Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“One pair of jeans. One pair of cotton shorts. One tank top with the image of, uh, a boy band, on the front? Or something. One pair of underwear and matching training bra.”

Rey winces at that, but does not interrupt.

“One pair of pink running shoes. One pair of girl’s athletic socks. One slapwatch, no longer running. One purple sequined backpack. Three black and white composition notebooks. One fuzzy pen, one souvenir pen from the Jakku City Aquarium. Six butterfly clips. One flip phone, battery charged, loaded with a twenty dollar prepaid SIM card. One phone charger. One shoebox, filled with official documents including social security card, birth certificate—”

“Yes, thank you,” she hisses, reaching under the plexiglass barrier to scoop the belongings across the counter and towards herself.

The items in her arms are all the belongings of a child, which is what she was the last time she breathed air outside the Jakku prison walls. She eyes the cheap acid-washed bell bottoms dubiously, wondering if they would even fit her anymore. 

The security guard shoots her an annoyed look. “Ma’am, I’m supposed to recite the list of belongings to ensure that all of your former possessions are being returned to you.”

“You don’t have to ma’am me, Bazine, I can see for myself it’s all there. Just… get on with it.”

Bazine shrugs. “Suit yourself.” She reaches for something from her desk, then slides it under the barrier. It is a folder. Rey opens it: more documents. “Your parole officer’s contact information, a few brochures on parole and mental health, your bus ticket to Tatooine, aaand your resettlement reimbursement check. Communication with your parole officer needs to be established by eight a.m. tomorrow morning. Any questions?”

Rey balks at the resettlement check. “No walking cash? How am I supposed to get to the bus station?”

Again, she receives a careless shrug. “You’re a crafty one,” Bazine says, with the barest hint of a smirk. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

. . .

Five minutes later, Rey is a free woman.

She plods along the dusty side of the highway that leads away from the Jakku State Correctional Facility for Women, dressed in her state-issued trousers, boots, and tunic, her stupid purple backpack slung over one shoulder. Already sweat is beginning to drip down her neck and seep through the back of her shirt, making it cling to her skin. It’s late June, and this clothing is clearly meant for colder months. It is stiflingly hot.

To either side of the road roll endless fields of farmland; the smell of warm manure sticks in her nostrils. She grits her teeth, squinting against the high morning sun.

Whatever. Fuck ‘em.

Fuck ‘em all.

. . .

It takes the better part of the afternoon to get to the Jakku Metro Transportation Center. She has been assaulted by the diesel fumes of passing trucks, mobbed by aggressive clouds of mosquitoes and black flies, choked by the dirt kicked up as she walked. She's borne it all as she always bears the indignities of her life; in silent seething fury.

When she finally steps into the cool, air-conditioned bus station, she lets out a breath so deep she wonders how long she has been holding it.

Rey needs a moment.

Spying an open spot on one of the station’s scattering of plastic benches, she takes a seat and reaches into her backpack to pull out the last of Maz’s letters. In it is a set of directions following her release.

Get a ride to the Transportation Center, where you’ll catch the bus to Tatooine. I’ll rent a room for you at the Jawa Motor Inn, just down the road from where the driver will drop you. Give me a call once you’re settled.

She glances at the timetable posted on the station wall. No sign of the Tatooine bus yet. So now she must wait. With longing, she lets herself stare at the candy bars and bagged chips in the vending machine. Who gives a newly released prisoner a check, and not a single dime in cash? What a cruel joke.

But she pushes her hunger down, deep down. Don’t think about it, she instructs herself. Distraction is key. She takes out the brochures and attempts to read about the benefits of talk therapy during her transition from incarcerated to civilian life. When that fails to occupy her thoughts—or defer the growling of her stomach—she watches the other passengers sitting around the station. Young people, old people. Families. Laughing children and harried but loving parents, clumped together, so comfortable with one another. All of them moving or waiting with purpose, all of them certain of the place they hold in their own lives. Or so it seems to Rey. She glares at them all.

Her sweat cools on her skin, damp clothes pressing in on her now with air-conditioned chill, like being dunked in ice water. She shivers and hugs herself and fixes her gaze on the arrivals time table, willing the word 'Tatooine' to show up, for lack of anything better to do.

When her bus finally appears, it is nearly four p.m. Rey is so hungry, her head spins as she stands and boards the bus. The engine has not even started yet before she is asleep in her window seat. She has only the vaguest sense of moving forward by the time they pull out onto the highway, headed east.

. . .

She wakes to hear the driver shouting out, “Next stop, Tatooine!”

For a few minutes, she blinks at the darkness outside the window, trying to orient herself. Her mouth is dry. The bus is air-conditioned, just as frigid as the station, and after her nap, she is freezing. Out the window, she can just make out the swaying shape of passing wheat fields. The bus slows, then shudders to a stop.

“Tatooine!” calls the driver.

She wants to thank him as she jogs up the aisle and steps down onto the road’s dirt shoulder, but her mouth feels glued shut, and she merely stares, feeling hollow, feeling nothing, as he nods, closes the doors, and drives off into the night.

She looks around.

This is not a bus station. This is barely a bus stop; there is a wooden board balanced on two rocks which she supposes counts as a bench.

She is on the side of an unlit country road. Alone. Without a ride, without cash, with only the faintest clue where she’s headed.

Again.

. . .

Making her way in the direction, she hopes, of the Jawa Motor Inn, Rey passes a podunk one-pump gas station. It’s lit by a single flickering light bulb, like something straight out of a horror film.

“Do you accept endorsed checks?” she asks the clerk, with an edge of desperation, in the tiny convenience store behind the pump.

“Sure, why not,” says the burnout-looking teenager, without bothering to look up from her comic book.

Relief swoops in like an avenging angel; Rey spins, taking in the aisles of junk food with something akin to exhilaration. Or maybe that’s just the hunger.

Either way, doesn’t matter. She’s feasting like a queen tonight.

. . .

Her room at the Jawa Motor Inn smells like cigarette smoke and stale beer and the bedspread sports several mysterious stains Rey is choosing not to inspect too closely. The room has a table and two chairs shoved in a corner but she’s too tired for that; kicking off her heavy clothes, she changes into her clean teenaged self’s underwear and tank top. She grimaces at the feel of the panties, unsure if she’s more offended by their bright colors or the fact that they still fit just fine.

Has she changed at all, in the six years that have passed? Surely she’s grown in other ways.

Surely.

Right?

Never mind. She’ll buy new clothes soon. For now, she tosses the comforter onto the floor and settles on the bed. With the fastidiousness and care of a true junk food acolyte, she unpacks her two bulging plastic bags worth of chips, candy, soda, jerky, and donuts on the sheets before her.

It is a bounty.

She grabs the remote from the nightstand and turns on the tiny, rabbit-eared television. The first few channels offer nothing more than fuzzy static, but then a smarmy late night television program host appears, mid-monologue. He’s pausing to chuckle at his own joke while the studio audience howls with delight.

Good enough.

She tears into the food. The abundance of salt and sugar after so long on a utilitarian prison diet is like an injection of jet fuel directly into her veins. Very quickly, she feels… too many things, all at once.

It’s overwhelming. After devouring a family-sized bag of tortilla chips, two soft pretzels, a handful of beef jerky, and half a dozen chocolate candy bars, she starts to feel ill. She wants to keep going, but she doubts she can, not without making herself truly sick. Reaching into one of the bags, she pulls out a pack of cigarettes and a brand-new lighter. Though the room has clearly seen its fair share of smoking, she heads outside anyway.

Because she wants to. Because she can.

. . .

The thick flavor of tobacco on her tongue is more familiar than chocolate, and very, very welcome. Rey leans against her room door, letting the cigarette do its thing, easing into the combined buzz of sugar and nicotine. The sky is dark as a bruise but the night promises to be just as sweltering as the day. No breeze, humid. But it’s better, dressed as she is; the swampy air feels good on her bare skin after the deep freeze of the motel room air conditioning. 

Moths flock towards the buzzing lamps affixed to the walls outside the motel’s curtained windows. They land, they stay too long, they tumble to the weed-strewn cement.

From somewhere behind the motel dumpster, a cat yowls and another yowls back.

“So this is freedom,” she mutters to no one.

Across the parking lot, on the two-lane country highway, the occasional car roars past. Where they’re headed, out here in the boonies, she cannot imagine. While she’s finishing her first cigarette and starting another, a furtive-looking couple pulls into the motel, carefully avoiding her gaze as they grab a key from the lobby, then disappear into the neighboring room. She watches them go. Perhaps she should be embarrassed by her lack of pants but it’s hard to muster up the energy to care.

And anyway, there’s something twisting in her gut. Could be envy, could be the junk food, could be the cigarettes.

Rey tries not to think too hard about what is going to happen in the room next door. She does anyway, though. She thinks about it a lot. Too much.

She considers pushing herself with a third cigarette. Wants to, craves it, craves the buzz and the feel of rolling it between her fingers, though she knows that overdoing it in this regard, as with food, will only result in making herself ill.

Take your time with things, Maz’s letter had warned. Everything will be too much, in the beginning. It’ll get easier.

But then… a free woman gets to make herself ill if she wants, doesn’t she?

A heavy, flattening wave of nausea rolls over her at the first hit of her next cigarette. It has her rushing inside for the bathroom; tears roll down her cheeks as an evening’s worth of excess comes back up, painting the toilet bowl and leaving her wilted on the cool tile floor. Her nose and throat burns. She feels weak.

A free woman gets to make any mistake she pleases.

Wiping the tears away, Rey rises to rinse out her mouth, bolt the outside door and draw her own cheap polyester curtains shut. She turns the tv volume up loud enough to drown out the duet of moans coming from the other side of the wall.

Then, settling back on the bed, she stares up at the popcorn ceiling, listening to the program’s simulated laughter and applause as the host interviews some celebrity she’s never heard of, promoting some movie she knows nothing about.

Eventually her eyes flutter closed. She sleeps, a deep dark abyss. Before today, getting out of prison was all she’d ever dreamed of. She supposes she’ll have to find new dreams, now.

. . .

The clock above his father’s living room television reads seven a.m. when Benjamin Solo awakens with a start from an alcohol-induced stupor. He is bleary, his hangover descending on him almost immediately with a vengeful, painful throb at the back of his skull. Heart racing, eyes refusing to focus properly. His stomach roils out a warning: this will not be pleasant.

With a groan, he pushes himself up out of the folding couch-bed. He shoves his feet into his seven hundred dollar luxury KENOBI silk slippers and shuffles toward the kitchen. Another groan issues forth involuntarily as he stretches, then scratches his bare stomach. He wears nothing more than his matching black boxer briefs, also by KENOBI, two hundred and fifty dollars, stretch cotton jersey, signature KENOBI graphic printed in gold-tone throughout.

They’d been a real crowd-pleaser, these boxers, back when he’d had the kind of funds to go to bars frequented by the kind of women who’d be impressed by things like KENOBI boxer briefs. He studies them for a moment, now, attempting to be objective.

So they’re tacky.

He’d had status; why wouldn’t he show it off?

Ignoring the foul taste of last night’s whiskey, Ben sets up a fresh pot of coffee. He zones out, looking through the kitchen window at the overgrown backyard and daydreaming of what his day might be like if things were different. There’d be the drive from his penthouse apartment into the office, pour-over coffee made from artisinal, hand-picked, locally roasted beans and a green shake to get the day started while he reads emails, then a morning of meetings followed by lunch with the boss at some high-end steakhouse, work well into the evening, off to the gym, then jiu jitsu, and later, once in a while, he’d head to whatever douchebag cocktail bar was au courant to find a meaningless fuck for the night. A good life. Exhausting, busy, but also… easy.

The beeping of the coffee maker jerks him back to reality.

Ben is living in his father’s house, sleeping on his father's couch, and he has absolutely no plans for the day.

With a sigh, he pours himself a cup, which he sweetens to the point of saccharine to hide the terrible taste. Han Solo buys store brand, pre-ground coffee beans from the supermarket. In bulk.

Ben pulls out a carton of eggs, a loaf of sliced white bread, and a pan. He goes about toasting some bread while he fries the eggs, then stumbles back into the living room with his breakfast. Absently, he turns on the television. It’s still on the channel he fell asleep watching last night: one of a hundred 24-hour news channels.

He perches on the edge of the bed as he starts to eat.

“Welcome back to the Situation Room. As always, I’m your host Ahsoka Tano, and this morning, we are continuing to discuss the breath-taking collapse of the multi-sector mega-conglomerate, Sidious Energy. Just two months ago, Sidious was considered one of the most profitable companies in modern history, a dynamo of Nabooian ingenuity and ambition, with stock sitting comfortably at about a hundred dollars a share. Compare that to today: as the bell rang and the market opened this morning, Sidious shares had reached an all-time low of twenty-five cents. My guest—”

Not bothering to look at the screen, Ben reaches out and changes the channel.

“—the stunning rise and fall of energy giant—”

Again, he changes it.

“—at the end of the yesterday, approximately nine thousand people and counting had lost their jobs—”

Nope.

“—the scope of the impact this is going to have, not only on the energy sector, but on the economy at large, cannot be—”

Ben switches again, jabbing hard at the channel button on the tv as he looks at his eggs sadly. He’s lost his appetite.

“Former CFO of the soon-to-be bankrupt corporation, Morfran Snoke, is out on bail this morning after pleading ‘not guilty’ at his arraignment hearing yesterday. His trial is scheduled to begin later this summer—”

He tries one more channel. Again it is the news.

“—Sheev Palpatine, CEO of the energy and technology powerhouse Sidious Energy, remains at large. Federal authorities are asking anyone with information as to his whereabouts—”

Enough. He snaps off the television, then storms back into the kitchen to toss the eggs and toast into the trash.

Ben finds he is short of breath, the world tunneling, everything fading to darkness at the edges of his vision. He stares down at the sink, gasping. He opens the tap and splashes cold water on his face, then watches the water swirl the drain.

There is no escape from this. It’s going to be the scandal of the decade, if not the century.

He feels the urge to cry, or puke, or scream. Maybe all three. Instead he grabs his father’s black bathrobe off the back of a kitchen chair. Pulling it on, he returns to the living room for his coffee, then heads for the front door. He swings it open then stumbles back; the morning sky is a perfect blue, cloudless, and the onslaught of sunshine has him scrambling for his KENOBI aviators.

Once out on the front lawn, he doesn’t know what to do with himself or why he’s come out here. Even with the sunglasses, he’s squinting; tiny knives are slicing into his temples, the world collecting its revenge for last night’s excess. Did he think just by leaving the vicinity of the television, he could escape the news? Did he think by returning to Tatooine, he would not be haunted by his life swirling down the drain back in Naboo?

He takes a sip of his coffee and grimaces. Truly terrible stuff.

In the driveway, the hood of Han’s truck is propped up. He can hear his father underneath it, tinkering. He takes another sip of the shitty coffee. The morning is already warm, and it promises to be scorching later. Han’s face appears to the side of the hood. His brow is damp; he lifts his arm to soak up the sweat with the sleeve of his ratty, grease-stained shirt.

Then he takes in what Ben is wearing with a frown. “That mine?”

Ben hates it when he does this, asks questions to which he already knows the answers. He sips calmly from his coffee and raises his eyebrows at Han.

Han shakes his head. “You could help, y’know, if you’re gonna continue sleeping on my couch rent-free in your ugly underwear.”

That is not a question, but all the same, it is unwelcome. Ben scowls at the golden-faced goddess adorning each of his slippered feet. A cool seven hundred dollars, that’s what these slippers cost him, in his former life. At the time he’d bought them, that price had been nothing to him. A drop in the bucket. A frivolous purchase, barely considered, tantamount to the candy that supermarkets position near the cash register to tempt impulsive shoppers. Just something he’d grabbed on his way out, along with his expensive KENOBI suits and ties and loafers.

His current bank account balance would get him laughed out of the store.

He looks up again. His father is still waiting for a response, lips pursed in grumpy contemplation.

“Help how,” Ben forces out.

“Lawn needs mowing. Gutters haven’t been cleaned in a while,” says Han, tipping his head in the direction of the rancher’s low-slung roof. “Chewie told me he rented a power washer for the week—my siding could use a rinse, don’t you think?”

With a heavy sigh, Ben turns to head back inside.

“You could do a load of laundry, maybe clean some of those dishes in the sink, while you’re in there!” he hears shouted after him.

He does neither of those things. Instead he crawls back into bed, pulls the sheets over his head, and closes his eyes.

. . .

Across town, Rey, too, is up with the sun. For her it is not the product of a hangover but of years of ingrained habit; her schedule has never really been her own. When she was very little, she woke whenever the people running her group home or her foster guardians told her too. And in prison, she woke when the guards told them to wake, ate when she was told to eat, exercised and worked and slept just the same.

She’d like to sleep in, but she can’t. Her body will not allow it. So she rises, dressing in the bell bottoms. They’re a bit snug, but they still zip up okay and she tucks the flared legs into her state-issued boots. She keeps the boy band t-shirt on, recoiling at the thought of wearing the now sweat-stiffened and reeking tunic.

New clothes soon. One thing at a time, though.

Her parole officer picks up on the second ring. “This is Finn,” he says, in a voice that deep and warm and a little bit raspy, as though she’s just woken him up.

“I guess I’m supposed to call you to tell you that I’m in Tatooine? And I’m going to see about my job today.”

She hears what she suspects is a stifled yawn. “This Rey I’m speaking to?”

“Uh, yeah,” she says, twirling the motel phone cord in her fingers.

“Good luck with the job. How about your living situation?”

“My friend rented a room for me at a motel for a few days. I’ll look for something more permanent today.”

“Lot on your plate for one day,” he says, kindly. “You doing okay?”

She bites the inside of her cheek. “I’ll be fine.”

“Alright. Same time next week, then.”

Her stomach grumbles as she hangs up the phone. Her breakfast, she realizes, can be anything she pleases, so Rey eats four gas station donuts, which she washes down with warm soda.

Then she heads out to the highway shoulder, turns left, and begins to walk. She picks dandelions as she goes, blowing their fuzzy petals into the wind, scattering them upon the land.

. . .

The Jawa Motor Inn is on the edge of town, but it's not a long walk. There's not much to the town, since the country highway it’s located on is Tatooine’s one and only commercial corridor. Just a single sidewalk-lined street, alongside which a couple dozen shops reside; that’s downtown Tatooine. The residential streets branch off from the highway in a neat and orderly grid, but as Rey paces them—nothing on the main drag is open yet, and she’s got a sugar high to work off—she observes that the town doesn’t run deeper than four or five blocks to either side of the road. Beyond them is farmland, and dirt, and trees.

That’s the entirety of Tatooine.

Returning to the shops, she takes them in: post office, little grocery store, a cafe, a bar, a few antique, thrift, and curio style boutiques, a salon, a deli, a pet store. On the corner of the only intersection with a stop light in the entire town, there is a homey-looking old fashioned diner. Its hand-painted sign reads, ‘Tosche Station’.

Rey pulls out Maz’s letter. Glances up at the sign, then back at Maz’s slanted cursive script.

This is the place.

It’s cute. Red brick exterior, wide windows that wrap around the two sides revealing the layout within: a long formica counter on one side and a line of aqua leather booths on the other. Retro theme, with a jukebox back near the restrooms and everything. Still, she’s puzzled, and squinting, she returns to the letter again, reading and re-reading the lines about the job Maz had secured for her. There it is, clear as day:

Once you get to Tatooine, find Tosche Station, you can’t miss it. My friend Han, you remember, the trucker turned mechanic, he’ll take you on at his garage. I’ve let him know what a whiz you were in the shop. He’ll train you up on cars.

“Pardon me,” says a grizzled middle-aged man as he passes by her. She startles, then takes a moment to study him: head of tousled grey-blonde hair, full untrimmed beard, rumpled trousers and hooded burlap poncho. He’s got a set of keys in his right hand—his left, she notices, is a metallic prosthesis—and he uses them to open the front door of the diner.

Han, perhaps?

“Actually, pardon me, do you have a moment?” Rey says, voice wavering slightly.

He glances her way.

“I’m looking for Han Solo,” she tells him, “the mechanic. And his shop, Tosche Station?”

“Ah.” The man nods. “Han told me about you—didn’t expect you at the crack of dawn, though. Rey, right?”

She nods, confused.

“I’m Luke. We’re partners, Han and I.” She nods again, but there must be something in her expression, because Luke adds, “Business partners.”

“Okay?”

“Come on in,” he sighs, opening the door and stepping back to let her enter the diner before him. “And I’ll show you the ropes.”

. . .

Back they go. Around the diner’s long counter, through the swinging doors that lead into the kitchen, past the ovens and griddles, the sink and the walk-in fridge, out through the heavy steel back door into the gravel parking lot behind the building, Rey following Luke like a good little duckling. In the lot are two massive dumpsters and one beat-up sedan Rey supposes to be Luke’s. At the other end, there is an auto body shop.

“Technically, I was here first. The name was my idea. When he decided he wanted to settle down somewhere a few years back, I offered him the shop—the last owner ran up his debts and skipped town, so I needed the income. It’s worked out pretty good for both of us.”

Luke doesn’t seem like a man who ever really smiles. But he attempts something like that now, a slight lifting of his face, for Rey.

“So… both places are Tosche Station?”

“Han’s a hard worker. But…” Luke laughs a little, “he’s also sort of a lazy bastard when it comes to things like, oh, I don’t know, naming his own damn business.”

“Ah.” She manages her own nervous laugh. “Where do I fit into all this?” 

“We figured you could help us both out, depending on where we need you. Sometimes I’m slammed and he’s got bupkus, sometimes it’s the other way around.”

“I’m going to work at the diner and the garage,” she clarifies.

Luke gives her another sheepish half-grin.

Rey scratches her head, willing away the beginnings of a headache. “That’s stupid.”

“Well then you don’t have to work at either,” sniffs Luke. He turns from her, back towards the door. “Feel free to find somewhere else that’ll hire an unskilled ex-con with no high school diploma or college degree.”

“No!” Rey jogs around him and turns, hands held high, blocking off his path to the door. Conciliatory. Maz will kill her if she blows this. “Not stupid. I… I misspoke. I meant… Unconventional. It’s all a little unconventional, that’s all.”

Luke sniffs again. “Maybe to you. Works for Tatooine just fine.”

“Where will I be today?” she asks, choosing to ignore his adversarial tone.

“Today it happens to be me that needs you.”

“I… I think I know more about engines than food, to be honest.” She darts a hopeful glance at the shop; it does not escape her notice that there aren’t any cars parked out front.

“Han’s not open today,” Luke says, shaking his head and side-stepping her. He opens the back door, Rey follows him inside.

“Why?”

“He’s… taking a few days off,” is all she gets back. Then, abruptly, Luke whirls on her. “Did you actually murder him? Plutt?”

The question might as well be a slap in the face. She sputters, “It’s… you can’t… I’m not…”

Memories of that night well up unbidden, but she shoves them aside. No. Not after all this time. No more going back—only forward. Only ever forward from here on out. Don’t think about it, she tells herself. Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think about it.

A well-worn mantra.

“Yeah, yeah.” Luke waves away her protestations with his mechanical hand. It draws her attention; she didn’t notice before, but the steel fingers are individually articulated down to the knuckles. It moves as though it were an extension of Luke, as though it were a real hand. She wants to ask him about it, maybe throw him off-kilter as he has done to her, but before she can, he says, “Han warned me I shouldn’t ask. But y’know what? It’s my diner, and I’m the one who has to trust you as my employee. So. You a murderer, Rey?”

She presses her lips together for a long moment, trying to find calm. Balance. Breathe. Don’t think about it. She breathes in, counting to four, then out, counting to four; just like Maz taught her.

“I was convicted of manslaughter, not homicide,” she says at last, in a low tone.

Luke sucks on his teeth for a moment, then shrugs. “… Right. Well just to be safe, we’ll start you on dishes.”

Outraged, Rey’s jaw drops. “Are you saying you think I'd do something to the food?”

He narrows his eyes at her. “I guess we’ll see, won’t we?”

. . .

She punches out hours later, back aching from being bent over the sink washing dishes, reeking of sweat, hands dried out from her rubber gloves.

Rey hardly cares.

She floats on air as she wanders through the streets of Tatooine, unwilling to return to her sad, dingy motel room. Like yesterday, the air remains warm even as the sun slips beneath the roofs of the wide, oak and maple-shaded avenues.

This place is not so bad, she thinks. The ubiquitous split-levels and ranchers are a little run down, the cars in the driveways a little tired, a little rusted, but all the natural world around them is green and flowering, overgrown even. Lush. Promising. There’s more abundance of life here than she’s seen in a long time. Granted, given her circumstances, that’s not saying a lot, but… still.

Rey is a free woman who has a job and she is taking a walk after her first full shift at said job. She is walking because she can, in any direction she pleases, for hours if she’d like, without accounting for it to anyone.

She could walk around this town all night if she wanted and no one could tell her otherwise.

Maybe she will.

On that thought, she turns down a street she hasn’t explored yet, and hears the sound of someone mowing their lawn in the distance. The scent of fresh-cut grass drifts towards her. It’s pleasant, evoking very distant childhood memories. She spies a man at the other end of the block, out in front of his house with a mower. Then she has no choice but to keep moving forward, to get closer, because she can’t fully understand what she’s seeing and she needs to understand.

The man mowing his lawn—giant, really, a massive wildebeast of a human—is dressed in what appears to be a pair of fancy gold and black boxer briefs, matching slippers, and a tattered old black bathrobe. His long legs are bare, covered with dark hair but not furry with it; they have been dyed green from the clippings up to his knees. Beneath his robe, she catches glimpses of a broad smooth chest and a stomach that is toned yet soft. He has muscles, but he’s not chiseled from stone. There’s heft to him, to his form—not flab, just… bulk.

Rey’s mouth begins to water, which she finds strange. Luke fed her dinner right before she left the restaurant.

It takes her a minute to realize she has stopped walking. That she is standing on the sidewalk in her teenager’s boy band tank top and bell bottoms tucked into state-issued boots, staring at the eccentric lawn-mowing colossus.

His dark hair clings damply to his prominent brow, which shines with sweat. The beginnings of sunburn pinken his strong nose and high cheekbones.

A man.

Oh, right, she thinks. Huh. Men.

There has been so little access to men in her life. Most of them have not been the kind she wanted much to do with, anyway.

The muscles in his thick arms bunch and twist under the robe’s sleeves as he maneuvers the ancient mower through the high grass, a steady torrent of curses falling from his lips, just audible over the roar of the machine.

It’s been a long time since… just, since. Longer than long. It’s been never, actually.

And he is quite a man.

Then, as though he can sense her, or perhaps catches a glimpse of her in his peripheral vision, he pauses his work and turns his head to look directly at her.

His eyes are dark in the afternoon shade. They scan up and down her body, slowly, drinking her in.

Rey’s breath hitches. And that is also strange, since she hasn’t been running or exerting herself at all. She’s been simply standing here, watching him. Why is she  winded, all of a sudden?

The man frowns at her, pulling a pair of expensive-looking aviators from the pocket of his bathrobe and plunking them on his nose. His wide shoulders hunch up around his ears. He turns away, mowing on, ignoring her.

That jolts her from her trance.

Without a backward glance she hurries back to the motel, feeling vaguely ashamed of herself but not entirely sure why.

. . .

Yet she can’t stop thinking about him.

Lying in bed naked, two fingers in her cunt and thumb working her clit with desperate fervor, she thinks and she thinks and she thinks.

About his stupid python arms: what would it feel like if he pulled her close, held her so tight she could barely breathe? Clung to her, whispering to her in a deep voice?

About his stupid long green-tinted legs: what if he twined them with her own, his body on hers, a warm solid weight pushing her into the mattress?

About those stupid black and gold boxers: so gaudy, so pretentious. Who the hell is he?

