Archive of Our Own

Rey is lost on this planet for nearly a week before she comes across another human. 

The man that steps out from behind the outcropping isn’t someone she’s ever seen before. When her own cryogenic pod opened, somewhere in the vast jungle that she slowly trekked out of over the course of four days, Rey had heard nothing but the sound of insects in the trees, maybe some of the larger fauna off in the distance. She had been lucky, she supposed—her pod had seemingly been tossed a great distance from the wreckage, which must have drawn the attention of the larger reptilian creatures Rey has spotted darting through the trees and over the vast mountainous regions beyond her campground. 

One thing she knows: she does not want to be found by whatever’s out there. There’s nothing out there to save her.

The realization is twofold—a sword that pierces her when she thinks about it, but also freeing in its truth. 

This man though, long-haired, bearded, and covered in the filth of days without washing, isn’t one she remembers from the short communal dinners they had onboard the spacecraft prior to being put into cryogenic sleep. She thinks she would’ve remembered someone of his stature if she’d seen him before—but he’s silent, swift on his feet and able to creep up on her despite the overwhelming silence that blankets the expanse of the forest they’ve found themselves trapped in.

His heavy-lidded eyes track her as she slowly steps to the side. He wears the same contraption around his neck that she does, the base of their helmet, though that’s long since been abandoned. That’s the only kinship she feels with him; they’re from the same place and wear the same uniform. The textured, rippled sleeves of his jacket match her own. Regardless though, there’s something off about him, and it makes the greeting die behind her lips before it’s even had a chance to be born. 

It isn’t like he makes a move to greet her either. The way he emerged from the rocky ledge, silent like a gust of wind before he was right there, not ten feet from her, doesn’t reassure her of any good intentions. The gun at his side is disengaged and pointed towards the ground, but he has at least a hundred pounds on her. Rey wonders how long he’s been following her. 

Only when a tiny little girl breaks from behind the outcropping does Rey relax. The girl can’t be older than twelve or thirteen—she’s just a little thing, practically shaking in her matching uniform jacket and clutching tightly to a backpack. Rey feels her shoulder blades slide back down from where they’d been bunched up around her ears when her hackles were raised by the man’s sudden appearance. 

“Hi,” Rey whispers to the girl, a tentative smile spreading across her face. “My name’s Rey—who are you?”

She pointedly does not direct the question to the man. Even with the obvious display, him emerging from their hiding place before the little girl, Rey doesn’t trust him. Rules change in disaster. At the end of the day, he is a man, and he has to become emblematic of all men if she’s to adequately protect herself. If she looks at him like an individual, she runs the risk of forgetting the precarious situation they’re currently in—trapped on an alien planet inhabited by creatures that resemble animals from her own planet that should’ve perished eons ago.

The man looks back at the little girl who turns her eyes to his. He gives a brief nod. It disquiets Rey; they seem to have their own internal language, and unless the girl is actually his daughter or a niece or something similar, it seems strange that they’ve developed this bond so quickly. She’s only been lost in the forest for a few days, less than a week. 

Now that she’s really looking at him though, Rey goes slightly numb. They’re far filthier than her, their hair streaked with sweat and grime. The deep troughs under the man’s eyes suggest weeks of sleepless nights. Neither of them move like they’re in the early days of their abandonment—they move like silent creatures who’ve assimilated into the environment. 

This occurs to her in maybe a handful of seconds. The man’s dark eyes watch her the whole while, searching. 

“Hanna,” the little girl introduces herself, stepping closer so that she’s right by the man’s side. “He’s Ben.” 

“How…how long have you two been out here?” Rey asks quietly. Her heel slides slightly as she takes another step back, sending her heart into a flurry. She tries to steel her jaw to keep her teeth from clacking. 

Somewhere from behind them, a bloodcurdling clicking sound echoes through the air. Rey whirls around, her finger already on the trigger of her blaster. It’s just a little thing, nothing like the blaster by the man’s hip, but it gives her a sense of security. 

“We shouldn’t do this here.” His voice, for the first time; it’s raspy, low from lack of use, and maybe the man— Ben —and Hanna do share some kind of unspoken language. Rey tries to suppress the instinctive shudder that ripples down her spine at the low timber of his voice. 

When she looks back, Hanna is already huddled by Ben, clutching her backpack ever tighter to her chest, bright blue eyes already scanning the treeline for any movement. Rey nods, waiting for Ben to make a move. 

The trees rustle in the wind as Ben leads them away from the noise behind them. Rey flanks the back, ensuring that Hanna is equi-distance between the two of them should anything catch them off guard. The terrain he takes them over is only slightly less navigable as the route she took away from the wreckage of her pod in the first place; the ground is strewn with tree roots and fallen branches, slick mud making it difficult for her to get a good grip with her boots. Neither Ben nor Hanna seem to have an issue making their way across the forest floor, which speaks more to how long they’ve been out in the wild. 

Overhead, night ripples like a bad dream, the stars in the sky almost entirely unrecognizable from the ones that Rey remembers from back home. She wonders how far they are from Earth—how off-course their ship had gone before crash landing on this planet, plucked seemingly from out of time. She supposes they’re lucky. She’d been worried at first after waking out of sleep that their air wouldn’t be breathable, that she would die a quick, excruciating death, suffocating in her suit. The relief she’d felt at realizing that the planet’s atmosphere was largely composed of oxygen had been enough to almost make her feel faint. 

She wonders if her relief had come far too soon. 

