Chapter Text
His smile fades and he falls to the ground, his head hitting the ground with a sharp crack.
“Ben!” The yell echoes around them in the darkness and Rey lurches forward, her hands scrabbling over his face, his neck, trying to find a pulse.
She bursts into tears when she finds it. She doesn’t know why she’s crying. He’s alive .
But she doesn’t know what to heal. His head, yes—he just hit it. And there is bruising on his body from fighting, and his leg, there’s something wrong with his leg. It’s easier to heal all those things than it had been to heal the cauterized wound of her lightsaber right through his gut. There are no organs to pull back together—just veins and bones and blood.
“Ben,” she whispers to him in the dark. Her hand finds his heart again. It’s there, thrumming in his chest through his shirt. “Please wake up. Please.”
I healed him. I healed him.
He brought you back, and had his Force drained.
She reaches out with the Force, searching for that angry hurricane of power that surrounded him.
But all she finds is stillness.
Nothing.
-
Ben hears her crying in the distance. It’s fuzzy in his ears, far away, echoing. But he hears her crying.
“Rey,” he tries to say but his lips won’t move. When had they gotten this heavy? His eyelids too—they won’t open. It’s like there is a weight on his chest—different from the one he’d known all his life. He tries to reach for her but his arm is heavy. He tries to something, to anything, but he can’t. He’s less than useless.
He’s weak.
He tries to reach out to her with the Force but it’s like—
It’s gone.
It’s just gone.
-
A blast overhead expands everything.
The world isn’t just Ben lying there unconscious and Force-less. The galaxy is fighting overhead and she has to help.
The fleet! There’s still time to save the fleet!
But she can’t just leave him here like this.
“Lifting rocks,” she mutters sadly as she stands and extends a hand and—
It’s a lot. Too much. Exhausting, harder than the first time she’d tried anything like this. Whatever it was Palpatine had done to them had worked—she felt too drained to do something as simple as lift him. “Ben please,” she begs. “I’m not leaving you behind. I—”
She’d done that once and it had been hard—when she hadn’t taken his hand, when he’d been too dark to remember that there could be good and light. Now, though—he’d come back for her, he’d fought at her side, he’d—
She’d died.
The enormity of that hits her in the chest. She had died. But her heart is still beating in her chest and Ben is there next to her, unconscious and so very heavy.
She lets out an angry yell. She shouldn’t feel powerless right now! She should feel more powerful than she’s ever felt, stronger than anyone and anything. She broke the Emperor. She broke the man who broke her parents. Ben came back for her. She’s alive .
And Ben’s eyes flutter open.
-
His throat is too dry to say anything and his lips won’t move but he sees her and that’s enough. There are tears on her face, a snarl on her lips that fades the moment her eyes lock with his. She’d been crying over him. There’s relief there.
Her lips are on his again—she’s kissing him—again. She’d kissed him. And she is kissing him. Now his lips can move against hers even if his arms are too heavy. He tries to lift them. His fingers only twitch. At least they move . He twitches his toes too. Ok. That’s good. He’s not paralyzed.
He’s just heavy. Everything’s heavy.
“We have to go,” she tells him and there’s starlight in her eyes. She’s so beautiful. Beautiful and alive. The memory of her dead in his arms makes his heart squirm. She’s alive. She’s alive and she kissed him and now she wants him to come with her. “They need our help.”
“I—” he croaks.
“Ben?” she frowns as though worried he’ll say no. He can’t blame her for that.
“I need your help,” he manages. God it’s hard—physically—to say anything at all. He doesn’t care about asking for her help. He knows she’ll help him.
“What’s wrong?” Rey asks.
“I can’t move,” he replies. “At least—” he twitches his fingers, he twitches his toes again, and he sees Rey see the movement. She nods. Then she stands and pulls him to his feet and he topples over onto her.
“I can’t lift you with the Force,” she tells him. “I tried, but I couldn’t. It was hard. Whatever that was…” she doesn’t finish. “But I should still be able to carry you.”
And somehow she gets him onto her back and his eyelids are too heavy for his eyes to stay open so he closes them, buries his face in her neck, inhaling the sharp tang of her sweat and feeling safe and warm for the first time in his fucking life.
-
He’s heavy.
And huge.
She’s known this about him for years—since she first saw him looming out of the shadows at her on Takodana, a masked monster. She’s fought him, fought at his back, but she’s never had to carry his dead weight before and he’s heavy and huge . His thighs are corded in her hands, his arms draping around her neck like a mantle. At least he’s not in that padded vest anymore. That thing would probably make him even heavier.
When she gets out to the ships she has to pause. There’s no way Ben can fly a fighter right now. And though his ship looks like it has a bigger cockpit, she’s also sure that Poe’s fighters overhead would blow it out of the sky the moment they saw it. So she stumbles towards Luke’s X-Wing.
