Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

She steps forward to retrieve her sabre as the last guard’s lifeless body slides to the floor, still clasped in his hand where she’d unthinkingly thrown it to him. He stays rooted to the spot, half crouched under the weight of a body no longer there. She takes it gently from his hand and holds out his own. He eyes it for a second before taking it from her. Whatever that was, I’ll deal with it later. 

Her feet are numb under her as she runs towards the viewport, clipping the saber to her belt, hands grasping at her hair as the tiny blips crawl towards the planet Crait, still under the muffled barrage of cannonfire. Cool, conditioned air begins to dry the sweat and blood at her neck. She turns, eyes caught on the flick of his arm as he shakes his sleeve to murmur into the communicator at his wrist. 

‘Pause the attack on the transports and await further instruction.’ He clips the blinking communicator off and flings it away where it clatters hollowly amongst jagged plastic armour. She breathes out in stunned relief as the barrage stops, laugh bubbling out of her as he moves behind her.

He stands on the dais, unmoving in front of the frail bifurcated corpse of his former master. Snoke’s robe hangs open weakly, exposing a length of mottled grey skin. He doesn’t respond to her call, head bowed and staring down at the bundle of muscle and bone that was once his mentor, expecting it to resolve itself into life and bring with it searing all encompassing pain.

‘Ren, we have to go. People will be coming.’ Nothing.

She moves to him slowly, addressing his side profile, his chest rippling with short sharp breaths, hands balled into fists. ‘Ben!’ she shouts, ‘we have to go, please.’ She takes in his stature, vibrating with tension and watches for a second, hand poised over her saber. Maybe she miscalculated. Cold fear begins creeping into her throat, but she swallows it down. No, she won’t let herself think that.

She moves tentatively towards him. ‘Ben’ she breathes, placing a hand on his upper arm. It’s burning hot, even under layers of leather armour, streaked with blood. She swallows once and ducks into his line of sight, breaking his focus on the body slumped half out of the stone throne. He finally blinks and his eyes focus lazily on hers. ‘We have to go.’ She tries to pull him with her, and it's like pulling a statue. She snakes a hand up to cradle his face. ‘Please’, she begs, ‘please. Come back.’ Her voice shakes as her fear for the first time starts to catch up with her. Like she’d stepped off of an ocean shelf and was now up to the neck in frigid water, chest squeezing. She pulls his forehead down to hers and presses forward into it, eyes screwed shut, pleading into the space between them. ‘Come back’, she gasps, heartbeat drumming in her skull, ‘we have to go right now. People are coming.’ Her head aches as she pushes all her strength into it, a sharp point of clarifying pain. He breathes out a shuddering breath against her open mouth and she feels him nod.

He grabs her arm and opens his eyes to meet hers fully. ‘There’s an escape pod.’ He says. She nods desperately. 

He jolts away and she stumbles before finding her balance again, a step behind him. He kicks through a hidden panel that falls clanging and misshapen to the floor. She crawls through the opening as he glances behind them before following her into the magenta antechamber. Inside the noise is flattened by isolating panels. 

‘It’s one person...’

‘Get in. We’ll make do.’

He opens the pneumatic door and slides in, ripping off his gloves that suck wetly to his skin. She unclips her sabre and flings it in a side compartment before climbing in over him, folding her legs over his to fit. His hand holds her hips to steady her as she cranes above them to flick through the thankfully standard pre-flight procedures. She initialises the climate and oxygen control, and jams on the gravitational dampeners as he reaches past to set their flight path to seek the nearest habitable planet, struck for a moment by the luck that Snoke’s prerequisites for life were broadly similar to theirs.

Her attention is momentarily dragged away by the sound of crunching plastic and a faint whiff of ozone. ‘Transponder’, he explains, dropping the crumpled housing and torn wires at their feet. She fumbles with shaking hands to clip the belt across them both, and with a nod he pushes the button to eject them into space as a thin trail of blood works its way between his fingers.

The roar in their ears swallows her scream as their bones shake until it feels as if they’ll disintegrate into bloodied pieces. She screws her eyes shut and counts in her mind, starting back from one each time her panic overtakes her and she loses her sliding footing. If she’s generous with herself, she’ll say she made it past ten. After a screaming eternity, gradually, the roar begins to quiet to a shout, and then a rumble. She cracks her eyes open to black space streaked with stars. When it eventually, mercifully quiets to a hum she unbuckles them and slumps to the dashboard drawing in gulping breaths, tensing her core to avoid losing the food in her stomach. She beats one balled fist lightly against the hollow panelling like a heartbeat. 

He’s first to speak after they’re safely drifting, out of the immediate proximity of the Supremacy. No sensors had blared into life, they hadn’t felt their course dragged by a tractor beam, somehow they had slipped out unnoticed. All that surrounds them is blackness.

He takes a deep breath and she moves with it. ‘Are you okay?’

She huffs out a nervous laugh and stares unseeing outwards. They’d made it out alive, the tiny pod had torn itself away from the Supremacy without ripping itself apart, I’m alive, I made it out of that room. Why does it feel as if I didn’t? Her jaw quivers as she draws in a quavering breath. 

‘You know they’d have killed us both…’, he says.

She nods a tiny nod in agreement. ‘I know. They were trying to kill me.’ Her voice sounds alien in the humming dampened interior of the pod. 

‘They wouldn’t have stopped until they did’ he says. She ignores his quizzical sideways look at her, and tries to draw in a single unwavering breath. She holds a hand up at him, not having the energy to continue talking.

Their pod crawls slowly along a broadly curving trajectory on the readout, a dotted line heading off-screen. Not equipped with lightspeed, or any substantial ion propulsion system, they’re being propelled only by tiny thrusters. 

He rattles off some facts about the pod to fill the silence. She’s grateful for it. ‘B class emergency escape pod, weighted up to 200 kilos. Maximum speed at full load, 800kph, fueled and with oxygen tanks to reach the nearest human-habitable area within a 4000 km radius. Of which there are at least 40 within that distance. We’re lucky we’re where we are, otherwise we could have ended up drifting into dead space.’ She looks at the blinking dots on the tiny readout on the dash. ‘We’ll land within the hour.’ Her breathing is growing louder, more laboured. 'Have you ever flown one of these before?' he asks. She shakes her head, knee bouncing against his. He fits her hands over the controls, leaving streaks of red on her skin, aggressively bright. 'Keep your hands there. You might need to take manual control.'

'Why?' She peers at him over her shoulder and he jerks his head for her to keep her eyes on the tiny viewport.

'It doesn't matter. Just keep them there.'

She does, eyes roving mechanically over the controls, ignoring the grinding thump of him resetting one of his joints behind her. From the sound and the short hyperventilating run-up he gave himself, most likely his shoulder. She squints, trying to focus on the readout, dimming round the edges. She leans forward, feigning a closer look, desperately willing oxygen back to her swimming head. She gives up on trying to school breathing, taking huge breaths, but still feeling like she’s running out of air.

‘We’ll make it’, he says. She leans her forehead to the dash and wraps her arms around her head as he nudges her hands off the controls, sucking in airless breaths.

‘Rey.’ She leans her head up and looks pleadingly at the coffin-like roof of the pod. A tear is forced out of her eye and tracks down her dirtied face. A fragile whimper escapes her.

‘Rey, breathe. You need to breathe.’ She balls her hands into fists on her lap. ‘Rey, you can’t lose it right now. You won’t.’ She’s shaking and attempting to curl up into a panting ball on his lap.

‘Rey, breathe.’ He unpeels her shaking arms from round her knees and pulls her back to his chest. ‘You need to slow your breathing’, he breathes, his hold against her unyielding as she attempts to thrash out of his grasp. ‘Breathe in with me.’ He breathes in deep and slow, as much to calm himself as her, ignoring the stab of sharp pain for his efforts. It can wait, this can't.

‘Get off of me’, she spits.

His laugh rumbles against her back. ‘You’re okay. It’s natural, just concentrate on me. Breathe in.’ She shakes her head, frantic. Tears silently carve clear tracks down her cheeks. ‘You’ll be okay, breathe in. From here.’ He places a hand on her stomach, and presses her back against him as he breathes in low and slow. Her breathing slows slightly. ‘Good, keep going.’ His brain is screaming at him in panic, the burn of his many injuries slowly starting to make itself known and demanding his attention. He stares at one tiny strand of her hair moving with his breath. ‘You’re okay.’ You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay… Bile creeps up to the back of his throat, he pulls her even closer.

Eventually, blessedly, he feels her breathing slowly return to normal. One arm clinging to his forearm across her front, eyes screwed shut, but he feels her muscles begin to relax from their cramping tension. She breathes out one long shaking solitary breath, and opens her eyes. She sucks in through her nose as he removes his arms from around her. He doesn’t say anything.

‘Fuck, I feel sick.’ He flashes a tiny smile her way. 'Guess this time is marginally better. I can sit up at least.' She slumps forward once again to rest her forehead against the cool metal of the control panelling, swallowing audibly as the adrenaline starts to wear off. He watches her take stock of her injuries, rolling muscles and hissing at the sting of bruised and cut flesh.

‘Where are we?’ She asks, pressing a hand to her shoulder and ineffectually scrubbing the blood from her hand on her knee.

‘Nowhere.’ Their destination has still yet to appear on the screen. 

‘They’ll be after us by now.’ She looks over her shoulder at him.

‘Unquestionably. But they've got no way to track us and we’re too small to be picked up by routine scans.’ She looks at him as he mechanically flicks through screens on the dashboard. Oxygen supply good, thrusters at steady pace, fuel consumption fair. ‘We should be dead by now.’ He smiles and her stomach sinks.

‘What’s the plan?’ She takes in the various dials and readouts indicating their general safety. All within tolerance.