Mostly, though, Rey can’t stop thinking about what’s inside those stupid boxers.

There is nothing stupid about that, she suspects. Hopes. Speculates. And what’s more: she cannot help but speculate what he might do, if she asked him politely to do whatever the hell he wanted.

She comes just from imagining it.

. . .

At midnight, half her cigarettes smoked, she gives up on sleep. It’s not happening, not tonight.

It’s been six years, hasn’t it?

You’ve been a horny incarcerated teenager for far too long, she tells herself, as she rises from the bed and tugs on the cotton shorts, not bothering with the training bralet. You deserve this, don’t you? You deserve to have a little fun, make a few bad choices.

Her running shoes still fit and they’re easy to slip on, which makes them preferable to the boots. Then she’s out the motel door, swinging the key and numbered fob around her ring finger, jogging back into town, a song in her heart and a spring in her step.

It’s easy enough to find the house again—there can’t be more than a couple hundred in all of Tatooine, and the sight of that handsome yeti mowing away, house in the background, is permanently burned into her mind’s eye.

There is a brief moment of panic when she reaches the doorstep.

“Am I really doing this?” she whispers to herself. Rey thinks of his biceps. She thinks of his legs. She thinks of his hideous boxer-briefs. She braces herself. “I’m doing this,” she confirms. She raps her knuckles against the door.

A minute passes, then another.

She is raising her fist to knock again, louder, when someone inside throws the lock and swings the door inward, leaving her standing there with her hand still hanging mid-air.

“Yeah? Can I help you?”

The man on the other side of the interior screen door is not her colossus. He is much older, a little wizened. She thinks maybe he bears a passing resemblance to the man from earlier, but then he shifts his weight from one foot to the other, and she can’t be certain. He must be in his sixties. Silver hair, deep lines on his face. Expressive eyes, a nose that looks as though it has been broken at least once in his life. She can see that he was probably very handsome, in his prime. Now he looks… distinguished, maybe, but mostly just rumpled and tired. He gives her a bemused half-smile. 

“Uh,” is all Rey can muster. “Uhhh—”  

She looks down at her running shorts and thin top, beneath which her pebbled nipples are making their presence known. She looks up at the man; he is visibly puzzled. She wonders if she could go back to her motel room and hide there for the remainder of her life. In theory she could, couldn’t she? She’s a free woman now, after all.

“Nope.” Rey gives him her own smile, tight, forced, and backs away from the door. “My mistake. Wrong house.”

She’s nearly to the street, and he’s still watching her, brows knitted, so she throws out a sad, quiet, “Sorry,” right before she spins on her heel. 

And runs.

Chapter Text

Her body is both delicate and solid in his hands. He picks her up as he pulls her close, so that her thighs wrap themselves around his waist and her elbows dig into his shoulders.

Ben kisses her, sloppily, eagerly, hands supporting her ass. It’s a nice ass, perfect size, round, fits in his hands like a dream. She fit in those jeans like a dream, too. Her chestnut brown hair is silky; he tugs it free from its ladder of buns at the back of her head and it tickles as she leans forward to press a gentle kiss against his neck. She smells a bit like dish soap, a bit like baby powder, something undefinable, something purely feminine. Citrus, he thinks.

This is a dream.

The moment shifts. There’s no prelude, no foreplay; they are fucking but there’s nothing exact about it at first, no distinctive details, just the impression that it’s going to happen and then it is. There is that rising tide of pleasure, a sweet yielding warmth, a wet vise, a soft girl growling fiercely in his ear. He’s giving her everything; she’s taking it. It’s divine. He’s going to come. He pauses to kiss her, he’s almost there. 

It’s been too long. This feels… he’s going to… has to… 

He comes, thrusting jerkily, and moments later, he is awake, blinking into awareness in the dim predawn light, still thrusting against the tangle of sheets bunched around his groin.

Ben is alone on his father’s living room fold-out couch. The dream, so intense mere seconds ago, is already fading to vapors in his mind. In an instant, it is gone. He is left with only the physical evidence of its effects. Reluctantly, he lifts the covers to inspect the front of his boxers. He knows exactly what to expect, but he curls his lip in disgust anyway at the sight of the wet patch.

He’s thirty years old. Who has a wet dream at his age?

Grumbling, he unearths himself from the bed and strips it, then himself, trusting that Han won’t be awake for at least a few more hours. He pulls on a pair of silk pajama pants from the suitcase he’s stashed in the closet by the front door, then stumbles off to the laundry room to hide the evidence of his humiliation in the washer.

Came in his sleep, like a fucking teenager.

The shame of it has him wide awake. With fumbling hands, he heaps his father’s shitty store-brand grounds into the autodrip and jabs blindly at machine’s buttons until the telltale hiss of brewing begins. While he waits, he leans heavily against the counter and stares at the lightening sky outside. He’s shaking with adrenaline, with chagrin. A sliver of moon hangs high, glowing pearly white. A bench swing hangs from the backyard’s ageless oak tree; it sways ever so slightly.

The wet grass shines in the moonlight.

Gradually, the smell of fresh coffee soothes his nerves, and his disgust ebbs away. It’s such a peaceful scene, his father’s backyard. Ben wonders if he would have been happier if Han had settled down here while he was still in Tatooine; if he would have lived here with his father, if they would be close instead of what they find themselves now to be, genetically-linked strangers who share a last name.

He wonders if his mother would have come here to live with them. If maybe his parents wouldn’t have gotten divorced if they’d had this nice little house in this nice little town, all those years ago. Would they have been a nice little family? What would have been enough to keep them all together?

Was there anything that could have?

The thought dredges up so much long-buried pain that the beeping of the coffee machine is a welcome reprieve. He carries his mug out into the moonlit backyard, hissing at the feel of the cold, damp grass between his toes as he makes his way towards the bench swing. He sits on it. He sips. He gazes up at the sky; slowly, the darkness drains away and a violent sunrise splashes across the world in slashes of scarlet and magenta.

He pushes himself, back and forth. The swing is silent. His father keeps the chain supports well-greased, it seems. That’s funny, he’s never seen Han out here.

“No,” he says aloud, just to speak the words. Give them weight. “It’s better this way.”

Ultimately, he’s glad that Leia is not here to see his precipitous fall from grace. It’s better that she passed thinking him a hotshot corporate lawyer than to see him for the guileless idiot he turned out to be. 

It’s better that his parents split; they made each other miserable.

It’s better that he and Han aren’t close, it makes how disappointing his life turned out to be easier to bear.

It’s better that he left Luke’s when he did, that they had that one final, awful fight. His uncle is a bastard, anyway. It was a clean enough break.

Again and again he tells himself this, as the sun rises in the east and the clouds clear. It’s better this way, it’s better this way, it’s better this way.

What he doesn’t ruminate upon—because he doesn’t know how, because he’s been doggedly focused on surviving the present for so long that he’s forgotten what it feels like to find grace in the past or hope for the future—is if it isn’t better this way… what is he going to do about it?

. . .

Around nine, his cell phone rings. He knows without checking who is on the other end; it’s the same caller he’s been dodging for weeks.

Morfran Snoke.

He could ignore it. That tactic has worked for him so far. But it won’t work indefinitely, and he suspects, based on Snoke’s inability to accept defeat, that if he puts the man off for long enough, he might actually show up in Tatooine one day.

Better to get it over with.

Picking up the phone, Ben grunts, “What.”

“Well!” An outraged huff on the other end. Then, Snoke’s raspy burr: “You’re a hard man to pin down these days, Ren.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Why ever not? It’s your—”

“It was a dumb nickname,” he interrupts, checking the house to see if his father has emerged from slumber yet. Though the sun is shining against the windows, he can just make out Han puttering around the kitchen, oblivious to Ben’s presence in the yard. “I always hated it,” he adds.

“Aren’t we feeling opinionated today!”

“You don’t get it.” He pauses; realizing that he’s holding the phone so tightly his hand is like a claw, he makes a conscious effort to loosen his grip. “It’s time to let old things die. Sidious, the Knights of Ren… it’s done. You saw to that.”

Snoke scoffs. “You think Sidious Energy can’t survive a little corporate restructuring? Listen, my boy—we declare bankruptcy, we sniff out a buyer to get the Feds off our backs. A merger here, some rebranding there… we’ll be on top again in no time.”

He sounds as self-assured as he ever did; it makes Ben’s skin crawl. Contemplatively, he watches his father make breakfast for himself. Eggs and toast, looks like—his favorite. Same as Ben.

“They find Sheev yet?” he asks at last.

Snoke disregards the pointed question. “Are you going to be a winner, Solo? You told me once you’d given everything you had to this company.”

Ben grimaces.

“Were you full of shit or did you mean it? Are you going to climb back on the horse? Or are you going to be a pathetic unemployed loser who sleeps on daddy’s couch for the rest of his life?”

He wishes Snoke were here in person so he could say what he says next to the man’s shriveled raisin face, but over the phone will have to suffice: “Fuck you.”

“Hm. I’ll remember that, Solo.”

And with that, the line goes dead. If his career in the capital wasn’t over before, it surely is now. 

Whatever, he thinks. But it’s not whatever. The ugly truth of his situation is this: even if Snoke does go down with the ship—and Ben suspects he won’t, the man has more lives than a cat and a rolodex full of powerful friends, friends who might very well stick with him despite the bad press—the truth is that Snoke is rich, and powerful, and eventually, he will land on his feet. Despite everything, in the end, he’ll be fine.

Ben will not. Ben was never good at playing the game; he worked too hard, he made too many enemies. He did put everything he had into Sidious and now he is left with nothing. He thinks of Armitage Hux, his main competition for the position of Sheev’s assistant and legal counsel; Hux alone could ruin him with tales of Ben’s boorish behavior as he climbed the corporate ladder. He has no good reputation to fall back on, no friends, not even any allies. He attempts bravado, forcing himself to shrug carelessly, though there is no one to see him to do so. Inside, his father has disappeared. No doubt he is eating his breakfast in the living room or returned to his beloved Falcon for more tinkering.

“Fuck ‘em,” says Ben. “Fuck ‘em all.”

He’s taking his own advice now. Time to let old things die. Kill them, if he must.

It was rotten to the core, anyway.

I need a drink, he decides. No. Not a drink. He needs many drinks.

. . .

The efficiency apartment above the deli is little more than a glorified closet with a single window. It comes furnished with a very old folding futon couch-bed and nothing else. The flooring is bubbling linoleum, the walls cheap faux-wood paneling. The “kitchen,” if one could be so generous as to call it that, is a sink, a toaster oven, and a single electric burner situated on a short stretch of laminate countertop. The appliances are plugged into one of the place’s two electrical outlets; the other is in the bathroom. The bathroom is barely big enough for Rey to turn around in. It has no shower. There is a row of cabinets above the counter, which house a smattering of secondhand utensils, pots, and pans. There are no blinds or curtains on the window, which looks down upon Tatooine’s main street.

The rent is a hundred and fifty a month.

“I’ll take it,” Rey tells the deli owner, a bug-eyed, sallow-faced man named Klaud. “Do I need to sign any paperwork?”

He laughs heartily at that, belly jiggling, and hands her the keys with a shake of his head.

. . .

Maz lives a few hours away, in the sleepy port city of Takodana, so she doesn’t get to Rey’s apartment until early evening. By then, Rey has unpacked her few belongings neatly in the cabinets above the kitchenette counter, her only storage space.

She’s also discovered that the futon has been broken beyond repair at some point in its history and no longer unfolds. While she waits for Maz’s visit, she curls up on the narrow couch—her bed, for the foreseeable future. She naps, drifting off to the sound of cars passing down Tatooine’s main street and the scent of meat wafting up from the deli below. 

For a hundred and fifty, you can tolerate a little meat smell, is her last cognizant thought, before she slips into dreams. He’s there waiting for her, as he was last night when she returned to the motel. The boxer-briefs, the slippers, the robe, the aviators. Tall, tall, tall. Those full lips, pursed and pouting at her.

In her dreams, she pushes up onto her toes and nips at them.

Rey is awoken what feels like moments later by her flip phone’s obnoxious ringtone. Blearily, she picks it up and sees that Maz is calling, and to her surprise, two hours have passed.

“So!” Maz exclaims cheerfully, upon being let up and giving Rey a spine-cracking hug then turning to take in the spartan quarters, “Better than a prison cell, anyway. Though not by much.”

“I don’t know how to thank you, Maz. Or repay you for…” Rey gestures around, though what she means is: the bus ticket, the job, all the rest of it.

Maz raises a thin eyebrow. “I wouldn’t thank me for this dump if I were you.”

She laughs. “For everything, I mean.”

“It wasn’t right,” Maz says, taking a seat on the futon. 

To Rey, the tiny old woman is ageless, but she cannot help but notice how wearily Maz sighs as she relaxes against the couch back. How long has it been since Maz got out? Nearly three years, she recalls, counting how many birthdays she’s spent alone in prison.

But she cannot dwell on that. If she let herself think of the time she has lost, or of losing Maz so soon after getting out, she might curl up on the couch and never rise from it again.

“Nice girl like you getting locked up,” Maz clarifies. She gives Rey a stern, meaningful look, her brown eyes magnified by her thick glasses. “I needed to see you situated. Safe.”

Rey collapses besides Maz then keels over, laying her head in the older woman’s lap. At once, Maz begins to stroke her hair, just as she did when they shared a cell.

A few minutes later, she says, “I’ve missed you, my dear child. Still too skinny, I see. We’ll have to do something about that.”

“Mm,” is all she can manage around the lump in her throat.

A sigh. “Well. If you want to catch me up about… about anything.” Maz pauses, then forges on. “About your past, even. You let me know.”

“Thanks.” The feel of those wizened hands gently tugging her hair into some semblance of order lulls her; Rey could almost fall asleep again. Drowsily, she ventures: “My case. Did you ever… look up the…?”

“Look it up in the news after I got out?"

She nods.

“And trust those vultures to get it right? Can’t believe you’d even ask. No,” says Maz, “Not. Ever.”

“Mm.”

“Your story is your own. I only hope… I hope one day you will tell it to me.”

“Maybe,” she murmurs. “Maybe one day.”

“Good. Good, then. Now, wake up, lazybones. What do we say, dinner at the Station?”

Rey twists to look up into Maz’s downturned face. She is grinning, her magnified eyes warm and twinkling with mirth.

“So you knew about the diner?” Rey asks, with faux-indignation. “And that it’s not an auto body shop run by Han Solo?”

With a laugh, Maz counters, “Technically, it is that as well. But I never pass up an opportunity to mess with that old coot, Skywalker.” Gently, she pushes Rey back to up a seated position. “Now, come along. I’m famished. My treat.”

Rey returns Maz’s smile with a genuine one of her own. “I can’t say no to that.”

. . .

They are halfway through their burgers, seated in a booth right beside the diner’s entrance—Maz reeling off a list of television shows and books Rey absolutely must catch up on—when Rey’s lawn-mowing colossus busts through the door. 

He is still dressed in that ridiculous bathrobe, though he's wrapped it around himself and secured it with the belt. He is also still wearing the slippers. In addition to that, he’s donned a trucker hat emblazoned on the front with a slogan Rey doesn’t quite catch as he lumbers past, towards the counter.

What she does catch is the eye-watering stench of grain alcohol that wafts after him like a noxious cloud.

Bewildered, transfixed, she turns to watch, grease from the burger oozing down her hands and forearms; every chrome stool at the counter is taken, but the lawnmower man shoves an elbow in beside a tall, hirsute man, who acknowledges his presence with little more than a sidelong glance before continuing to eat his roast chicken dinner.

He is perhaps the only one still eating. The dinner rush is in full swing and before he’d made his appearance, there’d been a steady hum of conversation. But now a hush has settled over everything. Only the clanging of pots and pans from the kitchen can be heard.

Everyone is gawking.

Rey is among them. She has turned in her seat so she can continue viewing the spectacle, burger forgotten. Her focus has gone laser-sharp, honed in on the tense set of his shoulders. She can no longer hear what Maz is saying; she’s uncertain if Maz is even speaking, or if she is also watching. 

The man waves at Luke, who moments ago was talking to one of his waitresses, a petite woman named Rose. (Rey likes Rose, she showed Rey where the rubber dishwashing gloves were stored halfway through her first shift yesterday.) Now Luke is glaring at the new arrival.

And the new arrival is glaring back.

They know each other. They must.

“Hey!” shouts the colossus, across the row of diners, “Little service down here?”

Luke makes a face like he’s sucking on a lemon. “What’dya want?”

“Fries.”

“We’re all out,” Luke says, crossing his arms.

“The fuck kinda’ diner runs outta fries?”

The words are slightly slurred. Rey can’t see his face from this angle; he is a solid wall of bathrobed man. His body is broad. Tantalizingly broad.

But he has kind of a flat butt, she observes, idly.

No one in the diner is saying a word. No one’s eating, except the tall, thin man, who is determinedly ignoring the colossus beside him.

Luke glares with even more disdain than he’d glared at Rey yesterday; she wonders what he did to get on her boss’s bad side. “You should leave, Ben.”

Ben. Rey blinks. Huh. Ben.

A very respectable name for someone behaving like such a disreputable mess. And Rey may be three days out of prison, but she can read a room well enough to know that this confrontation is going to be the talk of Tatooine for some time to come: a very disreputable mess, indeed.

Ben pivots, still leaning on his elbow, so that he can fling an arm out at the diner’s denizens. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” He blows a raspberry at them. “Just… love for me to go… die in a ditch somewhere.”

Rey spies Luke leaning over to mutter something to Rose, who throws him a curious glance before disappearing into the kitchen. Then Luke turns back to Ben.

“Go home, Ben. Your father’s there waiting—he’s been trying to spend time with you.”

“Oh, that’s rich,” laughs Ben, acidly. “Han, waiting on me ? What a turn. Father of the year.”

“Enough,” growls the tall man, putting down his fork. He has been hunched over the counter this whole time, but now he unfolds himself to stand and face Ben. Somehow, impossibly, he is taller than Ben by half a foot. Most of his face is obscured by a thick beard. His voice is guttural, rumbling with warning, when he adds, “I won’t hear you talk about him that way.”

Several things happen all at once. For Rey, it clicks who lawnmower man is: how he fits into the mosaic of Tatooine. Ben Solo. Han Solo is his father. Han Solo. Han Solo, who owns the garage out back. Han Solo, one of her two bosses: Han Solo, who met her at the door last night.

And the hot lawn-mowing colossus is his son.

Oh, God, she’s made a mess of things. Mortification burns up her neck, setting her cheeks on fire.

Meanwhile, Rose is emerging from the kitchen, carrying a plastic bag with a takeaway box inside. She passes it off to Luke, spares one look at the unfolding drama, and with a shake of her head, disappears back into the kitchen.

Across the counter, Ben staggers back from the tall bearded man. For a moment, he teeters precariously; Rey thinks he’s going to fall on his ass. But he regains himself and heaves forward, planting his hands on the man’s shoulders. Then he shoves.

“Do something about it,” Ben snarls.

Chewie doesn’t budge.

No one in the diner says a word. Even the kitchen has gone silent; the cooks are watching through the swinging doors’ porthole windows. Rey wonders if anyone is even breathing or if, like her, they are all holding it, waiting for whatever will happen next.

“Do that again. I dare you,” says the man, beard twitching with fury.

Rey hears Maz utter under breath, “Oh, no.”

“Chewie,” Luke warns, “Leave it. The kid’s drunk.”

But Chewie does not leave it. He cocks his head, staring Ben down. His gaze is full of challenge. For one long, excruciating second, Ben stands there looking back at Chewie. Then, with painstaking care, he reaches up and places a hand on Chewie’s shoulder.

And shoves again.

The retribution is swift. Breathtakingly swift. Rey doesn’t even really see it happen, that’s how fast it happens; one instant, Chewie is absorbing Ben’s shove, just barely rocking back onto his heels—the next, Ben Solo is sprawled out on the diner floor, blood gushing from his nose, clutching his side in pain.

Chewie remains standing, unruffled.

But Ben is on his feet again in a flash. With a tortured howl, he barrels forward, sending his shoulder into Chewie’s gut. Both men go down this time, tumbling, grappling. Ben eventually settles on top, in a seated position. He delivers a vicious jab to Chewie’s left eye. Before he can get in another one, Chewie has reached up, wrapped his hands around Ben’s throat and begun to squeeze.

Rey can hear Ben’s choked cough from across the diner. He lands hits wherever he can on Chewie’s torso and face, desperate blows, trying to get free. Chewie groans but holds fast.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Maz says, rising from her booth.

“Maz, careful!” whispers Rey.

Maz shakes her head. “They’ve given the people enough of a show with their dinner, I think.” 

She strides over, reminding Rey of how she used to break up fights in prison. Now, just as then, she steps up to the brawling men, utterly fearless despite her small stature. Serenely, she tugs on Ben’s shoulder. Seeing that it’s Maz—does everyone in Tatooine and the surrounding counties know each other? Rey wonders—Chewie releases his grip at once, which has Ben reeling backwards, nearly knocking Maz down.

“Quite the ruckus over here,” she says with a snort, moving out of the way.

“M’sorry you had to see that, Maz.” Chewie has the decency to look ashamed of himself.

“Oh, this old jailbird’s seen a lot worse than a little wrestling match. But you were a second away from killing the poor boy. Hardly think he deserves that, hmm?”

Chewie does not answer. Luke takes the opportunity to pass around the counter and, with a consoling pat on Chewie’s arm, he extends his prosthetic hand towards Ben. Dangling from its curled fingers is the takeaway bag.

“Your fries, kid,” he says. “On the house. Now. Go.”

Rey watches the back of Ben’s head turn in Chewie’s direction. Wordlessly, the hirsute man goes back to his seat and, letting out a soft, “Hmph,” he tucks into his dinner once more. Ben turns back to Luke. His shoulders slump. While Rey feels a twinge of pity for him, it’s also… nice, somehow. 

A few days ago, she didn’t think anyone in this world could be as much of a hopeless mess as she is. 

Deflated, Ben grabs the bag and makes for the door, still a little unsteady on his slippered feet. At last, Rey is afforded a clear view of his greasy trucker hat. 

It reads: Ass, Grass, or Gas, No One Rides for Free!

There is a dark trail of drying blood issuing from each nostril down over his unkempt facial hair. His eyes are bloodshot, too, and his nose is pink, from alcohol, maybe, or from yesterday’s sunburn.

Oh, what a mess, thinks Rey, something warm and tender, almost like affection, stirring in her chest. Her heart lurches. What a beautiful mess.

His eyes land on her. She sits up straight, curious. But he merely averts his gaze, rushing past her and out of the diner with his proverbial tail tucked between his legs.

“Well,” Maz chuckles, sinking back into her place across the table from Rey. “I suppose now you’ve encountered most of the infamous Skywalker-Solo clan. Welcome to Tatooine!”

But Rey cannot laugh this off. Not when he looked so… defeated. And so pretty. She pulls a clean paper napkin from the metal dispenser on the table and dunks it in her glass of ice water. Before Maz can question what she’s doing, she’s on her feet. Out the front door, turning the corner, hoping she can catch him… 

He’s only a few feet away. The carton inside his bag is open; he’s eating his fries as he shuffles off.

“Hey!” she calls out, breaking into a light jog. “Hey, wait up!”

Although Ben does not turn or respond, he does halt. When she overtakes him and steps in his path, his eyes flick down to meet hers. They’re not as dark as she’d initially thought. They’re a deep, deep ocher, with streaks of gold and just a bit of green.

“What,” he breathes out. Flat, low. His breath reeks of alcohol.

“You’re… bleeding,” she informs him.

He lets out a deep sigh. “No shit.”

“Here.” Before she can second guess herself, Rey raises up onto her toes and lifts the damp napkin to his cheek, dabbing away the crusted blood. He watches her do it, unmoving. There is something wild and electric jangling its way through her nervous system; she can’t look away from his face. His eyes are locked on hers. 

Everything about this act is so much more intimate than she ever could have realized.

“Don’t make it weird,” she mutters, “I’m just trying to help.”

He frowns. “Didn’t say anything.”

“You smell awful, by the way.”

“And who are you?” he asks, stepping back, leaving her there on her toes, dabbing at air. With a heavy swallow, Rey settles on her feet again. She lets her hands fall to her sides. 

“I saw you the other day. Mowing the lawn. I’m Rey. I’m… I just moved here.”

“Well, Rey,” he says, struggling to fold his arms imposingly while still holding the takeaway bag, “I’m Ben fucking Solo. And I don’t need your help.”

Rey can’t help but laugh at that, clipped and humorless. “Oh, you don’t?” She gestures towards the diner. “So this is… you at your best, then?”

“M’ fine. Fuck off.”

He won’t meet her eyes anymore.

“You’re not fine. You want to know how I know?”

A moment’s glance; he looks like he wants to sidestep her and leave, or maybe shove her as he did Chewie, but he merely trains his eyes on his slippers and works his jaw like a cow chewing its own cud.

“I know,” she says, undeterred, “‘Cause I’m not fine, either.”

When it becomes clear that he is going to stand there and stare silently at the sidewalk like an insentient mountain of a man-child until she goes away, Rey turns and marches back inside the diner. Takes her seat once more in the booth across from Maz. Tells herself she is not going to look out the window. 

Does so, anyway.

Ben is still out there, exactly where she left him. His head hangs low; long, lank waves of dark hair and that ridiculous hat obscure his face from view.

But his shoulders are trembling.

She doesn’t quite know what to make of that.

. . .

When Rey ventures into Salt Planet Thrift the next afternoon, she is greeted by the sight of a man with dreamy, expressive eyes and a woman with a magnificent cloud of curls constrained by a pair of pushed-back sunglasses. They are slouched behind the register; in tandem, they look up when Rey enters the shop with a cheerful ‘ding’ of the bell over the door. She nearly turns and walks right back out. They’re dressed in cool vintage jeans and tees, bobbing their heads to the catchy rock music playing over the stereo, and she is intimidated by how at ease they both seem. How laid-back. How cool.

At a glance, she takes in the racks of clothing and accessories, the shelves of tsotchkes and appliances, the cheerily painted walls, the line of curtained dressing rooms in the back.

Is all of this considered cool? Would she recognize if it was? What is cool, now? That part of life—where she might have learned how to be cool—has seemingly passed Rey by without her even realizing it. Until right this moment. Surely she can get by with the castoff mechanic’s coveralls and random left-behind clothing she found shoved in a corner of the diner’s cleaning supply closet earlier; who needs to go shopping when you can outfit yourself in the Tosche Station’s lost and found finest?

This is too much, just like Maz had tried to warn her.

But before she can backpedal, the man is up out of his chair, armed with a ready grin. “Hey, welcome to Salt Planet! I’m Poe, that’s Jannah. You… look kinda lost.”

He moves towards Rey, who takes a step back, bristling at his overeager charm.

“Er, hi,” she says awkwardly.

“Need some help?”

Rey blinks at Poe, panicking.

“Let her be, Poe,” drawls Jannah. She gives Rey a brilliant, gap-toothed smile. “Sorry about him. It’s been slow this week.”

Poe lets out an indignant, “Hey!”

“It’s… alright.” Rey takes a deep breath. “Actually, I… I could use some help.”

“What’re you looking for?” asks Poe.

“Oh, just…” Rey trails off, cheeks burning.

She has no idea what she’s looking for. ‘Clothes’ is as far as she’d gotten in the thought process.

Poe waves carelessly around the store. “We got all your household needs. We got knickknacks. We got outsider art, we got hotel art. Looking for clothes? We got winter gear, we got swimwear, we business casual, we got weird shit, we got normie shit—we got it all here. You tell us what your scene is and we’ll point you in the right direction.”

“I…”

“Or,” Poe adds, dark eyes flicking down to Rey’s state-issued boots then scanning upwards, taking in the faded jeans and sweat-stained boy band tank, “We could just… throw some things on you, see what works?”

