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She isn't even doing anything particularly interesting when it happens.

Rey is on the Falcon, sitting in the cockpit and eating a burrito while watching the sunset, unbothered by the rice and beans that spill onto the floor because she knows that a porg will snatch up every crumb. It's a perfectly normal evening, where she isn't particularly in a good mood or a bad one, neither sad or happy. She just simply is.

Another bite of burrito, swallowed and washed down with a gulp of water, and then suddenly her mind is taken over. All she can see in her mind is darkness as she remembers what it felt like to die, and the burrito falls to the floor. A group of porgs titter loudly in celebration and swarm it, but she cannot hear them, cannot see them, because she is lost in her own mind.

Darkness. Nothingness. And then, suddenly, everything.

She is looking up at Ben Solo's face as he holds her, breathing in a breath that feels cool and cleansing as her hand covers his on her stomach. He is staring at her and she stares back, understanding what he has just done for her. It's immense relief, it's a surging joy, it's an overwhelming sense of rightness like nothing she has ever felt in her life. A oneness that cannot be denied, or destroyed, or taken. She is where she is meant to be and she's so grateful, so overwhelmed, and she kisses him because it feels like the right thing to do, the only thing she can do, the only thing she wants.

Rey kisses Ben Solo and he smiles like she is the sun and it's the first time he's ever felt it on his skin. He smiles like he feels it too, and there is this overwhelming surge of what she's been searching for her entire life. Belonging. Completion.

They are whole.

But then his smile fades and he falls away from her, going limp against the cold ground, and it's like the coin has been flipped. The sense of completion is being ripped away and she cries, clutching at his hand, because how can she lose this so quickly? How can she lose him like this?

How is over, when it has only barely just begun?

But Ben is gone. She watches with blurred vision as the Force envelops him, taking him away. From her. From everything. Rey is alone, like she is always alone, and the sob that racks her body is unlike everything she's ever felt. It's like a limb has been ripped from her body, a deep, tearing pain from which she will never recover. But then--

I will always be with you.

A voice, Ben's voice, inside her head. He lives inside of her now, with all of the rest of them, and she takes a breath. And then another, and another, until she can make her body move from where she was so sure it would be frozen for the rest of time. She breathes, and she moves, and she stands, picking up the lightsabers from where they fell.

"No one's ever really gone," she says, and then she flees the spot where she was killed and then reborn, because of him. Her other half. She leaves without him. She makes herself leave.

Flying to the base is a white-knuckled blur, but at the end of the journey is relief. Finn greets her, and she feels the fluttering panic, like a terrified bird behind her rib cage, start to recede. They're safe. Finn, Poe, Chewie, Rose. They're alive. They're alive and she hugs them and she revels in this joy, because they're all alive, except for those who aren't.

There's a desert, hot and dry and barren in a familiar way that soaks into her skin, but she is free. It is her chose to be in this desert, to pay homage, to honor and respect, and she stares down into the sand as it parts for her, stares at the lightsabers she buries because there are no bodies, and she stands.

Who are you?

It used to be such a loaded question, but she looks over at them, Luke and Leia, finding comfort in their presence, and she knows.

She knows.

"Rey Skywalker," she gasps out, panting like she's run a marathon. Her cheeks are wet and she looks out across the countryside, colors dimmed by twilight. She's crying and she can't stop, not until the sun dips below the horizon, and then she screams, overcome by a blinding rage. It's enough to send the porgs scurrying away, enough that it feels as if the entire Falcon is rattling from the force of it.

When she's done screaming, she realizes that the bond has snapped open and Ben is there, staring at her. Her chest is heaving and her face is wet and when she sees him, she wants to scream again, but she doesn't.

"Come to the Falcon," she demands, sounding wrecked, like she's been ripped apart and sewn back together. "Right now."

And then she slams the bond shut, feeling it echo inside of her mind as she lets out another loud yell, because she doesn't know what else to do with everything suddenly inside of her.

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Rey stands at the end of the access ramp, and she waits. Cold air surrounds her, making goosebumps form along the her bare arms, but she barely feels it. Everything replays in her mind over and over and over again, and she knows without a doubt that everything she saw was real.