They descend together down a steep hill, forced to take shorter steps to ensure that none of them slip and fall the entire distance. Rey stares at the back of Ben’s head as they make their way down the hill, eyes tracing over the mated parts of his hair, where the sweat has curled the ends.

“Three months,” he says suddenly, voice carrying even with the distance between them. Rey almost pauses in her step, remembering at the last moment to step over a particularly gnarled root springing up from the dirt. He doesn’t look back at her; keeps his eyes trained on the forest floor in front of him, cognizant always that a second’s inattention can come at great peril. 

Rey would be wise to keep that in mind. 

“H-how is that possible?” she asks, mouth dry. “I’ve only been awake for four days.”

“Your pod may have still been semi-functional,” Ben explains, his body still forward facing, though Rey gets the notion that he’s acutely aware of where the two of them, Hanna and her, are at all times. “…We’ve been looking for other survivors since ours opened. You’re the first we’ve found alive.”

Hanna hums. Neither of them look back at her. Rey somehow feels colder than she did before she met them. 

The thought of the countless other people she met in those early days on board the craft. Rey remembers families—mothers and fathers, small children in bassinets climbing up the crisp white ramp that took them to the main deck of the craft before they were each sequestered off to their living quarters. Her heart clenches, bruised and sore. Her own pain feels negligible. It hurts to think of the hundred other people lost somewhere in the jungle, maybe beyond hope. 

Ben doesn’t speak again. He’s quiet until the open maw of a cave suddenly stares back at them from around a bend. It isn’t a particularly wide entrance—it looks like something Rey would hardly notice if she were hiking nearby, not unless she happened to walk right by it. The entrance looks barely big enough for Ben to squeeze himself through. Nevertheless, that’s where he and Hanna head, absolutely sure in their steps. Rey follows. 

The cave mouth is partially covered as well; heavy vines covered in leaves hang over the entrance like they’ve been deliberately placed there to ward off any potential intruders. Ben pushes them out of the way with a big hand once they’re near the cave. He doesn’t immediately squeeze through like she thought he would—though he briefly sticks his head in to ensure the cave is still empty, he then leans slightly to the side, allowing Hanna to make her way in first. Rey’s heart softens just the tiniest of bits. 

He looks at her next. Nods towards the entrance. Rey figured he would, so she inhales shakily and moves forward, trying to ignore the hot exhale of his breath against the nape of her neck as he follows her into the cave. He’s far too close for comfort.

She tries to ignore it. Inside, the cave is littered with blasters arranged in neat rows lined up against the wall, packs of rationed food that Ben had likely taken with him from whatever wreckage he managed to find, and articles of clothing piled by the back of the cave. It’s small, intensely perfumed with the same heady scent that Rey smelt on Ben when she passed him by; his presence is fierce in the cave. The two of them have likely been here for quite some time. 

Hanna has already made her way to the back of the cave where she picks up two rolled up articles of fabric. It takes Rey a moment to recognize that they’re bedrolls—those big, puffed up sleeping bags that Rey remembers from aboard the ship. They were part of the ship’s emergency equipment, in case of an accident like the one they’ve found themselves in. At least they’ve gone to good use.

There are only two rolls in Hanna’s arms though. Rey looks behind her for more. 

“We’ll share a bedroll,” Ben says from directly behind her. Rey goes stiff. His presence is vaguely menacing behind her; she knows from the brief moments of proximity that she barely comes up to his shoulders, the breadth of his shoulders making him seem formidable even from a distance. 

“Shouldn’t Hanna and I…we’re closer in size…” Her voice is a mere whisper. 

Neither of them seem to care to listen to her. It’s like her voice evaporates into thin air. 

Hanna unrolls both of the sleeping bags and lays them against the back wall of the cave, facing the mouth so they aren’t caught off guard in sleep. Ben leaves the spot where he’d been hovering behind her, opening a container where the ration packs are stored. Even hunched over the open container, he seems big, his tricep straining against the material of his shirt, also stained with dirt and patches of old sweat.

“We sleep in shifts,” Hanna finally said, smoothing the blanket back on her bedroll. “Ben sleeps on the second shift. You can use the bed when he’s awake.”

Ben doesn’t corroborate her words, but he doesn’t say anything to negate it. It makes sense. 

One of the sleeping bags is significantly bigger than the other. Much to her dismay, Rey finds herself feeling increasingly relieved at how prepared Ben and Hanna seem to be; they’ve clearly come across several wreckage sites, maybe even the bulk of the ship itself, and they’ve taken from it everything they could carry. The cave is small, damp and the cold bites into her skin so Rey understands why the two of them haven’t abandoned their heavy uniforms despite having a nest of other clothes at the back of the cave. 

Dinner is an informal affair. The ration packs are meaty pouches with a popcap at the top; Rey squeezes the stew-like concoction from the pack into her mouth and, for the first time in days, feels her stomach rumble happily. She hasn’t been full since she woke up. 

For the first few days, she subsisted off the few fish she managed to catch from the river cutting through the forest. She’d been too scared to try any of the berries or fungi growing off the bark of the fallen trees, aware of how big of a mistake that could be. Her pod had, through the sheer grace of God, landed near a source of running water, so Rey hadn’t yet succumbed to dehydration. It’d been the same river she’d been following at a distance before running into Ben and Hanna.

“Aren’t you…are you going to ask us where we are?” Hanna asks this, sucking from the pouch that Ben handed her. 

The man in question is silent, posted by the cave mouth with his back against the wall and blaster arranged across his lap. He sits with a leg extended, the other propped against the floor. He seems always ready for something to happen, his muscles never fully relaxed. Even now, eating and resting, the tangled vines pulled in front of the cave obscuring them from view, his eyes stay trained on the sliver of open cave mouth. 