“Poe,” warns Jannah. “Let the girl speak, for God’s sake.”

Rey shakes her head. “I don’t know. I need, uh, everything.”

“You’re in luck, then, since we got everything.” Poe tilts his head, his gaze inquisitive. “You have cash? We don’t take cards, but there's an ATM outside the bank.”

She pulls out a hundred dollar bill, an advance Luke begrudgingly gave her at the end of her shift this morning. Her hands are sweaty, making the bill damp; she winces as she displays it for Poe. Rey spent her teen years navigating the politics of prison with a keen sense of decorum and a well-honed survival instinct. She’s outwitted corrupt guards and learned how to smoothly smuggle nearly anything under her clothes; when she had no choice but to fight, she’s done so. She’s won cafeteria brawls with women twice her size. She’s survived loneliness, deprivation, and hunger. 

Every nice thing she ever had on the inside, she bartered for, fought for, or stole.

She has not been in a clothing store since she was fourteen. She doesn’t know what business casual means or if being a normie is a good or bad thing. She hasn’t the faintest clue what her ‘scene’ is.

Her hands are not just sweaty; they are shaking. The bill flutters in the air.

“What can I get with this? And, can you help me look… normie? I’d like to be normal, please.”

She attempts a smile, but it’s wobbly. Jannah jumps to her feet. She and Poe share a look.

“Not to fear,” Jannah says, linking arms with Rey and dragging her towards a rack of lightly-used shoes, “We’ll have you sorted in no time.”

. . .

Two and a half hours later, she exits the store dressed in a loose linen tank top, olive-hued leggings, and a soft, comfortable pair of leather sandals. Each arm is loaded down with packed-to-bursting bags; she now owns more clothes than she has collectively in her entire life up to this point. Poe trails behind her, carrying a pipe clothing rack and a few dozen hangers.

“You look just about as normal as they come, now,” he calls after her with a laugh, as she leads him up the street towards the deli. “You’re the poster girl for normcore, I’d say.”

At that, Rey throws him a contented smile.

Normal as they come.

She likes the sound of that.

. . .

Two days later and Rey watches, waiting, as Han Solo pulls into the parking lot in an old grey truck; Luke doesn’t trust her with keys. At the sight of her seated on a wheel stop, arms around her jean-clad knees and eyes wide with renewed mortification, he halts mid-exit from the truck and doubles over, wheezing with wry laughter.

Rey wants to crawl under the truck and hide. She narrows her eyes at him, jaw tight.

The laughter takes a minute to subside, breaking up into a coughing fit, before Han raises his hands and says, “You must be Rey.” She nods. He nods, too. “What'd’ya say we, uh, never speak of it?”

“Fine by me,” she says through clenched teeth.

“Maz told me you were a hard worker. You know anything about cars?” 

With a jerk of his head instructing her to follow, he sets off across the gravel towards the garage, keys jangling in his hand. Rey follows, recalling the countless hours she spent toiling in Jakku Correctional Facility’s many workshops. License plate stamping, furniture production, welding, sewing; even, on occasion, once the guards realized what a wiz she was, doing repairs on the machines.

“Only a bit,” she answers, “But I can fix anything.”

He fixes her with a dubious stare. “Anything?”

She nods firmly. “Anything. Have I got the job?”

Again, he laughs. It is a warmer, gruffer laugh. Friendly, even. “Don’t expect me or Luke to be nice to you. Or pay you much. We’re both ornery old bastards.”

Rey grins. “So I’ve got the job.”

. . .

Her first week of work as a sometimes dish-washer, sometimes food runner, sometimes garage receptionist, sometimes mechanic’s apprentice has Rey falling into bed each night, too hot and tired to even think about much of anything.

Except Ben Solo.

She’s always got just enough energy to think about him, right before she falls asleep and right before she wakes up.

There’s no crime in that, she figures.

She likes to conjure up a fantasy of those big hands taking hold of her waist, lowering her onto a soft bed; how he might settle himself between her spread thighs with a low grunt. How his soft lips might feel on her neck, where her pulse throbs.

She’s got just enough energy at night to reach down into her underwear and make herself come hard and fast with only her own thin, deft fingers while she imagines just what kind of lover he might be. 

Slow and tender? Fast and hard? Would he be a talker? Or silent, intense, brooding?

In her mind, she plays out every possible iteration. If she’s being honest, she likes them all.

. . .

She doesn’t dream of only sex, though.

Her dreams have been shockingly vivid of late: there is the one where, armed as medieval knights, she and Ben fight an army of gargantuan red lobsters, and the one where she and a teddy bear traverse outer space in a beat-up spaceship. One with an island whose stone steps she climbs forever and ever, never reaching her destination. Another, a nightmare, features a cave at the bottom of the sea where a milky-eyed leviathan floats in the darkness, laughing cruelly and waiting for her with its thousand tentacles.

But in the early hours of the morning, in those moments between deep sleep and waking, in one way or another she finds herself back in that moment where she is standing on his doorstep. 

And this time, he opens the door. 

Ben. 

Dark wild eyes and messy hair, reaching for her. She wakes with her thighs clenched together, grinding her teeth so hard her jaw aches. 

It is these liminal moments of longing that shape her newest habit: she rises with the sun and she roams. Aimlessly, just for something to do. After a couple days of this, she’s discovered everything there is to discover in Tatooine, which is how she comes upon the park.

Perhaps calling it a park is giving it too much credit. It is a few square miles of land that have been wrested free of the surrounding nature with the use of a lawnmower and a weedwacker. It’s an assortment of dandelion-dotted fields, an ersatz creek created by the town’s greywater runoff drains, one snaking asphalt running path, and a very forlorn-looking, sunbleached wooden gazebo.

The gazebo, though half-buried in vines and occupied by several industrious spiders, has splintering benches lining the inside. So it is here that Rey sits and unpacks her breakfast each morning; the summer has been so hot that by the time the sun rises she needs little more than her nondescript cotton shorts and t-shirt to be comfortable, and anywhere is better than the dismal oppressiveness of her tiny apartment.

And it is while she sits in the gazebo, enjoying her grocery store donuts—she’s upgraded from the gas station, at least—that she spies Ben Solo running for the first time.

His form, she thinks, is good. Probably. Not that she’d know the difference if it wasn’t. He looks like a natural, at any rate, with a long, loping stride, and he’s certainly dressed the part, in sleek designer running gear—all shades of black and gold, naturally. It clings to his form, letting Rey really drink in his thick thighs, his solid body, his defined arms. There is a sheen of sweat across his brow as he runs past the gazebo, oblivious to Rey’s presence within.

He looks good.

She shrinks back, curling up on the bench. As he passes, she turns to peer through the creeping vines so she can watch him course away, along the path, until he disappears around a bend.

Really good, even with his flat ass and exposed ears like two jumbo jet wings. It all… works, somehow. His face, his body; he’s a jumble of beautiful but incongruous details. A mess. So lovely.

By the time he loops back around, her donuts and coffee are gone and she’s halfway through a post-breakfast cigarette, nose buried in her library book. She hears his big feet slapping on the asphalt, though, and looks up in time to see him drawing near, his eyes on the gazebo.

Rey freezes. Can he see her? Does he think she’s here to watch him, like a stalker? Anxiously, she takes a drag, and blows the smoke out her nostrils.

Ben falters in his pace, but only for a second. That full mouth of his tugs downward ever so slightly, and his brows furrow: he’s seen her. She knows he has. He gets closer. For one dizzying moment, Rey thinks he might stop when he gets close enough, that he might speak to her. But he doesn’t. He is near enough that she can detect the evergreen scent of his antiperspirant or cologne or whatever and the musk of his sweat; can hear his heavy breathing, can see the individual beads of sweat pouring down his face.

Reacting on pure instinct, she rises from the bench and takes a step forward into the bright morning sunlight. She waves at him.

He sucks in a particularly deep breath, a jagged grunt, sounding almost pained. His eyes go wide. Then he is off, running past her, back towards town. Twice as fast as before.

. . .

Ben Solo thinks about Rey, too. Thinks about her shiny brown hair, those wide green eyes, her perky little tits, the way she filled out those outdated jeans of hers. And how close she got, when she reached up to wipe his face. The tenderness in her touch, the care. When has he ever been cared for like that? Can he remember the last time?

Years. It’s been years.

He doesn’t know much about her except the scant details Han offers up, including the fact that she’s only twenty-one. That gives him pause. And he doesn’t dare find some excuse to run into her at the diner or the garage. Not after last week. Besides running in the early morning when most people are still asleep, he doesn’t dare to show his face in town at all.

But he sees her in the park one morning, dressed like a fresh-faced model in a college brochure, eating her junk food breakfast. She’s looking right at him.

God damnit, he wants to rail at her. Why do you have to look at me like that? Like you really see me?

He’d resigned himself to just… thoughts. He’s allowed to think about her, and wonder what book she is reading and if she likes it and what her favorite genres are, and if she has hobbies, and how she likes her coffee, and what she’d do if he bought fresh donuts for her from that bakery on the main street and showed up with them one morning, but he won’t take it any further. It’s better this way. She’s too young for him, probably.

But as he runs towards her, he contemplates stopping at the gazebo, ducking his head so he can fit under the low-hanging vines that have overtaken it, speaking to her, backing her up against the vines and licking that powdered sugar off her lower lip. Why doesn’t he?

Just another thing you’d fuck up. Why even go there?

He runs on. On and on and on. Like he could outrun every mistake he’s ever made, or will make. Like if he just runs far and fast enough, he can outrun himself.

. . .

Nine days on, and it’s Rey who cracks.

It’s a Wednesday in July. The afternoon is so blisteringly hot she thinks she might simply dissolve into the puddle of sweat pooling beneath her on the cracked leather seat of Han’s cramped reception office. Her plain black tank top and jean shorts are damp and oppressive against her overheated skin. The office has no air conditioner, only a tiny fan positioned on the lobby counter directly in front of Rey. Several colorful ribbons are tied to the metal grate over the fan blades; they dance across Rey’s face as she leans closer, elbows on the desk, a wilted lettuce leaf of a human being.

Business is slow at the shop; business is slow at the diner. Han could be teaching her about carburetors or something. Instead he’s reclined on the sagging reception couch, nursing a beer, and flipping through the car section of the Tatooine Weekly Circular.

“Han,” says Rey. Even her voice is dehydrated croak. “I have a question for you.”

“Hm.” 

She can’t see him over the raised ledge of the desk, yet she knows without looking that he’s not really paying attention.

“Your son…” she hesitates, mulling her words carefully.

“What about him,” comes Han’s careful reply.

Rey clears her throat. “Ben.”

She hears him unearth himself from the couch cushions with a hearty groan. Then he appears over the ledge. Rey flits her gaze up to him then back to the fan’s colorful ribbons. Han looks every bit as overheated and tired as she feels. He peers down at her, frowning.

“His name is Ben and he is your son,” she starts, waiting for his affirmative grunt before continuing. “You live together. But he’s like… thirty?”

“Yes.”

Forthcoming as ever. Rey suppresses a growl of frustration. “Could you… just… what’s his deal?”

His initial response is little more than a knowing look. Rey presses her lips together and waits. A tense minute passes, the two of them locked in a staredown. Then Han gives in.

“Rey,” he sighs, “I don’t really know your whole story. You seem like a nice enough kid despite—”

“I’m twenty-one,” she interjects.

“A fetus.”

“I survived six years of prison.”

“Alright, a toddler. Listen, go… go easy on Ben, if you can.” At the gruffness of his voice, she hazards another glance; Han looks uncharacteristically earnest. A little imploring, even. She tries to sputter out a protest, but Han swats it away like an irksome insect. “He’s all over the place right now. Just lost his fancy high-powered job, and… ah, hell. He was never any good at handling disappointment.”

“What happened? With his job?”

Han scoffs. “Worked for a little company called Sidious Energy, heard of ‘em?”

The heat has rendered Rey’s stomach a bit wobbly all week, but with those two words it does a wild somersault. Gooseflesh pebbles along her bare arms. Something, fear maybe, lodges itself in her throat.

“I haven’t… they… uh…” she sputters, “Gas? And electric?”

“And solar. Wind. Internet. Not anymore—they went belly-up. ‘S’crazy, the whole company falling apart in, what, two months? A load of corruption, top brass manipulating the stock market, apparently. Federal prosecutors are involved. You really haven’t seen anything in the news about it?”

She swallows with difficulty. “Haven’t really paid attention to the news, oh… ever. The, uh, CEO—”

“Sheev Palpatine, yeah,” Han supplies. 

She inhales sharply at the name, but says nothing.

“Scumbag. He’s gone missing, it’s all over the news. But that’s how it always is with these assholes, right?” Han gives her a commiserative look. “They run around taking everything, fucking everyone over, and in the end they never have to pay for what they’ve done.”

Rey does not feel well. It doesn’t escape Han’s notice.

“Lookin’ look a little green around the gills there, kid.”

His brow is furrowed. When she meets his eyes, she can see his concern.

“Just… I think… the heat,” Rey gasps.

Han checks his watch, then shrugs. “Only an hour left, anyway. Knock off early, go home. Get some rest.”

Not needing to be convinced, Rey peels herself off the leather chair and rises to her feet. She feels unsteady, drained; she does not want to be here anymore. She doesn't want to be anywhere. She’d like to disappear.

It’ll be fine, she tells herself, don’t think about it.

She just needs to clear her head.

“Thanks, Han,” is about all she can muster.

“Yeah, yeah,” he grumbles, and he opens his mouth to say something else, but she’s already halfway out the door.

. . .

The garage door is open, light from within spilling out across the driveway, when Han returns home a couple hours later. The air is heavy, the sky packed with dark, ominous clouds. Streaks of electric pink at the horizon promise a combustive storm at some point in the near future.

Loud, angry music greets him as he turns off the engine.

Though he’d like to park the Falcon in the garage to shelter it from the rain that will no doubt batter it tonight, worsening the already pervasive rusting on its body, he cannot. Because in the middle of the garage, his son has dragged out his old weight bench. Ben, reclined upon it, is drenched in sweat and red in the face and midway through a bench press. Dumbbells are scattered around him on the concrete floor.

He has a hundred and fifty on either side of the barbell he’s holding in the air; with methodical care, he lowers it the rest of the way down to his chest before lifting it up again.

Better than drinking, thinks Han. We’re making progress.

He sighs as he gets out of the car. “Hey kid,” he shouts, over the music.

Nothing. Ben keeps his eyes trained on the single light bulb affixed to the garage ceiling. Han can’t say he’s surprised by the response; these days, Ben’s attitude towards Han vacillates between indifference and hostility. Most of the time, Han prefers the former over the latter.

But he thinks about the girl, how lonely she seems, how lost. And his son, cut from the same cloth. Ben has rejected every attempt he’s made to connect, but his son needs somebody to talk to; clearly, she does too. And Leia would want him to try. So he clears his throat.

“Glad someone’s gettin’ some use out of this stuff,” he tries.

Studiously, Ben continues lifting, not even glancing his way. Han steps into the garage. Moths and mosquitoes flit through the still air. With a flip of the switch, he turns off the radio.

“Ben,” he says quietly.

Nothing. Just the sound of his son’s panting as he lifts the barbell, holds, lowers, repeats. Han sucks his teeth, resignation simmering up into frustration. 

“You just going to keep ignoring me forever?”

“What do you want me to say?” Ben asks, without a break in his rep.

“How about you talk to me?”

“About what?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Han bites out, “Let’s start with what the hell was going on at Sidious before you got canned? Or did you get canned? Did you quit? I got no idea, since you never talk about it. While we’re at it, how much of all that bunk on the news were you actually a part of? Are the cops gonna show up and take you outta here in handcuffs?”

Now Ben darts a wounded look his way. Shoves a breath out harshly, then returns the barbell to its resting place above his head. As he rises to a seated position, he pinches the bridge of his nose, just like Leia used to.

“Don’t.”

His tone reminds Han so strongly of Leia, it nearly brings him to tears. God, she used to get so annoyed with him. But he got annoyed with her too. It was part of their dynamic. They fought, they made up. There was love there.

It’s unfair how much he misses her.

“Don’t?” he pushes, frustration boiling over into anger.

“Don’t do this,” Ben says. “It’s too late, Han. Fatherhood—that ship has sailed.”

Ben has always known just the right words to cut him down, like a red-hot blade buried deep in the chest. But in Ben’s eyes, it is pain returned for pain bestowed. Did Han start this? Did he strike the first blow?

“Okay, sure.” Han can’t keep the bitter sarcasm out of his voice, not now. Not with how hurt he is. Tiredly, he rests his hands on his hips, posture stooped. He’s too old for these kinds of conversations, but there’s no helping that; it's been a long time coming. “Sure, son, sure. Wouldn’t want to intrude. How about this, then—my new employee showed up on my doorstep at one a.m. a few nights back, not wearing a bra. You don’t wanna talk to me, maybe you should go talk to her?” 

Han quirks a brow at Ben; Ben’s eyes dance away. He purses his lips but he cannot hide the telltale blush that washes over his cheeks and ears. Not from his father. That makes Han smirk. Chip off the old block, the little punk. 

“I mean, do you think she was looking for me?” he goads, “‘Cause I think maaaybe she wasn’t. I’ve got this sneaking suspicion she was looking for you.”

“Don’t,” his son begs, voice breaking. “I can’t. She’s—”

“Why not?”

“She’s a nice girl,” Ben mutters. “I’d fuck it up.”

There’s no satisfaction in seeing Ben hurt, there never has been, there never could be; this is his son. That's not how he wanted this to go. Maybe he should mention her record, tell Ben she’s fighting her own demons. Not quite so nice as he thinks. But it’s not Han’s place.

He looks at Ben. He can still traces of the little boy he once was. Han can remember when he couldn’t get that boy to shut up. When Ben toddled around after him every minute that he was home, tugging on his pant leg, desperate to share every thought that entered his young mind.

Ben was always so eager to share of himself with everyone—until he wasn’t. Until he felt he’d been rejected one too many times. 

“Okay, we’ll move on,” he concedes, feeling just as broken as Ben sounds, “For now. What am I allowed to talk about with you?”

Ben’s shoulders twitch. “Chores. Food. The weather.”

“You’re shit at mowing the lawn—you miss about as much as you cut. And stay out of my liquor cabinet from now on, unless you’re going to start refilling some of what you’re drinking.”

Ben stands and moves to the garage workbench, giving Han his back. He picks up a towel and wraps it around his neck. “And the weather?”

Han snorts. “Well hell, my joints ache when it gets like this. Makes me miserable. S’not the only thing making me miserable, either, kid.”

That confession earns him another wounded look.

“Oh, here’s a threefer,” Han adds, “if it doesn’t rain soon, I'm gonna make you water the lawn and the vegetable garden.”

Ben merely nods. “There. Now we’ve talked.”

Han throws up his hands in disgust and turns to go. He gets as far as the interior door that leads to the kitchen, then he stops. 

Leia would want their boy to be happy.

He spins back around.

After a second’s contemplation, he settles for honesty: “You were too good for them, Ben. Sidious. They never deserved you.”

Now Ben gapes at Han, working his jaw. Han stares back. 

“I know what you think,” he says, “I’m some redneck deadbeat trucker who doesn’t know a damned thing about your life and hell, I'm not saying I’m not.” He flinches at his own words but keeps going, realizing as he speaks that he needs this as much as Ben does, even if the kid won’t admit it. “But you’re not completely right. I know some things, too. They had you running Palpatine’s errands, didn’t they? Licking his boots, I bet.”

His son appears to be on the verge of tears. His eyes shine in the dull garage light; his lips purse and un-purse; his hands are clenched into tight fists. “Han, please,” he chokes, “Leave it.”

“Don’t think I will. It’s my house, Ben. And I say you’re better off.”

“How!” Ben explodes, whipping the towel across the garage, narrowly missing Han. “How is any of this better? I keep telling myself it's better, but it doesn't feel better.”

Han bends over to pick up the towel. “You're back where you belong. You’re with me, with your family.”

“I never belonged with you.”

“You did. I wanted you to,” Han says.

“Bullshit.” Ben shakes his head, blinking back tears. “That’s a lie.”

How desperately Han wishes he could just walk across the garage and embrace him. How he wishes he had made choices in his life that would have led them both away from where they are right now—that would deliver them to some other universe, where his son would accept a hug from his old man.

He sighs again. “No. No it’s not.”

“If you wanted me around, why wasn’t I?” Ben's voice is all defiance, all resentment.

That’s his cue to go, most likely. He’s tried. Turn around, go inside, crack a cold one, put on the game. Ben doesn’t want to have this conversation and Han’s not sure he can take much more. But it has to be said.

“Things aren’t ever simple, Ben. Not saying I was a shining example of fatherhood. Not saying I did right by you. I know… I know I didn't. I know that. I’m just telling you that I'm trying to, I don’t know, make some of it right now. You are better off here. You got a chance to make a fresh start.”

Ben glares at his designer Ma-uL sneakers, seething; in his anger, he reminds Han of those awful, volatile teenage years. Han and Leia’s marriage had already fallen apart, he was on the road more than he was home. Luke had needed help in his kitchen. It had all seemed like the perfect solution.

You did this to him, thinks Han, looking at his sullen son. You left him unequipped. You failed him.

“You know you can stay here as long as you need,” is what he brings himself to say, “As long as you want.”

A sharp nod from Ben.

Han sighs, another sigh, perhaps the hundredth sigh since he awoke this morning. He feels like he’s done nothing but sigh since the day Ben called him from Naboo, desperate for help. No, farther back. He’s been doing nothing but sighing for years now.

He’s done what he can, so he turns to leave. But it’s as though Leia’s spirit nudges him with that sharp elbow of hers right to the ribs, just like old times. The girl. Don’t forget about the girl.

“Hey, kid?” he tosses over his shoulder.

A thick voice mumbles back: “What.”

“One more thing about the girl, then I promise I’ll leave it. But I say go for it. Ask her out for ice cream, treat her right. She’s not feeling too well today, maybe you should go cheer her up. She hasn’t had an easy go of it—kinda reminds me of somebody.”

He can hear his son sniffle, so he figures the least he can do is not turn around. Let his son cry in peace, as he no doubt would prefer.

“Think she could use a friend,” he tells Ben, as he opens the door to the kitchen. “Maybe you could, too.”

. . . 

The old shoebox is exactly where she stashed it when she moved in: on the top shelf of her kitchen cabinet, tucked all the way back against the wall, nearly out of reach. Rey has to stand on her toes, one hand on the counter pushing herself up, to nudge at it enough to grab hold and bring it down.

She stares at it. It’s a Ma-uL sneakers box, though she’d never had the money to own a pair of those. Too much time has passed for her to remember where the box came from; something she found in a dumpster, maybe, or passed on to her by a member of a foster household.

Her heart beats almost violently as she lifts the top and surveys the contents. Official documents, mostly. A couple momentos: a macrame bracelet given to her by a boy named Ivano who moved away not long after, a sticker for a rock band called Guavian Death Gang she picked up somewhere.

A handful of instant camera photos she has worked very hard to forget about.

Photos she took that night.

The night she followed Plutt, her guardian at the time, on his weekly trip into the nearby city of Jakku. To that dark warehouse in the shipping district. To the parked stretch limousine that had been waiting for him.

Rey picks up the top photo in the stack. There is it: a sleek, dark vehicle, taken from maybe a hundred feet away. The license plate is illuminated but blurred by distance; Rey imagines if she had a magnifying glass, she might be able to make out its characters.

The next photo: a bodyguard opening the back door and an older, distinguished-looking man stepping out, envelope in hand. A man whose face, back then, she could’ve sworn she knew but could not quite place.

The photo after that: the exchange, envelope changing hands from the man to Plutt.

Three fucking photos, the grand total of her evidence, before she’d realized her cartridge was empty.

But three fucking photos is all it takes to bring the first half of that night rushing back. She’d ridden the bus the whole way home feeling small and naive and numb, turning what she’d seen over in her mind again and again, a piece of sea glass worn smooth by the time she’d returned to Plutt’s house.

He’d been there on the couch watching something on tv, had ignored her entrance like he ignored most everything about Rey except for the things that made him furious, made him rage.

She’d tossed the photos in his lap and demanded answers.

And she had been worth so little to him, such an unthreatening non-entity, that he’d told her the truth right there. All of it, laughing in her face as he did so, taunting her with her own powerlessness.

That’s where the memories stop. Rey has chosen not to remember what happened after that for so long that she’s not sure she can now. There is that ugly laugh, that scornful look, and then there is nothing. Silence. Darkness.

No going back. Only forward. Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think about it.

Rey opens her window and sits on the sill, pulling her pack and her light from her sequined backpack. The cigarette is an excuse, a crutch; she barely smokes it, just stares out into the night. When it's burned down to the filter, she goes to the bathroom, locks the door, and runs the water in the sink for a long time, as hot as it goes. She runs it for long enough that it steams up the bathroom. She shucks her sweat-sodden clothing and washes up, standing in front of the sink, dousing her wash cloth and scouring herself limb by limb. The water is so hot it hurts her hands and the cloth leaves a trail of red skin wherever she scrubs.

Afterwards, she collapses onto her futon in just her dingy old towel, lightheaded and laconic.

But she is cool, finally. What little nighttime breeze there is caresses her bare limbs. So she has that, at least. Her wet hair feels good on the back of her neck and shoulders. She closes her eyes. Breath in, count to four, breath out, count to four. Again. And then again, after that. And so, and so on. Nice, orderly breathing.

Calm.

Her thoughts have slowed to a trickle, each one reluctant, sludgy.

Does she sleep? Her mind drifts off to a nowhere place for a while. There are no dreams, but she is hypnotized by the song of nighttime Tatooine: the occasional swishing of a passing car, the buzz and chirp of crickets and cicadas, the hum of the streetlamps and the muffled thumping of music coming from the bar down the street. A gentle lullaby. She dozes, maybe.

Soon enough, she gets hot again and wishes she had a fan. Makes a note to snag one from Han’s shop tomorrow. Thinks about getting up and putting on clothes, but doesn’t.

She is so tired.

The knock on the door booms like a thunderclap in the otherwise silent apartment, breaking the trance; Rey jumps out of her skin at the sound of it.

Has she summoned a ghost from her past, by opening that box? She darts a glance at the counter where it sits open, photos inside.

That’s stupid, she chides herself. This heat has scrambled her brains. Rey forces herself to sit up. She rubs her nose nervously and waits.

The second knock is louder, more insistent.

She glances down at her bath towel; it has loosened from where she tucked it under her arms and pools at her waist now, leaving her pale breasts exposed. Standing, she re-tucks it and hurries over to the door. But she does not open it.

Ben Solo’s face is distorted and bulbous through the peephole. His hair is wet. He is dressed in real clothes for once, a simple black tee and jeans. Though simple, they fit him well. They look expensive, just like everything he owns.

He is here. In the flesh. Really here.

“What the…” she whispers, right before he raises his hand and knocks a third time with the meat of his fist. The door shakes with each hit. 

Why is he here? Is she dreaming?

Breath in, count to four, breath out, count to four.

This is not a dream. Rey’s hands flutter over the towel, smoothing down its front as though it were a real garment. Should she change? No. There isn't time. And… maybe she wants him to see her like this. She checks the peephole again. He’s still there, shifting his weight from foot to foot. It strikes her: he looks a bit nervous himself. That gives her the push she needs; with a final steadying breath, she slides the chain lock and flips the bolt, then opens the door.

He is so large and so solid. Rey is not a short woman, yet he towers over her, with shoulders the breadth of her doorway. Self-conscious, she keeps one hand on the edge of the towel. The scent of his soap, something evergreen, rolls over her; she breathes it in deeply.

