazing.”

Ben nods.

Then Finn clambers all over the house and the garden like an overgrown child, exclaiming at the growth of plants, the soft, rich soil. Ben, on the other hand, spends an hour using the Force and gravity to split large stones from further up the mountain, until they are of a usable size.  The eastern wall is almost head-high now.

“You’re going to finish it?” Finn asks. He is pacing the length of the timbers that mark the garden bed, shoving the dirt aside with his boots and muttering to himself about water supplies and the angle of the sun. Finn has been spending a lot of time with the gardeners at the base, learning everything he can.

“What?” Ben asks, startled. “I-no, I just. It’s good practice.”

“Mm-hmm,” Finn says, and shoots him a sceptical eyebrow. “Okay. Well. Just, next time let’s bring a speeder so we can carry some tools along with us, okay?”

“Next-” Ben blinks. “What do you mean, next time?”

Finn just laughs and goes back to his project.

His uncle comes to see him the next day. “May I join you on your walk?”

“I- yes,” Ben says, confused.

They walk in silence almost the entire way. Ben knows his uncle has something to say, and waits with mingled dread and anxiety.

“I need to take Rey away for a few days,” his uncle finally says. “For training.”

“That’s what you needed to tell me?” Ben bursts out.

Luke raises an eyebrow at him. “Yes.”

Ben lets out a huge breath.

“What did you think I was going to say?”

Ben shrugs, spreads his hands. “No idea. Just. Something - a warning, probably.”

“Have you done something to warrant me chastising you?”

“No.”

“Then perhaps you should stop anticipating a scolding every time we speak.”

Ben goggles at him for a moment, then lets out a short, unamused laugh. “Right. Sure. I’ll do that.”

Luke almost-grins at him.

Chapter Text

They leave that night, and for the first time Ben and Rey exchange some kind of farewell before she leaves. It’s awkward, he boards the ship and sits quietly with her in the cockpit while Luke stows his gear and talks to R2 about their destination. When it’s time for takeoff, they clasp hands briefly, minds mingling, and then Ben gets to his feet, gives them both a quick bow, and takes himself away.

Luke is right. Somehow the discomfort is less when he’s not injured, or ill. The farewell may also have helped to settle things.

His ‘project’ gathers pace after that. His mother accompanies him one day, carrying lunch in a small knapsack Ben takes from her as they walk. When they reach the cottage she sketches as she talks quietly with him about the architecture of Alderaan, how they had designed their cities and major buildings to blend in with the snow-capped mountains. Ben’s seen images, but that’s all that remains.

A few days later one of the locals from the village appears as Ben reaches the outer gates of the base. She is waiting beside a speeder which is towing a boxy unit roughly the size of R2-D2.

Ben pauses.

“It’s a waste-and-water unit,” she says without preamble. “We salvaged it from a fire in the lower town last year, repaired it. It works fine, but we don’t have a use for it right now.”

Ben stares at her.

“My nephew said you might have need of it for the house you’re building. We might have a lead on a power unit, too, if your usage isn’t too going to be too high.”

“Your nephew,” Ben repeats, and then his mind catches up with the house you’re building. “Wait-”

“Daarvi,” she says. Which he really should have known.

Ben blinks, “I’m not-I’m not building a- I’m not even a citizen of this planet-”

“I’ll drop it off to the site,” she says. “Did you want a lift or are you walking.”

“I-I’m walking,” Ben says. The whole point was meant to be the walking. The cottage is just a little project, a distraction.

She nods. “It’ll be waiting for you when you arrive, then.”

“I’m not building a house,” Ben calls as she swings herself up onto the speeder. “Don’t-”

But she’s already gone. He shakes his head and stares up at the sky, mouth still working.

Well. He’s plenty distracted now.

“You’re going to have to add on at least one more room,” Poe says, squinting critically at the small space.

“I’m what?”

“I mean,” he shrugs, “I like your mother just fine, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think we’re quite at the stage of sharing a room yet, y’know? What if we visit you at the same time?”

“Have you completely lost your mind?”

Poe grins at him.

“He’s right, you know,” his mother says, strolling in from where she’s been measuring space for windows. “You really will need a room for guests. I’m not asking for an entire mother-in-law suite, but…”

“You two are enjoying this far too much,” Ben accuses.

“The three of us are enjoying this far too much,” Finn calls from the kitchen garden outside. “And you know, I’m guessing you’re going to want some kind of training/meditation/brooding space, so maybe think about putting in a courtyard. It could connect the garden to the house, and if you put a roof on you could use it all year ‘round.”

BB8 makes a little beeping sound and Poe laughs, “You’re right, BB8.” He glances over at Ben and adds, “you also need a droid charging station. NP9 will be sad if he can’t come with you.”

His mother laughs aloud at that one, head thrown back, shoulders shaking.

Ben lets the sound seep into his heart, but narrows his eyes at her and says, “You know, you’re not too old to end up moving rocks, Mother.”

She grins at him, eyes twinkling, and he can’t help but smile back.

That night he sends a subspace message to Luke and Rey, asking them to make a stop and purchase some specialised building supplies.

By the time Luke and Rey arrive home a few days later, Ben has given in to the inevitable and asked a local builder to put in foundations for an extension to the cottage that will turn it into a U-shape, with a courtyard in the middle and a second bedroom with private facilities on the other side. Apparently no-one in the small villages around here has any objection to an off-worlder taking the cottage as his own, which is insane.

A week goes by and the flooring material arrives. Ben lays it himself, working around some local volunteers who showed up one morning and began putting in the power connections. He’s given up arguing by now. The list of victims from the local villages gets longer every day and there's a low undercurrent of anger that this creep had continued his activities for so long. Who is Ben to deny them an outlet for their frustration?

Luke and Rey join him to spend a day moving stones with the Force, until the new external walls are all up, and Ben spends another day secretly lining the entire second bedroom with the synthstone he’d ordered. The main wall in the living area gets the same treatment, and when he steps back he can see shadows of Alderaan in the house, hints here and there he recognises from images of his mother’s childhood.

When he brings his mother to see it late one evening, she cries.

“There’s going to be an eclipse today,” Poe says idly, “I can’t remember what time.”

Ben grunts. He doesn’t much feel like talking today. His dreams last night were disturbing, messy, a horrible mix of Kylo and Ben, people trusting him only for him to betray that trust, death and smoke and destruction by his own hand everywhere he turned.

“Okay, buddy,” Poe says, undeterred. “Lets move some timber.”

They work for a solid hour, Ben levitating the tree trunks from the western slope while Poe and BB8 lay down guidelines for the rafters and calculate the right height for a roof that will still allow for a view of the ocean.

The first thing he notices is the birds. This planet has a healthy complement of birds in the forested areas, and as one, they all seemed to find a place to roost in the trees, their song growing quieter and quieter until all is silent.

Ben pauses in the middle of the field and glances around blinking. The tree he’s holding in mid-air slowly sinks to the ground. There’s something – it’s strange, nothing feels quite – the day is shifting rapidly to something eerie, something unfamiliar.

He blinks and remembers, suddenly, the way the world had gone dark, on Starkiller.

Will you help me? he had asked. Looked straight into his father’s eyes and teetered for that long moment between the Light and the Dark.

Help me. Help me, Dad.

And for once – for once – his vagabond father had been utterly serious, utterly focused on Ben. Had reached out and wrapped his hand around the hilt of the weapon that had killed him seconds later.

But it hadn’t been the weapon, had it. It hadn’t been the lightsaber that killed him, not really. It had been Ben’s lying, duplicitous nature. Ben’s fear and weakness. Ben’s blind devotion to Snoke.

There on that bridge. Teetering between honesty and lies. I know what I have to do but I don’t know if I have the strength to do it.

True.

Lie.

I know what I have to do.

Take off that mask.

Will you help me?

We miss you.

Oh it had burned. We miss you.

It’s too late.

He can see it, over and over. The darkness. Around him now, the darkness. On Starkiller the world falling into darkness. His father’s face. Han Solo’s face. The grip of the weapon in his hand, sharing the weight between them. Sharing the weight. Staring at his father. His father’s face. Han Solo, saying yes, and meeting Ben’s eyes. Kylo Ren’s eyes. Knowing Kylo Ren and all of the things he had done, his father, gripping the hilt, and hoping. We miss you.

Will you help me? Yes.

The darkness.

The weapon.

His father’s eyes.

“He touched my face,” Ben says, and raises a shaking hand to his own cheek. The world falls away.

Chapter Text

Buddy what’s wrong- Ben?

He strikes out, hears a thud and a groan.

Running.

Ben blinks and he is in the forest, amongst the trees. No snow.

No snow? There had been snow, that day. Death and snow.

Ben

He hears the word from a long way away, but it’s a voice he knows, knows so well.