“Do you know?” Rey asks, turning back to the little girl. It’s easier to study her here; her cheeks are still puffy with youth, rosy from the cold outside which never seems to dissipate. 

“…We think we’re still on Earth,” Hanna says quietly, looking down.

Rey can hear the click in her head, like a puzzle piece sliding into place. The sweat on her neck is cold. It’s always cold. Her eyes against the floor reveal nothing. She looks up at Hanna, then to Ben.

“What do you mean?”

Hanna’s eyes dart over to Ben. “Ben…he’s um…he was the Commander on the ship. We sent messages back home but…” She trails off. For whatever reason, it fills Rey with a kind of dread she hasn’t felt since waking up alone and hungry in the middle of the wilderness. 

She’s hidden beneath fallen trees while feathered bipeds that she’s only seen in illustrations and museums passed her by, their taloned feet sometimes getting within feet of her concealed body, and still Hanna’s words make her tremble.

“How can we be on Earth?” Rey tries to say it with a laugh, infusing levity into her voice. Neither of the other two laugh with her. The smile drops a bit off her face. “Wouldn’t…wouldn’t there be a rescue crew if we…” 

She breaks off abruptly and bites her lip. Bites it so hard she worries it might bleed. Ben shifts closer to her, back still pressed against the wall. If it’s meant to be a comfort, it’s a small one. 

“The messages kept saying they’d reached their destination,” Hanna says. Her nose twitches. “Instantly. No delay like they were traveling from here to Earth.”

“…What does that mean?”

This time, Ben finally speaks. “It means home base is close enough to our current location that the messages didn’t need any time to be received.”

His face is stone when she looks over at him, betraying none of his own emotions. 

“I don’t understand,” Rey says, throat tight. 

“It means we’re in the same location. We’re on top of where the messages were received.”

“But that’s clearly…” Rey points outside the cave. “That’s not Earth. That’s like…prehistoric.”

No response to that. Both Hanna and Ben watch her as the realization washes over her. It’s too soul-rupturing to speak aloud. If she says the words, says what that means, Rey doesn’t think she’ll recover.

They eat the rest of their meal in silence. Despite the way her stomach cramps up from the information she just received, Rey forces herself to keep eating; better to be full of food and dread then empty of both. 

Night is an ever-living being just outside their home. The sound of dragonflies and a roar off in the distance reminds them again and again that they aren’t home, regardless of what Ben has said. If this is Earth, it is not the Earth they left—whatever that means. When they finish eating, Hanna helps clean up the empty ration packs, putting them back in the container where Ben found them, folded tight to ensure there’s still storage space. 

“You should go to bed,” Hanna says to Rey as she swaps the dirty uniform jacket for a softer long-sleeved shirt, draping a vest over it as well. 

She passes Rey a change of clothes from the pile; they’re surprisingly clean despite being tucked against the cave floor. The spare clothes passed to Rey are obviously less worn, much too big for Hanna but nowhere near sufficient for a man of Ben’s size. Casting a wary glance Ben’s way, Rey breathes a little easier when she sees his full face turned towards the cave opening. The pseudo privacy allows her change, though she’s quick and never more than a sliver of skin is bare to the cold air. 

Hanna falls into an easy sleep within minutes, the sound of her soft breaths filling the cave. Rey tries to latch onto that sound and let it take her off into the folds of sleep as well, but her chest is far too tight to fully relax into sleep. On her own, she’d slept in fitful half hours, up in trees and burrowed under logs to ensure that none of the—she hesitates to say the word, but dinosaurs—creatures were able to get at her. 

She can’t fully let go here either, despite the seclusion. Ben faces the maw of the cave, his eyes still trained on the hanging vines. It reassures her somewhat, but not enough. 

“Thank you for finding me,” Rey suddenly whispers, knowing he’ll hear her. “And for…bringing me with you.”

He doesn’t answer for such a length of time that Rey thinks maybe he won’t respond at all. He’s a quiet man, taciturn. The unease she felt at first still persists, still humming under her skin like a sixth sense, but she wonders if maybe she’s been too quick to judge.

“It wasn’t an act of charity.” That makes her look over.

The darkness is a slash across his face, shrouding his right eye in shadow. His lips, when they part to speak further, are plush even under the scruff of his beard. She wonders if he is usually clean shaven or if this is how he has always looked. His words suddenly register. 

“Pardon?”

“I would’ve taken you with me with or without Hanna.” The words fall over her softly, then with a sudden spike of alarm. “But now that I have Hanna, it wasn’t negotiable.” 

Rey stares across the cave at him. He’s the same man. Off in the distance, something large and hungry roars. She’s had a drink of water but her mouth has never been so dry. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She asks. She doesn’t want to know. 

This time, he doesn’t answer and maybe that’s a small blessing. She’s still safe. Despite the uncertainty of this man, and how the bulk of him rests against the wall like maybe he’s there to ensure that nothing gets in or out of the cave, she has a full belly and a cot to sleep on and the security of a pack of sorts. She rests back against the sleeping bag and waits until her eyelids grow heavy, watching Ben through the slit in her eyes until darkness wells up like spring water and takes her under. 

There’s never a warm morning on this planet.

It doesn’t help that Hanna shakes her awake at an oddly early hour, notifying her that it’s their shift. The little girl looks oddly at ease, even at something like three in the morning—it’s hard to be sure of the time of day, especially since Rey doesn’t have a watch or anything to tell the time with, but it’s still dark outside the cave, so it’s probably a good guess. She’s probably relieved to have someone else awake with her; Rey knows from experience how lonely it can be to sit alone for hours on end. 