Ben’s dark eyes bore into hers for a long, tense moment. It sends a jolt through her, from scalp to toes. Despite her best efforts, she feels breathless, looking up at him. Her fingertips tingle, the muscles in her stomach jump. 

It’s just that he always looks so good. Even drunk in a bathrobe making a scene in the diner, he looked good to her. And now he is clean, with hair as wet as hers, and he smells good too, and Rey wants a hundred thousand things to happen, or maybe nothing at all. 

He is definitely nervous too, gaze shifting from her towel to the apartment behind her then back to the towel, before returning to her face. He doesn’t smile. She wonders if he knows how. Rey glances down at his hands: in one he holds a bottle of aspirin, in the other, a makeshift bouquet of dandelions. She returns to his face. He’s watching her, waiting.

So solemn, so intent. Hungry, almost. Rey bites her lip.

He doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t, either.

Chapter Text

“What do you want?” Rey finally manages to get out. She’s not entirely certain she’s ready for whatever his reply might be. Her heart is pounding. Half of her hopes he’ll sweep her up into a torrid kiss then rip off her towel and ravage her. Half hopes he’ll simply take her hand.

She’d like to have her hand held by Ben.

“The other day. I was an asshole.” He pushes the bottle of aspirin and the dandelions into her hands. “Here.”

Rey frowns, but accepts his offerings. The dandelions are all cheerfully ragged yellow blossoms, only a little wilted from their journey in his big fist. “Is this… an apology?”

That’s not what she was expecting from Ben fucking Solo. Yet he shrugs, eyes wide and brow scrunched, in the universal expression of, ‘duh’. As though it were obvious. It annoys her; how is she supposed to know what he’s thinking in that lovely mess of a mind?

So she squints at him. “You know what actually works as an apology?”

His jaw tics.

“An apology,” says Rey.

He clears his throat. Looks down at his expensive boots, then back up at her. “Yeah. I… Sorry.”

“Hm.” She lets him hang, but only for a second, because he looks so agonized standing there, slouched with penitence, gaze flitting from his boots to her face then back again, that she cannot maintain the ruse. “Okay. Forgiven. Do you want to come inside?”

He swallows. Fascinated, she watches the jut of his Adam’s apple dip and rise. 

“…Sure.”

Moving aside, Rey opens the door completely. With two steps, Ben Solo is standing in the middle of her apartment, studying it like the scant details of her life are going to be on an exam later and perhaps, it seems to Rey, using it as a convenient excuse to avoid looking her way.

In an attempt to calm the deafening racing of her heart, she turns to shut the door with exaggerated attentiveness. Slowly, slowly, buying herself time. When it clicks shut, she inhales deeply, back to him. Then she faces him.

He’s watching. The sight of him, so big he makes her place look like a shoebox, completely invalidates whatever little scrap of calm she’s collected.

“Nice… place,” he says, eyes shying away again.

“Efficiency.” She joins him in the middle of the room, then, rethinking being so close in only her towel, backs up until she’s leaning against the counter, where she deposits the bottle and the bouquet. At his puzzled expression, she explains, “That’s what they call apartments when they’re this shitty. Efficiencies.”

Ben shakes his head. “Yeah, I know.”

For a moment, they resume their staring contest. Is it Rey’s imagination or does Ben’s chest rise and fall more dramatically than before? His breathing seems labored. She glances down; his hands are balled into fists.

One of them has to say something.

So she blurts out the first idiotic thought that pops into her mind. “Did you know what was going on at Sidious?”

“Uh—”

“Han told me about it.’

His mouth opens and shuts, a fish out of water gasping for air; she can’t tell if he’s offended or frightened. Could be both.

“Kind of a rude question,” he says at last.

Rey cocks her eyebrow in challenge. “Then I suppose we’re both kind of assholes.”

Ben casts about, perhaps searching for an answer to her question in the bubbled and peeling linoleum flooring. He goes to the window, carefully perches himself upon the windowsill, then looks down onto the street for a moment. Finally, he directs his gaze back to her and begins to speak.

“Some of it. I wasn’t part of the Corellian energy scam or the Kanjiklub fiasco or anything.” His tone turns self-deprecating; he reaches over and begins to play with the sleeve of an oversized forest green sweater hanging from her clothing rack. “Mostly organizing Sheev's schedule. Acting as his counsel, sometimes. I was a shit lawyer.”

A chill passes through Rey at the name.

“Quit Sidious with nothing but the clothes on my back. All my money was in stock and my 401K. My apartment was a rental, my car was a lease. When it all came out, what they’d been doing…”

He cups his hands, then makes a blooming motion along with a soft ‘poof’ sound, like a bomb gently exploding.

“Sheev,” says Rey, voice strained, uninterested in his financial woes.

“Yeah.” He furrows his brows at her.

“Sheev Palpatine. You worked directly for Sheev Palpatine.”

“You okay?”

“I just…” she laughs, a dry panicked little noise. “What did your father tell you about me?”

That sends his gaze back to the sweater, almost as though he resents being asked. “We don't really talk,” is all he says.

“Oh.”

Ben sighs, but Rey is relieved. She doesn’t want to talk about Sidious or Palpatine; doesn’t want to think about it.

Is he mustering his resolve to make a move? she wonders, as riveted as he is avoidant. Do I want him to? Does he regret coming here? She fiddles with her towel and flexes her toes against the linoleum, considering crossing the room and depositing herself in his lap; the thought makes her pulse go haywire. But in a good way. She thinks she might like that haywire feeling.

“He said you’ve had a tough time,” Ben murmurs, “And you left early today because you weren’t feeling well. So.”

“A tough time,” she echoes, taking one careful, slow step towards him. 

Then another.

That doesn’t escape his notice; she sees his shoulders go tense, his jaw working. His big hands, now clamped onto the windowsill, are white at the knuckles.

“Yeah.”

“So you came here to…” 

She takes another step. One more would put her on top of him. He looks up at her, breathing rough and loud in the quiet of the apartment, the quiet of sleepy nighttime Tatooine. A thousand unspoken possibilities hang in the still, hot air between them. Suspended, almost tangible. With a flick of either of their wrists, they could pull one down.

Anything could happen. Or nothing.

“Rey—”

“I’ve never had sex,” she whispers.

He startles. “… Oh. I… Okay.”

It wasn’t the right thing to say; she knows it immediately in the way his face falls, in how he pushes up from the window sill and dances away from her, over to the kitchen counter. She cringes. Who would say something so preposterous to the man they’re interested in?

“I just didn’t want you to think…” she starts, but then she spies the open Ma-uL box, right where she left it. He notices it at the same moment. The rush of sudden panic makes her lightheaded. Hurriedly, she snatches it off the counter, shoving the lid back on, and tosses it onto the futon.

Ben scowls at the box, then at her, shaking his head. “That’s not why I came over.”

What’s not why he came over? Rey’s lost the thread of this encounter now. Why does she feel she’s on the defensive? It’s as though only at this moment does she realize, well and truly, how out of her element she is. So she does what she’s always done in prison when she was in too deep: she switches tactics, keeps the threat at bay by going on the offensive.

“I could drop you like a sack of potatoes,” she declares. “I’ve fought girls bigger than you.”

Warring emotions play out across his face. Affront, confusion, interest. At last he settles for, “Really?”

Regretting the bath towel now, she crosses her arms. “Well… close to, anyway. Heavier, probably.”

He gestures with his thumb towards the door. “I’ll go.” With that, he turns. She blinks. In an instant, he is reaching for the door. He’s leaving and Rey could cry at the injustice of it all. Why is he leaving? How has she botched this so horribly?

“I’ve never been on a date either!” she blurts out.

In for a penny, in for a pound. She supposes she’s truly lost control of her senses. There’s no other possible explanation for how fast her mouth is racing ahead of her brain.

“O-oh.” Ben shifts to look back at her, hand still on the doorknob.

“Yeah.”

She shrugs shyly at him. Extending an invitation. Attempting coyness or seduction, but landing in the realm of awkward.

“How… old did you say you were?” Ben asks, his deep voice wavering ever so slightly.

“I didn’t. Say.” She wants to weep at the worried expression on his face but she will not. Not in front of him. “Twenty one.”

He blinks dumbly, then pivots back towards the door. Rey watches, feeling miserable and hopeless and desperate for something she cannot name, as he opens it.

“Hope you feel better soon, Rey,” he mutters. He looks back at her only once, only a fleeting second, as if the sight of her there in her towel might turn him to stone if his eyes linger too long. Then he is gone, door closing quietly behind him. She hears his heavy footsteps recede down the hall, then the stairs. 

The street door squeals in protest as it is opened. It shrieks with finality as it is slammed shut.

“Thanks, Ben fucking Solo,” Rey croaks.

She looks down at the dandelions she’d placed on the counter. Feeling empty, feeling nothing, she loosens one from the bouquet, brings it to her lips, and rends the bloom from the stem with her front teeth.

The petals are soft on her tongue, but oh, mixed with her tears, their taste is bitter.

So bitter.

. . .

Ben wants so badly to stay in that sad little apartment with Rey. He wants to ask her what she really wants, but then, she’s told him, hasn’t she?

I could drop you like a sack of potatoes, she’d said. Her eyes—hazel, he’d observed, a delicate blend of gold and green—had been so wild, so frantic. He hadn’t known what to do with the vulnerable confessions she’d entrusted to him.

What do you want from me?

By the time he’s walked back to Han’s house, he knows there won’t be any sleep for him tonight, but he doesn’t turn to alcohol as he has in previous sleepless nights. Instead he ventures into a part of the house he’s avoided until now: the spare bedroom. It is stacked with boxes and bags towards which he has felt an apathy bordering on disgust. Why then, has he come in here now? The room is dark. He bumps into several sharp edges on his way over to the bed, where he sits and stares at the shapes of the past, illuminated only by the hallway nightlight’s dim amber glow.

He plays it all back in his mind: showering, shaving, carefully choosing his clothes, whimsically picking the dandelions on his way to the pharmacy, his palms clammy as he stood in front of her door, her shiny, soft-looking hair, how damp it was, how good it smelled—citrusy, just like he’d imagined—her pretty face, so innocent-looking, those purloined glimpses of her perfect legs as she approached him cautiously. As though he were a cornered wild beast.

But she is the one who is wild, he thinks. He wanted to see what was under that towel almost as much as he wanted to know why she yanked that Ma-uL shoebox away from him. Who is she?

Lost in his musings, he doesn’t hear Han approach; he’s brought back to reality by a sleep-roughened voice. 

“Back already?”

Ben doesn’t need to turn to know his father is leaning in the doorway. “Yeah,” he replies.

“You go see her?”

He nods. The box in front of him has caught his notice now that his eyes have adjusted to the darkness; it’s labeled, ‘BABY BEN CLOTHES’ in his mother’s bold handwriting.

Leia had kept those? There’s a tightness in his chest at the thought; his throat constricts. His eyes sting.

“You two talked?” prompts Han.

“I—”

He feels the bed sink slightly under the weight of his father taking a seat on the other side. He steals a peek over his shoulder to find Han’s back to him. Ben turns forward again. He wonders if he should confide in him that for the first time since he was a teenager, he is utterly flummoxed by a girl. For the first time since he can remember, he thinks he has allowed himself to have a crush. She unsettles him, and he doesn’t know what to make of her. And now he can’t stop thinking about what she makes of him. But Han would be smug about it or want to offer advice, he decides. He can’t handle either right now.

So he settles for: “We talked.”

“Good.” He can almost feel Han’s sigh; it is such a deep, heavy thing. “You can’t let stuff sit and fester too long. There were a lot of things I thought I’d have time to tell your mother. And then… then there wasn’t any time left.”

Ben can’t quite catch his breath. His throat burns now, like a fresh wound. “I know what you mean,” he manages.

“Don’t mind you making your own mistakes, but… can’t stand to see you making mine.”

“Dad,” he tries, but he can’t get the words out: thank you. I’m sorry. I fucked up. I wasn’t a good son. I wasn’t a good man. I don’t know what to do now.

I loved you both. I wanted you to be proud. I still do.

I’m scared.

This is his second time blubbering today, but the shame of it is outweighed by the suffocating sensation of being buried by his own life, each mistake a cinder block blocking out a little bit more light. He wants to be alone. He wants a hug.

“I know, kid,” says Han. A hand gently pats Ben’s shoulder. “S’okay. I know.”

. . .

The morning runs help so he keeps with them, and if he is disappointed to find the gazebo empty the next morning, and the one after that, well, he pours that disappointment into running farther, faster, better.

But then, like a miracle, he spies her on the third morning after his late-night visit; the sun is just rising, the whole world pearly-white and gold, dew clinging to every surface, air already thick as molasses with humidity. But she is there in the park in plain grey shorts, a large black tee, leather sandals, fresh-faced, nestled in the hollow of an ancient oak tree’s roots, a library book in one hand, cigarette in the other.

Beside her is a paper bag from Luke’s diner; her breakfast, no doubt.

What does it mean? Is this a game, is she tempting him or taunting him? How is Ben supposed to respond?

She makes Ben's head spin. He wants her so badly it’s like a physical hunger, a hollow in his gut; he finds himself clenching his hands into fists at random points throughout the day when he recalls the scent of her soap-clean skin or the sight of her long bare legs.

But she’d warned him off, hadn’t she? Threatened him, just about.

He does not know which way to turn. He does not know what to do with himself, his future, now that he cannot do the thing he’d always planned to do. He thinks he’d like to throw himself into Rey, into her future. Which, he supposes, is an improvement over where he was a few weeks ago, when all he wanted was to disappear.

And when he catches sight of the hungry, haunted look she throws his way as he runs past, his decision is made for him.

“Can I have some of that?” he pants, bringing himself to a halt a few feet from her. 

She goes all deer in the headlights, trying her best to pretend she hadn’t been watching him. He might laugh if he weren’t so parched, he might believe it if he hadn’t caught her ogling. As he leans forward, hands on his knees, and catches his breath, he tips his chin in the direction of the large metal water bottle she’s rested against one of the tree roots.

“Oh!” She fumbles in picking it up and handing it to him. “Sure.”

So maybe he makes sure his hand covers hers for a moment as he takes the bottle from her. He’s no saint, never has been, and he’s trying to suss out her feelings towards him.

Rey blushes, a soft pink glow spreading across her freckled cheeks. It’s adorable. And telling, maybe.

“Thanks,” he gasps, between sips. She nods. He waits a moment for her to initiate a conversation. When she doesn’t, he gestures towards her book. “What’re you reading?”

“A memoir,” she answers, slightly wary.

“Any good?”

“It’s alright.” She holds it up so he can see the cover, an abstract painting of a hooded figure. “It was written by this guy, he was known as Revan the Butcher. He did a bunch of bad things, went to prison for a long time. But the book is about… after. What happened once he got out and had to make amends. How he started over.”

Is it his imagination or does she seem especially wistful?

Rey glances up at him then away, taking a drag of her cigarette; a squirrel has drawn near to gather fallen acorns and she watches it with studious concentration.

Is she making a pointed reference to his time at Sidious, his own criminal past? If so, is she telling him he should start over?

With her?

He buys himself a moment by taking another long swallow of her water. Finally, he says, “Seconds chances—you think everyone deserves one?”

“I hope so,” she replies softly, staring up at him. “Do you?”

Ben tries for careless, straightening to his full height and shrugging his shoulders. “Guess I kind of have to, don’t I?”

“Good. That's… good,” she says. 

It seems to him that she wants to say more, so he hovers, waiting, but she just sniffs, nose scrunching adorably, then looks down at the book in her hands. The squirrel’s idle chattering and the buzz of the locusts is the only sound in the weighted pause that follows.

One of them has to say something.

“You like ice cream?” he blurts out, recalling Han’s advice.

She blinks, perhaps surprised by the non-sequitur. “I… I suppose?”

“Not lactose intolerant or anything?”

“I don’t think so,” she says. “I eat instant mac and cheese most nights I’m not at the diner.”

Ben grimaces; junk food, cigarettes. This girl matches him bad habit for bad habit. And if he had the faintest idea how to cook, he’d offer to make her a real dinner. As it is, he presses on with his dumb ice cream idea, asking, “Got a favorite flavor?”

He thinks she might be catching on, because her smile softens, becomes something coy and almost tender. “Oh, I dunno. Vanilla, maybe.”

“Vanilla’s underrated, in my opinion. High quality beans, heavy cream, sea salt, no artificial garbage? Nothing better.”

“…R-right.” She nods, although she looks confused, but Ben persists, trying to make a point.

“Other flavors can be good, too. But there’s something about a simple classic done right.”

Again, she nods, brows still adorably drawn. Again, an awkward pause unfurls between them. Just ask her out, he commands himself. You’ve come this far. Say it. Speak the words aloud.

Ben shoves the water bottle at Rey. “Thanks again.” He turns to go, conceding defeat to his cowardice.

“Do you?” he hears her pipe up, voice higher and breathier than usual. “Have a favorite flavor?”

He pivots; she’s leaning forward, book set aside, cigarette butt stubbed out on a root, arms wrapped around her knees. She looks eager, and worried.

Worried that he’ll leave?

He wonders.

Maybe he hopes, too.

“There was this place around the corner from where I lived in Naboo,” he replies. Checking to see if her body language has shifted—it hasn’t—he seats himself in the grass nearby. “They did goat cheese, orange peel and anis gelato.”

She laughs. “That sounds disgusting.”

Even Ben chuckles. “You’d think. It shouldn’t’ve worked, but… it did.”

“Oh,” she murmurs.

He pulls a few blades of grass and ties them into knots, giving her the space to take the conversation wherever she’d like, stealing glances every so often; silently, she studies him. There’s a cluster of dandelions in one of the tufts, so he plucks one of the puffy white-blossomed ones and hands it to her.

“Make a wish,” he directs, “then blow.”

Eyes on him, she hesitates. Then, carefully, she blows on the wispy florets; they watch together as they drift up a ways before settling down around them.

Rey sighs.

“Why are you asking me about ice cream, Ben?”

Is that hope in her voice? She twirls the bald seed head and stem between her thin fingers. Ben pretends to be fascinated by the motion, so he does not have to meet her eyes while he dodges the question.

“Tatooine has a decent ice cream parlor, Jabba’s Hut. Check it out. If you like ice cream.”

“Alright, I will,” she says.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Don’t make the same mistakes Han made, he thinks. Ben pulls in a deep breath; he feels giddy with nerves, like the day Luke fired him, like the day he graduated from law school, like his first day at Sidious. But this isn’t about work. What has work given him, ultimately? Nothing permanent. Nothing that truly meant anything to him, in the end.

With this, with Rey, there is so much more at stake.

He clears his throat. Easy, casual: “We could go together some time.”

“We could?”

There’s no mistaking the hopeful lilt in her voice. Ben raises his eyes to find her grinning.

“Long as you promise not to drop me like a sack of potatoes,” he teases.

Her face falls. She stammers, “I… I… that was…”

“Joke,” he says, hands raised in pacification. “Just a joke.”

She fidgets, still rolling the stem between her thumb and forefinger. “I want to get ice cream with you,” she says, almost under her breath, like a confession.

“Good.” Without knowing why he does it, he reaches over and taps the toe of her shoe, as if to demand her attention, although he knows he has it. “If you don’t like their vanilla bean, you can blame me,” he tells her.

Vaguely, Ben wonders if any of this counts as flirting and if it does, if he is succeeding at it. Rey is flushed and seems a bit breathless, so maybe. She hasn’t threatened him again, anyway.

“And if I do like it?”

He’s not a man prone to smiling. Everything about his life has demanded seriousness and intimidation. It has always been better, for Ben, to be feared than loved.

But he does his best to smile for her, and in turn, Rey’s wary grin widens until she is beaming. So there they sit, under the verdant canopy of the park’s old oak tree at the ass crack of dawn, gawking at each other like a pair of dopes. He doesn’t think he’s ever been so happy in his life.

“Well,” he answers belatedly, stumbling to his feet, resolved to leave now before he ruins this somehow, “If you like it, then… you’ll know. Worth something, right?”

He begins to back away, gaze on her as he goes.

“That’s worth… a lot,” she replies, to which he nods. She nods back. They’re both still smiling. That’s enough for right now; that’s plenty for him to go on. If he stays any longer, he might do something dumb like suggest they spend the rest of their lives together.

So he turns, feeling confident, feeling good, and away he jogs. 

It is not until he arrives back at Han's house that it strikes him: Ben didn’t actually ask her out.

Damn it.

. . .

Rey comes to that very realization at about the same time he does, but she’s late enough for her shift as is, so there’s nothing for it. Both the diner and the garage are oddly busy; she spends the next eight hours on her feet, sweating, washing dishes here, disassembling engines there. It’s all a blur. Even her lunch is scarfed down hastily while on her feet in the kitchen, dodging the cooks as they dart around, sauteing and grilling and baking with the tenacity of a conquering horde.

“Some festival going on over in Dagobah,” Luke pauses to explain at one point, and when Rey voices her disbelief that such a crowd is merely spillover from the next town down the highway, Rose pipes up to explain that Tosche Station is a much-beloved institution, and also, Rey, if you’re just standing around can you please take table five’s drinks out to them while Rose figures out what the fuck went wrong with table twelve’s order?

And on the day goes, hours slipping through her fingers like a cascade of water. Suddenly, the sun is setting and things are slowing down, and Rey is punching out, waving goodbye to everyone, muscles aching, her feet two lead anvils she must drag the block over to her apartment.

She’s tired all the way down to her bones.

And yet, when she thinks about her encounter with Ben earlier in the morning, it’s like licking a live wire. A frisson of nervous energy coils itself in her gut and propels her; once she has scrubbed away the day’s sweat and used her patented bucket method to clean her hair, she finds she cannot sit still. Her legs twitch, desperate to carry her to him. Not a single one of her library books can hold her interest for more than a line or two.

With a groan, she gives up and changes into a pair of loose, rolled-hem jeans, a white t-shirt, and an oversized cardigan. She contemplates the simple pair of heels Jannah insisted she grab, but goes instead for the leather sandals.

He’d definitely meant to ask her on a date, even if he hadn’t explicitly done it. Hadn’t he? Doesn’t that grant her permission to go over to his house? If Han answers the door again, at least this time she’ll have a ready excuse.

Sorry to bother you, she’ll say, Just wanted to give your son another opportunity to ask me out on a date since he botched the first attempt.

Credible enough.

Mind made up, she heads out into the warm night.

. . .

In hindsight, it’s a stroke of luck that she chooses the route she does, along the main drag. It’s only because she goes this way that she passes Tatooine’s one and only bar. And it is only because she passes Tatooine’s one and only bar—scrutinizing the neon-lit sign hanging in the window which simply reads, ‘BAR’—that she spots him.

Ben Solo, seated at the corner of the bar nearest the door, his back to the window. The woman behind the bar, a pretty Amazon with a platinum-blonde pixie cut, says something to him. Rey watches one of his shoulders rise and fall.

She has never been in a bar before. It’s fairly busy inside, although she notices that the stools on either side of Ben are empty.

No time like the present, she thinks, bracing herself, and in she goes.

. . .

“Hi,” a voice says from behind him. Ben glances up from his coffee and it’s as though his pathetic moping has conjured her up. Rey. Hands in her pockets, she gives him a diffident smile. Once again, the scent of her shampoo and soap wafts over him. Her damp hair has left dark patches on her white t-shirt; the rogue thought sneaks up on him, that he wishes her hair were longer, so her bra might be revealed.

Stop it, he chides himself.

He returns her smile. “Hey.”

“Coffee at this hour?” she asks, taking the stool next to his. Her knees brush his thigh, but she doesn’t move away; she rests them there, leaning on him slightly. He works to maintain a calm, untroubled air, though his heart is thundering.

“The stuff Han buys is shit,” he manages, “Couldn’t take it anymore.”

Rey tilts her head. “It’s late though, isn’t it?”

“What’s late and what’s early when you don’t have a job?” he asks, with a shrug.

She giggles. Outright giggles. He did that, he made her giggle. The tinkling sound of her laughter fills him with something ebullient, something light, as though he could float away on his own ego and the sound of her amusement. 

“Guess that’s fair,” she says.

“Friend of yours, Solo?”

“Phasma.” He gestures between the bartender and Rey. “This is Rey. Rey, Phasma.”

Phasma gives Rey a tight-lipped nod, which is about as much hospitality as she ever shows anyone. “What can I get you?”

Rey purses her lips to the side as she considers the chalkboard drinks list posted on the wall. “Can I have… uh, a beer?”

It’s such an odd request that both Ben and Phasma gape at Rey for a full second, before Phasma finally drawls, “Which one, then?”

Ben should be ashamed of himself for how cute he finds Rey when she blushes, but he can’t help himself. He smiles, seeing the pink in her cheeks.

“A… Starkiller IPA, please,” she says, pronouncing it ‘ee-pah’.

After Phasma has retreated, Ben murmurs, “IPA’s and vanilla ice cream, huh?”

She winces. “Is that bad?”

“No, no,” he rushes to assure her. “Everyone likes IPA’s and vanilla ice cream. Very normal stuff. It suits you.”

“I don’t… really drink, actually,” she admits quietly, eyes darting away from him.

“Ah,” he huffs.

“Just thought the name sounded cool.”

“Starkiller.”

“Intense.”

She seems happy to be here, to be talking to him, but nervous as well. Still a bit edgy. Ben sips at his coffee. He’s also nervous, if he’s being honest with himself.

“Sounds like the band name of a dumb teenage kid trying to impress his older friends.”

Rey laughs again, at that. “It does, I suppose.”

They might both be nervous, but that doesn’t stop Rey from tilting to get closer to him, her legs practically in his lap. He stares at her; she’s looking at their legs, where they’re in contact. With agonizing slowness, her hand creeps over until it is resting on his upper thigh.

Ben tries very hard to breathe normally.

The moment is interrupted by Phasma returning with a pint glass of foamy, deep amber-colored beer, which she places on a coaster in front of Rey, then arches a blonde brow expectantly. Rey keeps her hand where it is, the heat of her palm burning through Ben’s jeans and branding his skin forever, as she reaches into her cardigan and pulls out some cash.

With a suspicious glance between the two of them and a brusque nod, Phasma takes the cash and disappears.

Rey gently squeezes his thigh, gauging his reaction. Ben does not pop a boner like a horny teenager, although it’s a close call. Feigning nonchalance—he suspects she can tell he’s affected anyway, her eyes sparkling with mischief—he coughs, and nods at the drink. 

“Thoughts?”

She takes a tentative sip. Then grimaces. “Disgusting.”

Some of the tension eases, momentarily. “Well,” he chuckles, “now you know.”

“True. Yes. True. That is worth something.” With a crestfallen expression, she glares at the beer, stealing not-so-subtle glances at his coffee. “But that was all the money I had on me.”

Feeling emboldened by her boldness, feeling reckless, Ben snatches the hand on his thigh and laces their fingers together. Now it is his turn to gauge her reaction: she does not protest, not in the slightest. In fact, she leans in closer, until she is resting against his arm. She beams at him, but he catches the moment her eyes dart downward. At his coffee.

“Here,” he says, giddy, rubbing the back of her hand with the pad of his thumb. With his free hand, he nudges his coffee her way, then reaches over and takes her beer, bringing it to his lips. It’s good. Hoppy, sour, but a bit sweet as well. 

She bites her lip in barely-restrained delight.

“Thank you, Ben.”

“Mm,” he hums, contented.

. . .

Across the room, Poe, seated at a round table in the corner, trails off mid-sentence and hisses, “Shh—sh—shush. Everyone shut up.” He waves at Jannah, on his left, and Rose, who is facing the pair from across the table. “Shut up. Shut. Up.”

Rose blinks at him pointedly. “Literally no one was talking except you.”

“Please keep it down, Rose. I’m thinking.”

“What is going on here?” Jannah asks Rose.

“I honestly have no idea,” says Rose before finishing off her haymaker. 

