Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There’s a man standing on the paved path in front of her, blocking almost the entire thing.

Rey’s pretty sure she’s not supposed to see him.

For one thing, people don’t just usually go walking around dressed in all black and carrying a… a scythe? For another, well, the jogger who just casually went by completely ignored the man like he wasn’t even there, but glared at her for being in the way--and she’s not in the way, there’s a whole entire path for the lady to run on. If anyone’s in the way, it’s the big lump in front of her! But the jogger lady doesn’t even look at him.

Thus, Rey’s sure that jogger lady doesn’t see him.

She sneaks a bit closer, curious, and shifts her small bundle of flowers into her right hand, reaching out with her left to poke him--maybe he’s not real, maybe she’s just insane like Matron had called her, right before she ran away.

But her finger comes into contact with something very solid, and, in case that wasn’t proof enough, the man snarls out a curse (one of those nasty words Matron had said she’s not supposed to say) and spins around.

He’s definitely real.

Rey looks up--and up, and up--to where his face should be, but she can’t see anything underneath the hood of his black cloak-robe- thing. She refuses to let that daunt her (and maybe someone who’s sane would be scared of the scythe, but she’s not sane, and so…) and instead smiles up at him.

“I was jus’ checking to see if you’re real or not, mister,” she explains, “since jogger lady couldn’t see you.” She tilts her head to one side, frowning. “Why are you hiding your face?”

The man jerks a bit, tilting his head (or his hood, at least) down to look at her. “You shouldn’t be able to see me.”

“I’m Rey,” she says. “Are you sad, mister? Lots of sad people wear black. Here, you can have my flowers!” And she offers him the bundle, bouncing eagerly on her toes.

“How can you see me?” he asks, not even acknowledging her. “No one here can see me--just you.”

She shrugs, bounces a little more. “What’s your name? Have you ever smelled these flowers before?” And then she frowns, again. “Why won’t you put your hood down? Matron says it’s not polite to ignore somebody else’s questions.”

“I’m not a polite person,” the man says with a shrug, but he reaches up and puts the hood down anyway. “I suppose it can’t hurt. Death,” and then at her obvious confusion, he adds, “that’s who I am.”

His face is… strange.

His hair is long and black and almost wavy, and he has pale skin and a big nose and a black burn scar running down one side of his face. His eyes are dark, too, with a weird wrong almost blankness in them, like he’s trying to hide himself (and she decides that’s not okay). Strange… and yet, pretty, too, like some kind of dark angel (she remembers the pictures, from the books Matron had had, even though she wasn’t supposed to touch without permission).

“Everybody can be polite,” Rey says, frowning at him. “It’s a choice you make. Death’s not a name.”

He blinks, surprised, almost… guilty? “You’re right,” he agrees, very seriously. “You are very smart. How old are you, Rey?”

She keeps her lips pressed together, raises an eyebrow, and waits.

It takes him less time than she’d expected to realize what she’s waiting for; he lets out a huff of air and groans. “Ben.”

“Nice t’meet you, Ben,” and she beams up at him again. “I’m eight. Matron said I’m insane,” and she pronounces the word with a depth of gravitas.

“Are you?” Ben asks.

She shrugs, gives him an enigmatic smile. “Maybe. You could start being polite by taking the flowers.”

She offers up the small bundle of colorful wildflowers again, solemnly, although she’s pretty sure he’s not going to take them; instead, to her surprise, he reaches out with one leather-gloved hand and gently slips the tangled stems from between her fingers.

“Thank you, Rey,” and he smiles down at her.

“Aren’t you going to smell them?” The flowers look small and fragile in his big, leather-encased hands.

Ben frowns, hesitant, and then lifts the colorful blooms to his nose and inhales deeply; she waits, eager, bouncing on her tiptoes, as he lowers the bouquet--

And sneezes.

Rey makes a face, wrinkling her nose at him, and he smiles apologetically. “Allergies.”

She stares, wide-eyed. Allergies? What does that mean? Does that mean he’s sick, now? Did she make him sick? “Did I make you sick?” she asks, all awful horror and sudden, certain fear (is he gonna die now?).

But he just laughs, shakes his head. “It’s the pollen,” he explains, shaking the flowers at her--she stares, captivated, at the tiny motes of gold that land all over her hands and head.

“It looks like sunshine dust,” she breathes, bringing her hands closer to her face in wonderment. “Is it made of sunshine?”