Ben is still posted by the opening, but once Hanna and Rey put their original uniforms back on, carefully folding their sleeping attire and putting it back against the wall, he stands up, shrugging the strap of the blaster off his chest. He doesn’t say a word to either of them as they swap places, just nods at Rey with the same neutral look in his eyes. He gives nothing away. 

When Hanna passes him by, his hand comes down on the top of her head, ruffling her hair a little. It’s an intimate moment and Rey’s eyes flit away to give them some semblance of privacy. Ben whispers something to her and she nods, a brief smile gracing her lips. There’s something vaguely paternal about the gesture. 

To her, he’s not. Ben’s eyes still follow Rey wherever she moves. She tries to keep her head oriented the other way while Ben changes into his own sleepwear, blushing because she knows he doesn’t have the same compulsion to stay mostly clothed as she did when she changed. When he lies down on the bed she just woke up in, she sees him draw a deep breath in, eyes shuttering closed. 

Ben falls asleep between one blink and the next, almost instantaneously. There’s almost no shift in his body language between wakefulness and sleep—the same stiff posture, on edge like he’ll wake up at the slightest unusual sound. The blaster lies beside the sleeping bag, disengaged but still within arm’s reach. 

He looks softer in sleep, but just. Rey fights with herself to peel her gaze off his slumbering form and back to the entrance of the cave. The moon hanging in the sky is visible in the slight gap between the vines and the rock wall of the cave; looking at it now feels unreal, knowing what she knows. In days previous, Rey had looked up at that same moon and thought, How unusual, how alike all of our planets are in the end. That voice is quiet now. 

“What are you looking forward to?” Rey asks Hanna in a low voice, aware of how far their voices can carry. “Once we’re rescued.”

The young girl gives her an odd look, frowning. The way her nose scrunches up is almost adorable. Rey wants to drag her thumb across Hanna’s forehead to smooth out the frown. Still though, something about her expression troubles Rey.

“Rescued?” Hanna repeats, confused.

“Yes—I mean, I know we’re…” Rey swallows, doesn’t chase that thought. “But I promise you, people are looking for us. Even if the call wasn’t received, someone will find us.”

Hanna’s deadly quiet, looking at Rey like she doesn’t understand something. It’s unnerving. 

“We’re not going to be rescued,” Hanna says, turning her head back to look outside. 

Rey’s stomach clenches. 

“What about your mom—or dad—or—” Rey stutters over her words.

“Ben’s my dad now.” Hanna’s gaze only briefly strays to where Ben is lying, seemingly asleep. His facial muscles don’t move. In sleep, he breathes like when he’s awake, quietly. “Ben rescued me. We don’t need anyone else.” Her eyes shift back over to Rey. “And now we have you. You’re our family now.”

Rey tries to be sympathetic. She tries to understand how a little, traumatized girl living in the forest for upwards of three months might give up hope on being rescued. In a way, Rey’s late wake-up call has been a bit of a blessing; she has no such bitterness. A large part of her still believes with absolute certainty that they will be rescued. 

What does make her nervous is the thought of what exactly Ben has been saying to Hanna. As an adult, he should have been kindling the flames of her hope, keeping it alive even in the abjectly horrific conditions of their current circumstances. She’s not sure that’s been the case. Rey studies his face again in sleep—the scar bissecting his right eye, the bump on his nose, the deep set of his eyes. 

Nothing about this bodes well.

Hanna doesn’t look like she wants to talk anymore, satisfied with what she’s said. Rey wants to prod her further, but there’s a part of her that realizes this might not be the best time. Their relationship is tentative, budding; it’s been less than five hours since they met. Given the choice, Hanna will take Ben’s word over hers every single time. Rey isn’t an idiot. Tomorrow, she’ll ask him about exactly what he’s said to Hanna. There has to be an explanation.

If Ben is a commander, he has to know that it’s almost certain that there’s a team already on the way. They’re too valuable. There were over a hundred individuals on their ship—dozens of people more important than her. Rey was granted a spot as an engineer, a valuable commodity when terraforming a new planet, but there were governors and astronomers on board. 

She stares out into the darkness and hopes. The hours slip by like fireflies. 

Later, when Ben’s awake and they’ve had breakfast, Hanna lets her know that they usually go out in the morning to scout for food and other resources. It’s quieter in the early morning, most of the larger dinosaurs still sleeping until the sun is higher up in the sky, warming their blood. The early mornings are cool, much too cold for any reptile to be awake and alert the way they are, as mammals. It’s strange being reduced to her biology in such a way, but Rey knows it’s true. Even when she was alone, she took advantage of the near stillness of the early morning hours. 

She manages to get Ben alone for a second when Hanna has to pee. She doesn’t go very far, for fear of some large creature suddenly snatching her when Ben isn’t close enough to keep her safe, but they afford her just enough privacy to discreetly expel. 

“Did you…did you tell her that we aren’t going to be rescued?” She asks in a quiet hiss. Rey doesn’t want to go burning bridges when she only met the two of them yesterday, but she feels oddly protective of the little girl. Even now, her eyes dart over to where Hanna is partially hidden behind a tree. Still there, safe.

Ben levels her with a look. “There isn’t a here anyone can rescue us from. We’re sixty-five million years in the past, Rey.”

The thought is sobering. Rey shakes her head. “They’ll find a way. I mean, we got here. If we did it once, they can figure out how to do it again.”

