Chapter Text
"This is a waste of time," Ben sighs and braces his hands against the controller board. "My time, your time, time and resources that your precious Resistance is always short on and would be better off investing in doing something about the First Order, at last."
A lieutenant with the exact circlet braid his mother wore in the battle of Endor glares blaster shots at him over his mother's even more regal hairstyle. "Ben," she sighs in return, the long-suffering, chest-heaving affair that he's known from his cradle, "could you not be so difficult —"
"Could you stop interfering with my life?" Ben snaps, a vein popping in his forehead. "Nothing good ever came out of that." He can feel the hatred in the room spike—the lieutenant, a couple guards, a plucky technician, all indignant to find such an insolent person exist as to not worship every decision of their beloved Princess/General.
Leia winces, but the hurt is gone in a flash. "I am your mother, Ben Solo. I have done my best," lie , Ben thinks bitterly, "to protect you from a megalomaniac Darksider that preyed on you since you were an infant, and stars be damned, I won't let you fall in the hands of another."
"You don't know what you're talking about," he rolls his eyes. For all her hardcore Sith aesthetic, Rey hardly fits the bill of the cackling megalomaniac. Her scheme —if you could call it that—to keep him with her was selfish, but Ben found it mirrored a selfishness of his own. Staying on her planet had been an indulgence of many of his desires. If that's the way of the Sith, being seduced by the Dark isn't half as bad as Master Luke preached.
"I was in no danger," he goes on in a purposefully infuriating tone. His mother huffs inelegantly. Despite them standing in her flagship's headquarters, durasteel and white panels giving a sterile and efficient air, the back and forth between them flows as familiar as the Alderaanian steps of courtesy. "Does managing a paramilitary organization bore you so much that you have to stick your nose in Dad and I's business and invent trouble where there is none?"
"Whatever your father's up to is the definition of trouble," his mother scowls and adjusts her heavy, sharp-edged coat. Dressed in dark colors and statement gold jewelry, she resembles a Sith queen of old tales more than she'd want to hear. "And it is with great disappointment that I see you follow his steps," she thumps her cane.
"Better than following Grandfather's path, isn't it?" Ben grits out. His perennial failure at living up to her expectations is an old wound that never quite scabbed over, and he masks its bleeding by cutting her where he knows it'll hurt. They're incapable of breaking that cycle, it seems.
Leia's mouth opens, a retort poised and ready—probably along the lines of fancied yourself Vader's successor at some point, didn't you? you had the animosity towards my brother in common or you had your pick of role models, from Jedi legends to war heroes, and you consistently go for the worst possible —that Ben never receives.
His hearing tunnels, his vision darkens at the edges, and with barely a moment to recognise the hand of the Force in it, he's back on her planet. The two red moons, like a fond beast's eyes above him, cold wind razing his face. Suddenly his bones weigh more than a freighter, his blood boils like Mustafar's core, his eyes should be emitting smoke with how they burn, his claws ache like they're begging to be pulled off with pincers. Darkness chokes him in thick plumes, the scarce light inside him flickering, dying—
Ben's dropped back to the present as abruptly as he was yanked away from it, bracing himself against the Resistance's ship countdown projector and trying not to heave like a drowning man—for all that the busybodies conducting their very important for the galaxy's wellbeing duties on the bridge of the Raddus know, he's just standing in a room with perfect atmospheric simulation and environmental controls.
His mother is frowning at him when he blinks into focus, one small, beringed hand hovering to touch his cheek. He's sweating. "Ben? What's wrong?"
Rey, it's Rey, I need to go back, I shouldn't have left —
"Nothing," he shakes his head. There's no way of knowing how much of his vision, if any, Leia has picked up with her own Force sensitivity, but he has to take every leeway and opportunity he can to get away. Create it, if he needs to. "Just a bit of nausea. Crazy how a few days planetside can make orbit feel off."
It's the flimsiest excuse in the known universe—the lieutenant stationed behind his mother regards him with unveiled suspicion, but miraculously, it works on the intended target. "Oh dear," Leia brushes his cheek, and after he leans down enough, his forehead. "I just know you haven't been caring for yourself as you should in all those travels. Han wouldn't know a proper meal schedule if it shot him in the face," she scoffs, an undercurrent of fondness for the Solo men in her life.