He turns his head.

Rey is a cautious distance away, one hand extended toward him. Her face is lit by the glow of-

He looks down at his hand. His lightsaber is clutched in it, glowing red like the day he killed his father.

He makes an inarticulate noise and powers it down, drops it. Staggers back.

“Ben?” she says again. Her voice is shaking.

“Oh,” he manages, drops to his knees. “Oh gods. What.” He puts a shaking hand to his head. “What.” He is blinking furiously, all the jumbled pictures behind his eyes-

“Ben,” she says, voice thick, and she is right there with him, clutching at him.

He flinches automatically in anticipation of pain and puts a hand to his side, where Chewie’s blaster bolt had caught him. But there’s no wound there, and he hadn’t been Ben that day.

He looks around. No snow.

“Rey?” he manages, and his voice is shaking. She hates him, doesn’t she? They’d fought, in the snow.

“You’re all right,” she tells him, and he’s pretty sure it’s a lie.

“What happened?”

He reaches for her instinctively and she leans closer. “I don’t- I don’t kn-” he shakes his head. “My- we were, I was moving rocks, and- it all went dark.”

He tips his head back, searching for the sky. He can see glimpses between the canopy of trees. Blue, a few fat clouds scudding by. No dark. No snow.

“There was a-an eclipse,” she  says, and she sounds terrible.

Ben shudders. “Oh,” he says. “Yes.” But it’s all still so muddy. He had been back there, killing his father, and then fighting in the snow.

“Can you get up?”

Her arms are around his waist, and his arm instinctively curls around her shoulders. For a moment he breathes in the scent of her hair, beside his cheek. He’s not there. He’s here.

She is here, which means he’s not there anymore, on that catwalk. It’s the only certainty he has right now.

“Yes.”

He plants his foot and finds to his shock that if she hadn’t been assisting he wouldn’t have been able to get up at all. His legs are shaking like the aftermath of torture, or perhaps an hours-long battle.

“What happened?” he says again, more softly. He’s so confused.

“Let’s get you back home first, okay? We can talk about it then.”

He takes one shambling step, her arm still around his waist, and then his head turns instinctively toward his lightsaber, discarded on the ground.

Rey waits, obviously expecting him to call it to his hand. He doesn’t.

“Ben?” she asks again, tentative.

She is probably wondering if that’s the right name, he thinks dully. He is certainly wondering. More flashes are coming back to him now. “Is Poe all right?” He has to choke out the words, afraid, more afraid than he’s been since he sent that grenade spinning into a shuttle. He’d had the lightsaber in his hand, lit up and so deadly-

“He’s back at the base,” Rey says firmly.

He lets out a breath that’s half a sob.

Still, he turns away from his weapon and takes another few steps, leaves it lying on the ground.

He can feel Rey hesitate, senses the moment she decides not to ask, and calls it to her own hand using the Force. He grits his teeth at knowing it’s within range of his hand again, then lets out a helpless laugh. When is it not within range of his hand? With the Force, he can call it to him at any time. That cursed lightsaber, and his accursed family legacy.

Perhaps he can hide it at the bottom of the Firdian Sea.

She walks him through the forest and he follows blindly. They don’t come out near the cottage, however, but break out of the treeline in a spot he’s never seen before, at the foot of the mountain, close enough to hear the waves break on the shore.

He looks at her questioningly and she nods off to the left. When he turns he sees a speeder, engine still running.

“You covered a lot of distance,” she says quietly.

He lets out a shuddering breath. His legs certainly feel like it.

“Come on,” she says, “Lets get you home. Your mother is worried about you.”

Yes, he can feel that, her worry, intangible, floating in the Force. Yet more support that he doesn’t deserve.

It’s not pretty, but Rey hauls him up onto the speeder and he sags against her back with an inarticulate kind of relief. His body is drenched in sweat, he feels grimy and unclean all the way to the bone, and sadly only some of it will ever wash off.

Ben closes his eyes and wishes for oblivion.

When they reach the base she has to help him down from the speeder. His legs don’t want to hold him and he can’t seem to lift his head. Every part of him is exhausted. He lets Rey lead him and follows her through the gates, inside the base to familiar corridors, and keeps his eyes on the ground.

They stumble to a stop just as, “No,” Rey snarls, and then, “don’t you dare.”

Ben’s never heard her sound like that before. He lifts his head, blinking dazedly, sees Mareesak, frozen, staring at Rey. A second later he realizes Rey’s hand is outstretched, and the other woman is pinned against the wall with the Force.

“No more,” Rey says. “Do you hear me?”

Mareesak stares at Ben for a long moment and he stares back, uncomprehending.

Then she nods once.

Rey huffs out a breath, drops her hand and begins to haul Ben down the corridor once more. He stumbles along at her side, and then suddenly his uncle is there, Finn on his other side, and Ben is ushered into his quarters and the doors close out the rest of the world.

“He knew,” Ben says dully. “He knew what I was going to do.”

Rey sits at his side, watching his face. Her hands are in his hair. His mother doesn’t let go of his hand, but he can see the shaky line of her mouth, the way she has to close her eyes. Luke stands in the corner of the room, a figure all in black, still and silent.

“Not straight away. Not at the start. I asked for his help and he said yes. No hesitation. I held out the lightsaber and he took it but I didn’t let go.” He frowns, shakes his head as his face crumples. “Why didn’t I let go?”

“And he knew. I know he did. He knew that I was going to kill him and he just stood there.”

His mother swallows hard. Tears are tracking down her cheeks.

“The blade,” he swallows and can barely hold back the urge to be sick. “It went through him and still he didn’t pull away. He. He touched- he- my face,” Ben says, and he is gulping in air.

“I could feel it. He forgave me,” he grinds out, feeling sick to his stomach.

There’s silence for a long time.

“I asked him to bring you back to me,” Leia Organa Solo says slowly.

Ben opens his eyes and stares at her dully.

“I sent him to you because I knew there was still good in you. I knew it.” Her hand tightens painfully around his.

“Not enough,” Ben says almost silently.

“But there was,” Luke speaks for the first time. “Her instincts were right. And Han trusted those instincts enough to risk his life.”

“To lose his life,” Ben reminds them.

“But Ben,” his mother says. “Don’t you see? He did it. Again.” And he can hear a tremulous smile in her voice when she says, “One last time, Han managed an impossible caper that never should have worked. You’re here, with us now, because of him. And he tried to tell you at the end,” her voice falters, “it was a price he was willing to pay.”

Chapter Text

He drops into a fitful sleep at some point, and when he jerks his eyes open on a nightmarish vision the room is dark and there is only Rey, propped up against the wall, Ben’s heavy head resting on her belly. Her hands are still in his hair.

“Ben?” she says, her voice rusty.

“Mm.” He doesn’t want to talk.

“You allright?”

He shrugs. How does he even answer that?

Her fingers scritch gently at his scalp. “Go back to sleep,” she says.

“Mm,” he manages, and his eyes close again.

He’s not sure how much time passes. He knows his family come and go, he tries to eat the few times Rey offers him food, he thinks another night passes, perhaps. Rey keeps him quiet and soothed, her fingers scratching at his scalp or petting at his face.

The next time he opens his eyes he just knows. He pushes upright. “Where is Poe?”

Rey blinks at him.

“He wasn’t here last night.”

She bites her lip. “Ben-”

Oh. She hadn’t said he was all right, he realizes suddenly. She’d said he was back at the base.

It takes everything he has to force himself to speak. “Did I kill him?” He asks dully.

“No,” Rey says firmly. “No, Ben-”

“Then what?”

She sighed. “He was hurt, yes. We thought it would be better if-”

“I want to s-” then he stops. It might not be up to Ben anymore. He swallows and says, “Will he see me?”

“Of course he will.”

Ben tries for a rueful smile. “You don’t know that.”

“I do know it,” she says. “I’ll go tell him you’re asking for him.”

Poe enters the room a little slower than normal, and Ben keeps his eyes on the floor until the pilot’s feet come to a stop in front of him. He takes a deep breath.

He knows he did something. He knows it. The state of mind he was in – he would have lashed out at anyone who was near him. Cold sweat breaks out down his back at the thought that it could have been his mother. Or Rey. Bad enough it was Poe.

Ben swallows and raises his eyes.

Poe looks like someone tried to bash his face in with a stick. One black eye, bruised cheekbone, cut lip. His hand is heavily bandaged, too.

Ben takes a shaky breath. “I’m sorry,” he says, simply. There’s really nothing else he can possibly say.

“I know,” Poe says after a long pause. He sinks down onto the window seat beside Ben. “I know you are.”

No ‘buddy’, Ben notes dully. Even the good-natured Poe would struggle to feel friendly toward the person who had tried to beat your brains in.

“What did I do,” he asks.