“No.”

She pouts.

He tries to offer the flowers back, but she sticks her tongue out at him and glares, not mollified. “Those are your flowers, no give-backs, duh,” she says. “Besides, I have lots of flowers.” And then she remembers that she’s mad at him, and she seals her mouth shut again.

“Rey--”

She sticks her tongue out at him again and turns to walk away.

“I was wrong, it is made of sunshine,” he calls from behind her, and she stops walking, slowly turns around.

“Keep the flowers,” she tells him seriously. “And, next time you’re sad, come here, and you can have more. Sunshine makes everybody happy.”

And then she turns around again and disappears down the path.

The last thing she hears is a shouted question: “How do you know I’m sad?”

She lives in the park.

Kylo Ren, Death, lieutenant of the Lord of the Underworld--Master Snoke--(formerly Ben Solo, but that was before, and the before doesn’t matter now) isn’t supposed to know this.

He’s not supposed to care.

But Kylo has never been particularly good at being everything Master Snoke wants him to be, at following all the rules; it gets him in trouble, but there’s still that nagging bit of his before -self left, anyway, no matter how bad the punishments get.

And Master Snoke has no shortage of bad punishments.

He would certainly punish Kylo for this, if he knew--which means that Master Snoke doesn’t know about Kylo’s visits to a certain eight-year-old girl. And, since it seems like he can’t make himself stop visiting her, that’s the way he’d like to keep it.

Secret.

He’s still not sure why he introduced himself as Ben, only that the girl had looked at him like a man and not a monster, and she’d offered him flowers, and he doesn’t want to be the monster around her. It doesn’t matter that there’s no way she knows what his being Death actually means; he still can’t find it in him to shatter her view of him.

She’s the first person to see him as something other than the monster in a long time.

Kylo arrives in the park with a twist of his magic, as usual, and unseen by the pedestrians (although a couple dogs look his way, one whimpering, the other just staring), also as usual.

There’s still traces of the now-dead soul on his scythe. That’s usual, too.

If he concentrates, Listens hard, he can hear a young child humming, and he follows the sound to a patch of sun-warmed grass dotted with little flowers. Rey’s sitting cross-legged in the grass, barefoot and wearing a torn white dress, her thin, freckled arms and legs bare underneath. The dress is new, different--she’d been wearing leggings and an oversized t-shirt the last time he was here, and why is he noticing such a small detail as that?

(It’s not like he cares what she’s wearing, that she has something to wear. Nope. Nada. Nein. He doesn’t care.)

When he approaches, her large hazel eyes blink open and a smile crosses her face--a smile that, abruptly, turns into a frown when the flower crown resting on her dark hair slips down into her eyes. She pushes it back up with one hand, tucking some of her flyaway bangs back behind her ear--which is when Kylo notices the braided flower bracelets around both wrists.

“Hi, Ben!” she says cheerfully. “I knew you would come today. D’you like my crown?”

Kylo lowers the hood of his cloak (after the first meeting, she refused to talk to him unless he put his hood down) and pretends he’s not smiling. “You look like a princess,” he says, very seriously.

“I’m a queen,” she says, and then, “I made you one too!” Rey beams, climbing to her feet, one hand holding her too-big crown out of her eyes and the other offering out a braided circlet of pink and white carnations. It’s not as riotously colorful as hers, for which he’s privately grateful; and he’d never even consider doing something like this at any other time, but Rey won’t speak to him for days if he refuses her gift, and, well…

(The simple truth of the matter is that the girl was right: sunshine does help sad people.)

So he sighs, and reaches out for the crown (and if Master Snoke ever saw this memory there’d be no need to punish him, he’d die of embarrassment)--only for Rey to jerk it back, shaking her head. “No, no,” she says firmly, “that’s not how it goes. You have to kneel and I put it on you.”

He grits his teeth. Kneeling has never boded well in the past; the rules dictate that he is to kneel when in his Master’s presence, and most of the time, all he ever receives is pain. But for her--for his little sunshine queen (she’s not his, and he doesn’t care, he doesn’t, he can’t )--he’ll do it. So Kylo bends his knees, slowly, stiffly, and leans on the staff his scythe is on for support, and then he stares at the grass at her feet and hopes he’s not making a mistake.

There’s a soft brush of a hand against his hair, and then the barely-there weight of the crown settles onto his head. Before he can move, however, she’s speaking in a grave, solemn voice. “By the power invested in me by the church and the state, I dub thee Sir Ben of--” and she breaks off. “Hmm. What do you want to be ‘of’?”