It takes all her concentration to lift him up into the cockpit before she clambers up herself. She does her best to settle him in place before settling down on his lap and lowering the hatch over her head.
She has to hunch down, but she can still get the controllers and she eases the ship into the air.
Ben doesn’t shift underneath her. She feels his breath on the back of her neck as her knees knock annoyingly against the dashboard. His heart is beating at her back. His arms dangle limply at his sides but he is alive. She’ll take that over the heartbeat of a moment she’d thought he was dead.
“That’s Red Five!” she hears through her comlink and a chorus of cheers as she twists and swerves the X-Wing through the onslaught.
She finds a medical frigate as quickly as she can, pulling her X-Wing into its deck. Hers isn’t the only ship there, but she is the only person who is climbing out of the cockpit with a second body.
“Who’s that?” asks someone she doesn’t know.
“Ben,” she tells them. “Please—I need a bioscan.” The rest they can work on, but what if he’s dying slowly? Her heart is hammering in her chest.
They bring Ben to a ward and plug him into the scanners.
“All systems seem to be functioning normally,” the medic tells her. “He doesn’t seem hurt at all.”
The medic makes to remove the scanner but Rey glares at him. “Not yet.”
“Not yet? He’s—”
“Not until I say so.”
“Ma’am, that’s not—”
And Rey ignites the lightsaber in her hand and the medic backs away.
“I’ll leave you, then,” he mumbles and scurries away down the ward to a different patient in need of his care.
Rey settles in a seat next to Ben and takes his hand in hers.
“Are you awake?” she asks him. “Squeeze if you can hear me.”
He opens his eyes again instead. They look dazed, feverish, exhausted. But his lips twitch towards a smile. Somewhere she remembers Kaydel telling Poe that it requires more muscles to frown than to smile and he should relax more. She leans forward for the third time and kisses him. It’s a quick kiss, though, and she rubs her nose against his before pressing her forehead there. “We’ll figure this out,” she tells him. “I promise, we’ll figure this out.”
His hand tightens in hers.
“I don’t think there’s anything to figure out,” he manages to say. His voice still sounds wrong. Raw. Croaky. He gives her a significant look, then says, “It’ll be easier if you—”
“Won’t it hurt?”
“Not if you’re gentle.”
She remembers him pressing into her mind. Would it be different with an invitation? She tries but for all the focus she has she can’t muster the strength to do it. “I think I’m too drained,” she tells him, her throat clogging.
He lets out a sigh and his eyes drift closed again, his hand tightening in hers. “Rest,” he tells her. “You need it.”
“Ben—”
“You do. You died.” And his voice cracks over the word. She leans forward, throwing her free arm over his chest to pull him closer to her. She’d woken up in his arms. She’d felt safe, incandescently happy.
-
Ben lies there breathing. He’d always hated meditating. He’d never been particularly good at it. I’ve been every voice in your head all your life, Palpatine had told him when first he’d seen him.
His head is empty of voices now though. It’s too quiet. It echoes—fears and anxieties. It’s gone. Everything he’s ever been is gone now. Everything he’d ever thought he could be. Let the past die. Kill it if you have to. That’s the only way you can become who you were meant to be.
It almost makes him laugh but his chest is too heavy for that.
He tries twitching his toes again. Is he imagining it or is it getting easier? He tries lifting a hand and manages to brush it against Rey. Rey who is crying on his chest, who is holding him close, who wants him, who had looked at him so brilliantly in the blue light of the lightsabers before he’d been thrown into the pit.
In and out he breathes. He’s alive and she’s alive. Everything’s different but they’re alive and she’s in his arms, and he’d held her too. She’s kissed him three times. I’m going to kiss her, he thinks, anger flaring in him. When I can make myself move, I’m going to kiss her until we can’t breathe anymore.
How long they lie there like that, he doesn’t know. But he does hear footsteps and feels Rey shift on his chest to look up and—
“What’s he doing here.”
“He saved my life,” Rey says. “He saved all our lives, Poe.”
“And what’s he doing here?”
“He’s sick,” Rey replies evenly and Ben hears steel in her voice. He hears anger.
“He should be in a cell,” Poe says acidly. Ben remembers the inner contours of his mind. The pain of his mother dying, wanting desperately to prove himself to General Organa, his rage and defiance that he even had to fight at all. Dameron. Poe Dameron. “Or in front of a firing squad.”
And again, Ben hears the lightsaber ignite. “Don’t you dare,” Rey growls.
Silence stretches between them and Ben doesn’t have to force his eyes open to know that they’re glaring at one another.
It’s a long silence. He wonders if they’re having a silent conversation with their eyes. His mom and uncle had done that sometimes.
Then Poe sighs. “I didn’t see you,” he says. “And when we land on Ajan Kloss, I’d better not. No one can. Got that?”