Now Poe shifts and glances at him sidelong. “Nothing you would have done if you’d been in control of yourself.”

“But I wasn’t, was I,” Ben says stonily. That’s the whole point. He shakes his head, “Why are you even here talking to me?”

“Because it was an accident,” Poe says levelly. “I know that, even though my face is aching and my hand hurts, and I knew that even when it was happening.”

Ben looks him over again. The injuries are mostly down on side of the body. “I threw you? With the Force?” For some reason he has to know. Poe had probably hit a tree, or perhaps one of the walls they’d been so painstakingly building. It would explain the face and the stiff posture and the presumably broken fingers.

He shakes his head. “I don’t understand how you can forgive-”

“When I was growing up there was a big explosion, an accident,” Poe says, talking over the top of him. “My uncle was there. Almost everyone he knew at the mine died, and he was buried for two days before they could get him out. Rest of his life he couldn’t stand loud noises, being underground or closed in. Sometimes he’d just, something would set him off and he’d be back there again. Nobody’s fault.”

“Nobody’s fault,” Ben echoes almost soundlessly. “Except that my trauma isn’t from an accident, is it. It’s absolutely my own fault. And I’m considerably more dangerous than your uncle could ever be.”

“I didn’t know you had a – Finn explained to me, it was probably the eclipse that set you off, what it reminded you of,” Poe said. “We all know what to look for, now.”

“And what exactly would you do if I came at you with my lightsaber?” Ben asks.

The expression races over Poe’s face so fast it takes his breath away, and Ben almost chokes when he realizes what it means. His hand shoots out toward Poe but he stops it at the last moment, reminding himself of Poe’s likely pain, and that he has no right to touch the older man.

He looks down at Poe’s hand. “It’s not broken, is it,” he asks.

“It’s been taken care of,” Poe says, voice still carefully level.

“Taken-”

“My hand is fine, it will heal.”

“Heal from… what?”

Poe just shakes his head, jaw set.

“What did I do.”

“Ben,” he says, and turns his head to give such a look of sympathy.

“Oh,” Ben lurches to his feet and bolts to the facilities, losing what little food was in his stomach. When he’s done he stares down at the floor, then pushes up from his hands and knees, falls against the door frame and looks to where Poe has risen, looking wretched and lost.

“The whole hand,” he bursts out, wiping his mouth with the back of his own hand. “Like Luke? Did I-”

“No,” Poe says, “stars, Ben, no, nothing like that.”

“Don’t lie to me”-

“I’m not lying. You weren’t even trying to hit me with it, not really, you were afraid, and you just moved the blade as you pushed me away. My hand flew out, and the lightsaber hit the tips of two fingers. That’s it. I swear.”

“Gods,” Ben grinds out, and spins away, searching, hands wrenching at his hair, “what do I do now, what can I-”

And then suddenly Poe is in his face, eyes grim, mouth set. “You do nothing,” he says harshly. “You give yourself time to recover. You work through your shit until you’re in a better place. You let Rey help you, let Luke help you, let your mother and me, and Finn help you.”

“How can you even want to help me?” he cries. “Your hand, Poe-”

“My hand will heal,” he says firmly. “I got good medical attention immediately. It was a clean cut and they were able to reattach without any delay. My hand will be fine, and so will I.”

“I don’t understand you,” Ben says numbly.

“My uncle disappeared,” Poe says.

Ben blinks. “What?”

“Not straightaway. He stuck around for another year or so, but he wasn’t really living. I remember him, when I was young, just another happy hardworking guy. He never climbed back up out of that hole in the ground, not really. He shut down, he pulled away, he went off by himself. He could be dead, or he could be still ghosting around the universe, but nobody knows. Most likely he’s dead.”

Ben drew in a shaky breath.

“Do you think I want that for you? Do you think that will help me?”

Poe gets in close, right in Ben’s face. “I’m not letting you do that. You don’t get to do that. You have guilt? Fine, you work through that guilt by thinking about the people around you. About Rey, and your mother. And me, if that helps. Because I refuse to be the reason we lose you. You’re getting you life back, Ben Solo. You’re paying back a debt so big it may never be truly repaid. But every time you try you’re making things better, you’re putting the universe back into balance.” He straightens. “I’m no Jedi, but that’s what I believe. You’re making the world a better place as Ben Solo. And you owe it to everyone else, as well as to yourself, to keep going in that direction.”

It goes slowly, after that. Ben stays in his room for days on end, despite coaxing from Rey and Poe. Finally, his mother invokes something that feels like muscle memory, appearing in the doorway and using that parental tone that has him moving before he’s really registered the words.

“Up,” she says, no-nonsense. “Come on.” She starts walking down the corridor, expecting him to follow, and he does.

NP9 appears from an alcove and follows, beeping enquiringly.

“We are going outside,” Leia tells the droid. “Yes, you can come.”

Ben blinks a little at the mid-morning light when they emerge from the external doors. The corridors had been completely empty on the way out, he realizes a second later.

“Where is everyone?” he asks, unthinking. It’s the first time he’s spoken in days.

His mother lets out a long breath before replying. “We had another exodus two days ago. A peace was finally negotiated with the Pramle trade bloc, which means the planets in that region are now safe for those who wish to return home.”

Ben nods once, not really caring.

“I think there’s only twenty or so of our people left,” she says softly, “apart from our little… family group.”

He raises his eyes to the sky. Everything feels distant, fuzzy. He can sense Rey, in the back of his mind. She is training with Luke in the clearing. If he concentrates, he can sense his lightsaber in a cabinet, back in his quarters. Finn is in the garden, receiving instructions from one of the local cooks. Poe is sleeping.

Still recuperating.

“I’m going back inside,” he says without preamble.

His mother sighs.

“We’re doing this again tomorrow,” she calls as he walks away. Ben doesn’t reply. But he doesn’t argue either.

Chapter Text

The next day Rey accompanies them. The fresh air and sunshine probably do help his mood, Ben acknowledges, inside his own head. He doesn’t talk about it. What right does he have to feel better?

Luke and Rey appear the next day and walk him to the clearing where they complete a long and intricate meditation sequence based around defensive moves. The thought of even pretending to attack an imaginary enemy churns Ben’s stomach right now.

And so it goes on, for days. Poe appears at mealtimes, mostly, and refuses to let Ben avoid him. Finn is experimenting in the kitchen now, since many of their regular cooks have left, and they are all suffering through it together.

“I’m sorry you’re stuck with this. With me,” Ben tells her one day.

Rey blinks at him.

“Stuck?”

He gestures stupidly between their heads. “The bond,” he says, and shrugs. “I know you wouldn’t have chosen this…”

For a long moment he thinks she’s going to say nothing, or walk away. Her mouth opens, closes then opens again, and then she blurts, “You think I blame you for the bond? How could I possibly blame you? You were telling me the whole time not to do it, you were saying no with every breath you had left.”

He stares at her. “I don’t understand.

Her face is pale, eyes shiny as she stares back at him. “I did this to you. To us. I chose this, against your will.”

“But I was already in your head.”

“Yes, you were, which is how I know for sure you meant what you were saying. You were prepared to die rather than tie me down like this. I’m the one who didn’t listen. The only person to blame for this is me, so how can you possibly be shouldering the guilt for it?”

Ben stares at her helplessly. “I-it’s my gift,” he says, and spreads his hands. “I’m even better at guilt than I am at the Force.”

She stares at him for a long moment, then bursts out laughing.

It’s been a week since the eclipse when Rey first broaches the subject.

“There’s nothing to discuss,” Ben says.

“It’s your lightsaber,” she says, very quiet.

“It’s the weapon that killed Han Solo. Maimed Poe. Almost killed you and Finn. Did kill countless others.”

“So you want to destroy it? Is that it?”

He shrugs. The thought of destroying it hurts more than he can articulate, but he won’t argue for keeping it either.

“Ben,” she says. “Please talk to me.”

“What is there to say?” he bites out. “Together, that lightsaber and I committed crime after crime. I don’t have to wield it. It can be thrown into a volcano or left in a drawer and at least it will do no more harm. It is at least one thing I can finish and be sure that it’s over.” The way I can’t be sure with my own self, he thinks, then flinches when Rey stiffens.

“You wish you could be sure that you were finished and over?” she demands, voice suddenly hard. “That’s what you’re thinking?”

“I-”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“It was a passing thought,” he defends. In that moment he hates the bond. Why can’t he be left alone in his own head? Must his every weakness be bared to her?

“A passing thought that the universe would be better off without you.”

“It would,” he cries, nettled. “Stars above, Rey, how can you argue against that?”

“So the only reason you haven’t tried to end your life is because of me, because of the bond.”

He swallows and looks away.