He blinks up at her. “You choose,” and then he frowns. “Where did you get those words from?”

She grins a gap-toothed smile. “I heard them off the TV once when Matron was watching!” A pause, in which her expression shifts to considering. “Sir Ben of Sunshine,” she decides, then, “You may rise.”

Kylo stands. “Thank you, Queen Rey,” he says, with all the ceremony such an act requires.

“Are you going to leave already?” she asks, seeing him stand, and there’s something painfully sharp-edged and desperately lonely in her eyes. (And it’s all-too-familiar.)

Kylo hesitates. Master Snoke wants him back as soon as possible, but… “I can stay for a while,” he says, and tries to ignore the way his heart warms at her radiant smile. “What do you want to do?”

Summer turns to fall.

The nights start getting colder.

He stops by to check on her (as has become, entirely without him realizing, his habit when he’s out late), late one night in October, and finds her curled in a ball and shivering in her sleep. He takes off his cloak (he’s still plenty warm in his thick black tunic and pants) and tucks it around her, using a tiny bit of magic to spell it warm, and stays just long enough to see the shivers subside before disappearing.

(She can’t survive outside, alone, in the winter. Something is going to have to change.)

He stops and dons his extra cloak before reporting to his Master.

The first stages of a plan are already growing in his mind.

The note is unsigned, but Leia Skywalker-Solo doesn’t need to see a signature to know who the note is from; she knows the handwriting just as well as she knows her own handwriting, or her husband’s. It’s straightforward, to the point, explaining that there’s a homeless orphan girl living in the park who won’t survive the winter if she’s left alone.

Leia doesn’t hesitate, already planning out a list from the store for Han--and then she turns the piece of paper over and goes still, her breath freezing in her lungs.

In case she needed any more proof of who the note is from, there’s a simple pencil sketch of the girl, Rey, with flowers braided into her hair. In the corner is a tiny, scrawled postscript: she likes flowers.

“Oh, Ben,” Leia whispers, and she cradles the paper to her chest and closes her eyes, silently rocking back and forth.

Han finds her there, a while later; he doesn’t ask, just comes up behind her and wraps her in his arms, and together the two of them begin to breathe.

(It’s been two years. The time has yet to dull the pain.)

(Leia doesn’t think it ever will.)

Chapter Text

Rey keeps the cloak.

She doesn’t wear it, of course, that would be silly--but on some nights, when the world feels strange and the bed is too soft and she misses the way the wind sighs through the grass, she wraps herself up in it and inhales the smell of sparks and the taste of the rain-soaked storm. And then she can close her eyes and drift off to sleep, secure in the feeling of Ben.

Han and Leia are quite possibly the nicest people Rey has ever met in her entire life. They’d found her in the park, the same day she’d woken up with Ben’s strangely-warm cloak wrapped around her, and Leia had offered her flowers and a place to stay. Rey thinks they might be Ben’s family, although she’s not completely sure; she hasn’t dared tell them about Ben, yet, too afraid of losing a warm and happy house. She doesn’t want them to think she’s insane, too.

About a week after they’d found her, Rey hears the clattering of metal hitting concrete and some really interesting swearing, and she follows the noises to a door she hasn’t gone through yet. (She’s been very very careful, to stay in only the rooms she’s allowed to go in, to be good; she doesn’t want to be too much trouble. Matron always said that people won’t keep you if you’re too much trouble.) She cracks the door open, just a tiny bit, and peers through, but she can’t see anything around a stack of tall metal shelving laden with a tumble of metal parts and wires and shiny silver duct tape. The shelves jut out and obscure her vision, but if she opens the door a bit more, she could probably see around them--

The door shrieks, when she pushes it, and then there’s a rattle and the doorknob comes off in her hand.

The steady stream of increasingly inventive (and, she’s pretty sure, impossible) cursing stutters to a halt, and Rey freezes, unsure if she should run and hide or stay and face the punishment; before she can decide, Han comes around the corner of the shelves, his hands and face streaked with grease and his clothes stained. He stares at the door for a moment, nonplussed, and then grabs the edge and forces it the rest of the way open, propping it there with a block of wood. And then his gaze turns to Rey.

She stares up at him, and then down at the round metal knob in her hand, and then back up at him, and bursts into tears.