Poe’s gaze flits between the two of them, then focuses on Jannah. “Are you not seeing what I’m seeing?”

Rose frowns. “I can see the darts board and the bathroom. What am I supposed to be seeing?”

He rolls his eyes. “Behind you.”

Rose watches as Jannah’s eyes skate past her and land at a point across the bar. “Oh,” she says, jaw dropping, “Oh no.”

“Yeah!” Poe nods. “What're we doing about this?”

“What?” Rose makes to turn in her seat, just as Poe shout-whispers:

“Sh, Rose, stop—don’t! Don’t turn around, it’s too conspicuous.”

“Well I’m not gonna be the only one who doesn’t—” 

She loses her train of thought at the sight of Rey. New girl Rey whose last name she still doesn’t know, who is funny and a little skittish and cute although tragically, Rose is just now learning, straight… because she’s currently half seated on her barstool, half in the lap of one Ben fucking Solo. 

“Oh my god.”

“This… I don’t see this ending well,” says Jannah, with a woeful shake of her head.

Poe nods again. “Do we break it up?” He leans in. “Execute Order 66?”

“No.”

“What?”

“No,” Rose repeats. “We do not break it up.”

“Rose,” says Poe.

“Poe,” Rose deadpans back.

“Rose,” tries Jannah.

“Jannah!” she huffs. “No, listen to me you guys. First of all, they’re both criminals, right?”

Poe looks like he’s being forced to reluctantly disagree. “Well I mean, te-e-e-echnically, Solo hasn’t been charged with anything, but— ”

“He worked for Sidious,” Rose interrupts. “He’s definitely crooked. And I heard from Klaud that she went to jail when she was ten years old for murdering her parents with an axe or something.”

Jannah nearly chokes on her mouthful of dark beer; she begins coughing, and Poe pounds on her back until she waves him off, saying, “That’s ridiculous. Poe and I sold the girl an entire wardrobe last week and she was so nervous she was shaking. She’s harmless.”

“Now she is,” argues Poe. “Maybe prison… I don’t know, rehabilitated her?” He leans in even further, chin nearly in his wine glass, and gestures for the others to do the same. In a whisper, he goes on, “Or… is Solo her newest prey? She the black widow type?”

The women groan in perfect harmony, then glance at each other. Rose nods, and Jannah says, “Poe, you’re in timeout until you can think of something to say that isn’t irrereparably stupid.”

Poe scoffs.

“As I was saying, they’re both criminals. They’re both… well, they both seem a little odd. Odd ducks.” She tries for as surreptitious a glance at them over her shoulder as she can manage. “Two little lost ducklings.”

“Nothing little about him,” mutters Jannah.

Is Ben Solo… smiling? Rose thinks he might be. Who knew he had dimples? She sure as hell didn’t. She turns back to her friends. 

“I think this is a positive development.”

“Rose,” pleads Poe.

“Hey, I work with her, you guys don’t. All the poor girl does is go to work and go home. It’s… it’s really sad, to be honest.”

Jannah makes an expression Rose knows all too well: it’s her ‘I've-declared-my-stance-on-the-matter-but-I'm-open-to-being-convinced-otherwise’ face. It involves pursed lips and dancing eyebrows. Rose loves it when Jannah makes that face. She blows her an air kiss, which Jannah simulates catching, even as she sighs:

“But… Ben Solo? Really? We can’t do any better for her?”

“In Tatooine? Who are we gonna hook her up with? Chewie? Klaud? Luke or Han? Old Man Yoda and his seventy goats? Greedo? And besides, Solo’s hot, don’t pretend he’s not.”

Jannah’s eyebrows continue to dance; she’s definitely entertaining the possibility that Rose is correct. Rose can taste the victory at hand.

“He’s a dick,” Poe stubbornly interjects.

She laughs at him. “You’re a dick.”

“Yeah, I know, but I’m like… a charming dick. He’s just a dick dick.”

Rose makes an exasperated noise. She’s heard enough. She points at him. “You—still in time out, as I recall.” Poe pulls a face at her. Next she points to Jannah. “You—stay cute.” Jannah preens at the compliment, until Rose follows up with: “Also, it’s your round. I’d like another haymaker. Poe?”

“‘Nother cab,” he says, defeated, pushing his empty glass over to Jannah.

Jannah shoots a final, reluctant glance at the couple. “I could simply… pop in while I’m at the bar. Very casual. Totally not interfering. Just saying hello.”

Rose shakes her head. “Look how happy they both are. In the entire time we were at Tatooine High with Ben Solo, did you ever see him smile once? And her! She’s giggling, for fuck’s sake. He’s making the ex-con giggle. They are holding hands, you guys. Like in public. Let them have this.”

Rolling her eyes, Jannah relents. “Fine. Kiss.” Rose pushes up from her chair, meeting her girlfriend as she swoops in for a chaste peck on the lips. The moment stretches; they sink a little further into each other, lips parting, tongues brushing, the kiss becoming something heated; they lose track of where they are. Jannah’s hand gently cups the back of Rose's neck, keeping her close in that way she craves, that way that she thinks about all day, getting her through her long shifts at the diner—

“Uh, hi, it’s your third wheel calling, would you two mind saving that for later?”

Poe’s pout has resorted to sulking; he’s slouched down into his seat, arms crossed in protest. We really need to work on getting him laid next, thinks Rose. He’s been a pain in the ass ever since the thing with Zorri fizzled out.

“Right, right,” says Jannah. She presses one more soft kiss to Rose’s still-pursed lips. “Sorry, love. I’ll have to give you the… rest of that, later.”

After she’s gone, Rose shifts to smirk at Poe. “I’m not sorry. Not one bit.”

“Yeah yeah,” comes his gruff reply, though he’s smirking too. “‘Course you’re not, you heathen.”

. . .

If Rey had her druthers, she and Ben would sit on their barstools staring into each other’s eyes and exchanging flirtatious, nervous nothings until the bar closed and they were forcibly removed from the premises. But a yawn eclipses her story about something Lando, a regular at Luke’s, did earlier that day. And then another. The adrenaline that’s gotten her this far is ebbing away; not even the caffeine can help. With each blink, her eyelids grow heavier. She rests her head in the palm of her free hand and Ben tugs gently on the other, their fingers still entwined.

“Tired?”

“You’d think I was the one drinking the beer,” she says, chagrined.

“Hm.” 

The pint glass is half-full still; the coffee barely touched.

“Suppose I’d better take myself home to bed,” she sighs reluctantly, on the tail end of yet another yawn.

Ben nods. “I’d better walk you. Just… to be sure you get there safely.” A dimple appears in his cheek, the very faint telltale trace of a smirk: “Even if you have dropped girls bigger than me.”

“Will I ever live that down?”

He shrugs, still visibly suppressing his laughter.

“You like to tease me,” she accuses.

“I never tease,” he says, as he gathers up her cardigan from the back of her stool and escorts her towards the door. “I hate humor.”

It’s delivered so dryly she snorts before she can stop herself. That does earn a smile from him.

They fall quiet as they pass out of the air-conditioned bar into the still, swampy night. Hand in hand, they tread down the main drag, peering at the dark storefronts, the leafy trees rendered tawny by the streetlamps, the few stars peeking through the blanket of gathering storm clouds overhead.

“I’ve never been to a bar before,” she admits, just to fill the silence.

He doesn’t have to say anything for her to know he’s surprised; even without looking at him, she can sense his held breath, his raised brows.

“I… just turned twenty-one.”

“Seems like there’s a lot you haven’t done,” he comments, tone deliberately mild.

“Is that bad?”

“No.” He shakes his head, for emphasis. “Don’t see anything bad about you.”

Delight, affection, infatuation: all of it bubbles within her, a concoction lighter than air. Are they still walking on concrete sidewalk? Is there a world outside of Ben and her? Rey couldn’t say; all she sees is him. She swings her arm, bringing their hands up high in front of them, then behind. Again, the words dry up, but it isn’t strained now. It feels… anticipatory.

And when they reach the deli, she stops just inside the street door alcove, only to find him right there, so close she can peer up and count each of the moles that dot his face, each of the dark lashes that fan out from his searching eyes.

“Come up?” she whispers.

He swallows, hard. “That’s not…”

“A good idea?” scoffs Rey. “Like you really walked me home out of the goodness of your heart? Ben, please.”

He stares at the door behind her, seemingly lost in thoughts.

“Come up to my apartment,” she insists. “I have wine.”

“I don’t want wine,” he counters, but his eyes are full of want, lingering now on her lips, now glancing lower, drinking her in. Rey feels wanted and unwanted at the same time, but she’s not ready to give up.

“Come up anyway.”

“Rey.”

She surges up onto her toes, grabbing a fistful of his t-shirt to pull him down, ready and waiting to meet his mouth with her own. A soft landing place. She’ll be that for him. As soon as their lips meet—crash together gracelessly, teeth clacking—it’s like a detonation inside of her.

Liquid heat throbs in her cunt, the sharpest need she’s ever felt. She is clenching hard, underwear growing damp just from this clumsy embrace; she never knew such a response could be provoked from a mere kiss. For a moment, Ben stands frozen, eyes wide. It fills her with panic. She releases him and drops back to the balls of her feet, staring up at him in horror.

Has she ruined this?

“Oh, god, I’m so sorr—” she begins.

And then Ben seems to break through whatever was restraining him; he’s marching her backwards, his mouth everywhere, full lips seeking, restless. Now he is kissing her, pinning her to the door, filling her senses, granting no quarter; now his breath is warm on her cheek, his hands traveling from her waist down to her hips; now he presses his lips to the delicate, sensitive skin of her neck, just where her pulse is throbbing; now he groans into her ear, his big hands reaching down to grasp her thighs and hoist her up.

Rey’s head falls back against the door. Eyes squeezed tight, a kaleidoscope explodes in glorious technicolor behind her lids; and the smell of him, the feel of his tongue when it brushes hers…   

Everything goes slick and slack and hazy because he’s thrusting. Does he realize he’s doing that? They’re hidden here in the shadowy little recess of the door, but they are still on the main street of Tatooine and anyone could walk by at any moment. 

“Rey,” he pants against her shoulder.

“Oh, god,” she whimpers, when the hard ridge of his cock, contained behind his fly, makes contact with her clit.

“Like that?”

His voice is, somehow, impossibly, deeper than it has ever been before.

“Don’t stop.”

His breathing gets heavier as his hips give another hard jerk and she hiccups, arms scrambling for purchase around his neck.

“Fuck!”

It’s way too hot, more contact than she’s ever had in her life, and pleasure, which has always been so tightly controlled, so at her command, spirals up her spine, along her limbs, radiating out from her cunt before she can reel it back in. A few more thrusts is all it takes; she comes hard, so hard she is trembling, walls of her cunt quivering as though dry humping with Ben Solo were some kind of holy experience. She comes so hard she feels faint, maybe the slightest bit nauseous, or maybe that’s the coffee and the exhaustion working on her. There’s an obscenely slick mess in her underwear. Her legs are twitching, toes curled against the soles of her sandals.

“Oh,” is all she can get out, letting her head droop forward onto Ben's shoulder.

Gently, still supporting her with one hand, he reaches up to tuck a loosened lock of hair behind her ear. “You okay?”

At that moment, she thinks she could love him.

“I’ve never…” she trails off, mouth dry.

He goes still, and pale. “You’ve never done that?”

“I’ve never done anything at all.”

“I should—”

Carefully, he puts her down, making sure she can support herself before taking a step back. His eyes are shuttered, shoulders up around his ears. Rey glances down; he’s still at least somewhat erect and straining impressively against his fly. He must know what she's looking at, because he folds his hands in front of himself, as though ashamed.

“Don’t make it weird,” she says, scowling.

Ben shakes his head. “No, I’m not. I’m… I’m not.” He’s doing that thing with his jaw; she can almost see the wheels turning in his mind. He’s getting weird about it. Finally, he mumbles, “I should let you get some sleep.”

This? Again?

Rey could cry.

“You’re making it weird!”

“No,” he reaches one hand out, goes to take a step towards her, then seems to think better of it and stays where he is. “It’s not weird. I'll… just… see you around?”

“You’re not coming up?” Her voice cracks.

“Not tonight,” he says. 

In defiance, in outrage, she looks him the eye until he averts his gaze, attempting to surreptitiously adjust himself in his pants. His profile is beautiful in the streetlight, all angles and shadows. Beautiful and terrible, because this feels wrong, like he is judging her for something they’ve done together, and how is that fair?

Is he ashamed now? He was complicit, he was part of this. Does he think she should be? How dare he? When she feels so good, when her legs are still jello, her lips still tender from his kiss?

Isn’t she supposed to be allowed good things now? Hasn’t she paid her debt to society? Why is she still paying?

And why is Ben, who should understand better than anybody, the one making her pay?

He might as well leave, she decides, because if he doesn’t, she might make good on that threat to knock him out after all.

“Well fucking go then,” she snarls. 

Without waiting to see his reaction, she whirls towards the door, letting herself inside, slamming it behind her, scrambling up the stairs and to the left, into her pitiful excuse for an apartment, slamming that door too, just for good measure. She doesn’t even take stock of the fact that she’s forgotten her cardigan; that he most likely take it with him.

Who cares.

Fuck him.

Fuck everyone.

Fuck ‘em all.

. . .

Weeks and weeks pass and he must be in hiding because she never sees him anywhere, although she’s constantly looking for him while pretending she isn’t. To cope with the pain of rejection, the uncertainty of what to do with herself now, Rey returns to all her old friends: rage, resentment, spite, silence.

Tenaciously, she throws herself into each day like a walking hurricane, irritable, short-tempered with everyone. Some of her shifts she spends in belligerent wordlessness; others, she snaps at Luke with such vitriol that he exiles her to Han’s and orders her not to come back, grumbling that he’s had his share of cranky teenagers for one lifetime, thank you very much. Han sends sympathetic looks her way; but Rey finds the hints he drops that Ben is also suffering to be insufferable.

Rose invites her to join her and Jannah and Poe for the weekly pub quiz, or to go bowling over in Dagobah, or to come to Naboo for a weekend trip. None of this is Rose’s fault, and to her at least, Rey manages curt civility as she rejects each offer. But just barely.

They all infuriate her with their happy, normal lives.

Everything infuriates her.

But her stupid pride won’t let her seek him out; she feels trapped. She avoids the park, won’t even go near the Solo’s part of town anymore.

And the old friends are not what they used to be. They’re just barely keeping at bay the feelings that threaten to overtake her: her hurt pride, her need, her desire.

No. No, no, no.

She doesn’t need him, or Luke or Han or Maz or Rose or anyone. Her anger always has and always will be at the very heart of her, her strength, her sustenance. To think otherwise was folly. It is her truest friend, anger. It damned her and it helped her survive, but it has never abandoned her.

And so what if it leads her astray from time to time? So what if she sneaks into his house one afternoon she has off, while he and Han are out?

So what if she rummages around the dim rooms with a mixture of curiosity and dread over what her parole officer might say; so what if she tries to find her cardigan and when she can’t, instead steals his fancy slippers and his dad’s dumb trucker hat, shoving them in her glittery purple backpack and leaving his house with nervous glances around the neighborhood and none of the calm that might be attributed to a hardened criminal? And so what if she begins wearing those purloined items around her apartment even though they’re both far too large for her and her place is never less than sweltering as the long summer carries on?

So what if she curls up on her futon at night and cries hot, angry tears into her secondhand couch pillow?

So what?

Fuck ‘em all.

. . .

Ben is in a hell of his own making. The district attorney calls him one day and barks at him to shut up when he tries to proclaim his innocence, then proceeds to explain to him exactly how he is going to cooperate or run the risk of finding himself in prison for a very long time.

He wants to say he’s sorry to so many people, Rey chief among them.

But he’s making the same mistakes Han made, isn’t he?

Han stays silent on the matter. Maybe he figures he’s done enough damage; maybe he’s come to the same conclusion. He watches Ben from the corners of his eyes. The two men cohabitate like begrudging roommates, barely interacting, barely speaking.

And Ben stays away from her. No diner, no garage, no park, not even downtown Tatooine. Nowhere that their paths might cross. For weeks and weeks, the dreary hot summer wearing out its welcome, each day a torturous gauntlet of loneliness and regret, he hides like the coward he is. He sleeps with her sweater wrapped around his fist, breathing in the smell of her.

Coward, he thinks before drifting off. Coward, he thinks, upon waking.

When he’s not preparing for the trial, Ben throws himself into fixing all the things that have fallen into disrepair around his father’s house. He’s bad at it, even with the help of the internet. Each project goes at a snail’s pace, eating up countless hours. Han sends him to Takodana to do the same for Maz. She’s courteous but cool; he can tell that whatever side of the story she’s heard from Rey is the one she sympathizes with. He can’t say he blames her.

Nothing helps. There’s no reprieve. He thinks of little else but Rey. Sweet Rey, good Rey, innocent Rey.

Rey, Rey, Rey.

. . .

As July gives way to August and then barrels straight on towards an unseasonably warm autumn, Rey’s outward anger abates enough that she is allowed back in the diner. She even rises high enough in Luke’s esteem that she is allowed to work the closing shift. Rey likes it that way. After the dinner rush, there are rarely more than some families and a few gaggles of teenagers passing through for fries and milkshakes; business is slow enough that even she, with her limited aptitude for customer service, can handle things.

And it gives her time. Plenty of time. Time to read her books, to take cigarette breaks out in the parking lot, to shoot the shit with Rose and the skeleton kitchen crew. And once they close up for the night, she sends them all home so she can have the entire place to herself. The diner has air-conditioning and so much space, making it a vastly preferable environment to her hellish apartment.

The end-of-day rituals calm her, anyway. She takes her time with each of them, savoring the mundanity.

It’s on one such evening that Rey has her hip resting on the counter as she marries the condiments, content in her boredom, when Ben fucking Solo walks through the diner entrance.

Fuck, she thinks, gaping at him. Thought I locked that door.

She could inform him they’re closed and demand he get out. She could curse him out for having the nerve to show his face in here. She could cut him down to size with a few well-placed barbs about Sidious or about what a dork he was in high school; she’s gotten more than an earful about it from Rose in the weeks that have passed since she last saw him.

But what Rey actually does is: none of that.

She can’t seem to remember how to move or speak.

That’s odd.

He settles himself on a chrome stool directly in front of her. There are shadows under his eyes. He needs a haircut; his dark, lank waves fall to his shoulder. He looks as worn out as Rey feels.

“Could I have a coffee?” he rasps out.

That breaks the trance; now, if Rey wanted, she could hurl all the venom at him that she has harboring inside herself. And yet, still she does not do that. She spins, grabbing a clean mug and the hours-old pot of coffee from the shelf behind her, and pours a cup for him. After returning the pot to the burner plate, she watches as he takes a sip and winces.

Serves him right.

“If I told you I was sorry,” he begins, stealing pitiful glances at her, “…again… would that be enough?”

Rey sniffs. “Doubtful. How can I be sure you understand what you did wrong?”

“What if I told you I was an idiot, and shouldn’t have made you feel bad about… what we… we did.”

She could say a thousand cruel things.

“I guess that would be something,” is what she says, in a rough whisper.

“I was trying not to hurt you and I did anyway.” His voice is equally rough. It cracks as he tacks on: “I’m a mess.”

Her laugh sounds mirthless and bitter, even to her own ears. “Your father told me as much.”

“He hasn’t told me anything, really. ‘Bout you.”

“Oh,” she says.

“I’m sorry,” he adds. “Rey, I’m so sorry.”

She sucks in a harsh breath, then blows it out through her nose.

“I… couldn’t stop thinking about you.”

Rey is blinking too much. She doesn’t know what to do with her hands so she shoves them in the back pockets of her jeans and stares at her sneakered feet.

“Not just the way it felt, holding you, kissing you,” he continues, “The way you smelled, the sounds you made. Also… just… you. Who are you, anyway? Where’d you come from, huh?”

She won’t cry. “I’m nobody.”

“Nobody,” he repeats.

She nods. “I am.”

“Not to me,” he says. That drags her gaze back to his face; he looks desperate, on the verge of begging. She could forgive him so easily, just on the basis of that one small kindness. How she longs for kindness, a lifetime of it.

But she doesn’t say anything.

“I was a person of interest for a while.”

Interest piqued, Rey tilts her head at him.

Ben explains, “In the Sidious scandal. Thought maybe I'd end up behind bars. But I cooperated with the police and the lawyers. Gave them what they wanted. Agreed to testify against Sheev. It was enough to get me out of hot water.”

“Lucky you.”

He goes on as though he hasn’t heard her: “Have to report to the courthouse in Naboo next Thursday at eight a.m. There’ll be… cameras. Reporters. It’s going to be a bloodbath.” His dark eyes flit up to her then back down to his coffee. “Figuratively speaking.”

Rey remembers the last time she was in a courthouse. It wasn’t quite that much of a spectacle, but a cute young girl being accused of killing her legal guardian was still worthy of some ink in the papers. There hadn’t been any shocked gasps when the jury came back with their verdict, no flash bulbs or the low roar of scandalized onlookers; just a couple reporters calmly taking notes. Just the judge looking at her with a mix of something like pity and disappointment.

“Do you ever think…” she tries, but the question dies in her throat.

He leans forward onto his elbows and peers up at her. “What?”

She thinks about Plutt’s blood seeping into the cheap living room carpeting, how his bloated body grew cold as she sat for hours, staring at it. The weight of the gun in her hand, its grip growing warm.

She thinks about how anger moved in on that night, how it never left. It settled in alongside her fear, the two of them intertwining until one emotion was indistinguishable from the other. Her little house guests: burrowing into every thought, making sure she’d never be alone. Never be free.

“Do you think you can ever really make amends for the wrongs you’ve done?” she asks, studying the row of glass ketchup bottles in front of her.

She has done wrong. But she has paid her debt to her society. Hasn’t she?

“I—oh,” he says.

Does she get to begin again? Or must she carry her fear and anger forever?

The courthouse, the trial, the sentencing. The state foster home, and then, when she turned sixteen, the prison cell. Maz, with ever more fantastical tales of union disputes and espionage—though what she was locked up for, she’d eventually admitted during a rare moment of melancholoy.

It was the damn backroom gambling ring that got me busted in the end, she growled, before patting Rey on the back and returning to her game of solitaire.

Maz. A lone ray of light shining through the years of her life that, in all other respects, remain shrouded in darkness to this day.

Rey turns, unseeing, and begins wrapping forks and knives in paper napkins on the back shelf in preparation for tomorrow’s breakfast rush. The repetition of the work eases her distress, slightly.

“I’m sorry I bothered you,” she thinks she might hear him mumble, but it’s difficult to know for certain because she is already subsumed once more in her memories.

The years. Six of them. Six years. Six birthdays, six Halloweens, six grueling summers spent sleeping on a hard cot between cinder block walls that trapped the heat inside, cooking her in her jumpsuit, and six frigid winters exposed to the drafts that whistled through those same wall’s cracks, leaving her curled in on herself with chattering teeth, numb trembling limbs.

Clawing the tally of each passing day into the wall beside her bed.

Four walls, one ceiling, one floor, one toilet, two beds. Outside the bars, during the hours she was required to leave her cell: a common room, a library, a laundry room, a mess hall, the yard, the workshops. 

Every day, Maz’s face was the only one that looked at her with anything approaching kindness. Until she’d finished her sentence and left Rey to a string of alternately antagonistic or apathetic cellmates. 

Years. Years of them. Years that have been lost. Years gone, years wasted. 

“Rey?”

The enormity of it all comes down on her like a hammer. Her adolescence was the price she paid for her crime. Has that been enough? Was she forgiven and if so, by whom? By herself? By the world? Has she atoned, and moreover, did she ever really regret pulling the trigger in the first place?

She is spellbound now, trapped in her reverie. She barely notices her feet carrying her towards the kitchen.

“I’ll just…,” she hears someone say, faintly, tremulously, from very far away. “I’m sorry.”

So far away. All the way across six years, so much life, a vast abyss of life that went unlived while she sat inside a cell wondering why she wasn’t good enough, dreaming about the revenge she might collect once she got out.

And then, somehow, she finds herself on the kitchen floor, though she does not recall passing through the swinging doors. The floor has a layer of grease that no amount of mopping seems able to completely dispel, but Rey does not care; she curls on up her side, turning her head to rest it against the cool, slick tiles. Closes her eyes.

What is the cost of a human life, if the human was someone like Unkar Plutt? Have I paid that cost?

What would it have been like to graduate high school? College? Who might she have been if she hadn’t followed Plutt that night, if he hadn’t taunted her, if she hadn’t given in to her anger?

A Palpatine. The granddaughter of one, anyway.

There it is. Now she’s admitted it to herself since… since the sentencing, maybe. She’s done her best to keep it from her thoughts. A fucking Palpatine, but not one that was wanted. Not a scion of a wealthy high-society family. No one’s princess. Oh, no. Thrown away, hidden somewhere; a dirty, shameful secret.

Would she know where Sheev was today, if she hadn’t shot Plutt? Maybe. Would he have taken her in, if she’d walked into the lobby of Sidious energy and publicly declared herself his granddaughter? Unlikely. Still. Might’ve been the smarter choice, but Rey had acted on sheer impulse and adrenaline and yes, anger.

How Plutt had laughed and laughed at her. You’re probably thinking there’s money in it for you—I guarantee you there’s not, he’d jeered. The old man pays me to keep it quiet that you exist. His son was a stain on the Palpatine name. Sheev don’t even know who your mother was and he don’t wanna know.

All the old hatred, the old anger. Bile on the tongue. A tsunami of red rage sweeping over her again. She is drowned, but she is also back where she is safe, here under the waves. This, she knows.

Who are you? Ben asked her.

That she doesn’t know.

I went so long not wanting to know, admits a small voice from a sad, tucked away corner of her mind.

A mind that was bright, once. She was bright, she had been good. All her teachers said so. But she’d been given no direction to grow or explore. With each passing year, her life had been whittled down to a handful of options, and her mind had twisted around itself, becoming a dark thorny forest. She had been lost within the brambles.

She remembers it now, so vivid, so clear: the solid, heavy weight of the gun in her hand. Plutt’s face. One minute, laughing. Then stilled mid-laugh, gruesome, never to laugh again and also to laugh for all eternity. Rey can hear his laughter even now.

One final breath, the last taken as an innocent. And in the next, the trigger, pulled. 

The thought in her mind: Am I nothing? Am I really so worthless to all of them? 

I will not be forgotten. I will not be laughed at. I will not be scorned.

This is what she had locked away. It had burned her clean to the bone; by the time she’d entered that courtroom, she’d been a cindered wisp of a ghost. Already scarred beyond recognition to herself. 

She’d looked into the mirror on her first day in prison and seen an empty vessel, filled at last. But what had she poured into the vessel? How had she finally fed herself enough to be sustained?

Anger.

Will it be the same for Ben, to be called upon to account for his wrongdoings, whatever they were? Will it burn him down to nothing, too? To admit his own frailty?

If he is a vessel, how will he be filled?

Ben.

Rey comes back to herself with a start. How did she end up on the kitchen floor?

She rises, grabbing a hold of the nearby counter to steady herself. Her legs buckle threateningly. She is dizzy from the onslaught of the past. And she is crying, she realizes. Her face is warm and wet; the tears have run over her chin, down her neck. Her eyes burn, there is snot streaming over her lips. Her breath comes in great heaving gulps, a pained animal sound escaping her on each exhale.

Despairing, she rushes out into the diner, though she already knows what she will see.

The cup of coffee remains untouched, an oily patina blooming on its dark surface. The ceramic is cool to the touch when she reaches for it. 

And Ben is gone.

Chapter Text

For lack of a better plan, Rey finishes closing up the diner, every movement robotic, barely seeing what she’s doing. When all is relatively clean and quiet save for the hum of the fridges and freezers, she flips the lights, locks the front door and slips out the back, locking that behind her as well.