Her head is down as she tries to regulate her breathing, and her hands curl into tight fists at the sound of his footsteps, slow and measured. She only looks up when she stops, and her throat tightens when she sees him.

and she kisses him because it feels like the right thing to do, the only thing she can do--

They've faced each other like this many times, feet apart, shoulders squared, but this time there is no light, no dark, no epic war. This time it is only them, and nothing else.

Her eyes meet his, filled with tears, and she turns around to head back into the ship, knowing he'll follow. Maybe it isn't fair to do this here, not with what this ship means to Ben, but she can't think about fair, not right now, not when he--

The sense of completion is being ripped away and she cries, clutching at his hand, because how--

She isn't giving him the courtesy of fair, not right now.

Heaving out a sigh, Ben trudged after her, baffled by how much he saw with mother in her, in that moment. Leia Organa had softened with age, with motherhood, but she had a fire in her that nothing would ever extinguish. Not even death. He had loved her fiercely for all the ways she was like him, and all the ways she wasn’t.

And he had expressed that love by abandoning her and destroying all the things she held most dear.

His boots landed heavily on the Falcon’s access ramp, the ship seeming to vibrate with the force of her rage.

Ben follows her inside and she closes the ramp, facing away from him as it grinds to a halt. Even the porgs are silent, until she suddenly whirls around and stomps towards him, throwing one hand out to use the Force to slam him against the metal wall of the ship, seconds before her hand makes contact and fists in the front of his sweater.

She stares at his face, and then his mouth, and then lets out another frustrated cry as she presses her palm against his chest and shoves herself away. It feels like there is fire in her veins, because he always makes her feel like she's on fire, in some way or another.

"Were you ever going to tell me?" She asks as she turns to face him, staying a few feet away because she doesn't know what she'll do to him. She wants to beat his chest in with her fists, wants to grab his face and pull it to hers, but instead she lets out an angry sob and stares pleadingly at him.

“Which part?” He asked calmly, despite the anger boiling in his own veins. It would have been so easy to give in to it, like he always had, but that way lead him only to pain and darkness.

“That I brought you back? That I died to do it? Or that you kissed me?” He said, ignoring the tremor in his voice. “That I was finished? Complete? And yet I woke in this place, in this purgatory, and the only thing that felt real was you?”

He laughed humorlessly.

“That’s a little dramatic, even for us.”

He finally speaks, and the calmness in it infuriates her even further. She stares at him, breathing raggedly as he speaks, chest heaving as she lets her tears fall without wiping them away.

"Any of it," she says after a long moment, and then the fight seems to leave her all at once as her shoulders slump and she reaches up to wipe at the mess of her face, turning her head away from him.

He could have told her any of it, but he chose to keep it to himself, to be alone, even after they assured each other that they wouldn't be. "I deserved to know."

“I know,” he admitted quietly, his shoulders slumping, body sliding a bit down the bulkhead she’d thrown him against.

“I convinced myself that I wanted you to rule at my side. I thought that was the only thing for us. And now, I.” I scrubbed a tired hand across his face, a gesture that was reminiscent not of Kylo Ren, but of his father. “I want to be your friend, but I’m afraid I have no idea how to do that.” He offered it not as an excuse, and barely as a flimsy explanation. Friend was too small of a word, but he’d been so callous about their bond, had tried to use it against her, to manipulate her, and now, that was the last thing he wanted. The trouble was, he didn’t know how to stop.

“What I did was supposed to be the end of it. The end of me. And now there’s more. There’s you.” He nodded to himself, sniffling as discretely as he could. “I should’ve told you.”

When he begins to speak, Rey turns back to watch him, eyes wide and bright with tears. He's really talking to her, without that dry, sardonic tone that sometimes makes her want to scream at him.

"You want to be my friend," she repeats, sounding mystified by it. The word seems so banal for what they are, so mild, but he says it like he knows that but he wants it anyway. Her lips burn with the memory of something friends don't do.

"You should have." Ben's shoulders slump and she softens, still angry but in a manageable way, less like she wants to rip him apart and more like she just wants to understand. Why would he keep this from her? Even if he couldn't make himself say the words, he could have shown her, and she would have known.