“They will look for us in the depths of space for years and never find a thing.” His voice crawls out of his mouth and it is dark and terrifying. Her world collapses with each syllable. “We can’t even know if they’ll come to the same conclusion as we did. They might think us all dead. We need to proceed like this is the only way forward, like this is our life from now on. Hanna needs to know the truth if she wants to live. That’s the only thing we have left.” 

Rey didn’t think he could talk for so long. She wishes he would shut up. The moss on the trees glistens with dew, the greenest thing she’s ever seen. The thought of it being all she’ll see for the rest of her life—her eyes well up with tears. “You don’t really think that, do you?”

A hand cups under her chin, pushes her head up to look at him. Ben’s close now, so close she can smell the musk coming off his skin. His hand is so much bigger against her skin, rough and worn from months of foraging in the dirt and climbing trees. He’s weathered a whole new world for longer than she can imagine. Rey wonders how it’s changed him. 

“You’ll know what I think soon enough.”

Hanna rushes back over once she’s done, unperturbed by the sight of Ben holding Rey by the chin. Her heart skitters in her chest the longer he holds her there, so it’s a small relief when his hand falls away. 

Ben relieves himself as well, leaving the two of them alone for a handful of minutes. Rey already peed earlier in the morning, abandoning the cave briefly because she isn’t as concerned with sticking together as the two of them are; she’s wandered these forests alone for probably longer than the two of them ever have separately.

“What kinds of things have you seen?” Rey asks, still quiet. She winces when she can hear Ben pee; it’s not something she ever wants to get used to. She hasn’t abandoned the decorum of civilization just yet. She’ll pee in private. 

“We’ve seen fire across the sky,” Hanna says, eyes bright. “All kinds of dinosaurs. Huge trees. Bugs as big as your hand and bigger.”

“Wow. Was it scary?”

Hanna shakes her head. “Not anymore. Dying is scary. Being alone is scary.” A break in the light as a cloud passes over them; a brief shroud of shade. “Being with Ben? That’s not scary.”

Ben returns and shakes the hands he dunked into the river to clean them. His stride takes him across the forest floor to them in seconds—long legs, quick movements, ideal for their new environment, Rey thinks. He might actually be perfectly suited for it, in fact. Not her. She misses tinkering, the coldness of metal, the sip of a hot chocolate after a long workday. 

Rey’s quiet as they trek through the forest. Suppose this is their lot. What will life look like from this point onward? It won’t be a sumptuous kind of life. She flanks the back of their group again and watches Hanna and Ben go on ahead, never ceasing in their strides. She can’t say if this is where she wants to be, but until she knows for sure—knows for sure that no one’s coming…

She breathes in. 

The lightness of the day while there is a day. They find another lifepod, but a branch pierces through the glass and Rey covers Hanna’s eyes to avoid her seeing the slash of blood across the inside of the pod. Her throat clenches so tight that it hurts to breathe. Ben shakes his head at her as Hanna peels her hand off her eyes.

“She’s seen them before,” he says quietly. 

It’s easy to forget that they’ve lived a whole season without her. Of course they’ve come across other pods before—she’s the only other person they’ve found on a ship of a hundred, after all. It isn’t like the other pods just ceased to exist. Ben tells her about the bodies that scattered the grounds outside the hull of the ship—the crew and pilots, he the only survivor from that part of the ship. Hanna doesn’t speak. 

Each of the lifepods have resources encased in small containers along the sides—a failsafe of sorts. Not enough to last a particularly long time, but enough to get by for a few days. Rey sorely regrets leaving hers behind—she hadn’t been thinking clearly at the time, thoughts wild in her sudden emergence into an alien world where the first thing she saw was a grazing dinosaur. In retrospect, it hadn’t been a threat to her, but life does not deal in the looking back. 

They take whatever they can. Ration packs, a life vest, a change of clothes. Rey says some words for the dead passenger, whoever it was. Hanna and Ben stay quiet, ready to depart the second she finishes. Their sentimentality has long since been bled out. 

The land they walk across seems now familiar, even in its unfamiliarity. Rey knows the world was a different place sixty-five million years before her birth. The trees, though towering and wider than anything from her former life, carry with them a shadow of the self they will one day become. She flinches when a flock of pterosaurs burst overhead, but they don’t notice the group of three humans clustered beneath the trees. 

“What are we going to do for food once the rations run out?” Rey murmurs into Ben’s ear when they sit for a short break. Hanna munches on a nutrition bar, another kind of ration packed in each of the lifepods. 

He looks down at her. “Hunt.” 

“I can fish,” she offers. “I did that for…before you two found me.”

A shadow of a smile gusts past his face. “That too.” 

They return back to the cave long before the sun is at its highest point in the sky, wary of the activity soon to come. The sounds of trees cracking and breaking, the movement of dinosaurs through the forest, comes only minutes after they arrive back home. It makes the hair on the back of her neck stick up, but Rey is grateful they have a place at all. 

Do the hours pass faster now that she has people to talk to? Hard to say. It certainly makes bathroom breaks more uncomfortable. It makes Rey especially aware of the hair under her arms that she, in regular times, would’ve shaved, but now has to grow accustomed to. She realizes in the moments of inactivity how much she’ll have to change for this to become her new normal. Alone, change didn’t seem as much of a hassle. It becomes real when she realizes she has an external presence that other people see and recognize. 

Still, she doesn’t let herself get comfortable. Despite the company, Rey still feels acutely aware of the silent bond between Ben and Hanna; the way they make eye contact and seem to communicate something that they don’t bother to include her in. She wasn’t there for the early days, back when this bond was first made, and she wonders whether that means the door to that is shut to her forever. 

