Chapter Text
It is a soft awakening, and warm.
Too frequently, when Rey had been younger, she’d awakened to the sharp pangs of hunger, a stomach that was violently protesting its own emptiness; or it would be too hot and she’d wake feeling feverish, the AT-AT walls all around her absorbing the heat of the sun and it was a race to get out of it as quickly as possible; or nightmares would prod at her until she was awake, cold sweat on her skin, alone in the dark, left behind, unloved, unwanted.
But this is a soft awakening, her body arching up because yes—yes that feels good. So good. His tongue…
She keeps her eyes closed but her hands reach down to find his hair. It’s so soft, and he’d washed it the night before so it’s not greasy this morning. She rubs her fingers over his scalp and hums happily as he licks at her.
He doesn’t always wake her up like this. In fact, usually when he tries, she wakes up from the shift of the bed, his ungainly hulking size shifting the mattress too much underneath her. But she’d slept through it this morning and oh—it’s wonderful to wake up like this.
He’d gotten the idea from her (“Like most of my best ideas,” he’d joked the first time as she was lying there, blissed out and only just awake). One morning—a month ago, maybe; possibly two—he’d been hard when she’d woken up and she’d thrown caution to the wind and shimmied down the bed and woken him with a blowjob. He’d looked close to tears when she’d finished, that wonder and delight that they’re there together, that she loves him, that she wants to jump his bones more than not, that she’d think to wake him up with pleasure when most of his life he’d woken up in pain…
But it’s easier to wake him with a blowjob than it is for him to ease her legs open while she’s still asleep, especially if she’s sleeping on her side—which happens a lot—and especially since she’s a light sleeper in the mornings.
But there is his tongue between her legs, his fingers stroking her thighs, his breath hot against her flesh. There is his hair soft against her fingers, and when at last she opens her eyes because there is nothing in the world quite like the sight of his mouth against her cunt, there are his eyes, beautiful dark brown looking up at her, watching her chest rise and fall, watching heat flush her cheeks and neck.
She shoves her shirt up over her breasts and cups them. She can feel him smile against her core. He likes this view of her, he’d told her once. Sort of how she likes the view of him spread out underneath her, the muscles of his chest and abdomen rippling and sweaty, when she’s riding his hips until she can’t breathe.
It rolls across her like the waves of the lake at first—gentle lappings of pleasure that emanate from her cunt up through her gut, up through her heart until it’s much more like the waves on Kef Bir, crashing over her, making her muscles go tense, her heart lurch, her body protest the unexpected pressure as Ben bears down on her.
And then everything is peace.
She sighs, and arches her back, and pulls herself carefully away from his plying lips. He kisses the inside of her thigh as her heart races in her chest. The good racing. The Ben racing, not fear, not anger, not adrenaline. Just Ben.
Ben, kissing his way up her legs to her stomach, up her stomach to her chest, up her chest to her neck, up her neck to her lips. He tastes like her and sleep—a horrid combination except that it’s also perfect as she tucks her knees up on either side of his hips and guides him into her.
They’ve done this enough now that it feels familiar, feels right when he slips into her. They’ve done this enough that she can feel the way his breath shudders a bit at the way she’s still aftershocking around him, gripping him and releasing, holding him then letting go. He loves the feeling of her coming around him. But he’s long past the days when just this much would undo him.
He begins to pump into her, begins to rock his hips back and forth, back and forth. This time, he doesn’t brush her clit with his fingers as he does it because he knows she’s too sensitive, that it will make it worse for her, rather than better. So instead he takes his turn, Rey wrapping her arms around his neck to kiss him, then rubbing her hands up and down his chest, cupping the muscles of his ass, pulling him closer and closer until he’s choking back some incoherent words and collapsing on top of her.
Yes, it was a soft awakening. The heat of him above her makes her feel safe, protected, wanted. She can feel his heart hammering in his chest. God, how afraid of him dying she’d been. But there is his heart, beating life and love just inches from her own.
“Good morning,” he whispers after a moment or two.
Yes, it was a good morning.
-
It’s not a castle, not by any means. He’s not even sure he’d go so far as to call it good-looking. But they’d made it with their own two hands. Remade it, really. And he’s proud of that.
We should tell Maz, Chewie says as they stand there, looking at it. There’s lots of work left to do. Furnishing the thing, for one thing. And deciding if it’s a house or if it’s…
But no. No, he doesn’t get to think about that anymore. He doesn’t have the powers. Even if it would make Uncle Luke turn over in his grave to know that Ben was helping teach the Force, that’s not his path anymore. His path, he’s decided, is that he’s going to carve art into every stone from here on out. Rey’s is the path of the warrior, the teacher, the fighter, the Jedi—if that’s what she wants—and his is the path of making work for yourself because you can’t be fucked to figure out what your path is. He’s ok with that.
“We can’t tell Maz. We can’t reach out to the Resistance,” Finn tells Chewie.
Yeah, but she’d want to know. And also do you really think she’s still with them? She always hated governance. Likes the fight, but not the scutwork. I bet you anything she’ll make her way back here sometime soon.
She’d like to see it, he repeats after a moment.
Yeah, she would.