She thinks about what he's said, turning it over in her mind, and her voice trembles with a vulnerability she can't seem to hide. "It never occurred to you that maybe we weren't complete? That this place could have been a second chance?"

And then she's crying again, pleading with her eyes as she takes a few steps closer to him. "I thought we were on even footing, Ben, but this entire time you've been keeping this from me." She thinks about how she felt in that moment, the tremendous sense of rightness, and wonders why he wouldn't want to feel that again. Unless he didn't feel what she felt. The thought occurs to her quickly enough that her lips part, and she stops herself from moving closer. "Why would you keep this from me?"

Edited 2020-03-01 04:52 (UTC)

"That moment was the only good decision I've made in a long time," Ben admitted, his hands curled to fists at his sides. "It was the only thing... I can't make up for any of it. I know that, but bringing you back. Giving you back to the galaxy, it... It felt final. For me."

He swallowed thickly, his chin trembling faintly.

"I can't justify it. I'm sorry, I can't. I know you believe that I deserve a second chance, but I don't see how that could possibly be true." He took a step forward, because he could feel her holding herself back. "I've used what we have, what we are, against you over and over again. Tried to manipulate you. To hurt you. I feared that your knowledge of that moment might change your opinion of me."

A smile, rare and genuine, flickered across his face.

"I wanted it to, believe me. But I don't know if I can be the man you saw on Exegol."

Rey watches him speak, eyes widening the slightest bit as he moves closer to her. She wants more than anything for him to touch her, so she can feel her entire body hum like it did in that moment on Exegol, that brief, fleeting, perfect moment, but he doesn't.

"So-- you didn't tell me that you sacrificed your life for mine, and that we-- that I kissed you, because you were afraid that it might make me like you, and you don't think that you deserve to be liked. By me." He smiles, and Rey almost reaches for him. "Am I getting this right?"

She stares at him for a long time, unsure of what to say next. She knew that he felt remorse for his terrible actions. She's known that since the last time that she called him a monster. He has a lot to atone for, more than might be possible, but there must be a path toward redemption.

"You also didn't think that you'd ever stand on my side," Rey reminds him, drawing in the slightest bit closer to him without realizing. "And you were wrong about that."

"Liked isn't the word I would use," he said flatly, and while he might have claimed to have never lied to her, that hadn't stopped him from all those little lies of omission. The lies he told himself, which she had always been too foolish, or too astute, to believe.

"I was," he agreed, willing now to admit his mistakes. "I should have told you. It's better, that you remembered it on your own, but that wasn't my decision to make."

The tightly curled fists he held at his slides slowly unfurled.

"And you do remember it, don't you? And more, after."

Perhaps he’s right, just a little, on that count. The memories came back on their own, with no outside influence, without any prompting. Her gaze drops to his hands as they relax, and she shivers when she realizes that she knows what they feel like now, touching her skin.

“Yes, I remember,” she says, letting out a shuddering breath as he eyes well up again. It’s a rush of emotions that she has no idea how to process, and she has to make her self stay still so she doesn’t reach out and— and do what, she has no idea.

Again, she sees that moment in her mind, a vivid technicolor replay of her mouth pressing to his. Ben can see it too, she realizes. She can feel him there, at the edge of her mind, so she lets him see what came after, how she cried out in agony. “I mourned you.”

She lets him see the rest of it, what she saw of the life she lived. Her friends, safe. The glow of a yellow kyber crystal, and the dry winds of Tattooine. His voice in her head. I will always be with you.

Ben might have felt like he was complete, but she didn’t. Everywhere she went, there was a missing piece.

Edited 2020-03-03 06:50 (UTC)

"I can feel it," he confirmed, and in that moment, he'd known the choice he had made, known what it would do to both of them, but it had felt like the only logical conclusion to all the pain and suffering he had wrought. The only way to bring true balance back to the galaxy.

The galaxy needed her. It needed a Skywalker.

He reached, finally, for her hand, his touch careful, delicate, his thumb brushing across her knuckles. Her hands were strong, roughened, and while she was petite, she carried with her more power than most could fathom.