"Don't fret, Mom," he adds gently for good measure. That he has to sweet talk his way around his mother at the ripe old age of thirty would send him into an existential crisis if Rey's suffering wasn't tearing him inside, blaring louder than any siren. "A little dehydration never killed nobody," he shrugs as his father would.
From then on, everything proceeds as he had foreseen and schemed. Leia shoos him off to the medbay, which is situated within a convenient distance of the hangar. It's as easy as breathing, to befuddle his escorting crew members with the Force, to blend amidst the rest of busy pilots until he reaches the array of X-Wings, to slip into an unattended canopy and crack it over his head unnoticed. There's no droid hooked in this ship, but he won't be going far anyway. He sets clearance codes—Leia has given access to both him and Han into the Resistance code system in case an opportunity to help her mighty cause comes up, a choice she will most definitely regret after this—and drums his fingers over the seatbelt and the control yokes as the hangar field shield opens.
Hold on, Rey. I'll be there soon. If he focuses, he can sense her through the Force, a howl of anguish echoing at the back of his head. He powers up his stolen X-Wing and speed-limits it until the Raddus is gone from his system's scanning radius, and hopefully vice versa. He sets no coordinates, letting the Force and his piloting skills—the only inheritance from his father and grandfather that Mom would be proud of—guide him where he belongs.
The planet beckons him from space, dark tendrils cushioning his landing. He jumps out of the X-Wing and runs through the craggy soil, wind whipping him back. She's a black hole in the Force, radiating pain and destruction while seemingly absorbing every flicker of light and life in the vicinity—but even if she weren't, her wolves form a tentative circle a good running distance ahead of him, so run he does.
She's lying in a mess of her torn cloak and swirling shadows, the Dark Side so strong it vibrates in the air and threatens to pull him under before he could get close enough to touch her. He barrels on, heedless of his singing clothes and skin. At the eye of the dark storm, Rey's limbs are contracting and pulsing, shrinking and growing, her once wolfish face reduced to a blur, her eyes yellow lights that hurt to look at, like binary suns.
She's assimilating further , Ben nearly weeps as he tries to hold her and finds her alarmingly less corporeal than he'd hoped. Her Force is trying to make her a more of a wolf , he glares around the Sith beasts unhelpfully standing guard around them. Their eyes betray no emotion. But one by one, they throw their heads back and howl, a symphony of grief and hunger.
Prey was scarce, he remembers with a start. She was trying to change for them, to be a better hunter. Or Ben removed the last hurdles of humanity in the process of her Sith-Wolfication with his leaving. Either way, she's reached the limit of her Force's assimilating capacity, exceeded it, and now she's paying the price.
Keeping his hands plunged in the darkness burns them, but he doesn't budge. For the first time since he killed him, Ben follows Master Luke's instructions and reaches inside him, envisioning a well of light and applying it in the faintest corporeal trace of her. At least Force healing doesn't need fine motor control—he pours his light, his strength into her storm and fervently focuses on coaxing her own warped power to cease assimilating, to stop turning against herself, to rest.
You are enough, he howls in his heart, in hers. You belong. Please come back.
I love you.
The Force burns brighter and hotter, building and rising. And right when he thinks he won't make it, the only person to understand him and accept him wholly will be gone and it will be his faults, it shatters. Light fills his vision, and darkness follows.
When Ben awakens, everything around him is white. He'd think he's dead if it weren't for the medidroid's beeping. The Raddus ' medbay, a latent part of his mind remarks, but the rest burns still with a need—
"Rey," he gasps, his throat coarse and burned like he'd swallowed a volcano.
"Ben," he hears a croaky, but decidedly human, voice from someplace at his side and rushes towards her, yanking IV drips and alarming the med staff on his way.
In a cot identical to the one he'd risen from lies—Rey.
Stripped of her Force assimilation, stripped of the fur and teeth and claws and yellow eye sheen, left with nothing but human vulnerability. Her pale skin is covered in variously reddened burns, her hands wiry, her frame bony. Ben reaches out, to brush a strand of her hair aside, maybe, thin brown hair contained to her scalp now, fanning limply over the pillow. Or to touch her sharp cheekbone, her sharp nose, her bruised temple.
Her eyes are like suns . His hand trembles. And she has freckles.
"You better not expect me to be hairless," Rey growls, a naturally softer but no less formidable sound. Ben laughs, and goes on laughing despite his bandaged ribs' ache.
"Never," he promises. Rey's fingers have found his face, dipping in his dimples and tracing his moles. "I love you just as you are."