She looks up to the sky, perhaps hoping for stars, for something beautiful to focus on that can take her away from all of this, but there is only a mauve blanket of low, dense clouds. In the late summer heat, her clothes immediately cling to her skin, rendering it difficult to breathe.

Or is that her anger?

Or regret?

She hops up onto the closed lid of the dumpster. Pulling a cigarette from her purple backpack, she lights up, lays back, and closes her eyes.

Despite the balmy night, she feels cold. Numb. Not even the warmth of smoke held in her lungs can thaw her out.

All those years, she can feel them now. Now she remembers. The air presses in, oppressive. Why doesn’t it fucking rain already? When will she have relief? Will she ever?

Rey turns her head and spits on the gravel.

It feels good, feels right; letting the cigarette dangle between her lips, she jumps down off the dumpster and kicks at some loose stones.

That feels good, too.

She’s so desperate to make up for lost time, to feel normal, to snatch up all those firsts that were taken from her. But what is normal? Who is? Is Ben? Judging by Rose’s estimation of him, he’s not. Rey knows enough about Ben—understands enough about him—to know he struggles in his skin just like she does.

Ben’s been an open book with her since the beginning; not that he had much of a choice, considering Rey knows his father and his uncle and everyone he spent his awkward teenage years despising.

But Rey has not been honest with him.

A scream of frustration is building within her. She just wanted to move on. To start over.

With an angry flick, she sends the still-lit butt across the lot. She watches the cherry-red end bounce upon the gravel a few times, a distant beacon in the night. It comes to a stop. It gets dimmer. Then it dies.

All is silent, save for the crickets.

“Rahh!”

A shriek directed at the heavens. Another impetuous round of kicking at the stones, and then at a crumpled soda can that has missed the dumpster—sending it over the fence at the back of the lot and no doubt into someone’s yard—and then she aims her blows at the dumpster itself. Soft rubber soles hitting steel clangs in a way that satisfies her, but the impact brings tears to her eyes, forcing her to relent.

“So what, then?” she cries, at the dumpster. “Is that it? Game over for me, I missed the boat, too fucking bad for Rey Palpatine? Pack it in? Go fuck off somewhere and give up?”

She thinks about it. Thinks about anger. Thinks about revenge. If I don’t get to have a new life, she muses, I could fix the wrongs of the old one. Using another key she’s been trusted with, she crosses the lot and enters Han’s shop, where she boots up the twenty-year-old computer on the front desk.

It whirrs and groans in protest. As she waits, she lights up another cigarette, disregarding the strict embargo Han keeps about unnecessary flammables in the garage. Finally, the desktop appears. After another minute of peevishly clicking on the same icon again and again, about forty-five internet browser windows begin to populate.

“Shit,” hisses Rey. “Get a new fucking computer already, Han.”

At last, she gets a search engine home screen, and types in two words, a name. One she has tried so hard to leave behind.

Sheev Palpatine.

The internet is slow; she has time to sink into that old cracked-leather chair, rocking back and forth ever so slightly, bathing in the white light of the screen, and finish her cigarette. She even has time to pass around the desk and toss the butt out into the parking lot. By the time she returns, a list of recent headlines has appeared.

Rey settles in and begins to read.

. . .

After about an hour, she’s learned what she needed to know and had about all that she can take.

Sheev Palpatine, self-made billionaire, creator and CEO of Sidious Energy, wanted on charges of fraud, racketeering, money laundering, and a host of other white collar crimes. Father to four impeccably groomed, educated and sophisticated millionaires, magnates in their own rights. Grandfather to countless socialite heiresses and heirs.

Missing, for weeks now. Not found at the skiing lodge he keeps in Lothal, not at his beach house situated on the white sandy coast of the Onderon Sea, not at his $200 million penthouse in downtown Naboo, not at any of the two dozen luxury hotels in various cities where he has suites reserved lest the mood strike him to visit.

A ghost.

It’s the closest Rey thinks she’s ever felt to the man. She knows all about being a ghost.

And she thinks: if the authorities can’t find him, what chance does she have?

Then again, who has less to lose than her?

Rey locks the shop back up and sets herself to walking. It’s a slow, moseying, aimless sort of walk. Up one street, turn this way or that because she likes the look of this garden and wants to investigate or thinks she hears a car coming from that direction; the tiniest things influence her decisions. On and on, letting her imagination loose on the curtained windows of Tatooine that glow ultramarine by the light of their televisions.

What lives are they leading?

What battles are they fighting?

What battle will she fight?

It’s quiet. The night cools; Autumn is coming but it’s not here quite yet. It’s enough to have her longing for a sweater, but she does not stop, nor does not turn her feet towards home. Night birds sing to each other from their branches. An owl hoots somewhere. A far-off dog barks at nothing, or maybe something, maybe at Rey, what does she know?

What has she ever known?

Rey is so tired but it feels good to prowl like this, to spy on all these people with their television-blue windows and their easy, normal lives. She feels herself becoming one with the shadows of the sleep tree-lined avenues. Like she might disappear too.

She doesn’t turn down Ben Solo’s street but circumvents it, again and again, a shadowy predator stalking the night.

. . .

Her thoughts curl in on themselves.

She is so tired.

She wants rest.

She wants to be held for a long, long time.

She wants to be kissed.

She wants to have her hand held.

She wants to give away all this love that has been locked within herself, unable to be shared.

She wants to give to Ben.

She wants to take his hand.

But she also wants to not want anything, not ever again.

Wanting has never brought anything but more wanting.

Wanting is just a gamble one takes on oneself, and for Rey, it has only ever been paid out in pain.

She is so tired.

. . .

At last, in the early hours of the morning or the latest hours of the night, her aching feet demand she stop. Casting furtive glances around, Rey climbs the chainlink fence of Tatooine Elementary and collapses into one of the swings in its playground. She sways; she toes elaborate designs into the parched earth beneath her feet; she rests against the swing’s chain, heavy eyelids drooping shut.

As the sky lightens in the east, she makes a decision.

Dawn breaks gently. It happens in slow and subtle degrees. Rey watches, letting it wash over her: the clouds cracking open if only for a moment, pouring golden light over everything. A breeze picks up, tugging at the tendrils of hair that have fallen out of her buns. Dew has settled on every surface, transforming the rundown playground into something ethereal and dazzling. Reborn, almost.

When it is properly morning, sun hidden in the leaves of the playground’s trees, she retrieves her flip phone from her bag and calls one of the five contacts she’s stored on it.

“Hrmr,” groans a rough male voice, on the sixth ring.

“I need help,” Rey says.

She hears coughing, the whisper of bedding being adjusted. A long pause. Then: “Uh, good morning to you too, Rey. What’s up?”

“No, nothing dire,” she rushes to assure him, “Only… I need… I need help. I need to, er, talk to someone.”

Another weighted pause. 

“Like a professional,” she elaborates.

“Uh, okay. Yeah. I can help you arrange that.”

“Thank you, Finn.”

Just as she is about to hang up, she hears, “Rey?”

“Yes?” she asks, bringing the phone back to her ear.

“Still got the job?”

“Still got the job.”

“Apartment?”

“It’s… fine.”

“You, uh, making friends?”

“I’m getting to know people,” she says, evasive.

“Great,” he sighs, sounding relieved. “I’ll call you back with the name and number of a counselor later today, okay?”

“… Okay, Finn.”

“Take care of yourself.”

She wishes him the same, then shuts the phone with a satisfying clap. A ladybug has settled on her swing’s chain and Rey smiles at it, feeling more settled than she has in weeks.

One down, one to go.

. . .

Not bothering to shower, she stops by her apartment just long enough to swipe deodorant under her arms, brush her teeth, and remove a stiff piece of paper from the shoebox underneath her couch.

Then she’s off, a woman on a mission. Along the way, she gathers up the last of the summer’s dandelions into a posy, clutched tightly in her sweaty fist.

. . .

All is quiet at the Solo residence. Curtains drawn, Falcon rusting away in the driveway. The lawn has been mowed recently, the gutters are clean, the windows sparkle. Rey even suspects that the clapboard siding has had a freshening up; its once-dingy grey shingles are now a clean, bright white.

Today’s newspaper lies on the front walk, still unfolded. Rey grabs it on her way towards the house, then plops down on the front stoop, setting her dandelions beside her. She scans the front page, snorting in disgust at the headline above the fold.

‘WANTED BILLIONAIRE CEO SUSPECTED TO BE HIDING IN EXEGOL: LOCAL AUTHORITIES COMMENCE SEARCH’

The story is scant on details. Rey doesn’t know much about Exegol except that it’s way up north, up where winter means not seeing the sun for months and snow banks that stick around well into June. And that it was home to a cult that got busted up by the Feds a few decades ago.

She reads the story anyway, searching for clues that are not there, and then skims the local coverage afterwards.

Mostly she’s just biding her time. Eventually, her patience pays off.

The front door opens without a sound; someone has tended to its hinges recently. It's the sound of a throat clearing that alerts her to his presence; she turns to see the booted feet of Han Solo. He’s already dressed for work in his usual belted jumpsuit. He blinks down at her in surprise, then eyes the open newspaper in her hands.

“You didn’t do the crossword, didya?” he asks blearily. “Ben’ll throw a fit.”

“Just reading up on his former employers,” she replies, handing it over as she rises to her feet.

Han studies her for a moment. “You look like someone who never went to sleep last night.”

Rey shrugs.

His eyebrows knit in a way she recognizes; he’s not going to push the issue. “Coffee?”

She nods, and he presses a finger to his lip, tilting his head inwards towards the living room. “Quiet—he’s still asleep,” he mutters, then turns and disappears into the house. Rey follows. 

Ben is sprawled on his belly across the opened couch bed, limbs akimbo, sheets a mess, feet hanging off the edge. His torso is bare; his back seems to go on forever, pale skin over acres of relaxed muscle, a place Rey would like to spend some time. A quilt she presumes started out on top of him lies crumpled on the floor. His face is relaxed, youthful even, his full lips parted slightly. There’s a dark spot on the pillowcase from his drool.

An image of him and her curled up together, naked and sated and dreaming, presents itself to her; she could swear her heart skips a beat. She nearly trips on her own feet in her hurry to leave the living room.

Her fingers itch to touch him.

Once they’re safely in the kitchen, Han says quietly, “Him sleeping in like that doesn’t happen too much, these days. I try to let him be when it does.”

Her stomach twists, a pang of guilt. Rey drops herself into a kitchen chair in an attempt to hide her small whimper. Han catches it anyway. He shoots her a canny, knowing look then turns to set up the coffee machine.

“I messed up last night,” she confesses to his back, in a whisper. “I said something to him, but it came out… all wrong. I didn’t mean—”

“Y’know, I think he likes you.”

Rey thinks Han is right. It makes her feel even worse. “Yeah.”

The gurgling dribble of the brew cycle begins, and with a sigh, Han drops himself into the chair across the table from Rey’s.

“I’m not saying it’s the best idea in the world, you and him, but then, neither was his mother and me.” He grins ruefully at her. “But we got a handful of good years plus Ben out of the deal, so… even the bad ideas aren’t all bad.”

Rey has no recollection or knowledge of her own mother. She swallows hard. “Is she… has she… passed?”

“Few years back,” he says. “She was a powerful woman. So strong. But a big heart, too. District attorney. And later, a senator. Think that’s where Ben got the urge to be a lawyer. That was always my theory, anyway. He wanted to impress her, y’know? Wanted her to be proud.”

“Yeah.” Rey’s voice sounds strange to her own ears. Strained. Breathy. Strangled, almost.

Han stands and gathers two mugs from a cabinet, one ceramic and one of the plastic travel variety, as he continues. “That’s how it was with Leia—you wanted her to be proud of you. Never met a woman quite like her, not before and not after.”

“You split up?” she asks.

He nods. “Ben was twelve, maybe thirteen at the time. Took it hard. I was driving when I met her. Long haul, thousands of miles per week. Kept that up when I shoulda just settled down and played house husband.” He coughs out a wry laugh at himself, shakes his head, and pours the coffee. He passes the ceramic mug to Rey as he retakes his seat. “The things we realize were mistakes in hindsight. Too bad we can’t live our lives backwards, huh? Maybe I wouldn't'a been such a dumbass.”

She processes that, mulling over a life lived backwards, but when he doesn’t continue, she prompts, “What happened to Ben, when you split?”

“He went to stay with Leia. For a while. But he started acting up not long after, and she was so busy…” 

Han takes a moment to look down into his coffee. Rey takes a sip of her own and grimaces; Ben was right, it is terrible.

“It was more than she could handle,” he says, sounding tired. “So she sent him here, to Tatooine, to live with Luke. That didn’t go too well either. Soon as he turned eighteen he was gone. Disappeared for about two years. Had us all worried sick—we’d reported it to the police. He was officially a missing person. Thought we’d lost him.”

Rey can feel her eyes widening, but she does not interrupt.

He flashes her that sad grin again. “And then, miracles of miracles, he manages to get into college. We hear about it secondhand, of course, through the Tatooine grapevine. Police call us not long after to tell us they found him and he’s fine, just doesn’t want to speak to us. Yeah.” Han chuckles. “No shit, NPD.”

She can tell there’s old hurt there, and she feels sympathy for her boss, not just as her boss but as Ben’s father, but she’s not about to let herself be distracted from the story he’s telling. “And then what?”

“And then? Law school, University of Bar'leth, very prestigious, footed the bill himself somehow. Loans, probably. We all thought, ‘Hey, he’s still mad at us and maybe that’s just how it’s gonna be, but at least he’s straightened himself out, right? Look at the kid go—he’s really gonna do it, follow in his mother and his grandmother’s footsteps.’”

Rey falls back into her seat, understanding now where this history ends up. “Oh.”

“Then he met Snoke.” Han gives a defeated shrug. “Think it was at a job fair. Hired on the spot. The rest…” he hesitates, sighing again, a weary, pathetic sound, “is history.”

She’s seen Han in a playful mood, seen him tired after a long day, seen him irritated when things were busy at the shop, seen him flirt rakishly with some of the old biddies who bring their boat-sized sedans in once a month for unnecessary checkups, seen him in all manners of mood. But she’s not sure she’s ever seen him look as sad as he does this morning.

“I killed my legal guardian,” she blurts out. Han startles at the admission but she barrels on, “Unkar Plutt. I shot him. I was given six years for manslaughter because I was a minor and it was a first offense and I told everyone it was an accident, but…” she screws up her courage with a deep breath, “It was not an accident.”

Han shifts in his seat, looking guilty and maybe a bit discomfited by the confession.

“Did you know?” she demands.

“Not the particulars. Maz, uh, suggested that you were doing time for something serious.”

Rey feels her lips tremble and the telltale sting behind her eyes. “Am I a monster?” she bleats.

“No, kid.” He shakes his head vehemently. “You’re not. You’re not.”

The words are a balm to her burns, to the cindered ghost girl residing at the heart of her. They mean that Han will not cast her out for choices made long ago. That maybe… maybe Rey could stay in Tatooine. Maybe forever. Maybe it could be her home. 

Maybe, if Han could absolve her so quickly, his son might do the same.

Softening her voice, she tells him, “Maz was a good cellmate. She was more of a parent to me than anyone else. Especially Plutt.”

He scoffs. “Wonder if Ben thinks that about those Sidious assholes.”

“He doesn’t,” comes a baritone reply from the threshold of the kitchen and living room. The sudden appearance of its owner causes them both to jump.

It takes everything Rey has to turn in her chair and meet his eyes. He’s rubbing the sleep from them, but his hands drop limply to his sides, and he stares down at her, brows furrowed. She lets herself have one good look at his bare chest, then forces her gaze upwards, picking up the fistful of dandelions from where she’s set them on the table.

“These are for you,” she says, voice wobbling.

That earns her a wistful smile, a soft breath blown out through his nostrils. It’s their thing, after all. She knows he feels it too. Ben reaches out and takes them from her. His big fingers are warm, just like always. He never once looks away from her face.

“I’d, uh… better get going,” Han says awkwardly, shattering the intimate moment. “See you later, Rey.”

“Yeah, you too.” She nods at Han, watching as he moves across the kitchen to clap his son on the shoulder. Ben pulls the old man into a quick hug; it’s blink and you miss it, but it nearly brings Rey to tears all over again. 

Then Han heads out through the garage door, leaving Ben and Rey to eye each other. It is not until she hears the outer garage door open and shut that she ventures, “How much of that did you hear?”

“Enough.” He goes the long way around the table, avoiding stepping close to her.

The sound of the Falcon’s engine starting and Han driving off has Rey on the edge of her seat. It’s just them now. As Ben pours, his back to her, Rey takes the opportunity to once again feast on the sight of him. He is barefoot and shirtless. His feet, despite being the size of two loaves of bread, are very elegant. His torso is not sculpted but it is heavily muscled, broad and smooth and pale, dotted with moles, perfect, save for a web of scarring over his left side. She wants to touch that scar. She wants to touch all of his bare skin, feel it against her own.

He shuffles around the kitchen to fetch sugar and cream, which he administers to his coffee in worrying amounts. Then he settles into the seat Han has vacated and sips loudly, not meeting Rey’s eyes. She lowers her own; her mug has left a dark ring of coffee behind on the table, and she runs her fingertip through it, turning the circle into a childish flower design.

The silence that ensues is terrible. Fraught. Rey nearly runs out the front door just to get away from it. But she’s no coward. So she pushes her shoulders back, raises her head, and begins.

“I’m sorry for how our conversation went last night. I was… talking about myself. I know how it sounded, but I—”

“Yeah,” interrupts Ben. “Makes sense, now.” He meets her gaze. “Seems like our entire acquaintance is just the two of us fucking up and apologizing.”

She presses her lips together tightly and nods, abashed.

“Don’t worry. I’m an asshole, anyway. ‘That Sidious lawyer asshole.’ You know no one’ll hire me? Sent my resume to every firm in the city. Spoiled goods.” He huffs. “Toxic.”

The urge to go to him, to bring his head to her chest and just hold him, is strong. Rey nearly succumbs. But they’re not finished with this conversation. She’s not finished with it.

“You’re not toxic. Not to me,” she says.

Ben shakes his head, earnest. “Neither are—”

“Don’t,” she snaps. “Do not say what you don’t mean, Ben fucking Solo.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he murmurs, just as earnestly.

And he hasn’t, has he? Has Ben ever lied to her, or even omitted the truth, as Rey has? She knows then what she must do. From her back pocket, she pulls the paper she took from her apartment, unfolds it, and pushes it across the table.

Ben reads it in silence for a moment. Then, in a surprisingly steady voice: “Rey Palpatine.”

“Yeah.”

“The same?” he asks, regarding her as though truly seeing her for the first time.

“…Yeah.”

“But you’re not—”

“My father gave me his last name as… I don’t know,” she says. “An act of defiance, maybe. But it was the last thing he had to do with me. I have no memory of him. Or Sheev.”

Ben shakes his head. “Sheev’s youngest son died in a skiing accident years ago.” Rey had known that; she nods. He goes on, “The way Sheev talked about him, though… like his son was the accident. I always wondered.”

That bit is news to her.

“You think he killed him? Or—or had him killed?” she gasps.

Studying the birth certificate, he works his jaw. At last, he says, “Who knows with Sheev.”

It’s a terrible thought, and not one Rey wants to linger on. What does it matter to her if one stranger had another one killed, when they both threw her away? There’s nothing down that line of thinking except more of the same anger; Rey’s had her fill of it.

“You heard the part about Plutt?” she questions him.

“I heard.”

Somehow, he makes his voice feather soft. She scrutinizes his features, searching for hints of disgust, of moral reprobation, of abhorrence. But he looks back at her with limpid, dark eyes that seem untroubled. His brow is smooth, his mouth relaxed.

“Your father says I’m not a monster.”

“Course you’re not,” he replies, rapidfire.

Now he knows all of it. A rush of relief sweeps through her, so tremendous she feels dizzy.

“Ben,” she says, just to say it.

He leans in, expectant.

“Ben, I think… I need therapy. A lot of it.”

“Possibly,” he says, cautious.

“Yeah.”

He clears his throat. “… I think I do, too.”

Rey manages a tremulous smile for him and he returns it, reaching across the table, palm up, asking for something he doesn’t seem willing or able to put into words just yet.

“Your father thinks we’d be bad for each other,” she warns him.

“For once in his life, he may be right.” 

He makes his ‘duh’ expression, so Han-like she has to laugh. With joy, with relief, with tentative excitement, she laughs. After a moment, Ben breaks into a chuckle as well. And then Rey places her hand in his. Gingerly, he curls his fingers around her hand, nearly swallowing it. Her heart races, thoughts going all fluttery and body feeling light as air.

“Yeah,” she sighs, the last of her anger dissipating for the moment, like fog on a summer day. The sun shines in through the kitchen’s back windows; Ben's hand in hers is so solid, so real, so warm. He does not let go. She doesn't either. 

“Possibly.”

. . .

They decide to go for a walk later that morning. Where they walk, Ben could not say; it’s all a blur. Perhaps around the outskirts of town, where the streets crumble into dirt lanes and farms and then wilderness. Perhaps the park. It doesn’t matter.

All he knows is that at some point, the skies open up and at last, the storm that has been hovering, threatening, for what feels like most the summer, comes tumbling down upon them. In a thunderous deluge it arrives, sheets of rain so heavy there is no time to find shelter. In an instant, they are soaked. Ben stands with his hands on his hips and scowls at the heavens but Rey beams with delight, arms extended, as she dances through it. Tugging on his hand, she begins to run, stopping only to indulge in a bit of puddle-jumping by that one street corner that always floods. He can barely see but he trusts her; blindly, he lets her pull him onward. Even into the puddles. Even into a dance.

But they do find themselves back in the little alcove beside the deli eventually, soaked to the bone and laughing, half-delirious. This time, when she invites him in, darting a nervous look up at him before turning towards the door as though unable to watch him reject her, Ben accepts eagerly with a gentle kiss on the back of her neck.

He’s thought of little but Rey for weeks. Her eyes, her smile, her body. Last night at the diner, when she’d asked him if he thought he could ever truly atone for his wrongs, he thought she was both scorning and rejecting him. After she’d disappeared into the kitchen without a backwards glance at him, he’d stumbled home a wretch, then ransacked his father’s liquor cabinet before tumbling headlong into the oblivion of drunken stupor. 

How sure he’d been that all hope was lost.

Now he hardly knows himself. Who is this lighthearted young man? How little it has taken for him to veer so sharply from despair to elation. Is this normal? He has to wonder. And he knows he meant what he’d said to Rey; he could probably do with a little professional help, himself.

But for now, he is entering Rey’s shitty little apartment, hunched in on himself so he doesn’t bump into anything, feeling very much the bull in the china shop. Not that it matters, not when he turns to find her waiting, eyes bright. Her soaked hair has fallen out of her buns; it brushes her shoulders in damp curling tendrils. He can see through her pale pink t-shirt to the simple white bralette she’s wearing underneath. God, he’s already hard, just from that sight alone. His soaked jeans are freezing against his skin but it doesn’t matter: he wants her.

And he’ll do anything not to break her. Anything.

So what choice is there, really, but to back her up against the door, cup her pretty face in his hands, and kiss her deeply, desperately? He must. To not kiss her right this second would be a sin. They’ll start back where they went wrong and rewrite it all to be better this time. To make it not hurt.

Ben is tired of hurting.

He is tired of Rey hurting, as well. And although it gives him pause—he knows where this could end up, the physical and emotional weight of what might happen, and how if he’s not careful he might hurt her—right now, they are hurtling along together on a runaway freight train.

He slips his tongue into her mouth and tastes coffee, and under that, faintly, cigarette. He doesn’t mind. It’s Rey. He clutches her to him like a ragdoll, like something precious he very nearly lost. She kisses him back with the same intensity she did that night, the night he walked her home from the bar. When he made just one of a dozen mistakes he’s made since meeting her, including operating under the assumption that she was an innocent.

She growls, nipping at his lower lip.

But she is an innocent, he reminds himself, even as he hoists her up, even as he pushes his hips into hers, even as he swallows more of her adorable little growls. Regardless of her past, he is being entrusted with so many of her firsts.

Her growls melt into whimpers, then a keening moan as he begins a slow, torturous grind. There is too much sensation: wet silk boxer-briefs on his aching cock, and over it the hard seam of his jeans and hers, but even through all that fabric, the heat of her. It’s something. It’s not nearly enough but it’s something.

“Ben,” she pants, clawing at him, lips brushing his earlobe in a way that makes him shiver, “Bed. Bed, bed, bed. Bed, Ben.”

Wordlessly, he complies, shuffling awkwardly across the linoleum with her in his arms, nearly stumbling over a pair of shoes that have been left out in the middle of the apartment. With a gentleness he’s never known himself to possess, he lowers her down onto the ratty futon.

“C’mere,” she croons up at him.

It feels fated. Kismet. They fucked up and they fucked up and they fucked up but they still made it here, wet and shivering together on her couch, and to Ben it seems like he was always meant to settle himself between her thighs.

He was always destined to brush her hair out of her face, memorizing the smattering of freckles over her pert nose, the exact shade of green flecked around her irises, the long graceful column of her throat and jut of her collarbones, the hitched rise and fall of her lovely little breasts.

He was always going to lean in and bury his face in her neck, breathing in the scent of her: rain and soap and woman.

I love you claws its way up from his gut, demanding to be let out. But it’s too soon, isn’t it?

“Rey,” he sighs instead. “Sweet Rey.”

She snorts. “Oh, yeah. Sweet, alright. Like spoiled milk.”

“No,” he protests.

“Less chatting, more kissing, please.”

He couldn’t deny her anything, especially not this.

The next kiss is gentler, more tender. He traces her dimples with the pads of his thumbs and tries to make it something loving, a promise. His hands are restless, though; soon they wander under her shirt, skimming the slight curve of her waist. Slowly, giving her time to protest, he tugs her bralette down. Rey moans. He thinks he might, too. He feels truly delirious now. The weight of her in his hands is perfect, and precious. 

Her own hands set out to explore his back, stroking, scratching lightly, petting. Then his arms. His shoulders. Up to his face, holding him, gazing up at him. Up into his hair, fingers rubbing his scalp in a way that makes him want to purr. Back down to his shoulders, clutching. He lifts her sodden shirt to steal a peek at the breasts he’s exposed; pebbled pink nipples top each, demanding to be kissed.

He was always meant to be here.

Rey beams at him; he lowers himself, never looking away from her, and presses a soft kiss to one nipple, then the other.

She hums her approval. Then she shoves him.

“Hmpf?” Panicked, he retreats back onto his haunches.

“Up,” she says, “Sit up.”

“Did I do something—”

“No, no.”

She keeps pushing until he’s on his ass, seated squarely on the couch beside her. With a cheeky smile, she climbs into his lap and reaches for the hem of his t-shirt.

“Off.” 

Raising his arms, he lets her pull the offending garment over his head and whip it across the room. It lands on the linoleum with a wet slap.

She grins at his bare chest. “Ah,” she sighs. “There you are.”

How heady it is to be so openly desired by someone who means so much to him.

He has to kiss her again. Needs to. He does, gently, but she tangles her fingers in his hair and tugs, hard. The kiss belongs to her now; her lips are demanding, frantic almost. It becomes a heated thing, something urgent. She grinds down on him.

“Rey,” he groans.

“These, too,” is her response, reaching for his fly.

He helps, undoing the button at the waist then raising his hips for her, and it’s awkward, with their cold, fumbling fingers and the sodden fabric, but soon she has him down to only his KENOBI boxer-briefs, jeans around his ankles. Again Ben waits, enthralled, dying to know what she’s thinking.

“These are hideous,” she says, running her finger under the elastic waistband. Yet her smile is affectionate. 

His erection is clearly visible through the thin fabric.