Edited 2020-03-03 19:05 (UTC)

As much as she sometimes wants to, Rey usually does her best not to reach into Ben’s mind. Right now, however, with the bond open and thrumming, she can feel his reasoning behind his choice, and she understands it. If only one of them could live, of course he would make sure that it was her. Of course he would.

And all she could do was honor it. Back in their world, it was all she could do.

Rey is acutely aware of Ben’s arm stretching out, reaching for her, but it still feels like something of a surprise when he takes her hand. They haven’t touched like this since the night of her arrival, when she gripped his hands so fleetingly in that diner.

It’s such a simple touch, but somehow it makes her blood sing. Her lips part on a soft exhale and she looks at their hands, his hand gripping hers, and she swallows hard as she moves her head to instead let her fingers fall between his, palms touching as their hands interlock.

Finally, she lifts her gaze to look at Ben’s face, meeting his dark eyes and reveling in the intensity of his gaze. She feels pinned by it, held in place, and she swallows hard before breathing out his name.

Letting out a stuttering breath, Ben stepped forward then, reeling her in gently by the hand, his other arm sliding around her shoulders. His childhood had been full of a great many hugs, all of them warm, all of them loving, but the barren stretch of time since his mother sent him away to the Jedi temple loomed before him, cold and lonely. That loneliness was, of course, by his own choice, but it was a choice he'd made for all the wrong reasons, with all the wrong information.

Pulling her against his chest didn't feel strange at all. It was the closing of a loop. The return of something lost. The acknowledgement of something gained.

Her breath hitches as Ben pulls her in and curls an arm around her, and it feels like the easiest thing in the world to lean against his chest, nose tucked into the hollow of his throat as she wraps an arm around his waist.

Rey knows that this doesn't mean that things are resolved, or that parts of her are not still furious with him, but she just can't bring herself to deny this. The memory of how it felt to lose him is still fresh in her mind and a fresh set of tears squeeze from her eyes as she presses them shut, gripping her fingers in the back of his sweater.

Before she met Finn and they grew close, Rey couldn't remember ever being hugged. The act of it had felt foreign to her, even after desperately craving some sort of contact for all of her life, any scrap of affection.

This isn't like that. This feels like making up for lost time, and she sniffles against his collar, letting go of his hand only so she wrap both of her arms around him and squeeze tightly as she buries her face in his chest.

"If I had remembered all that and you weren't here," she admits breathlessly, turning her head to press her cheek to the front of his shoulder, "I'm not sure what I would have done."

"I've been able to feel the Force my whole life," he admitted softly, "The balance, the imbalance, the tug if it, always there. Calling to me, stronger as I grew older. And it's still here. Different, but there. But this place was... desolate, for those first few weeks."

Without you, was left unsaid, but he knew she would hear it all the same.

Rey holds onto him as he speaks, feeling the rise and fall of his chest against hers. She tries to imagine it, him waking up here alone after what he did. It makes her clutch at him tighter, as if she could somehow drag him inside of herself.

“I’m here now,” she assures him, letting out a warm, shuddering breath against his neck. There must be a reason for the two of them to have found themselves here, something cosmic that keeps pushing them together. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Edited 2020-03-05 08:09 (UTC)

They stayed like that for a long time, in each other's arms, their breathing evening out until it fell into perfect unison. He was reminded, again, of the times they'd fought, not each other but side by side, always perfectly in sync.

At their feet, there was a sudden tittering, the skittering of little feet on the Falcon's entrance ramp, and Ben looked down to see a Porg blinking up at them curiously.

"I can't be the only one to find those things unnerving," he said flatly, though there was a faint smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

Rey loses track of time entirely, forgets about everything that isn’t how they fit into each other’s arms. She has never been held like this, not once in her entire life, but she knows that nothing could ever come close.

Lost as she is in this embrace, she doesn’t hear the porg until Ben draws her attention to it. She breathes in deeply against his chest before turning her head and looking down at the creature. It lets out a warbling sound up at her, and she smiles.