He laughs in shock, but it quickly morphs into a hiss as he flinches in pain. ‘I don’t know, I didn’t think I’d make it out of that room.’ His mouth quirks into a small sad smile directed at no-one. Don’t know what to do with that. ‘What are your injuries?’, he asks. 

‘Uhh … nothing serious.’ She takes a deep breath, looking unseeing out into the nothingness. ‘Graze on my shoulder from a vibro-staff. I’ve got a cut on my calf, but it’s superficial. You?’

‘Shoulder was dislocated, one of my legs is slashed, but it missed all major arteries.’ He rattles them off like statistics, she becomes aware of a slow thump beside them, a pool of blood snaking off the seat and onto the floor into a growing puddle.

She keeps her eyes on it as she responds. ‘Was?’ She was right, then. 

‘It’s not anymore, one of them tried to rip my arm off. It's fine. I’ll deal with it properly later.’ She swallows, trying to chalk up the tremor she feels through both their bodies to the vibration of the craft. 

‘Medical supplies?’ She winces, and closes her eyes again. His answer finds them in the red-tinged darkness. 

‘Snoke never needed them. And F.O. ships rarely stray from habitable areas...’ 

‘Unless they’re hunting down the Resistance’, she breathes. ‘We have no supplies…’ She’s faraway when she responds, calculating their chances of survival, fighting infection, shock and blood loss… He frowns at her stricken yet determined face, brows furrowing in a way that magnifies his steady headache. 

‘Luke never taught you?’ 

A lick of anger rips through her at Luke’s name, a tension he feels in her body like a wave. Her jaw is set and streaked with oxidised blood. ‘Luke taught me nothing, you know that. Say whatever it is you want to say.’ 

He tilts his head back in a breathy exhale, feeling the murderous look she throws over her shoulder at him. He rakes a hand over his face and takes a controlled breath. ‘Don’t try to murder me. We really don't have the space for that.’ He hovers a hand above hers, close enough she can see it shake slightly. She feels an itch on her skin and moves her hand away to see a small scabbing graze that was there a moment ago, is now gone. She flexes the hand experimentally. Normal. She tries to search his face, but it’s turned away from her.

‘It’s a lightsider ability.’ He pauses. ‘I’ll teach you how so you can heal yourself.’ He darts a quick apologetic look at her. 

‘Can you heal yourself?’ She demands, still flexing the now healed hand.

‘Of course I can.’ He scoffs, and stiffens once again in pain. He’s cracked a few ribs, minimum, she notes, and didn’t think it was worth listing. 

‘But you don’t.’ She challenges, catching his eye out of the corner of hers.

‘Pain is instructional.’

She scoffs at his explanation. ‘Teach me then’ she bristles, hands balling into weak fists at her sides. 

‘You need your strength. You’re manipulating your life force…’ He avoids her gaze and pointlessly checks their position on the readout, a little red blip in a sea of black. 

‘But you can do it now?’ She stares at his profile, with an intensity he envies her for. 

‘I’ve had more training in it.’ He explains, quietly. Feeling his energy and fight ebb away as she inversely seems to be coming back to her combative, usual self. He’s an easy target, but she values her principles too highly to take advantage of it, instead relaxing with a sigh.

‘You can’t have had that much. I’ve seen your scars.’ She gives up trying to catch his eye and tries to center herself, closing her eyes.

‘I’m still alive, aren’t I?’ He smiles to himself and leans his head back, trying to relax into waiting. He wills his attention away from screaming muscles and they sit in silence for the first time.

It’s not exactly peaceful. It feels like the intake of breath before a scream. They are defiantly alive in an eternity of nothingness, at any moment the anomaly will be righted. How are we alive? Why did I do that? Every muscle and bone in his body is clamouring for attention, overcoming one another to replace each pain with another, until they all blur into one. That he at least knows what to do with, breathing in and noting each pain, reassuring himself that pain is good, it means he’s alive, his limbs are responsive, nothing is beyond repair. But the stream he creates in his mind, passing past splintering, scalding pain, stutters with a growing looming thunder, ripples and clouds with it. What did I do? 

‘I’ll teach you,’ his voice tumbles out of him, ‘but right now you should try to rest. Sleep if you can.’ It’s good advice, advice he knows he can’t take. 

She jolts and focuses for the first time on his breath on her neck, cooled with sweat. It claws her back from her fear to more familiar ground, the jarring feeling of a body wedged in with hers, close enough to feel his chest expand with hitching breath. The muscles of his legs shift slightly under hers.

‘We don’t know what’s waiting for us when we land.’ He says. ‘How’s your shoulder?’ The offended shoulder flares into pain under her sudden attention.

She looks down at it. ‘It’s fine. It’s cauterized.’ Her rotator cuff is damaged, she’d felt it as she sped through the launch procedure.

‘You should try to sleep.’ 

She huffs out a bitter laugh, and he feels it against his chest, feels her weight shift slightly on his lap.  ‘I’ve lived on my own for fifteen years. I’m used to getting sleep where I can, but I don’t think even I could sleep on someone’s lap if I tried.’

‘I’m sorry.’ 

‘It’s not your fault.’ She offers automatically, breathing in deep through her nose. ‘An hour ago I was in cuffs as your prisoner with a madman ripping through my mind. Now I’m flying through space in a fucking coffin with exactly zero personal space about to crash land on some rock in the middle of nowhere.’ She tries to knead the tension from her neck. ‘And I think we’re probably now the First Order’s most wanted.’ She huffs out a humourless laugh. 

‘That’s a good assessment of the situation.’  

‘How are you so calm about this?’ She curls her hands into fists and throws a dark look over her shoulder. His eyes are closed, mouth curled into a slight smirk as she stares at him.

‘It wouldn’t help me right now to panic.’ 

‘You’ll panic when the time comes.’ She tries to burn him with her gaze, but he won’t indulge her by opening his eyes.

He smiles. ‘When the time comes.’ 

‘And until then?’ She asks with an icy politeness. 

‘Draw on an inner calm. Acknowledge fear and panic and let it pass through me’, he says tonelessly. A mantra, worn, comfortable and well used. She turns away from him with a petulant exhale. She ignores the sinking feeling in her stomach, another wave of nausea, and straightens her spine, closing her eyes and concentrating on the movement of his chest at her back, slow and steady. 

'Hello, by the way.' He can hear her mouth pull into a smile as she says it. It's good she can see the humor in it, that will get them far. 'Don't think I said that yet.'

'You didn't. It's good to see you.' 

She laughs at him, overcome for the first time by the ridiculousness of the situation. 'No it isn't.' Her laugh quickly loses steam and he hears her teeth clack together as she closes her jaw. 

I’m okay. I nearly died. But I’m okay. Snoke is gone. I’m spinning in dead space. I felt the heat of the blade as it singed my skin. I smelt my flesh burn. I’m okay. It’s done. Concentrate on the present. That is all that matters.

When she opens her eyes again, somewhat more centred and scanning her eyes around the blinking lights of their escape pod, he is gazing out into the black as a green planet creeps into view. She follows his gaze. He catches her eye and nods small, mechanical. Their trajectory is creeping up on the cratered outline of a moon. Their relative size unknown. 

‘What does this pod come with in the way of supplies?’ She asks. 

He replies automatically, in a gladly toneless voice. ‘If it’s F.O. standard, twenty rations, thirty water rations, blankets, environmental sensors, holopad, emergency beacon, blaster -’

‘And if it’s not we might have nothing.’ She interrupts, panic clipping her words once again. 

‘We won’t know until we land.’ He offers evenly.

‘Fuck’ She jolts and he groans, shout ringing in both their heads. ‘Sorry, I hate not having any kind of plan.’ She crushes her head between her hands, dragging filthy hands down her equally filthy face. ‘How long until we land?’ she asks through her fingers.

‘Less than 10 minutes.’

She nods. ‘And when we land? She pointedly unfurls her clenched fists and flexes the stiff tendons. ‘Humor me’, she says through clenched teeth.

‘Don’t burn up on entry. Then grab what we can from the shuttle and find shelter.’

She nods to herself. ‘Terrain?’ She asks with a grimace, turning slightly to catch his eye.

‘By the looks of it, largely forested. The pod is sensing high humidity and barometric pressure.’ 

‘Great.’ She nods to herself, quirking her eyebrows up with an ironic smile.

‘Can you run?’ 

‘I have to.’ 

He smiles as she reaches behind him to pull the seat belt across them once more. 

They lapse into silence, concentrating on the slowly mounting groan of the craft being pulled into the body’s gravitational field as the thrusters kick into top gear. It climbs to near deafening volume, juddering violently as the parachute rips free from the shielding, throwing them against the belt slung across them both with bone cracking force. Her shoulder lurches and creaks with a searing bolt of pain that whites her vision for a moment. 

They crash, shuttle screaming and rattling around them. He crushes her body to him as she digs her nails into his encircling arms, trying to relax her neck on his shoulder so as to not smash their skulls together and kill them. She imagines for a second their charred bodies found together in a parody of an embrace. The last second of their life being their minds and bodies forced through each other. She wonders, idly, detachedly, what that would feel like. But it doesn’t happen, they hear the craft scrape against the ground heavily, parts crumpling weakly and wetly. When they finally come to a stop, it's as if their bodies weigh three times what they had before. It’s a strange feeling, she feels as if she’d screamed and burnt up everything within her, until only a gossamer thin shell remained. But she is suddenly reminded of her weight and form. Of the carcass she needs to force up once more. 

She unclips their belt and cranes above her to shut down what remains of the pod. They heave their weight against the door and clamber out onto moist, spongy ground. She barks out a laugh at her first breath of cool air, and hungrily pulls herself out into the open, rolling muscles in a brief inventory. Legs here, arms here, nothing is visibly broken, even as it feels as if her ribs scrape against her flesh. She turns to watch him wrench open the hold as fuel leaks steadily onto the earth. 