Her eyes flit up to Ben’s, then back to the bulge of his cock. Lightly, gauging his response, she runs the back of her fingers up his length. Even that whisper of a touch is so good; he bucks hard, nearly throwing her off of him.

“So take them off,” he gasps.

A challenge.

. . .

Rey is not one to let a challenge go unanswered. She makes quick work of the sodden underwear by slipping off him and down onto the floor, then urging him to lift his hips again so she can slide them down to his ankles.

“Let me just,” he grunts, toeing off his boots and socks. Once freed of them, he flings the boxers towards the pile of his other clothing.

“Oh,” she says softly. She is eye-level with the head of his hard, flushed cock.

It’s a lot more than she thought it was going to be. Both in size and girth—experimentally, she tries to enclose it in her fist and finds her fingers do not touch, although the way Ben's eyes flutter shut in response has her grinning—and also it is more than she thought, just in…  momentousness.

She’s going to have sex with someone. No. Not someone. Ben. She tenses, belly somersaulting in a flutter of nerves. Her underwear is soaked, and not just from the rain. She is hot all over, breathless, full of anticipation. Outside, the storm keeps up, hammering rain against her apartment’s lone window, an occasional rumble in the distance. But in here they are safe and warm and dry. And they are going to have sex.

Ben clears his throat. “Uh—”

“Sh, shut up,” she hisses. “We’re having a moment down here.”

“You in communion with my dick?”

“Don’t you think we ought to get acquainted?”

The question goes unanswered as Rey leans forward, pressing her cheek against the root of him, where his cock emerges from a dark thatch of hair. The skin is smooth, soft, blisteringly hot. She turns her head slightly and darts her tongue out for a taste, right where a bulging vein traverses its way up towards the head. Musk, soap, skin.

She thinks she hears Ben whimper. Her cunt throbs sympathetically, slicker by the second. With a glance up at him—he’s biting his bottom lip so hard he’s going to draw blood if he’s not careful—she uses the flat of her tongue and licks a stripe up the long length of him, over that vein, up to the leaking, reddened tip. The taste of his precome is slightly bitter; she's reminded of dandelions.

“Rey,” he murmurs.

“Hm?”

“Get up here.”

The temptation to torture him just a big longer is strong, but his eyes are dark and wild and beseeching, and Rey cannot resist their call. She stands, shucking her wet clothes, then moves towards him.

“Those, too,” he says, eyeing her hungrily.

She blinks in faux-guilelessness at him, fingering the strap of her bralette. “This?”

His tone turns imploring. “Off, Rey, please?”

What can she do? How could she deny him something she wants so badly herself? Without a bit of finesse, she peels the damp underthings off. But Ben is riveted, as though this is the world’s most seductive striptease. Once completely naked, she shoots him a crooked, nervous smile.

“Well?”

“Get over here,” he breathes, reaching for her.

She’s all too happy to comply, to deposit herself astride him, to rub her weeping, needy cunt against his cock. The throaty noise he makes is senseless. Guttural. Rey bows down enough to lay a chaste kiss on his chest, over his heart. She feels one hand land on her thigh, gripping tightly, while the other comes to rest gently on her neck. Just holding her.

A quick peek up at him: he is rapt, nostrils flared, lips pressed tightly together.

She grins wolfishly, then sinks her teeth into his firm, smooth pectoral. Not hard, just a nip, just enough to leave a faint pink mark behind. Then she kisses it all better before repeating the process a little higher up. Then again. Again and again—bite, kiss, bite, kiss—all the way up to his neck, then his earlobe. 

Bite, kiss.

“Rey,” he rasps. His cock jumps against her; she is wet enough that if she were to shift just a bit, enough for the head to find purchase, she could sink down onto him right now.

“Mm.” She teases herself and him with it, getting him slick with her, nestling his length between her lips.

“Are those—” his voice is breathless, deep, richer and sweeter than molasses, “my slippers?”

“What?”

Surprised, she pulls back. He’s frowning at something on the floor behind her. Twisting, she spies them: the purloined black and gold KENOBI slippers. Rey laughs. She turns back to him and arches an eyebrow in defiance.

“So that’s where they went, you little gremlin.”

His amused tone belies the accusation; he grins at her. Rey loves his grin. Loves his slightly crooked white teeth, loves the creases that appear in his cheeks, loves how his eyes go all soft. She rewards that grin with another twist of her hips, getting him just a bit wetter.

“Unf,” is all he’s able to say, after that; his eyelids flutter closed for a moment, the hand on her hip squeezes, and his breathing becomes labored.

Reaching behind his head, she procures his father’s trucker hat from where she hung it on the corner of the couch and puts it on. “Stole this too.”

He opens one eye, then huffs out a laugh. “You can—keep—that.”

“I will.” Teasingly, Rey rolls her hips. “Well, Solo, what’ll it be? Ass, grass, or cash?”

“Never much—of a—smoker,” he says, tortured, eyes drifting down to watch.

Rey smirks. “That’s too bad.”

She starts to move her hips again, but his big hands on her hip stills her. Then it is Ben who begins to tease, prodding at her entrance. 

“Don’t know if you’ve heard this, but I’m broke.”

“Good thing I don’t like you for your money then,” she retorts, kneading his solid shoulders, letting him take the lead. She’s not sure if he’ll be able to fit—she often finds herself on the brink with just a few of her own fingers—but she’s more than ready to find out.

“I… do have ass,” he says, strained. 

As he speaks, he reach for her own, one cheek for each palm, easily holding all of it in his hands. He begins to move her, as she’d been moving; up and down his length, pressing her aching clit against his cock. It’s exquisite. She shudders, collapsing into him, pressing quick, distracted kisses against his collarbone.

Against his shoulder, she mutters, “A flat ass.”

He freezes, stilling her hips again, and takes a wounded tone with her. “You don’t like my ass?”

“I did not say that.”

He gives her a playful squeeze. “I like yours.”

In response, she nips at his neck.

“My flat ass is all I have to offer,” he laments, teasing her.

“Ben,” she chokes out, needing that friction back, feeling the beginnings of her orgasm calling to her, “Please keep going.”

“Like this?” They work together now, Ben’s big hands helping as Rey rocks to and fro on his length, the pressure on her clit just right, and then— 

She comes. It’s a crash-bang kind of orgasm, sneaking up on her, stealing every thought in her mind except the white-out bliss of good and yes and fuck. 

“Oh, god,” she whines.

Then, shuddering, she lays her head on his shoulder and doesn’t think about anything for a while.

. . .

It takes every ounce of restraint he has to keep himself from coming as she rubs herself to climax on top of him; it’s a close call, anyway. Ben reaches down to corral his dick in a punishingly tight grip; it’s slick from her, and so hard it borders on painful. He takes four deep breaths and wills himself not to come, focusing on the sound of the cold rain against the window pane until he’s relaxed somewhat.

Rey’s eyes are closed, her body limp against his. In the time that Ben has known her, he’s admired her physicality plenty of times—she’s a lithe, graceful woman, tall and wiry and strong—but now he sits awestruck, willing his heart to calm, to not give him away when Rey’s head rests so near to it.

She can probably hear anyway.

Gently, he pulls the greasy old trucker hat off her head and tosses it away, then kisses her wet hair. In return, she administers another sharp little bite to his pec, right above the nipple.

“You are a gremlin,” he says.

Rolling her eyes up to meet his, she corrects him. “Jailbird.” There is something to this, to how lightheartedly she can pronounce the truth now. Ben thinks maybe he melts a little bit at her candor. And at the hint of melancholy when she adds: “Rough and tumble.”

“That so?”

Her voice goes airy. “Too rough and tumble for your refined city boy ways?”

“I can handle it,” he assures her.

. . .

Rey feels good. Epically good. The rat-a-tat of rain against the window is soothing her, not that she needs additional soothing; she feels like a rag that’s been wrung dry. Ben is still hard against her, nestled where she left him. She can feel his fingers bump against her, holding himself. Her stomach does another somersault.

“What do you want—” he begins, but she stops him with a finger on his lips.

“I’m just… going to…”

She bats his hand away and maneuvers him where she wants, the swollen tip of him breaching her entrance.

Sex.

They’re going to have sex now.

With a giggle, she leans in and kisses him. The moment he becomes distracted with kissing her back, she nips at his lips and begins to sink down onto him.

“Rey, wait,” he grits out, “Let me… let me help you work up to it…”

She ignores him, pushing down harder than she’d meant. “Gah!” she yelps, at the intrusion. There is a tight pinch. It burns, the burn of untested muscles being stretched. It is… a lot.

“Just… just wait.”

Rey does not want to wait. She’s been waiting for weeks, in one sense, and in another, she’s been waiting for half a decade. Life is finally here, and it is hers, and she wants to fuck Ben fucking Solo. But he lifts her up off him so carefully, kissing her and murmuring sweet endearments against her lips, that she lets him, coming to realize something she’s known all along: he’s a mess, but that’s why she trusts him.

Like recognizes like.

“See?” he asks, easing a finger into her and curling it forward. That brings a riot of sensation along with it; she clamps down on his finger with another breathy, high-pitched ‘ah!’. He chuckles, then rewards her awkward enthusiasm with another kiss as he begins rubbing circles on her clit with his thumb. A second finger joins the first inside her. They twitch, beckoning; her cunt spasms. It feels good enough to reignite her sensitized nerves. She feels herself warming up in earnest, ready to start this ride all over again.

His thumb never ceases its kneading as his fingers begin spreading, pushing against her walls. Working her up for him, like he told her.

“There we go,” he says, glancing down at her cunt then up to her face. “Easy, easy.”

“Ben, I’m ready,” she says.

He makes a counteroffer. “Let me taste. C’mon, Rey. Get on your back for me and let me—let me—”  

“Next time,” she interrupts, blushing. “I want this—I’ve waited long enough, Ben. I need you.” With that, she pulls his fingers away, then replaces them with his cock. He fixes her with an obstinate stare as he raises his fingers to his mouth and pulls them in deep, sucking on them before releasing with an obscene pop.

“I need you,” she repeats, more insistently.

He lowers his voice to a deep, dirty rumble. “You do?”

Rey answers by pushing down just as he thrusts up, half burying his cock in her cunt and drawing a long, breathy moan from her lips.

“Ah,” he murmurs. “You do.” 

“Ben.”

“Go slow, we’ve got all the time in the—”

But she doesn't want to wait. Rey pushes her knees into the mattress to either side of Ben’s thick thighs, then reaches one hand behind her to steady herself on his knees. It grants her the leverage she needs; gritting her teeth against the burn, against the stretch, she bears down and takes him all.

“Shit,” she hisses, when she feels his pubic bone against her sensitive clit.

He looks panicked, somewhere between exhilaration and terror, staring first at where she is stretched around the base of his cock, then into her eyes, questioning, then a quick detour to her breasts, then down again.

“Fuck,” is his answering curse, released under his breath. He rubs a shaky hand over his face, gathering himself, then wraps his arms around her and tugs her to him. Rey falls into him willingly, happily, nuzzling his long nose with her own. He catches her lips, kissing her with a carefulness she could not have managed herself. “You okay?” he asks, when they break apart.

Is she? Rey shifts her hips experimentally. The initial discomfort is fading. The hard pressure on her clit is nice. She does a slow gyration and hums with satisfaction; everything goes a little slacker, a little wetter.

“I’m good,” she sighs.

They begin to move. At first it is uncoordinated; he thrusts up too hard, making her yelp again, and she tilts her hips in a way that causes him to slip out a couple times. The former has him falling over himself to ensure she is not hurt. She is not, only startled. The latter has them both laughing, a little sheepish, a little bashful, despite the intimacy of the moment.

But he is so sweet with her, delicate. Touches her as though she’s spun glass. Holds her, helps her when the muscles in her thighs begin to ache, taking over, rocking up into her, slow and easy and gentle.

“Ben,” she says, “Harder. You can fuck me.”

He meets her eyes. “I can.” Still he moves with care, purposefully, grinding against her clit every time. “And I will. But not this time. Not our first time.”

He presses his mouth to her neck, hands on her ass lifting her and easing her back down. And so maybe Rey melts a little, swaying with him. And this time she comes not with a bang but with a whimper, a happy little whimper mewled in his ear, her heart pressed to his, his cock deep inside.

A second after, he pulls out, spilling over his thighs and her cunt with a helpless grunt. Rey stares at the thin milky fluid, fascinated, until he pulls her into an iron-tight bear hug and kisses her senseless.

It’s over.

For once, they got it exactly right.

Rey thinks sex might be her new favorite thing in the whole world.

. . .

Hours later, Rey awakes in Ben’s arms, albeit on the floor. Through her post-coital haze, she has only the vaguest recollection of Ben dragging the thin mattress down here after attempting and failing to unfold her futon, then vetoing her suggestion that they both just scrunch up on the narrow couch together.

It should be uncomfortable: hard linoleum under a thin mattress. But Rey is sprawled on top of Ben, a small puddle of her drool in the hollow of his collarbone, and he is providing such a soft landing place for her. They haven’t bothered with clothes, and she learns an interesting fact about Ben fucking Solo: he runs hot. Very hot. He’s pulled the blanket Maz knitted for her over them, and Rey can feel the sweat roll down her temples and pool in the dip of her lower back.

Ben is also sleeping. His mouth is soft, lips parted, snoring quietly. Even in sleep, one big hand rests possessively on the swell of her ass.

She feels sated, and cozy, and not even the slightest bit angry. She feels good. Dazed with happiness, even.

She also feels hungry.

Just then, her stomach takes care of the task of waking him up: it gives a tremendous growl, audible even over the rain still falling outside. He wakes with a gasp.

Rey smiles at him. “Hi.”

“Was that you?” he asks, low and gravelly.

She pouts down at him. “I’m hungry.”

Ben nods, rubbing the sleep his eyes. “What are your feelings on nachos?”

. . .

Rey does not keep a well-stocked fridge. Ben sighs deeply to himself as he surveys the barren shelves. Three takeout containers, fluffy white mold blooming around their edges, an apple so old it looks like a shrunken head, and an open box of baking soda.

He glances over at her. She’s got the knitted blanket wrapped around herself, humming a cheerful little tune as she artfully arranges a heap of corn chips on the foil-covered toaster oven tray.

“Rey,” he says.

“Hm?”

“You don’t have cheese.”

Her eyes go wide. “Oops.”

“Sort of essential to nachos,” he grouses.

“I’m sorry, I don’t… really cook.” She sidles up to him, peering into the fridge with a frown. “What do we do?”

He steals a kiss from her then turns towards his pile of wet clothing, not relishing the idea of putting it on but seeing no other course. “I’ll see what Klaud has.”

Her frown melts into a wide smile. “Get a bottle of celery soda too, please?”

. . .

While he’s gone, Rey continues constructing her nacho masterpiece. It’s not that everything has changed, it’s not that the old anger is gone or lessened or that she’s any less volatile a person than she was two hours ago, only… 

She is pleasantly sore, and her limbs are heavy the way they are after a long day’s work. When she looked herself in the bathroom mirror after they’d had sex, her lips had been puffy and bruised. There’d been a hickey blooming on her neck from where Ben had kissed her as he came, and red marks lower still in the spots where he’d kissed or clutched at her.

Is all this normal? It feels normal to Rey. Feels like the most normal thing in the world.

Rey had grinned at her reflection; she grins even now, thinking of the soft, needy sounds he made in his throat, the way he gripped her ass, the slow, steady rhythm he set.

She feels so loved.

By the time he comes barreling back into the apartment, soaked all over again from the downpour that has not let up, she’s got the nachos just how she wants them: blobs of jarred tomato paste, drained tuna chunks, and a diced hot dog have been evenly dispersed throughout the chip layers.

Ben presses a quick, waterlogged kiss to her lips. Then he looks down at the tray.

He blanches.

“Rey…”

“Hm?”

“What’s this?” he asks, quietly, brows drawn together.

“… Er, nachos?”

“With… tuna?”

She nods. “Like a tuna melt.”

“And hot dog?”

“Protein, Ben.”

He frowns. “That wasn’t in your fridge.”

“I found a package in the freezer,” she says, feeling defensive. “What’s wrong with my nachos?”

“Uh, nothing. Nothing.” Ben pulls the triangular hunk of cheese he’s purchased from the black plastic deli bag. It’s a pale butter color with black flecks and an ashen-looking rind.

“What’s that?” she asks, aghast. “That’s not nacho cheese.”

“I might argue,” he says, as he unwraps and begins to crumble the cheese over the chips, “That those are not nacho toppings.”

Cautiously, Rey leans over and gives the cheese a sniff. Then she moans. She doesn’t know what that is, only that its earthy aroma makes her mouth water.

“Open,” he says, pressing a piece to her lips. Rey obeys, then lets the cheese melt on her tongue. Pungent, yet still mild and creamy, with a soft texture.

“What is this?”

“Sottocenere al tartufo,” he says shyly, avoiding her gaze. 

His wet hair falls into his face and drips onto the nachos. Annoyed, he tosses his head. Rey goes to the bathroom to retrieve her sixteen-year-old self’s butterfly clips, then returns. She pulls the wet locks back and clips them in place, careful not to pull too hard or scrape his scalp with their pronged edges. He shoots her a grateful look.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. Now, what was that? Sodo what?”

“Truffle cheese,” he says. “Trust me?”

She attacks, wrapping her arms around his waist with such ferocity she almost knocks him over. “I trust you,” she says.

His work finished, he sets the tray inside the preheated toaster oven. He pulls away from her just long enough to strip back out of his wet clothes—which this time, without the jangle of a virgin’s nerves, Rey watches appreciatively—and then he returns to her, accepting her embrace. Inside her blanket, it is cozy; his rain-chilled body soon thaws, warms. When he lays his cheek atop her head, his long python arms bring her body closer until they are skin to skin, and Rey begins to hum contentedly once more.

That is how they stand, sharing their warmth and a bottle of celery soda, comfortable, watching with fascination as the fancy truffle cheese bubbles and browns under the red glow of the toaster oven’s heating element.

. . .

The thing they have created is disgusting. It is an unholy mess of soggy chips, hardened tomato paste blobs, crispy-edged tuna, half-frozen and half-charred hot dog bits, and melted over all of it, delicious, expensive, luxurious cheese entirely ill-suited to the dish at hand.

They finish the entire thing off anyway.

Rey licks each of her fingers to chase after the addictive, peppery flavor of the truffle. Once she’s done, she pushes Ben down onto the mattress, then crawls into his lap and licks each of his fingers, too.

. . .

In the week that follows, neither of them acknowledge that every passing day brings them closer to the trial. They exist in a bubble. The Autumn rains have come to Tatooine, and with them: the sharp, numbing winds that hint at the approach of winter. Not that either of them mind. It’s nice, even, to have an excuse to stay in at night and linger in bed in the morning, enjoying the so-so coffee and excellent bagel sandwiches Ben runs downstairs to buy from Klaud’s deli.

When Rey must unearth herself to get ready for work, Ben watches her with lidded eyes, offering soft, sweet compliments. She basks in his praise; it’s caused her to arrive late for work more than once, but Luke and Han have been exceedingly gracious about it.

And every day, Ben shows up a conspicuously short amount of time later, planting himself on a stool at the end of the counter, nursing a coffee that she tops up every now and again. If Luke sends her back to the garage, Ben seems to find his way there not long after, lounging in the old couch Han keeps shoved against a wall, an ignored book in his hands.

Sometimes they flirt. Mostly they just talk: about their childhoods, about their lives, about tentative plans for the near future, sometimes, when they are feeling brave, about their crimes. They argue a couple times; Ben thinks Rey should give up smoking and Rey thinks Ben should quit drinking. They find themselves at an impasse. For the time being, they agree to disagree.

Once, they get a little carried away and make out in the walk-in fridge, until Luke walks in on them and threatens to re-ban Ben from the establishment if he doesn’t stop distracting Luke’s best employee.

After her shifts, they take her free meal and head back to her apartment. They spend their evenings wrapped up in each other without interruptions, and in the morning, it all begins again.

The days are sweet as the cherry pie Luke keeps on display under a plastic dome on the diner counter.

Sweeter, even.

Chapter Text

On the morning of Ben’s day in court, it’s not so much that dawn breaks as night retreats, washed away by autumnal showers; what’s left behind is a wet greyscape, lit almost begrudgingly by a sun tucked away behind the low, dark sky.

The scent of ozone and dying leaves blows in on a cool breeze through Rey’s open window, along with the sound of cars whishing by on the street below. Soon she will need to shut that window and begin using the space heater Rose has lent her. She’s not too worried about staying warm this winter, though.

She has Ben.

Burrowing deeper under their pile of blankets, she finds that her tummy still goes fluttery, nerves singing, toes curling—all merely at the feeling of his hot, soft skin against her own. It’s been a week. Will she ever get over this luxury? Will it ever not feel like a luxury?

Rey adjusts herself, positioning her head on his chest so she can listen to the steady thumping of his sleep-calmed heartbeat. His face is relaxed, jaw slightly slack, and his arms are draped loosely around her waist; even in sleep, he holds her. She snuggles closer, pressing her hips against his. He gives a soft snuffle then smacks his lips. A moment later, his eyes blink open.

“Hmm.”

“Good morning,” she says, throaty and shy and happy. His lips twitch, so she cranes up and presses her own against them.

“Mmm,” he hums. 

It is a sound of ambivalence. Rey understands. On the one hand, it is a good morning. All mornings they wake up together are good mornings. They are safe and warm under the covers, they are naked, they have at least an hour before they need to rise from her thin futon mattress and get ready to go. On the other hand… today, they both know, Ben must go to Naboo and testify against Snoke, Palpatine, and Sidious Energy.

She wants to show him she understands. Lightly, she drags her fingertips across the cicatrix web overlaying his ribs, up to his chest, lingering on his flat nipples and eliciting a tight thrust of his hips before moving on to the hard rounded muscle of his shoulders, then into the roots of his thick hair. He smiles in earnest at that, so there she focuses her attention, alternating between rubbing and lightly scratching his scalp with her short nails.

“Feels good,” he slurs, eyelids slipping shut once more. 

He sags into her, his big body putty in her hands. Rey flings a leg over his thigh, bringing him even closer.

Close enough that his cock, which seems to be rousing at a much faster pace than Ben, is nestled snugly against her belly.

She peppers tiny kisses across his brow. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” His face is hidden in her neck; puffs of exhaled air tickle against her skin, but he soothes her by tracing each breath with his lips. “You don’t have to do this today, you know.”

“I know.”

“It was… a kind offer.”

“I want to,” she assures him.

“Rey,” he sighs, “When we… that night we talked about…” He stops himself short, then groans in frustration. His arms tighten around her, squeezing tight. Not unpleasantly so, but enough that she can feel the tension in his body. “If this is going to hurt you—” 

She gives an ardent shake of her head. “I want to do it for me, too.”

“Palpatine won’t be there,” he says, glancing up at her through his lashes.

“He might be. He can’t hide out in Exegol forever.” She attempts a smile but she can tell that it’s crooked and unconvincing by how his brows furrow.

“So if he is there? What then?”

“I want to look him in the eye,” she says, with more bravado than she feels. “I want him to see me. See that I don't need him or his family or his money. I never did.”

Ben jostles her a bit, maneuvering her onto her back. He keeps going, easing himself atop her, his hips fitting in the cradle of her thighs like they were always meant to lay like this. Maybe we were, she thinks.

Utterly earnest, he asks, “What do you need, Rey?”

He plays with her loose hair, waiting. When she hesitates, he scoots down and moves his hands to support her. He is so immense, in every way. His hands nearly span the width of her back as he raises her up, bringing her near so he can dip his head and brush his lips over her chest. Not her nipples, not her breasts; her chest, right where her heart beats out its answer. Rey digs her nails into the thick skin of his shoulders.

Does she dare?

She peers down at him, watching. It’s been a week. Only a week. But who cares, when she’s waited six years?

Whenever she’d dreamed of her life after prison, there was a Ben-shaped hole where she didn’t dare to hope that someone like Ben might reside. She didn't quite have the nerve. But here with him, on the ratty mattress on the hard linoleum floor of her shoebox apartment, gazing into his eyes, seeing only affection shining back, of fucking course Rey dares.

“I think I might just need you,” she says, plainly. “I could figure all the rest out along the way if I had you.”

He’s big. Big enough to build a life on.

“But you already have that, Rey.”

She could cry at the tenderness in his low, warm voice. It pings some deep, needy part of her she has kept carefully shelved for far too long.

“Do I?”

“Yes,” he says, lips quirking as he lays a final kiss over her heart. 

Then he strays: up the soft slanted mound of one breast and then across the valley of her sternum to the other. The sight of him loving on her is so intense she must close her eyes, though that only intensifies things; all there is left to do is feel. So she does. She feels him suck and lick and kiss his way down. Down, down to the hollow where her belly meets the bottom of her ribs. Lower, to her navel. More detours are afforded to each jut of her hip. Finally, she feels a sweet, warm kiss right at the top of her mound, where her clit is throbbing. Without thinking, she widens her legs and lifts her hips. Inviting, requesting, trying to get closer.

“Rey.”

She opens one eye.

“There you are.”

“What’re you doing down there, Solo?” she asks, grinning.

“I’m showing you,” he tells her, as he settles on his belly and drags his tongue up the length of her need-slicked cunt, “What you have. Here. With me.”

. . .

It’s a two-hour drive to Naboo on a good day with fair weather and a reliable car, but they’re in the Falcon on a highway besieged by rain, so they afford themselves three and a half. Han follows behind in Luke’s ancient TIE sedan. Every once in a while, Rey leans forward to check that he’s still there in the side view mirror; he always is, no more than a boxy outline, a pair of headlights, and the angry swiping of windshield wipers amid the silvery veil, but present and accounted for all the same.

Ben is a cautious driver. That surprises her in a good way. She’s pleased to find his eyes glued to the road, the radio kept at low volume, his hands at ten and two on the steering wheel. He’s wearing suit pants and a pressed dress shirt, his jacket and expensive-looking trench coat hanging from hooks in the backseat. Rey’s dressed in a similarly conservative little black dress Poe and Jannah helped her pick out from Salt Planet Thrift, along with stockings, low heels and a cardigan the color of oatmeal.

“She looks like a preacher’s wife,” Poe had said, when she’d emerged from the dressing room.

“The press are going to love her,” Jannah had replied, beaming.

Rey doesn’t know how to drive. She’d admitted as much in a quiet voice when Ben, Han, and she had discussed travel plans earlier this morning.

For a moment, both Solo men had looked so stricken, so sorrowful; her admission had rung in the air, awkward and haunting. Han had rubbed the back of his neck, eyes sliding away. It was Ben who’d escorted them all through the awkwardness by pulling Rey into the kind of hug he knows she loves: all-encompassing, wrapping himself around her, an overgrown vine swallowing her up until all she can see and smell and hear is Ben.

“Sweetheart,” he’d said, very softly, in her ear.

“Will you teach me when this is all over,” she’d mumbled, ashamed at the catch in her throat and the hot sting behind her eyes.

“Of course.”

He’d tipped her head back to kiss her, softly at first, and then with more need, more hunger.

“I’ll take Luke’s car,” Han had grunted.

. . .

So Rey and Ben are alone in the Falcon, and the first hour or so of the drive is conducted in near silence.

Not complete silence. There is still the low thudding of the windshield wipers, like a heartbeat Ben and Rey share; there is still the pattering of rain on the exterior of the Falcon; there is still the crinkling of Rey’s gas station bag of Tooka Treats every time she pulls out a handful and the crunch-crunch-crunch as she shovels the onion-flavored crisps into her mouth, careful not to get yellow dust on her dress. 

But Ben keeps his eyes straight ahead, hands white-knuckled on the wheel; Rey is lost in her thoughts as she watches droplets of rain roll along her window. 