She draws in a breath, her mind alight with rage, and when he looks down he can see that her hands are shaking. “How dare you,” she seethes, and for a moment he’s expecting to be struck. “How dare you take such a cowardly way out. And how dare you put the burden of that on me.” She scrambles to her feet and oh, he can see that little scavenger girl he’d argued with in the interrogation room in the set of her jaw, the sheer determination of her. He’d be in love in a heartbeat if he hadn’t already fallen.

“If you want to escape your past, Kylo Ren, go right ahead,” she bites out.

He recoils, and she gives a sharp little nod. “Don’t hesitate on my account. I won’t die, Ben, I can promise you that. I’ll keep living just so I can continue on being this furious at you.”

She’s at the outer doors when she spins back on her heel. “All those people that died in the war,” she spits. “All the people you killed. Any one of them would have fought and fought and clung to life if they’d had the chance. And you want to sit there and wish your life away because of guilt.” She shakes her head. “I’ve thought a lot of things about you, when you were Kylo Ren and when you were Ben Solo. But the one thing the two of them had in common was that I did at least think they weren’t weak.”

She storms off, her mind flickering like a white-hot flame in the bond.

“But I always was,” Ben says quietly to the empty sky.

He’s not sure what to do next. He sends a message to his mother via NP9 and spends that night sleeping in the half-finished cottage, wondering how on earth to fix this. Since he has no idea how to fix it, he decides to spend the next day felling timbers for the eventual cottage roof.

His peace is disturbed the next morning.

The child is a Togruta, Ben thinks, and stares at her stupidly. “What- what are you doing here?”

“We were exploring,” she says, and blinks big eyes at him. “My name’s Kheesa.”

He has no reply to that.

“Kheesa Rhen,” she adds, like perhaps not giving her full name is what has struck him silent.

She’s young, Ben thinks dazedly. The markings on her montrals are still quite pale, and she wouldn’t even reach Rey’s shoulder height.

“I sensed you,” she adds, eyeing the stack of timber Ben has amassed at the edge of the forest. “When the trees fell. What are you doing?”

What I always do, Ben thinks bleakly, but has enough sense not to say it. He glances between the fallen trees and her mondrals, which, as he recalls, are sensitive to vibrations as well as sound. “Where did you even come from?” he asks instead.

She gives him a long, level look.

“She came with me,” Luke says, striding up. “Kheesa, this is my nephew, Ben Solo.”

Ben glances between them.

“Kheesa has no family who can take her at the moment,” Luke says smoothly. “Her aunt has been caring for her, but would now like to go in search of her husband who went missing when the Pramle blockade was created. I agreed to bring her here.”

Ben has no idea what to say to that, but Kheesa breaks the silence instead.

“He’s sad,” she says to Luke.

“He is,” Luke agrees.

Ben’s mouth drops open. “She’s Force-sensitive?” You brought a Force-sensitive child within orbit of me? he shoots furiously at his uncle.

“She is, and I did,” Luke says, still calm.

“Why are you so upset?” she asks, and tilts her head to one side.

Ben draws a deep breath. “Because I’m not always a safe person to be around.”

“Me either,” she says. “My aunt says I have control problems.” Her face darkens, “I don’t like it when people say one thing but they’re thinking something else.”

He stares at her, a little taken aback. “Well, people do that a lot.”

“I know.” She folds her arms. “They shouldn’t.”

Ben’s brows lift. Well, he sends to Luke, I wish you luck teaching this one.

“Actually, I think she could benefit from your perspective as well,” his uncle replies with no remorse.

“No,” Ben says abruptly, ignoring the way Kheesa flinches. “Absolutely not.”

He whirls on his foot and storms off, ignoring the tiny voice in his wake that pipes to his uncle, “I like him.”

Luke doesn’t bring her by again, but Kheesa shows up in Ben’s general vicinity more than enough. He doesn’t speak to her again. Refuses to engage. He is not fit company for adults with fully functional shields, let alone an impressionable young mind with leanings toward the Force.

“Why do you come here?” Ben mutters.

“I like it here.”

“I meant, why do you come when I am here.”

“I know what you meant,” Kheesa replies, and smirks a little. “My answer’s the same.”

“It makes no sense that you would like being around me.”

“You’re honest,” she says. She hugs her knees to her chest. “You don’t say one thing and think another.”

“Of course I do,” Ben says, and tries to ignore the little burn that comes with you’re honest. Sooner or later someone will enlighten her about who he is and what he’s done. “Everyone does.”

“You don’t,” Kheesa says, bold and unafraid as always. “Everything you think is about how everything is your fault and everyone would be better off if you weren’t here.”

That gets a snort from Rey, who is on the other side of the clearing. Ben gapes at the young girl. She dimples at him (of course she has dimples) and scampers away. Ben glances warily across the clearing at Rey, who still isn’t speaking to him, and she gives him a long, flat look before she turns back to her practice, lightsaber twirling in her hand like the world’s most deadly dance.

Chapter Text

“I’m sorry,” Ben offers, later that night, when he finds Rey lingering at the table in the smaller dining area they’ve now moved to.

For a moment she doesn’t move, then she drops the small piece of cake back onto her plate and sits back. “For what, exactly?”

Ben swallows hard. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that this is a test. For a moment he would very much like to run away.

“I’m not strong like you, Rey,” he says, and gestures as if to say, obviously. “Sometimes the memories I carry just… overwhelm me. Sometimes I want to quit. I won’t,” he says, forestalling her. “I promise I’m not going to hurt myself. But I – I can’t always control my thoughts. Why do you think I’m so afraid of lowering my shields?” he adds, voice dropping. Then he winces. That was maybe a little too much honesty in one sitting.

She stares across the table at him, eyes shining. “It’s not about strength, Ben,” she half-whispers. “I should never have said that. It was unfair and untrue.” She bites her lip and reaches out to touch the back of his hand.

He closes his eyes at the simple comfort of it.

“I know you carry burdens heavier than the rest of us,” she says, and before he can say anything she adds, “and the fact that they’re of your own making doesn’t make a difference, they’re still there.”

She drops her head and says, “I shouldn’t have yelled.”

He almost smiles, it’s so grudging.

“I just. The thought of you-”

She stops and he gets a cold wave of terror, just a tiny taste of what she’s feeling, and Ben grabs convulsively at her hands.

“I won’t,” he says, as gently as he can. “I promise not to leave you that way if I can possibly help it.”

She squeezes his hands and bends her head to stare down at the table. Nods.

Luke is waiting by the side of the narrow mountain track when Ben rounds a clump of grey boulders.

“Uncle,” Ben says, taken aback.

They stare at one another for a long time. Then Luke says, “I understand from Rey that you are reluctant to take up your old lightsaber.”

Ben is so unprepared for that topic he actually takes a step back.

Luke is gazing off into the distance, his grizzled beard a stark reminder of the years that have passed since Ben first spoke to his uncle about lightsabers and crystals and construction. “I did so much damage with it,” Ben says, finally. He swallows. Shrugs. He’s not sure why he’s so off-balance about it now. He killed Snoke with it happily enough, after all. But something has changed, and he can’t just pick up the blade as if nothing has changed.

“While I was away… in my travels,” Luke says. Ben is almost amused at this description of a decade or more spent in exile in a hidden part of the galaxy. Only Luke. “I found something rare. I held on to them until now. I was never sure why.”

Ben waits.

“You’ve heard of Ahsoka Tano.”

Ben’s brow’s fly up. “I have.” He’s studied all of the old Force users, Jedi and Sith and anyone else he could find information on. It had been an obsession, he can admit now.

“At one time she wielded twin lightsabers, with white blades.”

“I remember,” Ben says.

“There’s no proof, of course, but there are stories that her white blades were a symbol of the choice Ahsoka had made not to ally herself with either the Jedi or the Sith.”

Ben nods, and Luke finally glances sideways to meet his eyes. “It seems to me that your situation might be quite similar.”

“I…” Ben honestly doesn’t know what to say to that.

“You have rejected Snoke and the Dark side. But I think it is fair to say that despite your new… pursuits, you would not call yourself a Jedi. Am I correct?”

“I-yes,” Ben admits. He can’t see how he could ever bear that title again. And he certainly has no intention of forgoing attachments, as is the traditional Jedi way. The thought of giving up Rey is utterly impossible.

“Then perhaps this crystal will be of use to you,” Luke says, and holds out his mechanical hand, palm up. In its centre is a Khyber crystal, colourless and dull.

Ben stares down at it. He wants it, so badly. His fingers itch to take it. To begin again. He raises his eyes to his uncle’s. “I don’t deserve this,” he says, after a long pause.

“Then strive to do so,” Luke says, and proffers the crystal again. “For all the remaining days of your life, Ben Solo.”

Ben takes a deep breath, swallows hard. “I will.” He reaches out to take the crystal and raises his eyes to meet Luke’s as their hands touch. “I swear.”