Chapter Text

They silently and efficiently unpack the thankfully stocked provision hold. She drags the laden tarp towards the opening of a small cave around two-hundred meters away. A dark little spot her eyes had narrowed on with familiar ease. It’s lightly raining, the damp mulch underfoot helping her as she hauls their supplies behind her, eyes locked on their destination. He strikes a glow tube and tosses it inside. The shape of the crevice resolves out of the gloom, roughly round with one clear opening. It’ll do. She lingers at the threshold as the rain begins to intensify.

She begins by gathering fallen branches and piling them in a pile to the side of the cave, aware of his shadow in her periphery. She digs through the stacked supplies as he heads back for the rest, setting to work on making a small artificial fire, reasoning the risk is too high for a real one with them this close to the Supremacy. They’ll try for one tomorrow, if they make it through the night. She shakes away the thought as he squelches in with the last of it. 

‘I dragged it under some cover’. She nods at him. It’s doubtful the pod can be of any more use to them, but the scavenger part of her is glad to still count it among their assets. He sets up a lamp on one of the latching crates before booting up the holopad and scanner to try to find where they are. 

She sags with relief as once again he’s the first to speak. As they began sculpting an environment vaguely liveable out of the damp stone, it had become harder to ignore the voice in the back of her mind warning her it would be necessary to talk to him. They’re going to have to spend time here, and their conversations won’t be running against a counting clock. Her stomach twists at the content of these brief meetings, what she shared under the half-crazed delusion that there wouldn’t be any more. She wanted him there, now he is, the circumstances not markedly different from her time spent with Luke. She had wanted him to stay, now they’re trapped together. 

'Bogano N-5, man-made moon to the planet, itself largely uninhabited. Previously a part of the Galactic Empire. Planet largely limestone and clay, nothing worth mining…’ He laughs a hollow laugh. ‘Didn’t take long.’ He turns the holopad to her, illuminating the dark shadows under her eyes as they watch a holo of them both, wanted fugitives of the First Order. ‘You’ve got a price on your head, Jedi.’

She flicks her gaze to her tiny fire as the temperature starts to drop, wrapping her arms around her torso. ‘Traitor to the First Order, reward one million credits.’ She stares at her likeness next to his masked form. ‘They didn’t even question if you’d been captured.’ She muses, rubbing her arms for warmth, before rolling her eyes. ‘I forgot I was talking to the fearsome, undefeated Kylo Ren.’ He tugs a couple of blankets from the boxes and hands one to her.

‘I think we need to talk about something’, she enfolds herself in the scratchy grey wool but stays standing. ‘We need to work together, for the time being.’ He unclasps the catch on an arm guard and tosses it to the ground. ‘If we go out there alone we’ll either be captured or killed’, she says. He peels off the other guard with a hiss, hand balled into a fist as the sleeve is revealed, stuck to the skin with dried blood. ‘I guess I need to make sure I can trust you, and I don’t know how I can do that.’ She deflates, shoulders rounding with weariness, eyes bright in the cool green glow of the fire. 

‘Why do I feel like we’ve had this conversation before?’

‘Because it still needs to be had.’

’I left with you.’ He folds the blanket and drops it to the floor with a fwump. ‘I helped you escape, does that count for something?’ 

‘How do I know you’re not going to try to kill me?’ 

He folds himself down gingerly to the floor, gazing up to the ceiling. Her eyes catch on the movement of his dirt and blood streaked neck swallowing thickly, before being caught by his gaze as she shifts from foot to foot. ‘I’m not going to kill you in a cave.’ He replies lazily, eyelids heavy.

‘You’re not saying you don’t want to kill me.’ She looks down at his slumped shoulders, head lolling forward. ‘I could kill you too if I wanted to, you know.’ 

He snorts, a wet sound that curdles her stomach. ‘How about we agree to only kill each other in fair combat. If we get out of this mess?’ He rolls his neck carefully, eyes closed.

She drops to her knees beside him and reaches a hand out of her bundle of blankets. He watches her, one eye cracked open. ‘Deal’, she says. He shakes her hand, before she snakes it back into the warm, a puff of breath visible in the cold.

He busies himself, checking and rechecking the holopad, eyeing the pitch black mouth of the cave as she sits beside him. She tries to rub the warmth back into her arms under the blankets, shrinking closer to the artificial fire and trying to ignore the itch of her filthy clothes on her skin. It's a silence of layered discomfort, almost impressive in its resolution.

‘Heal me.’ Reys demand, jolting him out of his hypnotic routine. Check holopad, heart jolt at the shape of something in the near oblivion of the moonless night, school breathing back to normal, check again. Be ready at any second to fight for one last time, and die cloaked in the blood of whoever was coming for them. 

‘Excuse me?’ He blinks at her. Somehow her presence had melted into the background. Clearly he's more injured than he'd let himself believe.

She snatches the holopad and switches it off, flinging it lightly onto a pile of folded blankets and clothing. Standard issue FO garb, shapeless and unisex. ‘Or teach me how to do it. Whatever’s easiest.’ Her breath isn’t visible anymore, and the blanket is only loosely draped around her shoulders, tattered robes mostly dry emphasizing their filthiness. ‘We’re stranded, limited supplies and the Universe’s most wanted right now. We need to be as strong as we can.’ She reasons.

‘I agree. We should eat.’ He counters. 

‘Fine.’ He blinks at her, knowing he’s missing something… ‘Look I know we need to eat, I just want to make a plan, know that there is, in fact, a plan.’

‘I know. We will. We’ll eat, then heal, then plan.’ 

She nods.

They eat unheated rations in silence, the minimum suggested for beings of their size. The smell of wet leaves permeates everything as the volume of the rain climbs louder and louder. She’d heard rain before, brief shivers of it falling for a few seconds to evaporate before her eyes. If it ever rained in the night, it was gone by morning. Only once had she been caught in it, frozen as it pricked her sun scorched skin and absorbed her in a little bubble of hush like a held breath. On Ahch-To it was largely invisible, a misty haze clinging to every surface, wetness creeping in stealthily. Here it is like a challenge, willing you to imagine more and then showing you how ridiculous your imagination is. It runs past the cave in little channels forged through the mud. 

They drink sparingly from their water. She unwraps her bruised arms by the fire then stands to mechanically shrug out of her tattered clothing into the plain shapeless ones from their stores. She winces as she peels scabbed blood from her calf. He stills behind her at the noise, but doesn’t turn.

‘I don’t know when I’m going to see my friends again.’ She gazes into the green light. ‘I’m not used to having friends.’ She smiles an ironic smile to herself. ‘It didn’t even occur to me until just now.’ A huff of a laugh. ‘I’m only used to keeping myself alive.’ She turns to him. He’s changed behind her and is in the corner, looking at the holopad again. He looks smaller, barefoot and in a shapeless long sleeve, silhouette merging into shadow. She attempts to sit cross legged without tensing in pain. 

‘Can I heal that now?’ He skims through something on the screen, not looking at her.

‘Can that be tracked?’ She answers his question with a deflecting one of her own. A habit she’d learned to keep herself safe and at a distance. 

‘Potentially.’ He shuts it off and buries it amongst the boxes. It’s too valuable to destroy.

‘I’d rather you taught me how to do it.’ She looks away into the middle distance as he walks closer once more, flicking her gaze at him, guarded. 

He sits next to her, a meter away, yet she’s more uncomfortable than when they’d been pressed together. ‘It took me months to be able to manage it.’

She looks back into the fire. ‘I’m a quick learner.’ She turns to him. ‘Try.’

‘It’s easier if you try on someone else first.’ He reaches away from her to check and re-check a proximity sensor, the skin of his lower back purple with bruises. 

‘Okay.’ She looks at him meaningfully. 

‘I don’t need any healing.’ He smiles at her, gaze down. 

‘Humor me.’ He takes a deep breath. He rolls up the sleeve on his arm to reveal a huge cut to his forearm. ‘What the hell?’ 

‘It missed all the major arteries.’ He moves to shake his sleeve back down, but she grabs it.

‘Idiot.’ She turns the wound to the light and it oozes wetly, darting him a quick acerbic look. His body has become a part of their shared resources, she resents his poor treatment of it. ‘What do I do?

He takes another deep breath, good job we don’t have limited oxygen, and looks down at her hand around his forearm. ‘You need to gather the Force in you, direct it, and strengthen it with your own energy.’ He explains with a hint of apology.

‘And I do that how?’ He leans slightly closer, giving her time to back away. She doesn’t. He leans his arm lightly between their knees. The rain falls in diagonal sheets outside the cave, illuminated with a bright flash. She shivers and draws a blanket around her shoulders as the thunder follows.

‘Lightning. Close your eyes and reach out to the Force.’ 

She closes her eyes, pursing her lips in a slight pout. She peeks out. ‘I’m trusting you here.’

‘Clear your mind.’ He instructs.

She bristles, but does. She concentrates on the sound of the fire, the sound of the rain flinging itself against already sodden earth and the moan of winds picking up. She lengthens her spine and wills the tension from bruised and tense muscles. She visualizes the Force through her body, lightly disconnecting herself from her bodily self to become a floating vessel for it. Or attempts to, at least.

His voice sounds in her mind. Now direct it slowly towards your hands. She sinks into the still somewhat unfamiliar feeling of being aware of the Force within her. She knows it has always been there, as essential yet unconscious as breathing. Now she draws her inner eye towards it, drawing it into the open. It tingles static-like in her muscles. She imagines herself dipping her hand into its flow and gently directing it, counteracting its inertia to control it. It slows somewhat, she feels the pressure on her chest, like being suddenly pulled by g-forces. She tenses to sit up straighter.    

From there you pour it outwards, and pour some of your energy with it.