It opens for her briefly. 

“Did you have any family on the ship?” Hanna asks over dinner. She sucks back another ration pouch, smacking her lips as she does.

Rey smiles ruefully, shakes her head. “No. I was alone.”

“My mom was with me,” Hanna says, her smile dimming a bit. Something mists over her eyes, but it’s gone in the next second. “…We found her by the river.” She doesn’t say anything more. 

Rey thinks of something she can say, but the endless possibilities of sorry’s and oh no’s and everything in between crowd in her mouth until she realizes that there isn’t a word. There isn’t a single word. There’s a sound that passes seamlessly over the event horizon of them and then disappears. She puts her arm around Hanna’s shoulder and tugs her close. The little girl nestles her head beneath Rey’s chin. 

Ben watches from the other side of the cave. He doesn’t blink. 

Night falls again. 

Ben sits closer to her this time, within arm’s length. He still watches the cave opening for signs of movement, but his closeness makes it impossible for Rey to sleep. Instead, she lays there with her eyes open just to slits, observing him under the cover of night. She feigns sleep. Beside her, Hanna’s soft breathing carries through the cave, the girl truly well and out. 

“Are you going to pretend all night?” 

Every time he speaks, something new happens inside of her. Tonight, it’s the sudden skip of her heart, missing a beat. Rey blinks her eyes fully open; Ben doesn’t look over at her, but somehow he knows that she isn’t asleep. 

“How did you know?” She whispers. 

His eyes shift over to her, dark, inscrutable things. “It wasn’t hard to tell. You’re a nervous little thing.”

She sits up, red in the face but short of temper. “You can’t speak to me like that. Hanna’s right over there.” Her eyes glance over briefly, trying to ascertain if Hanna is actually asleep. The little girl doesn’t budge in her sleeping bag. 

The presence at the base of her sleeping bag is a person, she knows that—Ben is real and human, flesh and blood like her, but there’s something different about him. Hanna too. Rey knows they aren’t the same as her. Maybe they’ve been here for too long. Maybe it’s something in the air or the isolation of being on this planet for months on end or the weathering on their souls from going week after week with no signs of a rescue ship. It’s done something to them. When he looks at her, it isn’t entirely human-like. There’s something else behind his eyes.

“Hanna understands.” 

“What does that mean?” Rey sputters, scooting back against the wall. She keeps her voice down, in spite of her annoyance with the man sitting next to her. 

He follows her, scooting closer too. “It means that you’re important to the both of us.”

“We only just met. I mean—” Here she loses her nerve, anxiety clogging her throat. “—You’d feel this way about any other person. We’re important to each other because we’re human.”

His eyes crinkle at the edges but he doesn’t smile. “Not quite.”

“What then?” She asks. “And how is…how is being ‘important’ grounds for talking to me like I’m—” Again, it doesn’t pass her lips. 

His hand comes down heavy on her foot then, reaching up until he circles her ankle overtop the blanket. Rey’s whole body goes stiff and she looks down. His hand dwarfs her slender ankle—if the blanket weren’t in the way, his fingers would easily overlap. Her heart skitters in her chest; she knew to be wary of him. There’s a strength in him that she’s seen come out in bursts—lifting a piece of ship they’d come across to flip it over and scavenge out its innards, climbing a sheer rock face to see ahead of them into the forest, even just the flex of his muscles under his uniform. She has to be careful.

“Hanna’s young.” His voice is gravel, deeper than deep. “She needs a stable family.”

“She has a family,” Rey whispers, cracking on the last word. 

“She had a family,” Ben corrects. There’s a pause and then his voice like a whip crack. “I’m her dad now. Since I found her, I’ve thought of myself that way. But she misses her mom.”

“Her mom is dead.” She can’t imagine her voice being any lower. It’s a wonder that Ben can hear her at all. 

He smiles, with teeth this time. “And so is her dad. Here I am though.”

It takes her a minute to face what he’s saying, but when she does, Rey narrowly avoids diving for the mouth of the cave and making a break for it. “You can’t expect me to pretend to be—”

“It won’t be pretend.” The look he levels her with is significant. Her breath catches in her chest.

The cold of the cave is almost negligible when contrasted by the cold in her chest. He’s handsome, yes. In another world, in another time—if they had arrived at their destination and Rey had seen him from across the compound and he’d met her eyes, she might have drawn in the courage to talk to him. She can’t deny how looking at him makes her feel (needy, cloying, demure), but she’s clinging to the scaffolding of civilization, which says that this can’t be how any coupling starts. Just because it’s the three of them. Just because he looks at her like he wants to eat her. 

“You don’t even know me.”

“It will be good for all of us,” Ben says instead of responding to her words. He squeezes her ankle. “Hanna needs a mom—and I need you too.”

She doesn’t fall back asleep after that; she falls silent, but not asleep. If Ben knows that she lies there, motionless and quiet, his hand still heavy on her ankle like a cuff or a chain, he doesn’t acknowledge it. 

There’s birdsong in the air the next morning, but Rey doesn’t pay it any mind. They swapped shifts just a few hours before; her eyes burn from lack of sleep. She looks at the girl sitting opposite her by the mouth of the cave, who has become precious in their short time together, and understands what she has to do. Ben sleeps soundly on the other side of the cave from them. If she’s going to do this, there isn’t much time left.

“Do you mind if I go pee?” Rey asks Hanna, feigning casualness. 