“Why haven’t you ever kissed me?” Rey asks.

Ben’s hand jerks and the tool scrapes across NP9’s outer casing leaving a visible mark. “Uh,” he says intelligently, staring at her. His mind is an endless vista of empty space.

She presses her lips together gently, trying not to smile, he knows. He can feel her amusement, nothing mean or sharp-edged, it’s all affection.

“I.” Ben swallows.

She dips her head. “I mean. I feel as if you do… as if you want to, but. Am I wrong?”

“No,” he says hoarsely, because he can’t make her feel that uncertainty, no matter what it costs him. “No, you’re not wrong.”

“But you won’t,” she says softly, picking at the seam of her leggings.

“Rey,” he says softly, still kneeling in the middle of the half-finished cottage. “We’re bound together for life. I can- I can want things, feel things, but that doesn’t mean they’re a good idea. It doesn’t mean it would work. Between us.”

She nods to herself a little. “And if they didn’t work,” she murmurs.

“It’s not as though I could take off to fly a blockade somewhere-” he catches himself too late.

She glances up, eyes wide.

He lifts a hand before she can speak. “I’m sorry, that was- it’s not, forget I said that.”

“If you’re worried,” she begins, “about Te-”

“I’m not,” he interrupts. “It’s not- I don’t know why I-”

“Because you could ask me.”

“I don’t have any right to-”

“You’re my bondmate.”

That stops him cold. He’s never heard her say it like that before.

“You have every right.”

“No, I-”

She sits back and eyes him shrewdly. “You don’t like me saying that.”

He sighs a little. Shifts around until he’s risen to his feet. He hesitates for a long moment, then walks slowly across the room to where Rey is perched on the newly-delivered table.

He knows she can feel his nerves. It’s simultaneously reassuring and completely aggravating to be understood that well, and seen so clearly.

“I’m not entitled to anything of yours,” he says. He wants her to understand what he means by that. “Do you-”

“You don’t feel like you deserve it.”

It’s perfectly accurate, but it feels like a punch anyway. He nods once, jerkily. She sighs and shakes her head, her eyes fixed on his face, full of sadness. It’s the sadness that sets him moving again.

“It’s not that I don’t want to kiss you,” he murmurs as he reaches her. “You do know that.”

She drops her eyes.

It’s part-question, no matter how silly it seems that she could have any doubts, considering the bond and how it reveals them both to each other without mercy. “Never doubt that I want to.”

“Is it because of Tema?” she mumbles down to her knees.

“No. Rey, no,” he rushes to say. Hells, how had he not seen that she was worried about this? “I don’t… resent, or blame you, or wish you’d never known him. None of that. He made you happy, he made you feel more confident and less alone. And all of those things I want for you. No, I swear it.”

He swallows and has to stare just past her left ear as he says, “It’s me. I don’t… know about these things. I was still a teenager when-” he swallows, shakes his head. Doesn’t want to say it, not right now. And Snoke hadn’t exactly encouraged deviation from his plans and goals. The Knights had lived monk-like existences, focused on their training, practising their deprivation and detachment at every opportunity.

“And I. I’m afraid,” he whispers.

“I know.”

“What you give me now is already so much more than I dreamed,” he raises one trembling hand to touch her cheek. Thinks of the images he has from her dreams, her memories, of how she had swaddled herself in cloth to protect her skin from sand and sun on Jakku. Ben’s fingertips drag gently down that smooth, unmarked skin. She is so… “so beautiful,” he whispers.

Rey tilts her face up to his, watching him wonderingly. “Ben,” she says, voice trembling.

“Ben have you seen my-” Kheensa comes running into the cottage at top speed and Ben and Rey burst apart like they’ve been electrified. She skids to a halt and stares, eyes wide. A small squeak escapes her and she spins away, running out of the room just as fast as she’d entered it.

“Master Luke,” they can clearly hear her shouts, “ugh, Master Luke they were going to kiss and I RUINED IT…”

Ben closes his eyes.

For a moment there is frozen silence and then Rey snorts, a huge burst of horrified laughter escaping before she claps her hand over her mouth.

Ben is about as mortified as it’s possible for a person to be. And yet, the bubbling, intoxicated, embarrassed cocktail leaking from Rey’s mind to his makes it impossible to be angry, or even annoyed.

He tips his head back and studies the half-finished cottage roof. “I’ll always remember this magical moment,” he says, and that’s the final straw for Rey, who doubles over, completely out of control, while NP9 whirls and spins in the corner.

Chapter Text

Rey stretches lazily, eyes barely slitting open. Of all the many things that have changed for her since BB8 rolled into her life on Jakku, being able to sleep comfortably for as long as she pleases is the one she hugs closest to her heart. She’d learned to live with a certain level of hunger without letting it take over her entire life. But lack of sleep – it makes the hands clumsy, the mind and reflexes slower, moods lower and darker, somehow.

“Mmm,” she muffles the sound into her pillow and rolls onto her belly.

In the back of her mind, her awareness of Ben stirs. It’s the mental equivalent of a glance across the room, not quite a request for attention, but an indicator that he’s awake too, and aware of her.

Morning, she sends in his direction, an impulse she’s never indulged before. They never talk in their heads. She’s not sure why.

There’s a pause before he answers, and she’s guessing if they were face to face it would be startled silence.

Hello, he says, cautious. It’s the caution that pushes her to keep going. Why is he like this with her? She knows he talks to Luke in his head.

Why don’t you ever try to talk to me like this?

Another pause. I wasn’t sure I’d be welcome, he sends back after a while.

She frowns, and he must get the sense of questioning because he adds, after Starkiller.

Rey sits up abruptly, blinking across the room.

After-

I hurt you, he says, the words stark and full of regret. I forced my way in.

She swallows, knowing she has to tread carefully. Yes, you did, but you’ve apologised, and I accepted. We’re past that now, Ben. You can’t live back then. It’s not healthy for either one of us.

He doesn’t reply, and a beat later she adds, suddenly stricken, But you don’t have to – if you don’t want to. All of a sudden she’s remembering the things that have leaked out into her mind from Ben’s dreams, in his weakest moments. Things she’d seen that had made her run as far away from Ben as possible. Far enough away that she could no longer hear his suppressed screams or his choked sobs reverberate inside her mind.

She had seen it all, couldn’t escape it while Ben slept in the bacta tank, or after the drug. With his shields so terribly weakened. All the punishments Snoke had dealt out for mistakes, not all of them physical. The way Snoke had never left him the privacy of his own mind. She can’t demand access, that would make her no better than-

A soothing sense comes through the bond. I know, Ben tells her, I know that. And I’d – I’d like to. If you… if you have no objection, I will- I would like that very much.

Rey draws her knees up to her chin and curls over them, smiling down at her feet, arms wrapped around her shins. There’s something about Ben’s awkwardness, his formality that is so, so endearing. I have no objection, she sends back, and she’s probably leaking affection all over him but in this moment she absolutely does not care.

This is the first time she’s truly felt Ben inside her mind, so close.  Not just hints through the bond, but the essence of Ben as a person.

He’s adorable.

Once she’s dressed Rey grabs a piece of fruit from the small table in the dining area and heads straight to the mechanic’s workshop down two levels, BB8 following at her heels and chirruping all the way.

“No, it shouldn’t take long,” she tells it. “Poe did the cleaning already, and very kind of him it was, too. I really just need to get that panel off and see what the damage is.”

She finishes her makeshift breakfast and tosses the core into a bin in the corner of the workshop, then gathers up a handful of tools and takes a seat at the bench. BB8 has rolled up onto the top of the bench via an improvised ramp at one end, and Rey sets to work immediately, chattering idly to the droid.

“Hold on, I’m nearly there.” She prizes up the bent panel and tilts her head from side to side, inspecting the hinges. They would hold, with a little touch-up, and she sets to work. This is going to take some welding. She

“You had no business trying to follow Finn further up the mountain,” she tells BB8 as she reaches for the only goggles left behind when the Rebel’s mechanics left. They’re absolutely huge, a pair more suited to a Lasat-sized head than Rey’s. They span her entire face, from top lip to past her hairline, but she settles them over her eyes as best she can. “I know you’re a tough little unit, but there are some spots that just aren’t built for a droid like you, and you’re lucky all you got was a mud bath and a bashed in power-coupling.”

BB8 trills in indignation as she begins to work.

“No,” she exclaims, leaning back for a moment and waggling the wand at him. “It is not your job to survey this entire mountain. There are exploration droids for a reason, you know-”

The workshop door swishes open. She doesn’t bother glancing over her shoulder, this will be a worried and guilt-ridden Finn, right on schedule. Instead she narrows her eyes and concentrates on what she’s doing, reattaching the bent hinge. It takes only two or three seconds, and then she sits back, satisfied, and shuts down the welder.