Her mouth falls into a frown. How?  She feels a little fizz of something, in the radiating energy around her.

It’s hard to explain, it’s something you have to feel and do simultaneously. It takes practice. She breathes deeply, and draws her fingers through the Force. It moves around her, seeming to resist the more she tries. A fluid seeking the path of least resistance, effortlessly sliding away from her. It’s okay. It doesn’t come naturally to everyone. You’re weakening yourself with it. Her focus wavers, a wave of discomfort moving through her, disrupting the flow into eddies. It’s okay. Don’t force it.

The Force shrinks away from her, pushing her away, back into her physical self. She settles back into a weary and aching body. She sinks, curling over her legs. ‘Why can’t I do it?’ 

He shrugs and shakes his sleeve back down over the angry looking wound. ‘You’re a survivor, it goes against every instinct you have. You eventually learn to do it without fear of losing yourself.’ He nudges a few fuel tabs into the fire. They fluoresce before being consumed.  

‘It’s possible then?’ she asks his profile ‘If I do it I could will my life away? All of it?’ Fear flares through her, forging a burning path from stomach to throat. She knows her survival hinges on quelling it.

‘It’s possible.’ 

‘How do you do it?’ She stares into the flame.

‘You set aside fear.’ He smiles and settles back. ‘We can try again tomorrow. For now just watch me.’ He reaches for her calf and she unfolds it, eyeing him warily. Never mind she can't truly feel it. 

‘Were you in my head?’ She asks. He sets her calf across his lap, shimmying her pant leg up. She notes his obvious reluctance to touch her skin. He touches her only as long as necessary.

‘I followed you. Try it.’ 

She closes her eyes and tries not to focus on the throb in her leg, or the twist of discomfort as he lightly places his palm on her skin with featherlight pressure. She gathers the Force to her once again, and feels the edge of his energy next to her. It hums and resonates calmly with hers. She feels the muscles tingle and twitch as the skin knits itself back together and tries to stay calm, steady the ripple of revulsion at having her body change through a force outside her. At the previous impermeable, now permeable boundary between her body and the world. With it, the same nausea she felt as the vibrostaff had cleaved her flesh. When she opens her eyes the skin is grubby, but the wound is just slightly pink. She puffs out in surprise and tucks her leg back away under her. The evidence was gone, but the feeling remained. 

He extends his hand to her shoulder, giving her ample time to pull away, but she doesn’t. She simply flutters her eyes closed as the prickling warmth melts over the bruised flesh, rolling the now relaxed muscles through only the barest ache as they finally untense.

She opens her eyes. ‘Now do yours’. She squares her jaw and waits.

He gives her a few seconds to close her eyes. When it’s clear she won't, he chuckles and closes his. She watches as serenity overtakes his features, dirty and blood streaked muscles relaxing. He looks younger. The muscles on his arm twitch and knit back together as she watches, and she imagines she feels an itch on her own forearm, as if in sympathy, or remembrance. He opens his eyes to her looking into his. 

‘How much energy does that take?’ He looks away, flicking his eyes to the mouth of the cave. ‘You can tell me, I’m not trying to kill you.’ Stupid.

He replies after a long pause, answering the dark more than her. ‘I don’t have the energy to stand up.’

She swallows as the admission hangs between them, eyes following the same path, beyond the light of their artificial fire and into thunderous darkness. 

She slaps her knees with her hands and springs up, need to move forcing her upright to stagger with the sudden movement. ‘That’s good’, she throws over her shoulder. ‘Means you’re not going to be able to fight me on this.’ She rifles noisily through their provisions. ‘I don’t want to look at your bloodied up face anymore.’

‘Well if you want to kill me right now it would be trivial.’

She heads back, dropping to her knees in front of him, convincing herself she doesn't see him flinch out of her space. ‘Lucky for you we have an agreement’, a bright smile that aches in her cheeks. ‘Shut up and hold still.’ She wipes a damp cloth roughly over his face, fingers on his shoulder trembling slightly. He closes his eyes and shuts down in panic. She’s done in seconds and moving away to scrub at her own dirt-streaked skin. ‘Sleep, I’ll take first watch.’ She pads between the proximity sensors, he opens his mouth to speak. ‘Don’t argue with me.’ She throws him her blanket, still warm, and ignores his eyes on her back as she stares out the mouth of the cave into the night. 

He awakes with a start and sits upright. She looks quizzically at him from the corner, sat on a pile of boxes and packs with his cloak over her lap. ‘I hope you don’t always wake up like that.’ 

He sighs and rolls his shoulder. ‘What are you doing?’ He has no idea how much time has passed, there’s no perceptible lightening to the sky, but he hadn’t checked the length of the day-night cycle. Stupid.

‘Taking inventory’. She’s hunched over a tiny notebook and pen. ‘Water isn’t a problem as long as the rain holds out. I’ve tested it, it’s within allowances for safety and we have tabs to purify it. There’s a tarp out there collecting it. The rations will last us twenty days comfortably, fifty days subsistence. The generator is solar powered and the tree cover doesn’t look too thick so our sensors should be good for a while. The air quality is also fine, but our bigger issue is being found before that.’ He stops mechanically rolling his muscles, smiling in her general direction. Ever practical. There are many worse people with which to be stranded.

He rubs his palm over his face and stands to come look. She reaches the book to him and he chuckles at the scribbles. ‘What? Surprised a sandrat like me can write?’ She bristles. ‘I’m used to writing on a holopad but I make do.’ 

‘It’s not that,’ he smiles apologetically in her general direction, not really caring if it lands. ‘How did you calculate this?’ He points to a table of figures, crossed and re-written. 

‘I’m used to getting by on the bare minimum. I had to estimate your metabolic rate. Am I close?’ He imagines her weighing and measuring his sleeping form with her eyes. 

‘Very’ he breathes. She’s suddenly aware of him looming over her. He steps lightly back out of her space and loops lightly, waking his muscles in a practiced way that belies their current surroundings. 

‘I checked the barometric readings, we’re under a huge band of pressure. The storm isn’t going to let up for a few days. But we’re still too close to the Supremacy. I checked on the holopad.’ He nods, stilling to stretch his bruised shoulder. Pain is about the only normal thing he woke to. ‘As far as I can tell, nobody is out there. Yet.’ He breathes in, and notices her tensed limbs, her face imploring him for an answer, her eyes deeply shadowed and pink with strain. ‘Where do we go now?’

The fear in her voice catches in his chest. Easier to convince himself it's just his ribs, only half-healed and burning. ‘I don’t know,’ he admits. She sighs in frustration and looks into the night. ‘Once the storm passes, we’ll see if there’s any settlements nearby. Hope there’s a ship there we can take.’ 

‘And that nobody recognizes us.’ 

He smiles, a tiny movement that melts away as he tosses some more fuel into the fire. She breathes deep and steels herself, poised to jump to her feet at any second.

‘I’m going to contact the Resistance, let them know I’m okay.’ She holds her breath for a reaction but he is rooted to the spot. ‘ I won’t tell them where we are, or that you’re here. I just want to tell them I’m alive. I know what it’s like to not know.’ She tries to catch his gaze.

‘Okay,’ 

He busies himself hauling more firewood to add to their neat pile as she rattles off a quick cloaked message into her beacon before removing it and shoving it from her sight. She never intended to not immediately head back, him in tow, but packs this shameful thought away with the beacon. Before plans seem ridiculous to her now. Before she killed at his side.

‘You should sleep.’ He says to no-one. 

‘Are you in my head again?’ She throws back, reflexively, caving in on herself. 

‘No. A rock would be able to tell that you’re fading. When did you last sleep?’ He asks, perusing her notes.

‘I’ll sleep when I need to.’ She parrots his words back to him, safer than using her own. 

‘Good. Do. There’s a few more hours until the sun comes up.’ He flicks his eyes to the sky. 

‘I don’t know how to sleep with another person there.’ She argues, shrugging on the happy familiarity of her brazen solitary nature.

‘Close your eyes.’ He says around a smile. ‘You’ll figure it out.’

She laughs a short fake laugh. She slowly stands as if to prove him wrong, and feels fatigue hit her like a weight thrown over her. She frowns down at sluggish, alien limbs. Unnaturally healed, no longer exactly her own. She stoops carefully to retrieve the fallen cloak.

‘You’ve fought off eight armed darksiders, crashed on an alien planet, all your adrenaline is gone and you’re running on quarter portion of vegmeat. You can’t brute force your way out of sleeping, Rey, sorry.’ He takes up her previous place near the cave opening, averting his gaze as she curls herself into a furious ball of muscle by the fire, slowly surrendering to a bone deep fatigue. 

‘You don’t sound sorry’, she grumbles, tucking her chin out of the collar and pulling the blankets over herself for good measure. ‘Wake me if we’re gonna get killed.’

He sits by the mouth of the cave while she sleeps behind him, listening to her shivering breaths as she gives into exhaustion. He hopes she will get the sleep she needs right now, the dreamless gray void he’d find himself in after successfully exhausting mind and body to slide into emotionless nothingness. His stomach sinks. If they’re to be found, it’ll be soon. And she’s in no position to protect herself.

He tries to draw on any strength remaining in his body, hoping whatever he gained with his few hours of rest would be enough for him to straighten his spine as he watches figures sweep from out the treeline to take them both. He hopes when it comes to it, he’ll be able to stand before he’s forced to the ground once more. Potentially he could resist a few Stormtroopers, but if they sent his Knights? If they were still his Knights. He notes his utter reluctance to reach out to them. They wouldn’t come to his side. Nobody would. She did. Now she's being hunted because of him. Because she came to him. Did she know she was walking to her doom? Did she think he would immediately fly away with her? In the end he had, in a manner of sorts.