Hanna nods, giving her a thumbs up. She doesn’t expect anything. Obviously not; in the short time they’ve been together, she hasn’t known Rey to lie. She doesn’t know Rey at all. 

Once Rey breaks away from view, away from the maw of the cave, she makes a break for it. Her feet are light under her as they carry her down a hill—she jumps over a fallen log half-sunk into the dirt and keeps running straight. This initial ground is the most important for her to cover. In a matter of minutes, Hanna will realize that Rey hasn’t returned from her bathroom break and will call out her name, to no response. After that, she’ll rouse Ben from sleep. 

So she runs until her lungs burn and her throat tastes of blood, of rust. It’s still early in the morning, so Rey doesn’t worry about dinosaurs or any of the other gargantuan creatures that call these forests home. 

She follows the river for some time, knowing that if she strays too far from her only source of water, she risks something far worse than whatever awaited her with Hanna and Ben. That thought hurts her heart. She stumbles, rocks cascading under her feet, and slows to a walk; she’s far enough now, possibly, she thinks. With a glance behind her, she sees that the forest is still. Not even the sound of Hanna’s voice penetrates this far into the woods. 

It doesn’t make sense that she’s suddenly so glum. There’s a reason she ran—Rey recalls the look in Ben’s eyes the night before, his insinuation that they would be a family, not just in name. She remembers the heat that flooded her body at the thought. 

Rey knows what he looks like under those clothes. He doesn’t make an effort to hide the broadness of his chest and the sculpted muscles of his pecs and arms when he changes at night and in the morning. It might not have been a hardship. A strong part of her adamantly did not want to leave their nest (she flinches thinking of the cave as such). She did not want to leave her little Hanna.

She stops for a drink, bending over the river and looking herself in the face. Her cheeks are pink, hair streaked with dirt and debris, and still—she thinks, guiltily—still Ben looked at her like that and thought he’d like to have her under him. Rey curses silently and cups her hands into the water to splash it against her face. 

It’s not right to think that way. Someone will come. Someone will find them. She isn’t Hanna’s mom anymore than she’s Ben’s wife. 

A crack from somewhere behind her. Rey doesn’t whirl around because her heart stops. Another crack. It’s almost too difficult to move, her body frozen in place looking over the water. It should be too early. The movement behind her is loud though and far too close for comfort. Her own wild hazel eyes stare back at her from the water until another crack breaks through the silence and the water ripples.

The fight comes back to her. Rey dashes for a tree, ducking behind it. Her heart slams in her chest, breath already huffing out like her lungs won’t let her take enough in. She bends and peaks her head out just enough to look.

On the other side of the river, a large shadow suddenly glides over the water. She watches in a dazed sort of shock as a huge, feathered head emerges from the woods—Rey’s seen the shape of this creature before, in bone. On television. In movies and books and—the Tyrannosaurus is a singular creature up close. Magnificent. But she is prey here. It isn’t like watching the same creature on a screen when her tender flesh and ripe smell must put a target on her. She trembles behind the tree. 

A big hand wraps around her mouth, stifling any noise. Rey knows it’s him from the earthen scent clinging to his clothes. “Easy, kit,” he shushes her, lips dragging against her ear. On the other side of the tree, the Tyrannosaurus treads across the forest floor with heavy steps. She could almost feel the ground vibrate beneath them. It pauses for a drink. 

Ben keeps her close to him, his right hand on her mouth and his left arm a band across her chest. His body is raging hot against her, engulfing her almost. Rey can’t remember the last time she was this close to someone. The minutes that pass are endless, but he doesn’t let her go until the beast lumbers off, more rotting wood cracking under its feet as it goes back into the forest. 

He doesn’t let her go even then, his rough hand still clamped over the bottom half of her face. Rey whimpers. Ben shushes her again, presses a kiss to her sweaty head. His lips are also rough against her skin, not plush like they might’ve been in a better climate. Adrenaline still rushes through her body, but it’s like being held so close to Ben somehow calms her down. 

His lips hover near her ear. “It’s okay—I’m not going to ask why you left.”

It’s ominous. She trembles again, but this time not because of a dinosaur creeping up behind her. 

He goes on: “Do you know how Hanna felt when she realized you were gone?” He doesn’t wait for Rey to shake her head or make a sound. “Guilty. She thought it was her fault that she lost sight of you. You made our darling girl cry.”

Now it’s her own guilt heavy in her chest. It’s what Rey expected though; hadn’t that been why she’d run so fast, gotten so far away from them? Not as big of a lead as she thought, anyway. Ben presses on, nipping at her ear to call her attention back to him. 

“When we get back, you’re going to tell her that mommy just went for a walk, alright?”

The word makes her dizzy. He hadn’t said it out loud the night before; the insinuation had been there, but now in the light of day, Ben calling her Hanna’s mom makes it all too real. 

“Mommy and daddy just needed some alone time, right?” He breathes, tracing the side of her face with his nose. His breath shudders over her skin. 

Ben’s hand lifts momentarily off her mouth, just enough for Rey to whisper, “Ben, Ben, please—” and then his two forefingers slip past her parted lips to rub over her tongue. The lust that zips up her spine and into the back of her brain feels as prehistoric as wherever they are; her own breath catches so quickly in her throat that she almost chokes on it. 

His other hand moves as proprietarily, clutching her between the legs suddenly. His grip is firm, holding her there to make a point. Rey feels entirely malleable in his hands, made more real because he touches her. All thoughts of escape are distant, from a different version of her that’s now scampering down some hill or hanging from the jaws of a dinosaur, losing the last of her blood. This version of her whimpers when Ben pushes his fingers against her clothed opening. 