She shifts in her chair to glance over her shoulder, and it’s not Finn. It’s Ben.

He blinks at her, jaw dropping a little, and then she sees him blink, fight back the laugh and lose the fight. His shields drop just enough for her to get a brief taste of the joy bubbling through him, a lightness she has never felt from him before.

Ben drops his head, trying to hide as always, but the smile that spreads over his face is huge and beautiful to see, like moonrise over the desert horizon. That long line bracketing the left side of his mouth is back and for a moment she just stares. He’s so different. In this moment he looks so young, feels so light.

Then he lifts his head, words jolting out of him between bursts of laughter, “Rey- I- what are you-”

Finally he shakes his head and moves forward until he’s within arm’s reach. She tips her head back to look up at him, and only when he reaches out his hands to gently touch her face does she remember the goggles.

Oh.

Oh gods, she must look like an even stranger version of Maz, and she’s not sorry he’s laughing at her, not when it lightens his face like that, not when it makes him feel like tiny bubbles rising to the surface in the bond. “Ben,” the word trips out of her involuntarily.

Still gently laughing, Ben gently lifts the goggles up and away, letting them sit on her hairline.

Then he leans down, his hands cup her face in a grip that’s light and tender and somehow possessive. She sucks in a startled half-breath and then he’s kissing her.

Ben.

Is kissing Rey.

She lets out a soft, shocked noise and straightens, caught between sitting and standing, but not losing her chance to press her mouth up firmly to meet his. The welding wand tumbles from her hand to the workshop floor, her other hand seizes the side of Ben’s tunic in a death-grip. There is no way she’s letting him go. Not now, not ever.

His mouth is warm and firm over hers, and it’s not even the kiss that has her face growing hot, breath coming faster – it’s the sense of him.

Ben, she thinks, stupidly.

Yours, he is thinking, Rey I’m yours you know I’m yours-

She tries to think about that, even though her whole body is thrilling to the kiss. There’s a desperation underneath those words, a relief- Were you afraid I didn’t want you? Oh, Ben- She shifts under his hands and presses her body against the entire length of him, head tipped back, so warm. Everything about her is a welcome, an invitation.

I couldn’t ask you, he’s thinking, nonsensically, and then she understands what he means, the way she’d reached out in her mind so casually this morning, something so simple, or so she’d thought. But it’s not simple, of course it’s not, and how could he possibly have felt comfortable with her as a bondmate when he hadn’t known if he was fully welcome in her mind?

You are, she tells him, fierce. She reaches up to wind her fingers through his hair, pulling him closer. Ben, you are. You’re… you’re welcome… she finishes helplessly, not sure how to say it. Of course you are. You’re part of me now.

He makes a rough noise at that, shocked out of his silence, and jerks back from the kiss.

“No,” Rey breathes, already reaching for him.

“You are impossible,” Ben tells her, and that calm mask he usually wears is shattered, every feeling written all over his face. Utterly impossible.

And he closes his eyes, leans his head in until their foreheads touch. His hands are shaking where they touch her face.

For a moment she’s confused and then she feels surrounded:engulfed:protected:drowning in-

 “Dodo youyou seesee itit?” He asks, and he’s speaking aloud but she can hear the words before they leave his mouth.

“I-”

Close your eyes, he tells her, and see me.

She closes her eyes and the moment the world falls away her mind feels it unfurl: a room, the walls shiny black and shot through with stars, the floor is… snow? It shifts beneath her feet and she should feel cold, the shiny black walls and the snow and the roof is glass, she sees now, tips her head back to take in a torrent of colours above but she’s warm, she’s so warm, like the early mornings on Jakku before the sands begin to burn-

At her feet is an egg. Obsidian. Gleaming and perfect and she kneels beside it, reluctant to touch but needing so badly to touch-

This was how it looked when I woke up after Starkiller, Ben tells her. He’s kneeling opposite her now, hair long and shaggy and hanging in his face and he is staring down at the egg with such naked affection on his face that Rey is momentarily jealous, jealous of an egg-

He looks up, startled, a grin slashing across his face –

There’s nothing to be jealous of, Rey, and it’s so tender, his not-voice, he’s so naked here

It’s you, he whispers, and draws her hand down to hover over the egg, that perfect shining orb.

This is you, it’s what you left behind in me, that day. It protected me from Snoke.

She drops her eyes to it, not really understanding.

On Kashyyyk it got bigger and bigger.

She blinks and it’s as big as BB8

It’s growing more the longer I know you.

It’s as high as their shoulders now, filling the space between them

Ben looks at her, face open and unafraid, and sets her hand gently against the side of the egg

The golden glow nearly blinds them both, they blink their nonexistent eyes against the flare of light

Then the wash of emotion shoves through her and she cries out at the onslaught

Ben, she thinks, and Kylo, and Ben until he is all she knows.

Rey blinks her eyes open and she’s crying, why is she crying?

Ben’s arms are around her. “Rey?” she hears, and it sounds like it’s not the first time he’s said it. “Rey, are you

“I’m okay,” she croaks. “I’m okay.” She gulps in a breath or two. “I’m very very okay.”

For a moment she can feel his confusion, and then he lets out a short breath, gives a little headshake. “Of course you are.”

They stay as they are, safe in each other’s arms, for a long time.

Kheesa is already at the house, working with Finn on the garden, when Ben arrives. Her face lights up when she sees him, and it strikes him hard, like a blow, as she runs to greet him. First Rey, now Kheesa.

“Hello,” he says dumbly, staring down at her. His ever present-guilt is still there, it will always be there, but he can’t seem to move past the way she’d called brightly, “Ben!” and made a beeline right for him. He can’t help but feel an answering gladness, a smile touching his face briefly.

Over her shoulder, Finn straightens and is watching him shrewdly. Ben shoots him a helpless glance and he gives Ben a careful, measured nod before turning back to his work.

“Come and see,” Kheesa is chattering, and draws him into the house. “Luke finished the water and waste connections this morning. Did you know he grew up on a moisture farm?”

Ben clears his throat. “I. Yes, I did.”

“Oh right, he’s your uncle, I forgot,” she says, unconcerned. He takes a deep breath and glances up at the rafters that have been put in place in his absence. There’s only the roof left to do, really.

They move through the house and she shows him around it like he’s never seen it before. There’s a proprietary note in her voice that is charming and terrifying all at once. They finish at the huge wide window that shows the view down to the sea, and Ben realizes with a surge of amusement that he or one of the other interested parties has recreated his wide window ledge from his quarters at the base, a perfect place to sit.

They end up side by side, Kheesa tucked up against the corner, knees at her chin while Ben turns sideways and stretches one leg along the sill, knee cocked.

“You seem…” Kheesa begins, then falters.

Ben raises an eyebrow. He knows what he seems. He can feel it bubbling in his chest.

He’s happy. Hopeful. It’s unfamiliar and terrifying but it’s not something he can back away from. Not when it makes Rey feel the way she does in the bond – calm, and light, and welcomed. “I had a good morning,” he says, and thinks what an understatement.

At some point he’s going to slump back into one of his black moods, he knows that. I have to warn her, he thinks, then almost snorts. As if she doesn’t know.

Gods. He takes a breath. More terrifying than the hope is the feeling of being known. He’d shown her everything, and she stayed.

So far a voice in his head says.

“Kheesa,” he finds himself saying. “Will you tell me about your aunt?”

She tugs on her legs until they are up against her chest, tightens her body into a tight ball. Ben just waits.

She bites her lip and looks away, and for a moment Ben thinks she’s going to run, then she lets out a short, sharp breath and says, “Can’t you tell?”

“I can tell you’re angry with her,” Ben says carefully. “I was hoping you would tell me why.”

Her shoulders pull up to her ears.

“You sensed something from her, I’m guessing,” Ben says. He can still hear the flat tone of Kheesa’s voice when they first met, I don’t like it when people say one thing and think another.

“She told Master Luke she wanted to find my uncle,” she bursts out.

“But you don’t believe her.”

“She was thinking how easy life was without him,” she explodes. “How much simpler it would be if he just never showed up.”

Ben sighs silently. He extends a leg out until his foot brushes against Kheesa’s. “I know it’s hard to understand,” he says, “but it’s not always as simple as that. Your aunt had that thought. Maybe she really meant it, maybe it was a fleeting feeling. People’s thoughts aren’t a permanent record of who they are. We all think things we know aren’t okay. We all have moments of weakness, of selfishness. Haven’t you ever had something you wanted to keep just for yourself, when someone else clearly wanted you to share it?”

Her mouth twitches. It’s not quite a pout.