He can’t panic. He just needs to get them through the hour, then the hour after that, and the hour after that. He scans the torrential sky for any light, sight of ships making planetfall as she whimpers behind him. The tell-tale shriek of TIEs he imagines giving him one last moment to look at her stricken face before they’re both blasted to pieces. 

Three REM cycles later, clever little Jedi, she wakes up and he hears her consciously school her panicked breathing to something more regulated. She stands, still bundled, to come to him.

‘Nothing?’ she asks. 

‘Nothing yet.’ 

She nods. They watch in silence as the first hint of gray begins to move across the sky. 

Chapter Text

They check their surroundings the first morning, sabers clipped to belts slung over baggy black clothing, eyes roaming an angry sky. She nods towards a tree, its branches low enough to climb with a boost. She clambers up, binoculars round her neck, picking as high as her brain will allow her to, scanning above the tree-line. Nothing as far as she can see. Good enough for now.

She climbs down, lowering her weight back onto his shoulders with a mumbled apology. He lifts her lightly down with a shaky jerk of his head. She doesn't press, she pauses at the mouth of the cave, letting the rain run down her face, palms outstretched, still not used to the novelty. The small sound of pleasure as she rubs it around her neck almost lost to the downpour.

They sketch a rough perimeter on the map copied from the holopad, Nothing for at least ten kilometers. The whole procedure had taken minutes, but the rain has soaked them to the skin. They turn back to back to undress quickly and redress in their last dry clean clothes. He moves behind her to gather the wet clothes and add them to their drying tattered clothes from before as she stares out into the mist swathed forest, stuck on the stuttering image of a leg protruding from the undergrowth. That's how it would come in her mind, a foot reaching for solid ground, noise, then silence.

After a brief, semi-indulgent back and forth they agree from now on they'll allow themselves to switch on the holopad once a day to see any update on the manhunt. They will also scan once for lifeforms per day, heads craned together over the readout, expecting at any moment to see the net closing in.

‘I wonder if the rock is shielding us’, she wonders aloud, eyes tracing the damp fissures above them. They can’t know, so they stay inside. One week and they’ll assume the hunt has moved farther afield. One week and the storm will have passed and they can try to find civilization. If there is any to be found. 

Breakfast is the same dry rations, portioned out according to Rey’s calculations, not enough to satisfy them, but sufficient to keep them from losing their strength and reflexes. She starts a fire, reasoning that although they are being hunted, the cold and damp are a definite death sentence. They outline a ring of stones for the fire’s edge, sheltered but close to the cave mouth for ventilation. They move their wood closer to the flames to dry them out and maintain it, stowing away the handful of remaining fuel tabs, trying not to do the math in their head. 

With the first feelings of familiarity creeping in with breakfast, other bodily needs also rear their heads. She ducks into the rain, tarp over her head to pee, stepping just out of sight as the rain continues to fall in sheets. The sky is an variagated gray as he watches the clouds merge and darken whilst her feet splash and slide in the leaves.

‘Did you imagine us hiding in a cave in the rain when we got into that pod back on the Supremacy?’ She raises her voice over the rain. He doesn’t answer. ‘What, are you ashamed?’ He can hear the smile in her voice, even as he can't see her, the forest having absorbed her with the briefest rustle of leaves.

‘Why are you talking to me right now?’ 

‘I’m sorry, is there someone else here I can talk to?’ He hears her pick a careful path back over to him. ‘Go on’ she steps back into the cave brushing bark from her hands, jerking her head towards the outside. ‘Or have you transcended the human need to urinate?’ He takes the tarp and trudges out into the rain.

‘You know this wasn’t exactly what I pictured either. I didn’t know planets could even be this wet.’ He doesn’t respond, but somewhere above them something takes off into the sky at the sound of her voice, adding a rain of mossy twigs to the mix. ‘Have you been captured and executed out there? If so, I’m going to eat your food.’

He stomps wetly back into the cave as Rey stands with her arms crossed at her chest. ‘I just wanted to make sure you were still alive’, she smiles, raking her eyes over his dark look.

‘I prefer to pee without an audience.’ 

‘I wasn’t looking.’ 

He sticks as close to routine as is possible, considering the circumstances. Unable to train his body as he usually would, he opts to train his mind. He pours a little energy into his shoulder and ribs, to dull the worst of the pain and ensure they don’t set wrong. Maybe half as much as he usually would, needing to find the balance between conserving energy and being about to fight when necessary. It is easier than he imagined to slip into meditation with her there. But his serenity only makes him more aware of her frustration.

He can hear every time she stands to pad towards the cave mouth, cupping a handful of rain in her outstretched hand and letting it fall to the ground with a wet slap. He can smell the turned earth of her pacing over the dirt ground they’d leveled as their floor, hear her retie her hair in readiness for combat equally feared and anticipated. He smiles at his furious little shadow, marvelling at how much weight she can impart into a look. Pressure, like an animal curled over his ribs. 

She tries to mirror him, sitting down in the corner, each breath mockingly uncalm until she gives up and throws herself to the ground in frustration. She rolls off her back to check their stores, double check her calculations, and attempt to reconcile with being stuck here for as long as it takes the storm to pass. He knows that if she could climb into the sky and force it to stop, she would.

She boots up the tiny standard issue off-line reader and skims hungrily through the directories, finding it stocked with all number of dry survival guides, of which she knows the contents, having found it out herself through trial, error and suffering. She knows they have enough food to survive, even if it might feel like they’re starving, she knows what pain and confusion might come from lack of water, and to avoid it at all costs, she knows what to wear to wick sweat from her body, to stop the dangerous dip in body temperature by night that could kill her. But she has never been able to deal with waiting, with not knowing.

Before she would exhaust her body, push it to its limits each day to reward it with bare rations in the evening, safe in her home to enjoy them and the buoyant feeling of having cheated death, survived another day in an environment hostile to her very existence. Here there is nothing to fix, nothing to do with her hands except wait. She skims the guide; companionship, conversation, staving off isolation, her one companion sits an unmoving statue, silent as stone. 

‘Does the offer still stand?’ She breaks the silence of their first afternoon in captivity. ‘To be my teacher.’ 

‘I said you needed a teacher…’ He sits reading, one ankle crossed lazily on his calf. Funny how redactive memory can be. It had taken him less time than she anticipated, to relax from his usual taut upright posture. Less than a day, it turns out. She wonders if he's trying to mock her, show just how easily he can shrug on calm like it's a garment to be worn and taken off at any moment. Or perhaps he’d simply discarded the need to impress her, them having agreed to keep each other alive for the time being. Or agreed not to kill each other, which amounted to roughly the same thing.

‘Well it would help for you to do something instead of just sitting there.’ She picks up a twig and shreds it viciously into a pile in front of her.

‘Help you or help me?’ Great, sarcasm.

She groans in frustration at his non-answer. Still, at least it's something new. Goading him into an argument would give her something to do, instead of imagining footsteps tramping out of the forest. Execution. Imprisonment. Torture. Not necessarily in that order. 

‘You’re just restless.’ She imagines strangling him and pushing his gasping face to the ground. He scoffs, like he'd plucked the image from her mind. ‘Somehow I don’t think you’d enjoy being a student to me.’ He flashes her a quick fake smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, just muscles around his mouth grimacing then relaxing. 

‘I’m not a child. I don’t need you to teach me to read. I’m talking about training. Doing something with this time that might help us when we get found.’ She eyes him, daring him to look up, before giving up and looking out towards the forest. ‘We can’t stay in this cave forever, and when we leave I want to be as strong as I can be. As prepared as I can be.’ Rain continues to pour a sheet past the cave mouth. Still nothing. She turns back to him. ‘Teach me some of that weird shit you do.’

‘Weird shit?’ His eyebrows shoot into space and he finally lets the reader fall flat onto his lap. Progress.

‘The freaky Force stuff.’ She gesticulates wildly. ‘Force holds… the time you knocked me out.’ She points out into the forest, drawing his mind to another decidedly less wet one still fresh in his memory.

‘I’m already attempting to teach you how to heal.’

‘Yeah, and it’s going great so far.’ Great, already sinking to his level. 

He breathes in deep and exaggerated through his nose. ‘Rey, I barely know you and until very recently you were trying to kill me every chance you got. Why would I teach you that?’

‘Maybe because we’re stuck here together and we made an agreement’, she says. ‘You offered before, when I was trying to kill you!’ She points at him as he opens his mouth in a pantomime breath to retort. ‘Don’t pretend you didn’t, you wanted to teach me then, in between trying to slice me into pieces.’

He leans forward ‘You were untrained!’ It’s the loudest he’s heard his voice in days. 

‘So train me!’ She shouts.

He twitches, fighting the urge to stand up and stalk away from this conversation. But he had offered to train her, and he’d meant it. He stays seated and sighs, looking up to the ceiling and down again. ‘It takes months, Rey, maybe even years...’

‘We better start then, Ben.’ He's Ben when he annoys her, funny how that works...

‘You need to be calm to effectively work with the Force like that.’ He parries.

‘I’m calm!’ Little shreds of bark rain down and catch the light. ‘I’m incredibly fucking calm right now. I’m trying to plan, to the best of my ability, so we can navigate our way out of this shit-hole situation we’re in. I’m reacting rationally to circumstances out of our control by trying to do what I can to get control and keep surviving.’ She clenches her fist at his attempt to interject. ‘Which sounds light-years more calm than sitting there, meditating, reading and wasting away when we might be found any second!’ She huffs angry breaths through her nose which slowly die down to normality in the rain pattered silence. 

‘Do you feel better?’ His inflection-less question hits like a slap in the face.

‘Much’ she sneers, ‘thank you for your concern.’ He inclines his head in mock deference. A pause in which he can tell she is consciously counting her breaths, trying to cut the cycle of circling fury threatening to overwhelm her. ‘Why do you have to be so difficult all the time? I don’t know what fucking madness overcame me that I decided to come to you.’ She spits. ‘We should’ve just burned up on re-entry. It would have been nice’, she says, wistfully. ‘A blessing even.’ He smiles at her over his reading, eyes on the page.