“We’re going to get you out of these,” Ben murmurs into her ear, already tugging at the waistband of her pants, shucking them down her hips and Rey steps out of them willingly because the fingers in her mouth wipe away any thoughts of resistance from her brain. It takes nothing for her to listen to him. “Come on, honey, step out of those.”

He strips off his own clothes from behind her, not bothering with Rey’s jacket top, which crisscrosses over her torso. It’s enough for him to pull her pants and underwear off, tossing them into a pile not far from them. 

It’s no effort at all for him to get her onto her back and Rey wonders where all of her bravado is now. His jacket hangs open, exposing enough of his hirsute chest to make Rey’s thighs tremble, her core clench. Ben only roughly pulled his pants down to mid-thigh, so his cock hangs in the air, ruddy and swollen. Big. The noise that comes out of her is animalistic. 

She isn’t wet enough, not yet, so Ben spreads her legs wide, until her inner thighs burn, and spits directly onto her clit. Her hips jump, the action taking her off guard. “Ben—”

“You call me fucking daddy or you call me nothing,” Ben growls, pushing his thumb against her clit. Rey lets out a loud moan, then clamps her own hand over her mouth for fear of being too loud. 

“D-daddy—” she mutters through her fingers, “Pl-please, I’m—”

“Just give me everything you have, alright, honey?” Like it’s nothing to ask. His thumb swirls over her clit, making her blood heat up so fast that Rey has to clutch the hand over her mouth with her other hand to hold it in place. Her whines barely seep through. “That’s all I want. I want your pretty little pussy and your attitude and your sweetness and I want all of it and everything else you have to give.” 

He ducks his head for a lick when he thinks she’s wet enough. The swipe of his tongue, the texture of his tongue over her slit, makes her leg kick out, nearly getting him in the head. Ben chuckles and shuffles closer to her. When he angles his dick and notches the head into her opening, it all comes rushing back to Rey. She’s in too deep though. 

Her back arches off the ground, littered with dead leaves and berries that leave dark purple stains on her jacket, when he pushes into her. The first man she’s ever slept with and it’s on a version of the planet sixty-five million years in the past or in an alternate dimension. It’s enough to have her almost howling. The length that pushes into her should be too big—she’s too small, they can’t possibly fit—but Ben grinds his hips down and the sound of her own wetness giving way to him is almost too much.

The breath leaves him in a gasp, on the side of relief. When Rey looks up at his face—too handsome, even mud-streaked, even littered with nicks and scars from this life or the life before it—Ben smiles down at her.

“You’re going to be my little girl’s mommy,” Ben rasps, clutching Rey by the throat as he moves over her. His cock slides into her again and again, pushing a space for just himself inside of her. “We’re going to be a family. I’m going to take care of you—” Here, he pushes the whole of his cock into her, holding himself there and Rey has never felt so full, like he’s in her everywhere. “—Forever, even if we find someone else, even if there’s another man—you’re both mine for the rest of our fucking lives.”

She realizes too late that he gives no thought to protection. She’s on the shot, but that was almost three months ago by their count, even if she was in cryogenic sleep. 

“Y-you have to—to pull out when you—” She gasps, can’t say the words. 

Ben’s grin is wicked, a flare of heat in his eyes she’s never seen before. “Don’t you want to give Hanna a sibling?”

“It’s—it’s dangerous!”

“Don’t worry, honey,” he pants, fucking into her again and again, hips never tiring. “I’ll protect you. You just lay back and take what I give you.”

She can’t think longer on what it might be like being pregnant on this prehistoric continent so far away from home. She can only take what Ben gives her; and he gives her it again and again and again until she’s near boneless with exhaustion and Ben pulls his softened cock out of her with a smug look in his eyes. 

When they stumble back home, Rey does not think about how she can feel Ben’s seed leak down the side of her leg. She can only smile when Hanna comes into view, croaking out an apology that she hopes sounds sincere, despite the leaves in her hair and Ben’s grin. The young girl scrunches up her face, not fooled for a second, but she doesn’t think Rey left because of her and that—

Rey looks back at Ben. His eyes are dark on her. That’s good, isn’t it?

The months go by. In the early mornings, the three of them scour the miles that surround their camp for supplies and any signs of life, the former of which slowly dwindles while the latter never appears at all. Ben fashions himself a makeshift spear and starts to hunt some of the smaller game—lizards that dart across the ground as they trek the forest, oviraptorids that don’t manage to fly off when he comes into sight. Rey teaches Hanna how to fish. 

Maybe they aren’t going anywhere. The thought of rescue remains lodged in her mind for a long time, always just a couple thoughts away, until the day her stomach starts to swell. Just a little bump that Rey wakes up to and suddenly her mind is clear of all but how Ben’s eyes mist when his palm cups her belly and Hanna has to hold back a screech of joy. 

She knew that there had once been a moment of singular clarity and, then, the moment of divergence. Another Rey existed in someplace that had made it away—that had gotten everything she wanted.

However, the thought of that did not change her circumstances; she wanted to, but could not, resent the impenetrable. That version of her existed in some other dimension with all of the qualities she lacked. That version of her was as remote as a daydream. Rey could not interrogate her or stare her other self down; she could not anticipate her actions anymore than the other could anticipate her own. 

Besides, even in the ever looming danger, the constant threat of predation or the annihilation of their small family, it is a gift to have one at all.

So she does not say anything when, one day, in the early hours of the morning, over the clear blue horizon, Rey watches as a spaceship descends out of the sky.