The lightsaber disengages and Rey’s hand is back in his.
He hears footsteps and Rey whispers, “Do you think you’ll be able to walk soon? I think people will notice me if I’m carrying you.”
Ben tries to move his feet, just a wiggle of the ankles. It’s not easy but he can do it.
“I’ll make it work.”
He brought her back to life. He can walk a few feet.
-
He is standing on his own two feet, but his motions are lurching, uncoordinated. Rey is holding his hand because his vision is blurring and his breathing is ragged and there’s this horrible pallor to his face as though he’s about to faint. He just needs to rest, she tells herself over and over again. He just needs to rest and sleep and it will be all right.
They lurk by the gang plank of the medical frigate. She’s wearing a dark grey cape and hood and Ben’s head is down which is about all they can manage to keep him from being noticeable. “We just need to get to the Falcon ,” she tells him. It seems miles away, especially with all the celebrating Resistance fighters dancing around them, hugging, cheering, singing in the trees.
She catches sight of Finn. His arms are around Rose and he’s whispering something to her. A lump lodges in her throat. No one can. Got that?
She’s not going to get to say goodbye.
“Now,” she tells Ben and her voice is harsh to her own ears. “Now, ok?”
And she leads him around the outskirts of the crowd, doing their best to stay under the cover of the trees until they reach the Falcon . She helps Ben up the gangplank leads him to the captain’s quarters, helping him into the bed. He passes out almost at once. That much she can feel through the Force.
Ok. Now I just have to figure out how to fly this by myself.
It’s as she’s settling into the pilot’s seat in the cockpit that she hears footsteps coming up the ramp. She holds her breath, hoping, praying that—
“Rey?”
It’s Finn. He’s standing there in the doorframe, his eyes steady.
“I have to go,” she says.
“Then I’m coming with you.”
“I won’t be coming back.”
“Yeah, I got that when you weren’t even going to say goodbye.”
She looks away. A traitor tear drops down her cheek and she brushes it away angrily. “I’m coming with you,” Finn repeats, that stubborn jut to his jaw. “Rey—I need to tell you something.”
“Finn,” she begins but whatever it was she was going to say vanishes from her mind the moment he says,
“I can feel the Force. It flows through me. Or whatever.”
Rey blinks at him.
“You’re Force Sensitive?”
“Force Sensitive. Yeah. That.”
She reaches out. It’s there. How has she never noticed it before? How had she not thought to look during her training, once she’d learned how to?
“So I’m coming with you,” Finn says. “Because I need a teacher.”
You need a teacher! Kylo Ren had growled at her in the snow on Starkiller Base.
She can’t not tell him. Especially if he’s being stubborn and refusing to get off the ship—refusing to leave her behind.
“Ben’s here,” she tells him. Finn’s face darkens for a moment. “He saved my life. He helped me—he—”
And the words fade away as she watches him closely, trying as hard as she can to read every line in his face, to understand what he’s thinking without pressing into his mind.
“Do you trust him?” he asks her slowly.
“Yes,” she says. “I do.” I love him. But she doesn’t want the first time she says those words to be to Finn. Ben needs to hear them first.
“Ok,” he says.
“First lesson—trust your instincts because you’re helping me fly this thing.”
“Can’t Chewie do it?”
And she hears Chewie call out from the hallway, We can hear everything you said.
Finn grimaces. “I told them during the battle. Chewie and Rose are coming too.”
And they both appear in the doorway too. Rose offers Rey a smile, and Chewie tilts his head at her and she can see that You were just going to leave? Just like that? in his eyes.
“You trust him?” Rose asks, watching Rey closely. Rey nods, but her eyes are on Chewie.
“He saved me,” she said. “When Leia died, he—”
Fine, Chewie interrupts. You don’t have to explain.
“I don’t want you to hate him,” she warns.
I don’t hate him, Chewie replies, his head tilting again. I held him in my arms when he was a baby. But that doesn’t mean I’ll forgive him.
Rey swallows. She can work with that. “That’s between the two of you.”
Chewie nods and he moves to the front of the cockpit.
Then Rey guides them to the air.
Down below, she sees BB-8 stop rolling, sees him look up, his head wiggling slightly before dropping sadly down his round belly.
I’m sorry, she thinks as she blinks back more tears. How little could she have expected her life would change when she found that droid. She’d been waiting, waiting, waiting for her family...
Palpatine. Rey Palpatine. She shudders.
She prefers Rey Nobody to that.
Rey Solo, a voice in the back of her mind whispers.
Later, she tells the voice. Ben can barely walk, and they don’t know what’s happening with his Force Sensitivity. She’s only kissed him a few times. She hasn’t even said she loves him. She doesn’t even know where they’re going yet.
“Chewie?”
Yes?
“Let’s go somewhere green.”