She throws herself on her back to jam the heels of her palms into her eye sockets and groans, laying a hand on her stomach to feel the air sucking in and out and the strong muscles moving under her skin. 

‘You start by learning to get out of a Force hold.’ She sits bolt upright, fast enough he wobbles in her vision for a moment. ‘It’s not dissimilar to when you pushed me out of your head. You just haven’t tried it yet.’ 

She sits crossed legged, facing him. ‘Okay, let’s try then.’

With a blink, a sudden cold inertia grips her body, smile sliding off in reflexive panic. She tries to look down at uncooperative limbs, but her neck strains as if against gravity. Like being suspended upside down, the rush of blood to her head, and the telltale buzz of static in her ears. She breathes in shallowly, to try to slow the approach of unconsciousness. Her muscles strain and tremble, cording in stress, but still unmoving. She’d been here before, on Jakku, ankle hooked in trailing cables above a twenty foot drop as inviting as a plush mattress in contrast to the other option. Knowing letting the blankness win would mean certain death.

‘Breathe.’ She looks back into his eyes for the first time, trying to reconcile his relaxed hunched posture and academic tone with the fear threatening to swallow her. One elbow rests lightly on his crossed leg. ‘First you have to calm the panic you’re feeling.’ 

He didn’t give any sign, no hand outstretched to her, just switched it on with a blink. Bastard. She’s no match for him in this, but he let her think she is. Power seething under the surface to be doled out at his leisure. Dressed in a loose shirt and trousers, but still swathed in darkness. Anger vibrates him in her vision. 

‘You’re not calm.’ Obviously... His mouth quirks into a quick smile. Whether she meant to send him the thought or not, its good to see her come back to herself, even slightly. ‘Focus on the Force in your body. Concentrate on that.’ Don’t look at his arrogant calm face. ‘You can still move that, control that. Recognize it as connected but separate from your body. That’s what’s holding you.’ I’m so stupid. She shrinks in on herself and curls up in her mind in a tiny fetal ball. So weak and stupid for asking for this… Trapped, again, like before. Bound to a table in a cold metallic grip she can taste in her mouth.

You’re not trapped. He says in her head. Picture your breath and how the Force moves with it. She screws her eyes shut and concentrates on little panicked breaths. You can’t let it pull you down. It'll only strengthen the hold on you. It comes as much from you as it does from me.

She breathes, in and out, in and out for what seems like an eternity. Until the breaths are clean and un-accusing, not boasting, not confirming her as weak, powerless, nothing. Just existing, proving her defiant continual existence. In an instant it’s gone, her muscles blazing into over-stressed life. She slumps onto her hands and draws in the first deep gasping breaths in who knows how long. She turns her face away to hide the tracks of panicked tears before roughly brushing them away. A waste of water and salt.

‘Next time I’ll give you a warning.’ He offers.

‘Rather negates the point of it. You don’t have to baby me.’ She turns to him, meeting his look with a fragile smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. ‘I want to learn this.’

‘I know you do.’ She nods, gazing into the middle distance. ‘It’ll get easier.’ She swallows, mouth dry as sand.

‘I think the storm might be letting up.’ She lifts her head from the rolled up blanket serving as a pillow. The Force hold had taken with it her willingness and ability to hide herself. She lies curled and staring into the roaring fire. Too tired to hide her tiredness anymore, she lolls her head in the direction of his voice. 

‘Should be at least four days yet.’ The pressure band that descended on their location swallowed them entirely in red and orange. He hasn’t forgotten that.

‘I’m going to see what I can see…’ He shakes out and slides on his boots, tenting a tarp over his head. ‘I’ll do a quick loop. I’ll shout if I see anyone.’ He doesn’t wait for an answer before ducking into the rain that beats loudly against the buffeted tarp.

Finally alone, her failing grip slides in an instant. Tears flow down to soak into her makeshift pillow, blurring her vision of the cave mouth into a jagged swipe of glare. Her stomach flutters as deep shaking sobs fall out of her, lips quivering to loose a thin quavering whine. It’s been years since she’s cried like this, limbs curled in on themselves and panting with a searching neediness. She misses her friends. For all she knows the message she’d sent had been broadcast into space, her friends atomized and vaporised in the atmosphere above Crait. She wants to reach out, but can’t. The one message had been risky enough, if they’re gone, please don’t be gone, she could be tracked if she sent another. She had to wait for them to reach out.

But what if they never do. What if they don’t want her to come back. Is that what she wants? They’d be safer if they don’t try to find her, but she wants them to want to, having been deprived of it for so long. She needs to be strong. But she’s been strong for so long, when is she allowed to stop? Will it ever stop. 

She knows her nose is running, she knows her guttural sobs are impossible to disguise, her throat clenches and throbs. Her head aches with it. She’s cried herself to sleep before he returns, at some point the sharp desperate pain giving way to merciful oblivion. 

She wakes to the comforting weight of another blanket over her legs, a cup of water and a sleeve of painkillers sat on the crate next to her. She snatches the pills from sight, as if he hadn’t been the one to put them there. She gulps a couple down, the water soothing her burning throat. ‘Find anything?’ Her voice cracks.

‘Just more trees, I didn’t want to go too far.’ His sodden boots are propped on some branches to drain. 

‘How far did you make it?’ She tries to infuse her question with nonchalance. Did you hear?

‘The rain’s pretty heavy still, but I kept the cave in sight.’ A lie. ‘You should eat. It’s keeping warm by the fire. I already ate.’ She fishes the foil wrapped portion from out of the embers, picking the generous portion out with calloused fingertips. 

‘Is this the standard portion?’ she asks around a mouthful of spongy protein chunks. 

‘Of course’. 

She groans and tips her head back in pleasure. 

‘Did he do this to us?’ He’s shocked out of his reading by her voice, momentarily struggling to pick the thread of her question from the tapestry of his own. ‘Is it because of him?’

‘What do you mean?’ He knows he has to tread carefully, but it would help if he knew where the ground was. If he fails now she will leave him for dead, walking into the trees without a second glance.

‘When we fought together I saw your moves before you made them. We worked like one body. That’s what he was talking about, right?’

‘Potentially.’ Careful. 

‘You know something. Tell me.’

‘I don’t know.' He winces through his response. He had time to find an answer, but didn't. She's right to be disappointed in him. 'I have an idea…’

‘Tell me your idea, then.’

He reaches into the dirt for a stone, turning it face to face on one lightly shaking palm. ‘I don’t believe he had the power to connect us as he says he did. I’ve read of Force users being able to communicate like that, but to pass objects, that's very rare.’

‘So we did that?’

‘We did.’ He takes a deep breath, better to get it out in the open, sooner rather than later. ‘It can happen, it can be made between Force users, it’s a link between the two. A Force bond.’

So that's what he meant. Her relief is too hollow to be of any real comfort. What else did you think? A handful of conversations they could plausibly deny as dreams. They only matter to you because you don't know any different. ‘Did you make it?’

He locks his eyes to hers, body freezing. ‘No, I didn’t.’ She nods to herself automatically, eyes un-focusing. You'd never have forgiven me if I had...

She snaps back to herself, allowing herself a few seconds of introspection before surpassing it. It's a level of control he envies. ‘Can it be broken?’

‘I don’t know.’

Her mouth curls into a half-smile at his answer. He's predictable already. ‘Well it wasn’t always there. Surely that means there’s a chance. What can it do?’

She drops eye contact and he blinks away the sting left behind. ‘Bridge our minds, allow us to share our power. I knew when you were close by, it helped me to find you.’

‘When?’

‘Takodana.’

‘We hadn’t met.’

‘Like I said, I don’t know. But it’s the only thing that makes sense.’ You don't want to know the depth of my theories about you, scavenger. He darts his eyes to hers, a not insignificant part of him hoping she can simply take them from his mind. Meet him with blinding violence, let him burn his sight away. 

‘How could I have been bonded to someone I’d never met?’ Her turn to twist them in her memory.

‘I knew you, I don’t know how I did, but I knew it was true the first time we met.’

‘It’s true. I felt it as soon as I saw your face.’ She smiles to herself. ‘How does this make any sense?’

‘It doesn't.’

‘Glad it’s not just me, I suppose.’

She dozes on and off through the night. Every time she opens her eyes, he’s moved from one slouching position to another. By the cave mouth, reclined against the firewood, sat cross legged by the fire. He always stays within her eye-line, but averts his gaze from hers. He ignores her eyes raking over him, studying his profile, taking in his casually clothed form. She knows it irks him to be without his usual uniform and armour. But he doesn’t curl away from her look. 

He reads, he meditates late into the night. She can tell from the depth of the hush that surrounds them. He scratches something down in a notebook. Blue cover, haven't seen that one before. When she lapses into consciousness again it’s gone and he’s gazing outside. She focuses on his deep, even breathing and closes her eyes. 

Chapter Text

‘Did you sleep at all? She stares at him through air wavering with heat. He’s by the cave mouth, blanket folded across his knees amidst a circle of readers and cups. A jug of water gurgles beside him, a purification tablet bobbing at the base. 

‘Some.’ 

She smirks and looks away, stretching. The first word out of his mouth, an immediate obvious lie. ‘What do you keep writing in that notebook?’ She rounds back on him, pinning him in place with a heavy stare, contrasting with messy hair and blurry eyes. 

‘Nothing important’, he shrugs.

‘I know you’re lying to me’, she muses, tilting her head. ‘Could be the bond we apparently have, or it could just be your face. I understand why you used to hide it.’ She rakes her eyes over it in illustration, the twitch under the eye she doesn't have to see to know its there, mouth set into an angry line, moles and freckles on pale skin that rarely sees sunlight. 