“Actions are what matter, Kheesa,” he says. And for a moment he feels an ache for the young Ben Solo, who had not understood the path his own actions would lead him down. “Actions are what can help or hurt those around us. Perhaps your aunt doesn’t want to be married to your uncle any longer. That’s her right. Or perhaps it was a brief impulse because she has become used to life without him, and she’ll be happy when she finds him, and he’ll never know she had that momentary thought. She may well barely remember ever thinking that.”

Kheesa brings her chin forward to rest on her upraised knees. She stares up at him with big eyes and oh, he does not deserve the trust she is showing him. He takes a breath. Doesn’t matter if he deserves it. What matters is he not screw it up.

“But if your aunt is spending the time looking for him, that is what’s important, isn’t it?”

Kheesa’s jaw juts out, doubtful, but then she sighs and turns her head to look away, down to the sea.

“Sometimes you’re going to sense things from people. But you have to remember that’s not the entire story. It took me years to learn but it’s best to keep an open mind,” he finishes quietly. Then Ben leans back, content to let her think it over.

Chapter Text

He dreams that night.

Legs dangling over the edge of the platform of Nyebacca’s family home, Ben stares down into the vibrant writhing canopy of Kashyyyk’s southern forest.

“You’re not real,” he says, and lets his eyes flick sideways to the scuffed boots dangling beside his. He’s not ready to look up and meet those familiar eyes.

“I could be real,” his father counters.

“I’m asleep. And you’re not glowing,” Ben challenges. He’s heard the stories.

“Well I was never a Jedi,” Han says reasonably. “But no one ever said ordinary folk couldn’t have an afterlife.”

Ben shudders and hunches his shoulders. “If that were true I’d never rest again. All of Kylo Ren’s victims-”

“It doesn’t work like that, Ben. Things like revenge – that’s a concept for the living. When you’re on the other side…” his father’s voice trails off.

“What?”

“The important things are what stay with you. Not petty garbage like revenge.”

“And your important thing was to visit the person who killed you?”

“My important thing will always be my son, and your mother. My family.”

Ben sucks in a sharp breath and his eyes flick up to his father’s face, can’t help himself. “Dad,” he says, the words dragging out of him. “I’m so sorry.”

“I know,” Han says, and he is wearing that quiet, wise expression again, the one he’d worn on that catwalk. “Ben, I know that. I knew it then.”

“How can you forgive me?” His eyes fill with tears. “How can you possibly-”

“Ben,” he chides. “Do you know how many times I cheated death, over the years?”

Ben swallows and dashes the tears from his face. He shrugs. “I don’t know. More than four?” It’s an old family joke, he can’t even remember the origin of it anymore. Something about how many times Luke saw Han at the wrong end of a blaster in the first year they knew each other. Or the number of times the hyperdrive let them down in a big moment, Chewie always claimed. Or the number of times Threepio had interrupted his parents kissing in some out of the way corridor, he remembers Luke quipping, once, probably just to see Ben recoil from the image. Parents kissing. Ugh.

His father grins, familiar creases appearing in that aged face. “Probably more than forty, if I’m honest. Ben, I coulda died at any time during my surprisingly long life, and most of the time it would have been for a completely stupid reason. Do you know what I was doing when I met Rey? I was running a shonky deal smuggling rathtars, two-timing the Guavian Death Gang and Kanjiklub.”

Ben blinks. That does sound like something his father would do.

“I should have died then, coulda died, like all those other times. And I wouldn’t have mended fences with your mother, wouldn’t have ever seen your face again.”

Ben frowns a little. “I don’t…”

“Everyone dies, Ben. It’s the oldest truth and no-one ever escapes it. Everything ends. What was I ever going to do in my old age? Something reckless. You think I wanted to sit around and waste away? I was always gonna die with my boots on, and this way I got to do it for the most important thing in my life.”

Ben looks away, mouth trembling.

“But I miss you,” he says, after what seems like forever. He knows he sounds like a little kid, but this is his dream, after all. And if it’s more than that, well. This is his Dad. Who better to see that side of him?

His father sighs. “All things are present in the Force, kid,” he says after a while. “You know that. Don’t make me say something as cliché as I’m always with you.”

He manages a watery smile.

“No. Sorry, Dad. I won’t do that to you.”

Han knocks their shoulders together. “Your little scavenger girl will see you right,” he says quietly. “Just… don’t mess it up. And be kind to your mother.” And they stare out at the rising sun trying to fight its way through the thick canopy above and below them.

In the morning Ben can feel Rey’s discontent and worry in the bond. He hesitates, in the middle of pulling on his boots, and stares at the door to his quarters. They hadn’t really settled anything yesterday. They’d kissed. Ben had… opened up. The day had gone on as normal after.

Which left him sitting here, staring at the door and wondering what his role was now. Was he supposed to go to her? Pretend he couldn’t sense it until she came to him? Had he caused it somehow?

He huffed out a harsh breath. Well. That did seem the most likely explanation. He’d been waiting for something just like this, hadn’t he? There was no way someone could get a glimpse of the mess inside Ben’s head – inside his soul – and be okay with it. Add in the tiny detail that Rey could never escape the mess inside Ben’s head, and-

The door flies open and he’s suddenly staring at Rey.

“Would you stop that?” she demands, annoyed and glaring.

“I-what-” Ben begins, feeling as though the conversation somehow started without him.

“Stop stewing in your guilt, or your angst or whatever. Not everything is about you.”

He blinks at her. “Uh.”

“I can feel you, you know?” She gestures at her head. “Am I not allowed to wake up in a bad mood?”

“I- no, of course-”

“Because that might happen sometimes, okay? Maybe I had a bad dream, maybe I woke up with a headache, maybe I’m frustrated because of something in my training. Either way, it’s not always about you, Ben Solo.”

“You’re right,” he says, feeling his eyes fly wide at her vehemence. “Sorry.” He raises his hands, placating.

She takes a deep breath and folds her arms.

He stares at her warily. “Um. Are you okay?” Is it okay to even ask?

She sets her jaw and looks away. “I’m fine.”

“Okay.” Now he really doesn’t know what his role is. He’s heard I’m fine in that tone before and it definitely does not mean the other person is fine. “Do you, uh-”

“You’re an idiot, you know that?”

It just bursts out of her and Ben feels the first flick of temper. Where is all of this coming from? “Am I.”

“Yes, you are. It’s just constant drama with you. Why do you always think the worst?”

“I don’t know Rey, why? Perhaps because every time I turn around you’re leaving again?” he spits.

She steps back, draws in a deep breath.

Ben closes his eyes. Shit. “I apologise,” he says.

“No,” she says, “Don’t. I want to know what you’re really thinking. I need to know. If we can’t be honest with each other, this is never going to work.” She takes a deep breath and steps inside the room, letting the doors close behind her.

Something in him relaxes, and Ben realises with surprise he’d been coiled tight as a spring at the body language that she wasn’t really here, that she had literally had one foot out the door. She sighs and sinks down to sit, cross-legged on the floor.

“All right,” he concedes, “but that wasn’t fair. You’re not doing it now. You haven’t run-”

“But I did. At the start of all this it was all I ever did,” she breaks in. “When you were sick or injured, I left you. You fear it for a reason,” she finishes miserably.

He boots his boot down and stares at the floor. “Why did you go?” he asks. “I mean, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me, who wouldn’t want to get away, but I guess. I’ve assumed things before now, that may not actually be true.”

“Look at us,” Rey says lightly. “Communicating.”

Ben’s mouth twitches. “Luke must be near tears.”

She swallows hard and stares at the floor. “When you were injured, when I first- linked with you.”

“Yes?”

“You were injured, and I could feel that, and it- wasn’t great,” she finishes hurriedly. “But then, uh. When they were treating you. I guess the- whatever they gave you lowered your shields. And. I could. See things. Feel things. Your memories.”

Ben slumps back against the wall and stares at her, aghast. He has memories from his time in the tank, the constant stream of nightmares and guilt-

“Mostly Snoke,” she adds, lower, head dropping.

“Rey,” he says. “Rey, I’m so sorry.”

She lifts one shoulder in a half-shrug. “Not your fault.” She snorts, “Really, really not your fault.”

There’s a long silence, then Ben says, “I’m amazed you ever even came back.” He means it mostly lightly, but she flinches and looks away, and there’s a heavy, cloying guilt from Rey now, in the bond.

“Rey?” he says, very softly, questioningly.

“Do you know what scares me the most, in life?” She bites her lip, takes a few deep breaths before speaking again, and her voice is thick and low. “Everybody leaves. Everybody leaves me, Ben.”

“I won’t leave you,” the words leave his lips before he’s thought about it.

“I know you won’t.” But she says it with a trembling smile, glancing up. It should be a happy statement, but what he’s feeling from her is devastation, and guilt so deep he recognizes it instinctively for the destructive force it is. “That’s what I figured out the first time I left. I know you won’t leave me. Never.”