“Why? It can’t be because of their soulless black eyes,” she says sarcastically, before using the Force to nudge the animal gently away from them. It waddles off and Rey pulls back only enough to look up at him, feeling calm and refreshed.

His mouth is lifted in the barest hint of a smile, and she lifts one hand to touch her fingers to his chin, letting them glide upward to briefly rest at the corner of his mouth.

“Somehow I just knew,” she says quietly, sounding almost shy as she pulls her hand away from his face, “that you’d have a nice smile.”

His smile widened by a fraction and he huffed out a sound dangerously close to laughter as she sent the little creature on its way.

At her touch, he ought to have startled, but it felt nothing more than an extension of the bond tethered between them.

"I think you might be alone in that," he said, though he thought again of his mother, the warmth of her love, and how much easier it had been to smile when she was near him.

“That’s alright,” Rey assures him softly, stroking the pad of her thumb gently along the curve of his cheek before resting her hand against his jaw. “If someone gets to see it, I’m glad it’s me.”

It occurs to her that they’re still just barely inside of the ship, and she huffs out an amused laugh as her hand slides down the side of his neck to rest in the juncture of his shoulder.

“I— “ She tucks her face against his chest again, pressing a warm cheek just below his collarbone as she curls her arm tightly around his waist. “It’s very unfair of this place, I think, to make me forget my only kiss.”

For some reason that she cannot seem to put a name to, she wants him to know.

Edited 2020-03-06 05:53 (UTC)

"You remember it now," he said, his tone somewhat bemused as the conversation took an unfamiliar turn. Reaching for the hand resting against the crook of his neck, he curled his fingers around her own, his cheek resting against the crown of her head.

"That's the only thing I've ever done that I was sure of. Being by your side at the end of things."

She’s glad that her face is pressed against his chest so he can’t see how her cheeks flush slightly, and she closes her eyes as his hand finds hers. Half the things he says make it seem as if he doesn’t want to be here, or doesn’t think he deserves to be. He never would have told her any of this if she hadn’t remembered on her own, and a part of her wants to be angry with him.

But she can’t, because she’s too grateful that he’s here at all.

“But it wasn’t the end of things,” she reminds him, keeping her face hidden because this all feels so big and unfamiliar. “Not for us.”

"No, it wasn't," he murmured, lifting a hand to cradle the back of her head, his fingers sliding into her hair.

"There's nothing to do here but move forward," he said, needing to hear the words as much as he needed to say them. They were both so tethered to the past, and while he no longer wanted to raze it to the ground, there were certain things he needed to let go of, if he ever hoped to live.

The base of her skull seems to fit perfectly in the cup of his large palm and Rey shivers at the simple intimacy of his fingers sliding along her scalp. Never in her life has she experienced such tenderness, and it’s at his hands. Perhaps it should surprise her, but it doesn’t.

Ben has said something similar to her before, but this time the message is far less aggressive and she finds herself nodding against his chest. Rey spent her life waiting for parents who weren’t coming back, longing for family, only to find herself heiress to the throne on the wrong side of a war she wanted desperately to end. She loved people, lost people, fought with her life, and it still ended with her back where she started, alone in the desert.

Ben is right. There are people she misses, will always miss, but she has to keep moving forward.

“And you’ll be with me?” She breathes out, finally pulling her face away from his chest so she can look up at him, moving their joined hands to rest against her cheek. “I— I don’t want to move on from you.”

"We can't move on from each other," he said, his smile somehow full of both regret and hope. "I think we already tried that."

His thumb grazed the curve of her cheekbone, smudging through her dried tears.

"I'm with you. I'm always with you."

Edited 2020-03-14 22:21 (UTC)

Rey smiles up at him, wide and toothy, as she reaches out to rest her hand against his jaw. Their bond crackles between them, and she feels like she did in that beautiful moment after he brought her back. He gave her everything, all he had, and the enormity of that washes over her.

Except this time, she doesn’t have to lose him. He isn’t going anywhere.

“Always,” she breathes out, turning her head slightly to nuzzle into his palm. She presses a kiss to the base of his thumb and then leans in, pushing up onto her toes to wrap her arms around his neck in a tight hug. Always.

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