He turns to her with a slow, controlled exhale. ‘Why are you mocking me?’ She meets his gaze and bites off a retort. She’s attacking him for invading her privacy. As if it is his fault. The anger drains out of her to be replaced with a chill not warranted by their surroundings. 

‘I don’t know, I’m sorry. I’ll make us some food.’ A confusing woman. She unbundles herself to reach into the stores, snapping off measured pieces of protein block and grabbing a handful of energy gels that is to be their breakfast. She nudges some more wood into the fire before toeing on her filthy boots to head into the rain, ignoring the eyes that track her lazily. 

‘Been reading anything interesting?’ 

He looks down at his hands, surprised to find himself still holding the device. ‘This thing’s mostly full of First Order propaganda. Designed to keep morale high in the event of separation or evacuation.’ He notices he doesn’t need to raise his voice over the rain, that it's not strictly necessary to map her approximate position with his mind in order to give the conversation the appropriate amount of attention. When she replies, it’s as if she’s standing next to him. Interesting. He makes a mental note to record it when he can be sure he's not being observed.

‘Is it working?’ 

He chuckles, eyes wandering over the cups that mark the passing of time during his vigil. ‘Not really. But it’s something to do.’ 

She crunches her way back to him. ‘I’m not used to staying still either. Even if I know now the best thing to do is rest. It still feels unproductive.’ She crinkles her nose at him. She hands him the dripping tarp and climbs up to his spot.

When he returns, they pass the morning in silence, save for audio files of the First Orders "technical superiority", "unwavering patriotism" and "devoted converts" playing into the air in a coldly clinical artificial timbre. He’s heard it all before, but it's the closest they can come to a productive rest, reasoning it may be of some oblique help in outwitting their pursuers. On the fifth self-satisfied summary of their "singularly devoted and youthful military force" she silences it with a lazy flick of her wrist.

‘Can it’, she lets the arm flop over her face dramatically, falling into the dirt with her sprawl.

‘When did you learn to do that?’ He sits up slightly straighter but works to keep his tone light.

‘Don’t get too impressed, I’ve been trying all morning. Whoever writes that drivel deserves to be ejected into a black hole.’ 

‘You’re mean when you’re bored.’ He notes.

‘No, I’m mean most of the time.’ She says to the rock above her. ‘Usually there’s just nobody there to notice.’

She feels her strength start to finally return to her limbs, and with it a crawling irritation there. Her legs won’t stay still where she puts them, like there is a roar in them that starts as a whisper and only grows until she shakes them out and tries valiantly once again to find a comfortable spot. The weight of the blankets help, until it doesn’t. Wrapping herself up in a cocoon of them helps, until it doesn’t, and she’s left starting the cycle again from the beginning. She needs to move again.

They eat, pushing down the part of her that protests it. She hasn’t moved her body today, but she knows she still needs to replenish lost energy, even if it feels like a waste in the moment.

‘How’s your shoulder?’ She halves a protein bar and throws the other half to him. He catches it with his bad arm with a sharp intake of breath.

‘It’s just bruised. It’ll heal.’ He rolls it gently, throwing the bar back to her. She takes it with a shrug and shoves it in her mouth.

‘You gonna heal it?’ She says around the chalky bar.

He shrugs, carefully, to prove a point. ‘I’d lose more strength than I’d gain.’ 

‘Mind if I try?’ His brow furrows. In all honesty, he’s exhausted. He hasn’t slept properly in days and mid afternoon is when his energy usually dips anyway. She’s up and energized. She takes frequent, often sudden naps throughout the day. She curls like a cat on or against all manner of surfaces. He is a man of almost dogged adherence to routine. Right now he’d usually be meditating. Napping had never occurred to him, sleep being a necessary evil he’d rather do without entirely. Typically at this time of day he’d be in solitary study. She’d be preparing for a night of scavenging in the cool of sundown, once the sun is past its deadliest point. They are both people of habit.

‘Be my guest.’ He’s too tired to argue.

With a wordless exchange of looks, she settles into a meditative pose next to his shoulder. He’s not going to join her, but let her try to puzzle it out herself. She places one hand lightly on his shoulder and his pulse thunders underneath it. He wonders if she can feel it, the blood trying to leap from his body. He closes his eyes, mouth dry.
The feeling of touch, any touch, is not comfortable to him. He leads a life of violence and physical training, but even his medical care is done by droids. Any healing he received from Snoke was from a minimum twelve-foot distance, replacing the pain with a bottomless gulf of shame and self-hatred that often made him miss the simple feeling of broken and twisted flesh. He met the bodies of others at the end of a blade, or through layers of leather and plastic. Here he can feel each fingertip searing his skin like a brand. 

Her sudden proximity, alongside their strengthening Force bond is changing something in his brain and the thought terrifies him. This weakness, the desire for her petrifying contact, to keep her near, her voice always next to him. He can remember a map of every place on his body their bodies had touched. Where he’d touched her calf to heal her, her fingers on his arm crushing him to her in fear. And now the patch on his shoulder where her hand gently rests and moves with his breath. 

She’s frustrated. Her fingers twitch as she huffs out of her nose in annoyance. Her hands slide from him, brushing his back, two tracks to add to the topological map she doesn’t know she’s making. 

‘Anything?’ 

He turns to meet her face, squinted in hopeful apology at him. ‘Maybe?’ 

She relaxes into a hunch. ‘You don’t have to be nice. It feels like the Force is resisting me more the harder I try.’ She traces squiggles in the dirt. ‘It’s like it’s got a will of its own.’

‘You might be right in that.’ It might feel a little better. He hadn’t felt any of the itching and sensitivity that he usually felt when he accelerated his own healing. But he hadn’t felt any of the shameful bile of guilt either. But he felt soothed by her hand’s gentle weight on him and he misses it. ‘We can try again tomorrow.’ His stomach twists and unclenches at her tiny, ponderous nod.

She stands to stretch out her limbs in preparation to run through some forms with her unlit saber.

‘Maybe you need a few more surface wounds.’ She twirls the weapon in her grip. ‘For practice.’ Her grin is highlighted and shadowed by the fire at her feet. ‘If you were to wander a little too close when I was practicing…’ She shrugs. 

He scoops up the reader and a blanket to settle himself in the corner and give her room to go through her forms. His shoulder does feel a little better, less stiff and tense. He’d put his weight on it to lower himself down unthinking, but no stab of admonishing pain had followed. He smiles slightly at the dull combat manuals he is re-reading, adding a little note into his diary, knowing she's too absorbed in her work to notice. 

She pushes her body through some of the forms from the combat manuals that had been soaking into her brain all morning, her brain sucking them up like a hungry sponge. 

‘Who are the "territorial protection force"?,’ she asks, swinging her unlit saber in a backhanded grip to her front.

‘FN units, Troopers’. 

‘And what exactly are they protecting with blasters and batons?’ She brings the weapon round in a controlled arc, shifting back onto her supporting leg for counterbalance. 

‘The interests and territories of the First Order and its allies.’ He smoothly intones.

‘Riiight. Am I doing this right?’

‘The batons are heavier than your sabre. You need to pull it from your shoulder.’ His eyes slide away as she adjusts her stance to move through it again.

It’s the first time he’s thought about the First Order from an outside perspective. It’s clear that her life was relatively untouched by their physical presence, save for the odd bundle of troopers at Niima outpost, to be complied with until they move on. She has an idea of some of the high command, through holos and missives, but doesn’t know the messy ins and outs of the force. The simmering stew of ambitious and self-assured generals and commanders all vying to steer the Order in their direction. To the outside world they are as emotionless and clinical as the plasteel of their armour. Even the internal writings betray a constant battle for uniformity, inhuman detachment that screams at him between the words. She’s not stupid, she hears it too. She counted amongst her friends proof of this desperate struggle to condition the humanity out of people. Maybe that’s why she came to him. 

She groans in frustration and shakes out her limbs, then resets to her opening stance. 

‘Do you think the Resistance are still safe on Crait?’ She folds her sweat cooled arms around her, trying for nonchalance as she picks a stone up and turns it in her palm. She had to get the question out there, too tired out from her afternoon training to keep it in anymore. If anything it had just worn down her resilience, instead of scratching her restless itch. She has to get it out of her head.

‘I called off the attack on the escape pods.’ He shrugs. ‘Beyond that it’s possible they carried on as soon as they realized what had happened.’ He flicks his gaze to her with a tiny apologetic smile. It’s true. He doesn’t want to lie to her.

‘Possible?’ The barest ember of hope.

‘If they did, we’d have heard about it.’ She nods, absently in answer. ‘I think they’re not getting what they want right now, so they are choosing to say nothing.’ 

She straightens her back, peeling her damp shirt from her skin as she rolls her shoulders back. ‘The traitor Kylo Ren brought to justice and the last of the Resistance finally eradicated. A new age of order in the galaxy.’ She peeks at him at the shimmering edge of her peripheral vision.

He smiles, ‘They can’t say that, so they’re saying nothing. There’s something bigger going on than wiping out the last dissenting voices.’ He picks up a stone and lightly tosses it towards the fire.

She nods, turning his statement over in her mind. ‘What do you think that is?’ 

He thinks for a moment, perching his chin on his folded knees. ‘They haven’t named a new Supreme Leader. I was next in the chain of command.’ He meets her eye briefly, at the fleeting contact a slew of violent images tumbling over themselves in his mind; damp skin, singed armor and the drone of blood in his ears. ‘Guess nobody wants to take up the mantle.’ 

‘So I’m sat with the Supreme Leader of the First Order right now?’ 

‘For the moment in absentia, it seems.’ He huffs inwardly, another diffident shrug of his shoulders.

She blinks at him, folded in on himself in front of the fire, bare feet dirty with mud. ‘What are you going to do?’