He’s still confused, not sure what to say next, when she adds simply, “Because I made you that way, Ben. Even if you want to, one day, you can’t leave me, you’ll always be there. You told me not to do it, you told me it was permanent and I did it anyway.”

He gapes at her.

She swallows and says, voice shaking. “Now do you see why I don’t think of you as a monster? I know who the real monster is, Ben. It’s me.”

“Rey-”

“You were so brave yesterday,” she says. “Gods, you just, just let me in, and you never once asked me to drop my own shields in return.” Her eyes fill with tears.

“It’s not something I could ever ask,” Ben says, aghast. “That isn’t my decision to make. Rey- you don’t owe me-”

“Yes I do,” she breaks in over him. “Yes. I. Do.”

“I don’t want it that way, he shoots back. Not as payment of a debt.”

“Not that,” she says, and dashes angrily at the tears that have become to spill over. “Not because- just. Oh, I’m so bad at this. don’t you see, Ben?” She appeals to him, spreading her hands. “Master Luke told me I had to be honest with myself. To look inside and find the strength to admit my faults and my fears. And I have- I mean, I’ve tried. But when I finally admitted my biggest fear was being abandoned – then weeks later, I bonded you to me. For life. I didn’t face it, I forced it to disappear. I’ll never really be alone again, because I’ll always have you. And you didn’t want it.”

“Didn’t want it,” he says, gaping at her. “Are you mad? Of course I wanted it, Rey. Why do you think I ever left the First Order – of course I wanted to be near you, to be worthy, to have our bond thrive and complete the connection. It’s all I wanted.”

“But you said – you begged me not to,” she says dumbly.

“For your sake, not mine. You hated me. You were afraid of me, didn’t trust me. How on earth could I wish for the bond when that was how things were between us?”

“Ben,” she says, staring. “You really couldn’t tell? I hadn’t felt like that for such a long time… I’d been working my way toward liking you since… well, I can’t really remember when. Even when you were on Kashyyyk I couldn’t stop watching you.” Her lips quirk. “Why do you think I got so angry when you apologised? It was just one more thing bringing you closer to someone I could care for. You kept doing these things- protecting your mother and befriending Poe and-”

He manages a huffing half-laugh at that. It’s nice to have it explained, all these months later. He’d puzzled over it for hours, late at night, staring out his window into the darkness.

She is watching him, almost smiling, her mouth twisted into an odd self-deprecating slant, and when he gives her a quizzical look, says softly, “Even now. Even now you’re not asking anything of me. not expecting-”

He frowns. “What do you mean?”

She shakes her head, wordless. Then leans forward, places her hands on his shoulders, closes her eyes and-

Ben pulls in a shocked breath, his own eyes falling shut as he feels Rey’s shields drop.

“Oh,” he says. And is lost in her.

Poe is ready to fly again. His hands are free of bandages, his face completely healed. Ben lingers at the edge of the hangar, hands in his pockets, and watches the pilot run his pre-flight checks.

Finally it’s time to go. Poe pauses at the bottom of the ladder, staring for a moment at the inside of his helmet where it’s clutched in his hands. Then he turns, glances past Finn and Rey who are hovering and fussing, and calls to Ben, “You comin?”

Ben stares at him.

“Come on,” Poe says, and tips his head toward the fighter in invitation. “Someone should get to see my magic in action.”

Ben draws his hands slowly out of his pockets and takes a step forward. “You want- me?”

Their eyes meet. “Yeah, buddy,” Poe says, quiet and kind. “Let’s take a trip together, huh?”

For a moment Ben honestly doesn’t know what to say. “I-” he swallows. “I’d really like that.” His voice is shaking, and he can feel Rey wrap him up like a blanket in the bond. He takes a breath, buoyed up, and says, “Thank you, Poe,” nakedly grateful for so much more than this one small kindness.

He is eating with his mother when Luke ambles around the corner of the cottage and Ben tenses. He can tell there’s something on his uncle’s mind.

Their eyes meet and Ben can read the reassurance there, that nothing is wrong.

“It’s time for me to do some travelling,” Luke says. He stands before them, hands clasped. Leia tilts her head up to meet his eyes. Some wordless communication passes between them and Ben’s mother relaxes just slightly. “I’m afraid the journey will take quite some time, and Kheesa has expressed a wish to remain here, rather than accompany me.”

Ben swallows the remainder of the food in his mouth in one hard gulp. Luke’s eyes turn from Leia’s face to Ben’s. “Would you take responsibility for her?”

Ben draws in a huge breath. “Uh.”

Nobody fills the silence. Ben stares at his uncle. “You’d. You’d trust me with her?”

Luke inclines his head.

Ben looks away. The last time anyone hinted at this Ben lost the plot completely and ran away. It hadn’t helped much. Hadn’t kept Kheesa at a distance, either. He takes a steadying breath and lets it out slowly.

“Her aunt isn’t coming back for her, is she.”

Luke says, “She hasn’t abandoned her niece completely. If she is needed she will return. But she understands that Kheesa requires specific training in order to master her gifts.”

So this isn’t a short-term situation.

Ben swallows. People keep trusting him with things. Running isn’t an option – or, at least, it’s not a choice he’s made. If it were, he’d have fled this planet a long time ago. Seems that he’s going to have to rise to the occasion. “All right,” he finally says. “If she’s happy to stay with me, I’ll agree to it.”

Luke smiles. Ben’s mother leans in, her face pressed to his shoulder. He can sense her pride, her trust in him, and he closes his eyes against the sudden terror. Please, he thinks. If you’re watching over me, Dad, help me not to disappoint her.

Ben runs a finger around the edge of the panel to check for any more mud. He hears a sound behind him and glances back to see Rey. “Just some mud from an ill-advised trip to the courtyard,” he tells her. “Following BB8’s bad example, I suppose. NP9 will be fine.”

There’s an enquiring sound from the droid. Ben turns back to face nNP9. “You’ll be fine,” Ben says, and a reassured beep comes in reply. He smiles.

He feels a sudden whip of affection from Rey as she watches, and lifts his head, anticipating the kiss. Sure enough, she is halfway across the room already, a hand outstretched. He can feel her wry amusement that she is so easily read, a layer underlying that of satisfaction that her touch is welcome, and beneath that the steady, sure and bottomless ocean that is their bond. She makes a face at him and then bends to press their mouths together. It’s affection and humour and liking, with a little lick of heat in the belly that promises great things in the months and years ahead. They’re not hurrying toward that, though. Plenty of time. Ben hums a little as he kisses Rey back, and feels her smile against his lips.

When she straightens she rests her hand against his cheek. “I’m heading back to the base for the rest of Kheesa’s things,” Rey says. She reaches the doorway and hesitates. “You’re sure it’s okay for me to go with Luke?”

Ben smiles at her. “It’s fine,” he says. “You’ll know if I need you,” he reminds her, and taps the side of his head. They’d hammered this out over many long nights, but he’d stood firm. The bond is for life – all the years ahead of them. If they don’t sometimes get away from each other, they’ll drive each other mad. And now that they’ve both dropped their shields, and the bond is stable – distance of light years is not enough to truly part them.

Ben knows Rey, knows her thoughts and her fears and her feelings. And he is known in return. It is a stability he had never dreamed could exist. It is the reason why he can wave her farewell on a journey of several months, and feel secure in her return.

“And you won’t be alone,” Rey replies, eyes glinting.

“Mother won’t be away that long.”

“I meant your young shadow,” she said.

He grins, tipping his head forward so his hair hides his face. “I know.”

Kheesa had been alight with happiness at being allowed to stay with Ben, at being the first to move into the cottage’s spare room. Especially since it’ll be just the two of them for a week or two, until Leia and Poe and Finn return from their diplomatic mission to the new government. She has all manner of plans for them to go fishing and attempt to hike to the peak of the mountain.

Rey’s amusement in the back of his head had been difficult to contain. Should I be jealous, she sent to him, her tone arch even inside his head.

I think she’s convinced herself she’s been put in charge of me, he’d replied silently, as Kheesa had pointed with firm authority to the spots on the holographic mountain where she’d planned for them to visit, Leia grinning and suggesting alternate routes.

It is possible she’s the more responsible of the two of you.

He’d narrowed his eyes at Rey, who’d dimpled back at him, the same way she is now – he doesn’t have to see her face to know that smile. She lets out a breathy laugh and heads for the door.

“Ben?” she says, and pauses at the doorway.

He looks up, sees her hesitating, one hand resting on the stone wall. He waits, knowing there’s something she needs to say.

She takes in a quick breath, squares her shoulders. “I love you,” she tells him.

For a moment Ben freezes, half-crouched over the droid, staring up at her. Then a smile breaks slowly through until it takes over his entire face. There’s only one reply he can possibly make to that.

“I know,” he says.