“Hey, kid,” Han says, crouching down to be at her level. “What’s wrong?”

“I-i-i’m sorry,” she stutters out, offering him the doorknob, “I d-d-didn’t m-mean to break anything.”

He takes the doorknob from her small hands, makes eye contact with her--just long enough to catch her attention--and then tosses it over his shoulder. It lands somewhere with a dull thunk. “The damn door falls apart all the time anyway,” he tells her, and then he reaches out again and puts his hands on her shoulders. “Hey now, cheer up, Rey.”

“Am I in trouble?” She darts a nervous look up at his face and sniffles, tries to stop the crying.

Han stares at her, utterly confused. “Why would you be in trouble? Come on, do you want to see what I was doing?”

She shrugs. “I d-didn’t ask permission--”

“Sweetheart,” he says, cutting her off mid-sentence, “if I had asked for permission before doing any one of the numerous stupid things I’ve done, I would be a hell of a lot more sane than I am now--and probably dead from boredom.” And then he frowns, as though reconsidering. “Although, you should probably not follow my example. And you should still ask permission for stuff. But you can come in the garage any time you want, okay?”

Rey nods, hardly able to believe her luck--no trouble and she can come inside whenever? What kind of dream is she living? “Does the door really break a lot?” she asks, glancing quickly over at the handily located block of wood.

He nods.

“Why don’t you just get a new one?”

Han stares at her like she’s suggested he cut his arms off or something equally horrendous and unthinkable. “Why would I buy a new door? Besides, I’m a mechanic. I can fix it.”

“He always says that,” Leia calls down the hall. “I don’t think he realizes that wrapping duct tape around the doorknob doesn’t qualify as fixing it.”

“I wasn’t asking for your opinion,” Han shouts back, and then he grins at Rey. “She likes to pretend like she knows everything, it makes her feel smart.”

“I heard that!”

His face turns a truly impressive shade of crimson and he stands, abruptly. “C’mere, kid, I’ll show you the Falcon,” and he turns and disappears around the corner again.

Rey glances back over her shoulder, but Leia doesn’t show up, so she follows Han deeper into the garage. There’s one car--if the bucket of bolts can truly be called a car-- in the two (or maybe three) car garage; the rest of the space is full of parts. Lots and lots of parts.

“My customers’ cars stay in the shop,” Han says, “but I keep her in the garage.” And he beams. “This beauty is the Millennium Falcon. Ain’t she gorgeous?”

Rey blinks. “It’s a scrap heap,” she says, flatly, more than a little confused. The car is old and the paint is chipped and there’s rust showing through in spots--and there’s a long crack spidering across the windshield. “Does it even run?”

Han stares at her like she’s grown a second head (so much so that, for a moment, she almost reaches up to check). “Does it even run, she says,” and he turns to the car and runs a loving hand across the scratched hood. “Don’t listen to a word she says, girl. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” He grins, then, a gleam of pride flashing in his eyes. “The Falcon has the best stereo system around! She’s faster than the wind and she handles like a dream.”

“If she’ll even start,” Leia says dryly from the doorway. “Han, if you want me to make you lunch, come now.”

“Don’t listen to her,” Han says cheerfully, and whether he’s talking to the car or to Rey, she can’t tell. Maybe he’s talking to both of them. Even though the car isn’t a person. “I was just going to show Rey the basics--”

A loud barking cuts him off, and an instant later Rey is laying on the ground, underneath a wriggling, shaggy brown something (she can’t quite see the shape). Something wet crosses her face, and she screws her eyes closed and scrunches her nose and shoves at the solid mass on top of her, to no effect.

“Chewie! Get off!” Han says sharply, and the brown mat retreats enough for her to sit up.

The brown mat is a dog.

A big, dark brown, long-haired dog with a silver collar (the tag says “Chewbacca, answers to Chewie, if you find him please sternly tell him Chewie, Han says to get home right now and he knows what that means”), tail wagging wildly as he sits down at Han’s feet.

“You have a dog?” she asks, blinking, wiping the slobber off her face with one hand.

“Yes,” Leia says, “but he should be outside.” She says the last four words with obvious intent.

Chewie doesn’t move.

“Chewie, outside, now,” Han tries, firmly.

The dog just barks and saunters over to sit next to Rey. He sniffs her face for a minute and then licks her cheek. “Eww,” she says, but she’s smiling, and she reaches out one hesitant hand and scratches his head. He barks, again, and looks at Han, and for a moment the bark almost sounds smug (which is ridiculous, because he’s just a dog).