“If she comes, she comes,” Rey says. “That’s what the Force wills, if it happens.”
Chewie grumbles something in Shyriiwook that Ben doesn’t understand. Then he marches away.
“So what next?” Rose asks. Because of course she does. If there’s one thing Ben’s learned about Rose Tico, it’s that she’s a planner. And that she can’t sit still for long. They all have that in common.
“I think furniture would be good,” Finn says, casting a glance at Ben. Am I supposed to build it? Ben wonders from the way that Finn’s looking at him. That actually might be interesting. The next thing he could learn how to do with his hands.
“I meant,” Rose replies, rolling her eyes, “What do we do with it? Now that it’s built?”
Silence stretches between the four of them—not one of them brave enough to say what’s on their mind.
“It’s whatever we want it to be,” he says at last. “A research lab, or a school, or—” he looks at Rey and his cheeks flood. He’s not going to say that out loud. Because he would mean a place for all of them, a place where they could be one another’s family, but he’s not such an idiot as to know what it would sound like.
But Rey says it. “A home.” Her hand slips into his and squeezes. She knows what he means. What he meant. What he will mean. Their Force Bond is broken, but somehow they can read one another better without it these days.
Finn’s arms are crossed over his chest. He’s frowning.
“What?” Rey asks.
“Nothing,” he says slowly.
She rolls her eyes. “No, you’re thinking about something.”
“I’m just…” he sighs. “Does it have to have one purpose? Like what if it’s people hiding from the remnants of the First Order, or kids who want to learn the Force, or an artist colony,” he shoots Ben a look that Ben doesn’t know how to react to because he doesn’t know whether he loves or hates the idea of just sitting here doing weird art projects until he drops dead. Hell, he could learn how to make his own paints and paintbrushes and—
And prove Finn right.
He doesn’t know how he feels about that at all.
“Can’t we just see how things go?” he asks.
“So a home, then,” Rey says again. “Our home.”
“I guess,” he says. “Aren’t homes supposed to be quiet and...I don’t know. Aren’t things not supposed to happen at homes?”
Because Finn wouldn’t know. He’d been taken as such a young child.
But before Ben can open his mouth to say something, Rose snorts. “Homes are the people that make them. So they can be whatever we want them to be and also be a place where we sleep and eat and rest.”
“My mom used to run Senate prep sessions out of our home,” Ben replies. “So we could probably run a Force school out of here.”
Finn shoots him a look he recognizes far too easily because it’s exactly how he’d felt when Finn had mentioned an artist’s colony.
That makes him feel better about the artist’s colony.
-
It takes Rey longer than she wants it to decide on how she wants to build her saber. She’s used to the one that had belonged to Ben’s grandfather—the feel of it in her hand, the weight of it. But it doesn’t feel natural to fight with it in some ways. She’s a hellcat who’d learned to fight with a quarterstaff, not a sword.
She remembers the vision of herself from Kef Bir, with the dual-ended saber, the one that had been a staff. Red had felt wrong to her—had felt like Ben in pain and suffering. But she had liked the form of that.
“Where would I go to make my own?” she asks him. “I need a crystal, right?”
And that’s when she learns that the crystal colors all have different symbolism. Blue and green and red and purple and gold and silver and every possible shade between them. Ben smiles as he drones on about it and she does her best to listen, even though she’s tired. She’ll regret it if she forgets this. She worries it would make him sad if she asked him to write it down so she could remember properly.
She and Finn go off to find crystals. Ben had opted out of going—firmly, and as gracefully as he could manage—and when they return, she and Finn meditate by the lake for days, imbuing their crystals with the Force. Finn’s saber sparkles blue with an edge of purple and it hums through the sunset air when he ignites it for the first time.
When Rey completes her staff, it shines somehow both gold and silver, depending on whether it is day or night. The sun and the moon, perhaps; light for light or dark.
And when she swings it it is her—the way she fights, the way she breathes, the way she defends, the way she questions. It is her beginning; it is her hard labor.
She glances at Ben, who is watching her. Finn is showing Rose his, and she’s praising the way he’d put the thing together. Rey swallows as she looks at Ben, nervous all of a sudden.
“It suits you,” he tells her quietly. There’s something jealous in his voice. Better than mine suited me, he hears without prying.
-
“Would you want to teach?” she asks him when they’re curled up in bed together. Her head is on his chest and her fingers are trailing down the line of hair between his belly-button and his groin.
“I don’t know if I could teach classes,” he says. “But I can help you with things you don’t know. If I know them.”
“You’ll probably know them,” Rey says. “The texts have some information, and Luke’s journals, and your mum taught me a lot. But there’s so much I don’t know. And I feel like you will.”
He swallows. His Force lives on in her, maybe this knowledge can too? Otherwise it would die with him. Which might be for the best but also—
—Balance.
He nods. “If there’s stuff you don’t know—stuff you don’t work out yourself. Because you’re good at that.”
She flushes slightly at the compliment. He loves it when she flushes, when she pulls her lips almost shyly between her teeth. You are everything your grandfather was afraid you’d be — completely self-made, Ben thinks proudly as he kisses the top of her head.
And him?
Re-made, he supposes. Self re-made.