She glances over at him for the umpteenth time. He’s frowning. Perhaps they are both lost in their thoughts.

The last time she stepped foot in a courtroom, her future hung in the balance. Today is different. She knows that. She knows they will go inside, Ben will testify per his agreement with the district attorney, and they will come home. This day will end without cuffs on either of their wrists. They will come home together. Maybe they will have sex. Maybe just cuddle and watch a movie on Ben’s laptop. They’ll eat something unhealthy but delicious. Rey knows that he will knead her neck, right at the nape where she stores her fear and anger, and she will canvas his face in tiny kisses. All will be well, all will be fine.

Yet her pulse still races.

Again, she checks the side mirror. Again, she spies the old TIE’s headlights through the mire.

She considers the way Han hovered around his son earlier, looking half-ready to extend a hand towards Ben, half-ready to turn and walk away. He is a man, she thinks, full of deep, quiet regret. He bears it in the stoop of his shoulders, the lines of his face, his silver hair. He wants to be there for his son. Yet he seems deathly afraid of offering too much to Ben and having it rejected.

But that is not a wound Rey can heal. The Solo men must do that for themselves.

The last time she saw Plutt comes to mind, his face forever locked in that deathly grimace. It is a blood-tinged memory and Rey shies away from it, thinking instead of her real father, then her grandfather. Of legacy. Is it so bad, after all, to have never been a part of the Palpatine dynasty? Look at how history weighs on Ben and Han and Luke. If she could start again from the beginning and choose for it to happen in any way she pleases, would she choose family, even if the family available for choosing is doubtlessly laden with its own failings? Would she seek them out? Is there any universe, any path, where she would forego fetching the gun that night, forego pulling the trigger?

Would her pain, her anger, be greater or worse if she altered the path she has tread?

No, Rey decides, staring at Ben’s profile. I’d choose this life again. I choose this pain, but also, this joy.

“Penny for your thoughts.”

It’s a hushed, gentle invitation, befitting of the nerves they are both feeling. She manages a smile for Ben; again, it must not be convincing, because upon glancing at her, he takes one hand off the wheel to clutch it in his own.

“The lawyer at my trial wasn’t very good, I think. I don’t know,” says Rey, equally hushed. “He was a public defender, I was fifteen.”

He clears his throat. “A lawyer might do public defense work for a lot of reasons. They’re not all bad.”

“I think mine was, though. He basically told me to lie about… it being an accident.”

Ben twines their fingers and squeezes. “Okay. Maybe he was.”

“But,” she continues, “That got me my sentence, and that brought me to Maz. Who brought me to you.”

He darts another look her way; it’s hard for her to read it. Worry? Unease? Love?

“If you had it all to relive, would you do the same?”

Just the question she’s been asking herself.

Rey takes a deep breath. She peers out the windshield, at the flashes of crimson and marigold in the passing forest, at the slick road, at the dark sky. Thinks about legacy, thinks about the heavy weight of the past, thinks about what she wants for the future.

“I don’t want to be angry anymore,” she says. “I’m tired of what-if’s.”

“Yeah.” He nods, understanding. “Me too.”

. . .

The press are on them before the Falcon is even fully inside the Naboo courthouse parking garage. Ben scowls at the wall of cameras as he carefully navigates the crowd and parks in a vacant spot. Rey shrinks down in her seat, anxiety attacking her again with a vengeance. Once the engine is off, he turns to her, taking in her visible fear. Still scowling, he leans forward, opening the glove compartment. He pulls out his aviator sunglasses and hands them to her.

“Still time to back out,” he says. “You could… go get some food. Plenty of nice coffee shops around here. Bookshop around the corner. Movie theater, a few blocks away.”

“No.” She shakes her head. “I’m where I want to be.”

His expression softens. “Let’s get this over with?”

Aviators perched on the bridge of her nose, Rey shifts in her seat to kiss his cheek. The noise he makes is vulnerable, edgy. Just for her.

“Let’s,” she says.

. . .

The three of them squeeze into the end of a bench in the packed public gallery. Rey watches Ben as Ben watches the proceedings; one foot bounces incessantly, the hard heel of his dress shoe tapping on the courtroom floor. She rests a reassuring hand on his thigh; he lays his own on top, then squeezes in a crushing grip.

“You can do this,” she tells him.

He nods.

At both the defense and the prosecution’s tables, there sit flocks of lawyers. But as Ben is called and rises, making his way to the front of the courtroom, Rey’s eyes are drawn to the bald, scarred back of one man’s head in particular. The one among them who is not a lawyer.

Morfran Snoke.

He is a shockingly tall man, but his posture is terrible; he sits slouched, dressed in his eccentric gold and black pinstripe suit, his head resting on his hand. Almost as if he is bored by the question of his own guilt and the repercussions its answer will have on his future.

“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you god?”

Snoke’s head swivels towards Ben. Rey can only imagine the expression on the man’s face. From the angle she is seated, she can merely glimpse the side of his weathered face; the former CFO of Sidious Energy does not look pleased.

Ben stares back at Snoke, his expression unreadable. A perfect mask.

“I swear.”

. . .

Ben fields all of the prosecution’s questions with measured, precise answers. His testimony, as far as Rey can tell, is devastating. The jurors are all tipped forward in their seats, hanging on to every detail, many taking notes. Several times, a susurrus of gasps erupts in the wake of a particularly damning answer.

When it is the defense’s turn with him, Ben offers not a single word more than is necessary, no matter how the attorney’s questions prod and poke at his moral failings, his culpability, his compliance. Every aspect at his time with Sidious is dragged out for recrimination. Once, upon being asked if he’s considered the staggering economic repercussions of Sidious Energy’s misdeeds, Ben squirms in his seat, ever so slightly; he gives a tight nod and opens his mouth to reply, but does not get the chance before the prosecution raises an objection. It is sustained.

For Rey, the entire thing is a brutal spectacle from which she derives no satisfaction. She wants to go to him; she wants to hold him. She spends half of his time on the stand chewing her lip, worried for him, and the other half remembering her own time spent in a chair just like that one, her own testimony, her own nerves. It’s agony.

But aside from that one moment of vulnerability, Ben remains stoic, more so than Rey has ever seen before. 

This must be it, she thinks. This is how how he survived: his mask. The one he wore all those years he toiled away for her wayward grandfather.

Han slumps lower and lower in the bench as the cross examination proceeds, until at last Rey must elbow him hard in the side, cutting him a sharp, reproving look. That seems to bolster him; he nods and straightens, though he remains pale, his breathing labored, for the duration of Ben's time on the stand.

Eventually, it is finished.

And when it is, Ben steps down, takes one final expressionless look at Morfran Snoke, then passes back into the gallery. He stops at the bench beside Han and Rey, extending his hand towards Rey. It is trembling.

Snoke twists in his chair to glare at them. His eyes are the color of old ice, face contorted into a snarl. He is a cruel-looking man, whom Rey is glad not to know.

She takes Ben’s hand.

“You did so well,” she tells him under her breath as he helps her to her feet. Han rises too, offering Ben a nod. Ben nods back. Together, the three of them head towards the exit. Rey does not spare another glance for Morfran Snoke. Outside the courtroom, they ignore the reporters’ microphones waving in their faces, the bombardment of questions flying their way. 

“I’m gonna take you home and make you dinner,” she mutters.

“Rey—”

She gives him a sheepish grin. “Okay, okay, you’re taking me home. But I’m gonna order us dinner.”

“I love—that idea,” he says, looking tired, but relieved.

Her heart skips a beat.

. . .

“Welcome, welcome. Come in, hurry up, it’s terrible out there.”

It’s dark by the time Maz greets them at the door of her seaside rowhome, on the following Sunday evening. They—Ben, really, though only this morning Rey did a few spins around Tatooine in the Falcon, much to her delight—have driven over an hour in the pouring rain to get here, but it’s worth it.

Not just for the steaming cups of gatalenta tea Maz has waiting for them after they step inside and shuck their dripping raincoats, boots, and umbrellas in the foyer, but for the woman herself, warm as ever, tugging them down, one at a time, to bend at the waist and accept her surprisingly strong embrace.

“I’ve made lentils,” she says, leading them back through the long hall towards the kitchen at the back of the narrow house. “And accouterments, naturally.”

“I didn’t know you cooked,” murmurs Rey, taking in the mosaic of framed photographs cluttering the walls. In them are people, so many people. Some bear a resemblance to Maz, some do not. All are laughing, all are smiling.

“Maz’s lentil curry is renowned.” Ben meets her eyes, giving the hand he’s holding a squeeze. “Han complains about missing it all the time.”

“I’ll send you home with some for him,” she calls out, from the back of the house. They emerge out of the hall into a small but cheery, cluttered kitchen. Wafting aromas of warm spice and butter and baking flatbread have Rey’s mouth watering. Maz points to the table.

“Sit.”

She goes to check on dinner, peppering Ben with questions about Han and the shop. Rey sips her tea and watches Maz flit from griddle to oven to fridge and back as she talks. She cannot help but marvel at the sight. Maz has been out for three years and yet she seems entirely comfortable in this home, in this life, like she was never in prison at all.

If Maz can do it, thinks Rey, so can she.

“Nice house,” she musters, though her throat is tight with emotion. And she means it. It is nice. There are more photos in here, plants in every corner, warm lamps and dangling tea lights making the room a cozy safe haven; Maz’s is a home packed with evidence of a life well lived.

Ben has not let go of her hand. When she glances at him, he lifts it to his mouth, brushing his lips across the back of her knuckles.

“My kids put all my stuff into storage for me when I went in,” says Maz, bringing over a heaping plate of flatbread and a bowl of roasted greens. “Some of it’s got a bit of wear and tear now but who cares? If something’s a classic, it’s a classic forever.”

Rey nods. Maz points to the open bottle of wine on the table, instructing Ben to pour, then retreats. She returns a moment later with the pot of lentil stew and takes a seat.

“Ben’s been here before,” she tells Rey, as she reaches for Rey’s bowl and begins ladling lentils into it.

Rey glances at him. “You have?”

“Did some work on her bathroom,” he says, not meeting her eyes, studiously focused on his flatbread.

Maz hands her back a heavy bowl, then serves herself. They dig in. For a few minutes, there is just the sound of eating and the rain against the windows. It might be awkward if the food were not so good, if the company—Ben and Maz—did not seem so at ease with the silence. 

Then Maz sets her spoon in her stew and turns her attention towards Ben. “Now, young man. You know damn well that your father and I go way back, and I’ve watched you grow up from that precocious little boy to…” she trails off, waving in Ben’s direction.

Rey struggles not to laugh through her mouthful of greens. “Where are you going with this, Maz?”

“This young lady,” continues Maz, laying her hand on Rey’s arm, “Is my baby. I like her more than I like some of my flesh and blood children. Do you understand?”

Her cheeks go hot. Good lord, Maz is giving him the speech. She hazards an anxious glance at Ben.

He swallows, then nods. “I understand.”

“Do you?” Maz lets go of Rey and leans forward on her elbows, squinting at Ben. “Because if you hurt her, you hurt me. I don’t take kindly to being hurt, not by anyone. Do you understand that?”

The effect of her narrowed eyes is exaggerated by the magnification of her thick glasses.

“Maz,” he says, patiently, bemused. “I understand.”

“Good!” She claps her hands. “Good.”

“Thanks for not making it awkward or anything,” Rey drawls.

“Oh, you want awkward? Let’s talk about the time that upstart in cell block three took your pudding and you nearly started a prison riot.”

“Maz,” she warns.

Eyebrow raised, Ben leans in. “Let’s.”

She shoots him a look. “No.”

He shrugs, returning to his lentils.

“Well then, why don’t we discuss what our boy here is going to do to atone for all those years he spent holding up a vile, greedy corporation, working for two of the biggest bastards this side of Naboo! Hmm, Solo?”

“I don’t—I haven't—no one will touch me,” he settles on.

“Nonsense! Plenty of nonprofits out there that would take you.”

Rey shakes her head. “Let’s not do this either, Maz.”

“Oh, fine,” sighs Maz. “I suppose we’ll just have to talk babies, then.”

“Maz!” they both cry, eyes bulging wide, at which she begins to chuckle raspily. Before long, they are all laughing.

As they laugh, something in Rey's chest, some pressure valve that has been sealed shut for a long time, suddenly eases, and a warmth moves in where there had always been fear and anger. She’d be hard pressed to describe the feeling. It is something like assurance. Something like confidence, something like contentment.

Something like hope.

. . .

He has walked through fire and emerged the other side, stripped of his dignity, his prestige, his power, but having regained something infinitely more precious: his humanity.

He mulls over this idea—what he has lost and what he has gained—as he occupies his usual place in the diner, the corner stool closest to the door at the end of the long gleaming counter. A cup of cooling coffee sits before him, a half-finished slice of birthday cake too. He’s distracted, though, by the pandemonium around him; for whatever reason, Winta, the seven-year-old daughter of Omera, a local artisan, has requested to have her birthday party at Tosche Station today. 

The place is overrun with hyper second graders. Balloons hover in shiny clusters at the end of each booth, paper plates of half-eaten chicken tenders, french fries, and chocolate birthday cake are strewn about the tables. A manic pop song booms out from the old radio on the counter.

In one corner, Luke paints animal masks and silly doodles on the children’s faces; in another, Han and Lando bicker as they do their best to twist long balloons into the shapes requested by the partygoers.

Rey is right in the middle of it. Throwing her head back to sing along to the music, she hops from foot to foot in a joyful, unskilled dance-off with the kids.

A crude dandelion has been painted on her right cheek, over the dimple, cheery and yellow. He smiles at the sight of it, thinking that she is the loveliest thing he has ever seen. When she catches his eyes, he goes red at having been caught staring, but merely Rey bids the children to dance on without her and makes her way over to him, stopping for a second to pluck a balloon creation from Han and Lando’s booth.

“Hi,” she says, sliding onto the stool beside him.

“Hm.”

Rey laughs, then settles the balloon atop his head. Leaning back, she studies her handiwork, then adjusts it a few times; Ben can feel she’s positioned it at a jaunty angle. Finally, she nods in satisfaction.

“What have you done to me?” he asks, gaze flicking over the painted dandelion, then her pert mouth.

For some reason, the question causes her to blush a charming pink all the way down to her collarbones. “Just including you in the festivities.”

“Am I wearing a flower balloon hat?”

Her eyes float up to it, then meet his. She gives him a cheeky grin. “It suits you. A vast improvement on the bathrobe and trucker hat, anyway.”

He cracks, chuckling along with her. “Gremlin.”

“But a lovable gremlin, yes?”

Before he can answer, the bell above the diner entranceway dings out the arrival of a newcomer. Ben swivels on the stool to see who has joined the party.

Then his whole body goes cold, mind frozen to petrified sludge.

Standing in the doorway, wearing an expensive wool coat and leather gloves, flanked by two burly square-headed bodyguards, is Sheev Palpatine.

. . .

Rey watches in frozen horror as, haltingly, Ben rises and stumbles forward into her grandfather’s path, blocking him from advancing further into the diner. Sheev is not a strong-looking man; he is short, and his fine wool coat billows on his frail frame. Ben towers over him, but the two guards hovering at Sheev’s shoulders tower over both men.

“You’re not welcome here,” Ben says.

His attempted aura of stern intimidation is hampered ever so slightly by the balloon flower hat bobbing atop his head.

Sheev grins at him. “You needn’t concern yourself, m’boy, I have no plans of staying. I merely wished to see my prodigal granddaughter with my own eyes.”

How did he even know where I’d be? Rey wonders. Then she remembers: the journalists, the cameras. He saw them.

So why now?

“Funny,” she says to Sheev, her voice sounding harsher than usual, nearly squawking. Her hands are balled into fists. Someone behind them flips off the radio, and although a few of the children continue shrieking and playing, all the adults in the diner watch in rapt silence. “I’ve been hoping to see you, too.”

When Sheev’s gaze slides over her, it is like being doused in something slimy, and staining. He assesses her, his gaze cool. And then he chuckles contemptuously, less than impressed with what he has found. In that laugh, Rey hears the echo of every vulnerable moment of her twenty-one years, every insecurity, every doubt. She resists the urge to run back into the kitchen and hide until he’s gone.

“You’re looking well, considering your… lengthy incarceration.”

It’s strange to be addressed so directly by a man who has never before acknowledged her existence, but her anger wells up and fuels her, sustains her. Allows her to get out her next words.

“Doubt you’ll do half as well as I did,” she says, “You don’t come from where I come from. You couldn’t possibly understand.” She takes a step forward, coming to stand just behind Ben. “Though you will.”

Sheev bares his teeth; she’s gotten to him. It was almost too easy. You’ve spent too long as a pampered hothouse bloom, she thinks. If you ever knew, you’ve forgotten what it is to be a weed. To have to fight for the light, to drag yourself up through the cracks of the world.

“It has occurred to me,” he says with the unconvincing blasé of someone unused to being offended and struggling to recover, “That perhaps you were always doomed. Bad stock. On your mother’s side, of course.”

“That all you came here to say?” asks Ben, in a low, menacing tone. The bodyguards bristle, moving closer to their client. One pulls out a set of brass knuckles, an unspoken threat. “Because if it is—”

Rey lays a hand on his arm. “The only thing we share is DNA, Sheev. Get out.”

“If I were ever brought to trial—between the lawyers and the fines, they’d take most of my earnings. She wouldn’t get a cent.” Sheev's smile is smarmy, all supreme confidence now. “If I was even found guilty.”

“You will be,” says Ben, matching his confidence.

“Going to turn on me like you did Snoke?”

Ben has gone stiff; Rey tugs on the arm she’s still holding but he does not look back at her.

“I never wanted your stupid money,” she says. “I didn’t even know about you until—” realizing what she’s about to say, she shuts her mouth hard, but it’s too late. 

She can see realization dawn on Sheev’s face; he’s heard the unspoken words.

“Ah.” He barks out that cruel laugh. “So that’s what happened to poor, stupid Plutt. He ran his mouth, did he?”

Rey drags in a deep, calming breath, just like Maz taught her. “I followed him that night. I saw you paying him off.”

Sheev shrugs. “Better to pay the riff-raff to deal with the riff-raff.”

“I don’t care what you think.” The words are pushed out through clenched teeth; she is shaking. “You’re a monster.”

“Same as your boyfriend,” he says airily.

And just like that, she understands: Sheev Palpatine is not a man who can allow anyone to be happy, if he is not. So he has come in an attempt to ruin them both.

“Maybe. Maybe he was a monster, too, but he was also a human being underneath that.” She glares at him. “He was more. You… you’re… hollow. There’s nothing more to you than what’s on paper and when they take that from you, you’ll be a ghost.”

Just like me, grandfather.

Sheev tilts his head. “And what does that make you, my dear?”

“The same,” she says. “A ghost. A monster. It doesn't matter. There was more to me, too. I get to be whatever I want now because I've done my time. Eventually, you’re going to do yours.”

Sneering, Sheev looks towards Ben. “No matter how this all turns out—and you can consider this a final act of courtesy between business partners—you’re betting on the wrong horse. She will never be your meal ticket.”

She takes another step forward, ready to tell him off for good, but Ben is swifter. Before she can speak, before she can hold him back, he’s lunging towards Palpatine with an enraged bellow, arm raised and ready to strike. He has the element of surprise on his side and gets in one good jab at her grandfather’s mouth before the bodyguards are on him, returning that blow with several of their own.

Horrified, Rey watches the hits land: to his torso, to his face. They pop his flower balloon hat. He stays on his feet but just barely.

“Stop!” she cries, rushing in to punch at the iron-like torso of the guard with the brass knuckles. He swats her away like a fly. “Stop!”

They do not. For a moment, there is chaos. 

Rey had not realized that Han, Lando, and Luke, who have been silently watching all this melodrama, had moved closer to her; now, they push past her. Though none of them are young men, they are still spry enough to get between the guards and Ben, to peel them off of him and drag Ben away, towards one of the booths, where they sit him down.

Sheev is laughing, all the while. Laughing, laughing maniacally. He has an awful laugh. Blood trickles from the corner of his mouth but he does not seem to care. Rey ignores him. She leans over the counter to grab a clean towel from the shelf below, then elbows in beside Han and Lando. Tilting Ben’s head back, she gets a good look at the damage the bodyguards have done. His own lip is busted and they’ve torn his black sweater in the scuffle, but that’s not the worst of it. 

The brass knuckles have pummeled and torn the pale skin of Ben’s face from brow to jaw, a rough gash that is oozing blood down his right cheek, down his neck, disappearing under his sweater.

“Damn it,” mutters Rey. She dips the towel in a nearby glass of water then blots at the wound.

Ben looks dazed. His face is a mess. A beautiful mess, at least she still thinks so, but a mess nonetheless. The gash is deep enough that Rey expects it will leave a scar.

“Damn it!” she repeats, enraged, helpless, scared.

Luke turns towards Sheev and his guards. “Out. Out of my diner, now. You’re not welcome here. Not now, not ever.”

And Sheev has the gall to continue laughing, hands raised, as though this were all a whimsical misunderstanding. “We’re leaving, Skywalker, not to worry. I think the children understand, now, don’t you?”

With that, he turns to leave. The bell over the door rings out again as the guards open the door for him then file out in tow, but now it is Rey who sees red, Rey whose blood is up. She’s hot on their heels, following them out onto the sidewalk.

. . .

“You okay, kid?” asks Luke.

“Someone keep an eye on her!” he barks out, already trying to rise from the booth, but Han and Lando’s hands are there pressing down on his shoulders, keeping him seated.

Luke tilts back, looking out the window. “Don’t worry, I’m watching.”

The numbing, heart-pouding high of adrenaline is wearing off, and in its place, Ben feels a terrible burning pain on the left side of his face. His body is already sore; as the bruises bloom, he has no doubt that ache will get worse.

He grunts.

Lando moves away, back behind the counter, but Han stays by his side. He looks up at his father with his good eye; the other is already beginning to swell. 

“You did good.”

“Getting my ass kicked?”

Han huffs. “By standing up for her. Don’t think she’s had a whole lot of that in her life. Besides, I saw those goons’ faces. You got in a few good swings.”

Ben scoffs, then winces. His everything hurts.

“Get that disgusting thing out of here,” says Lando, pointing at the bloody towel on Ben's face. He waves Han away, then leans a hip on the table and opens up a first aid kit on the table. “Alright, now I won’t lie to you and tell you this will feel good—”

“Spare me, Lando,” Ben grits out.

Lando nods, unbothered. “Sure thing. Close your eyes.”

Ben does. Something cool pours down his face, rushing over the torn, ravaged skin of his wound; a second later it begins to fizz, then burn.

“Fuck!”

“Yeah,” says Han. “I know. Take it easy. The pain means it’s working. Don’t want that thing getting infected. Just ask Luke.”

Luke sighs. “Don’t make this about the hand, Han.”

“If you’d treated the damn bite right when the raccoon got ya—”

“Anybody get that bastard’s license plate number?” interjects Lando, disrupting the fight all of them have heard a dozen times before. 

“Yeah, yeah, I’m on it,” Luke grumbles, grabbing a napkin and moving away to jot down the plate details on the SUV parked outside.

Ben tries to open his eye but the sting is nearly blinding.

“Keep it shut, son.”

“What’s she doing out there?”

Luke chuckles. “Oh, she’s just giving him a piece of her mind.”

Just then, Lando sets a needle and thread on the table. Ben eyes it warily, feeling nerves kick in. Lando gives him an apologetic grimace. “You’re going to want to keep both eyes closed for this part.”

He’s quick to comply.

Something is sprayed across his face; it must have anesthetic properties, because a minuter later, when Lando starts poking at the ruptured skin around his wound with a needle, he has only the faintest sensation of it, like an errant tickle.

As Lando works, Ben hears Luke get up, then come back. He’s calling someone. Ben’s not sure what gets him, whether it’s the beeping of the numbers as he presses them, indicating that Luke, like most of his generation, has not put the phone on silent mode, or the fact that Luke still dials people’s phone numbers manually. Either way, he busts out an exhausted, breathy laugh.

“Wouldn’t do that if I were you,” warns Lando.

“What, laugh?”

“Move.”

Ben frowns, but collects himself and goes still.

“Sheriff Holdo, Hi. Yes, I’m fine, I’m fine, thanks for asking. Yes, the party's fine, everyone's having a great time. Listen, you won’t believe who just stopped by our diner—and if you hurry, I think you’ll catch him on the road out of town…” Luke’s voice fades away, presumably as he heads off to give Amilyn the details.

“Mom would've been proud,” says Han, quietly.

Lando makes a sound of agreement.

Ben swallows, though the act is difficult. “She would’ve said I was being an idiot.”

“Yeah.” Han laughs, or sighs, or something in between. He ruffles Ben’s hair very gently, careful not to disturb Lando’s work. “But trust me, from one idiot to another—she woulda been proud, all the same.”

“Thanks, dad,” is all he can get out.

His dad pats his shoulder.

. . .

The day is incongruously perfect. Cool, crisp. Blue sky overhead, sun shining down. She squints. A few feet from the diner entrance, a sleek black SUV has been parked; the men are heading towards it.

Before she can say anything—and really she doesn’t even know what’s left to say—Sheev pauses mid-step on the sidewalk then turns to look at her. He’s got a handkerchief pressed to his mouth; it’s dappled with crimson blood from the split lip Ben gave him.

“Not a cent!” he snarls.

Rey crosses her arms. “I wouldn’t take it.”

And that’s that. Sheev stands there steaming for a moment, glaring at her. Then, with an exasperated huff, he turns and disappears into the back seat of the SUV. The guards’ faces are expressionless, impersonal as they climb into the front; they do not even look back at her.

Why would they? she muses, as the engine turns over. She’s nothing to them.

The engine revs, the brake lights glow red for a moment. Then the SUV is off, racing down the street, turning the corner, and vanishing into the cold, bright afternoon.

Never in her life has she been so happy to be nothing, and nobody. She is simply a creature of her own making; no more a Palpatine than she is a Skywalker or… a Solo.

Well, not a Solo for now, anyway.

Rey smiles to herself.

. . .

“So… therapy,” says Ben, sounding like he’s got a mouth full of cotton, once Rey is back in the diner. 

He’s resumed his usual vigil, at the counter. The radio is on again and the party has picked up in her absence, for which she is glad. Omera, Winta, the rest of the children and their parents look a little shaken, but as Rey takes the stool beside Ben’s, Rose begins leading the group in a line dance. Soon, the incident seems well on its way to being brushed aside and forgotten.

He is holding a fresh towel over half of his face. Someone was kind enough to remove the popped remnants of the popped flower hat from his head. Gingerly, she pulls the towel away; a rough line of black stitches have been sown along the cleaned gash. Examining them now, she is certain it will scar once it’s healed. There is some small, feral part of her that preens: he earned that scar defending her honor. Fighting for her. It is her scar, and it always will be.

I choose you, thinks Rey. “A lot of it,” she agrees.

His bad eye is bruised and swollen, but his good eye shines wetly. “And… more coffee?”

Though the request floats between them, his hand is extended; he is asking for one small thing, but also for so many big things. He watches her, looking hopeful. And nervous.

Rey does him one better. She climbs onto his lap, careful not to jostle him. Around them, the diner bursts into a cacophony of hollers and cackling laughter and wolf whistles, and though she grins, she does not look away from him.

“As much of it as you can drink,” she says in a low voice, right before she gently kisses him on the uninjured side of his mouth, marking her turf, staking her claim.

This is my inheritance, is what she tells him and the citizens of Tatooine and the whole world, with that kiss. This is what I have earned. A life, a messy one, all mine, to be lived however I want.

And I want this.

She pulls back, waiting to see if Ben has gotten the message.

Tossing the towel onto the counter, he grins, lopsided but genuine, eyes crinkling. He wraps his arms around her and tugs, bringing her in close.

He’s gotten it.