“Come on, lunch,” Leia says, and there’s a slow smile spreading across her face.

Rey looks at Han.

“We can work on the car later,” he says, offering her a hand up, which she takes. “Let’s go, kid.”

As she follows him to the kitchen, she covertly pinches a fold of skin, just to see--but she’s not dreaming.

She can barely believe it’s real.

“Are they your parents?” Rey asks the next time she sees him.

Ben stiffens a bit, some kind of pain flashing over his face. “Yeah,” he says, finally. “What are you doing here?”

Rey points at the snowman. “I like snow,” she says simply. “Why are you here?”

He hesitates for a long time before he answers. “Looking for you.”

She takes a closer look at him. His face is worn almost through with exhaustion (she imagines that just a little more and she’d be able to see his bones) and his eyes are dark and very sad. “I don’t have any flowers,” she says quietly.

He smiles (he looks like he’s had his insides scooped out, leaving him hollow and empty), but it’s a sad thing. “That’s alright.” A minute passes, and then he asks, “Have you met Chewie yet?”

“Yes!” She beams, eyes lighting up. “He likes me! Leia says he’s not supposed to get on the furniture, but Han told me how to tell him to open doors, so now he comes and sleeps in the bed with me at night!” She hesitates, then asks, “Do you want to see him? I can bring him with me the next time I come to the park.”

He shakes his head quickly. “No, no. I can’t see them. It’s better this way, you have to understand that.”

She doesn’t, but she doesn’t push. Maybe one day he’ll tell her why. “Han’s teaching me how to fix the Falcon.”

“That piece of garbage?” Ben scoffs. “I’m surprised it’s still running.”

“Han says it’s the best car in town,” she says, and he softens a little.

“It does have a nice stereo,” he admits, and then sighs. “You have a good day, Rey.”

She knows that means the conversation is over, that he has somewhere to be. And she knows he has to; she knows she’s not so important that he can schedule his whole day around her.

But that doesn’t mean she’s not sad when he leaves.

“Bye, Ben,” she says quietly, and then he disappears.

She dreams.

In her dreams, there is a young boy. He has dark hair and a bright smile, and he is loved, loved, loved; but there is a shadow in the distance, and it falls over him, slowly but surely, like the approach of a thunderstorm.

And, eventually, the storm breaks, as all storms do.

She sees the same boy, older and terrified, and he flees to the protection offered by the shadow because he has nowhere else to go (he doesn’t realize, he doesn’t see, the safe harbor of love is still there waiting for him, always waiting, always there to receive him). She sees a man, his eyes too ancient for his body, torn apart by grief and self-hatred and self-blame and pain until the maelstrom of his soul threatens to swallow him whole (he cradles a frayed, worn brown robe and whispers, what would you have done, Master? What did you do? Please…).

Everything is dark.

A light burns, faintly, in the distance, but it illuminates nothing (she can’t see, and she suddenly thinks that this is the most important part, she needs to see this more than anything else), serves only to taunt her, to show how little she can make out in this night. There’s a voice, a woman’s (she should know it but she can’t recognize it), but she can’t hear what it says (there’s music, wild and haunting, and it is like nothing she has ever heard before).

“I can’t,” she hears over the music, and if it would just be quiet maybe she could tell who’s speaking but she can’t hear.

“You must--”

The man with the too-old eyes stares at her, like he can see into her very self. “I failed you,” he whispers, and it echoes around and around and around and around and around--

[failed you failed you failed you failed you failed you failed]

“I failed you all.”

A castle looms on the horizon, imposing and utterly black, etched in gold, drenched in shadows, and its very foundation a hill of screams. A thousand roads stretch out before her feet, each one paved with different words, different deeds, and yet every single one of them leads her there, to the very center of that poisonous blackness.

(We’ll get her back, I promise, someone whispers.)

From everywhere and nowhere all at once, there’s an awful, hideous pressure, and then:

come closer, child

And somebody screams.

(The world spins all around, and everything is gone, and a girl is singing, somewhere, and in the background a heartbeat drums a wildly desperate pace.)

[hush, little baby, don’t say a word, mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird]

(no!)

[so hush little baby, don’t you cry, no one’s gonna love you after i die]

(the heartbeat stops.)

“Rey! Wake up, kid, we have a visitor!”