Her self control had been admirable, but it was a question that had demanded an answer since the throne room. Since Snoke’s body slid to the floor and he raised his saber to fight alongside her. Nausea bubbles in his stomach, the ghost of the panicked doubt he’s been actively suppressing since stepping into the escape pod. He thinks about staying silent, letting the question hang there until she moves on back to practical things. Maybe she’d ask him to train, so they can put their minds to something else for a bit longer. He swallows. If he doesn’t say anything, she might try to go into his mind, and find the drone of what am I going to do? What do I do? What do I do?, thumping louder than his own heartbeat. He can’t leave. Of his choices, words are the least terrifying. She’s still looking at him, waiting for an answer. 

‘I don’t know.’ He admits his doubt, and it reminds him of another time. When his doubt tried to tear him apart, and potentially succeeded. ‘To the First Order I’m a murderous traitor. To the rest of the galaxy I’m a genocidal tyrant.’

‘It wasn’t your sole responsibility, what they did.’ She offers, kindly, even as her jaw tightens at the mere thought of it.  

‘Please don’t make allowances for me.’ He tenses with the pain of it. He doesn’t want to be lied to, not by her. ‘I knew who I was working for. I may not have pushed the button to destroy the Republic, but I could have stopped it, and I didn’t.’ He breathes a steadying breath, ignoring the waver in his voice. ‘I killed people and I had people killed and tortured for information I could have plucked painlessly from their head.’ He recounts the story in an icy detached tone, trying to pretend he’s talking about someone else’s life. ‘I can see it a lot clearer with him out of my head. I know now I have no place in the Universe with him gone.’ She doesn’t argue. A blessing.

‘So what’s your plan?’ She asks again, tone clipped as she springs to her feet to check through their stores once again, needing something to do with her hands. 

‘I have no plan. Help keep you alive, get you to safety. I can’t see further than that. I don’t think there is anything beyond that for me.’ It’s oddly freeing to admit it, he smiles to himself, pressing his face to hide against his knees.

‘You’re talking about suicide.’ The fear and anger in her voice brings him back to himself. He turns to reason, palms up, imploring, anger bubbling up in him in a creep of stomach acid. She of all people, practical Rey, should understand the checks and balances that render his life essentially over. There is no path back from what he has done. He’s annoyed at her, and then annoyed at himself for being so. 

‘No, I’m talking rationally, Rey. Maybe I can make things right with you if you let me, but what about all the people whose families I killed.’

Her eye twitches and she looks away. He reminds her of his father, the thought settles like a stone in her stomach.

‘There’s no way I can make any of that better. I only had a few months to fuck up your life and I got a lot done in that time, hurting and killing your friends, torturing you, forcing you to flee your home because of what I did.’

‘And saving me’ she looms over him, forcing him to tip his head back to meet her eye. She doesn't register the movement of her feet until she's staring down at brown eyes lightened by the fire into spots of suffocating earnestness. ‘ You could have killed me, but you didn’t.’ Maybe you should’ve. 

‘I hardly think I deserve a medal for that. Besides, it doesn't matter who I save, it's not going to change anything.’ He drops his gaze to the ground.

'Do you wish you didn't?' 

He endures the passage of her eyes over his body, measuring the image she finds there unfavorably against one held in her mind, his act no longer persuasive. 'I don't regret it, but it won't change anything.'

'My life has no value, then?'

'Yours does, mine doesn't.' The light is warm when he says it, forging a path between passing clouds to crawl towards his skin.

A glass shatters against the cave wall, shocking his gaze back to her. She looks at him with the same furious anger she’d leveled at him on Starkiller, when she’d allowed herself to hate him for a few moments, to push his wounded body into the snow and enjoy it. 

‘I’m asking you to fucking try!’ She shouts. ‘You can’t make everything right but if you’re not the monster they say you are, the least you can do is try. Not just give up completely, staying alive just to keep me alive like some pathetic martyr!’

‘If I die now, you die. Do you want that?’

‘Of course I don’t want that.’ He may as well have asked her to drink sand. ‘And I don’t want you to want that either!’

‘Well you don’t have a choice in that.’ He straightens his spine from his slump, rolling and waking his muscles for combat he's seemingly only just realised he's knee deep in.

‘Bullshit.’ She spits.

‘Are you serious?’ Every muscle is tensed with rage as he stares at her, trying to force her down with his look. But she's stronger than that. She steps closer and once again he has to look up at her, tendons standing out white on the backs of his hands as he crushes them into fists. Good.

‘I’ve been inside your fucked up mind, killer, and I’ll do it again.' There's a tally she's marking in her head every time her words find their mark in the visible twitching of muscles. She adds another stroke and her joy has all the comfort of a warm meal. 'You don’t know how to function without a voice in your head, fine, I’ll be the voice in your head every day telling you to grow up, stop being a coward and take responsibility for your own life.’ He seethes at her but stays silent. ‘You are too smart to fool yourself anymore that there’s nothing you can do. You just have to try, Ben. Just fucking try, for both our sakes.’

‘Why do you care so much about this? Why can’t you just let me die?’ 

‘Because I know what’s underneath that stupid mask.' She speaks at him through a jaw tensed and aching. 'You showed me. From the beginning. You made me deal with the person underneath all of it. Why did you do that? If all you wanted to do was give up?’ Her words echoes dully, a gauntlet thrown down into bruised leaves and turned earth. She almost doesn’t hear his quiet, shameful admission over the roar in her ears.

‘You were supposed to kill me.’ He murmurs. 

‘Don’t put that on me.’ The defiant tears that had been gathering at her eyes begin to silently fall.

‘I’m sorry’, it trips off his tongue, an old reflex. An attempt to defuse and escape the situation. In the back of his mind a weary voice warning him that you never want to make a woman cry, kid. If you do, you wanna make damn sure you stay with her until they stop. 

‘Don’t give me the responsibility of absolving you.’

He carries on, needing to do it, the masochistic part of him wanting to shatter the fragile equilibrium between them. Needing to bury that voice so deep he'll never hear it again. ‘I knew what you were the first time I met you in the forest. I knew if anyone could do it it would be you.’

‘Why would you say that to me?’ 

‘Because it's the truth.’ 

She’s silent for a moment, letting the words find their mark and dig into her flesh. It’s a borrowed pain that squeezes at her insides, setting them churning. ‘I wish I’d never met you.’ She shakes her head, curling her body to the ground to hide her face, silently coated with hot tears. She cries when she’s angry. The only emotion he's reliably able to stir in her. 

‘I know.’ He agrees. She shakes her head at him, face streaked with unacknowledged tears. ‘I’ve not been fair to you.’

‘No’, she huffs out. ‘You haven’t.’ She leans her cheeks against her knee, letting the tears run off and the thump in her head quiet for a few seconds.

‘For what it’s worth. I am glad I met you.’ He quirks up a sad smile. ‘I don’t enjoy that I always make you cry.’

She sniffles in his direction. ‘You can’t help it. It’s just your sparkling personality’, she scoffs. He chuckles mirthlessly, but it quickly falls apart, his teeth chattering together as his adrenaline leaves him in one sapping breath.

‘Don’t leave me.’ She pleads. ‘Come here.’ 

He does as he’s told, sitting warily next to her as she pulls the blanket to her and wraps her arms around herself. He desires somewhat shamefully for her to turn her anger against him again, end it all in the dirt, her blazing eyes the last thing he sees. That he would know what to do with. Instead she leans her head against his shoulder, eyes closed. He feels the warm living person beside him, smelling of caff and leaves. Her tears drip onto his shoulder, burning hot. 

He meditates with the warm pressure of her head against him, a warm point of light his strength beats out from like a heartbeat. Maybe it’s the weight, maybe it’s the thrum of the Force signature, calmed to tired serenity once again after his inevitable success in upsetting her. He hadn’t meant to do it. The same way he hadn’t meant to focus his mind on that casual touch between them, shame flaring at what she'd find if she ducked into his mind right now. His anchor on it, wrapping around himself like a blanket. He asks too much of her, he always had. 

He wants to lean her head in his lap, thread his fingers through her hair as he pictures his hand adrift in the flow of her Force signature, bright and strong. He’d never spent so much time working with the Force with someone. Unless you count Snoke scraping claws through his paper thin defenses. The pain had been a lesson. The discomfort, a warning. This was nothing like that. She shifts slightly. This is it, he knows. In a second she’ll push him away.

She turns, and breathes in before meeting his eyes with a watery smile. She curls up to sleep without moving away. Close enough he could reach out and touch. He can see the pulse beat in her jugular, steady and strong. 

He reads, screen leant on his thigh, unwilling, unable, to move out of her space. 

She wakes a few hours later, blinking up at him for a second. He’d sensed it was coming from some delicate change in her Force signature. Tomorrow, I’ll tell her about it in the morning. He expects to see her flinch away from him, but she just draws the blanket around herself and turns to stretch the sleep from her limbs. Wordlessly she pads over to her preferred watch spot at the mouth of the cave, and he settles down to sleep, still partially lulled by his meditation, limbs pliant underneath him. 

He’s ripped from his sleep by a jolt of fear so acute it roars in his ears. He blinks his eyes open to see her, half risen from her seat at the cave entrance, gazing with horror at the sky streaked with light. They’d been found. 

He's on his feet before the thought can consciously register, pulling her back into the dark with one hand clamped over her mouth. Her breath huffs out of her nose in hot stabbing puffs, every muscle tensed and as solid as iron against him. He slams his back against the rock wall, a sharp point jabbing hard against his spine with a blinding intensity. Her hands claw against his, grounding him in their pain. He can deal with the gouge of her nails, clawing at his skin, if they can only get a visual on who it is that’s found them. Gain just enough time to regain the advantage. 

His blood screams in his ears. She stills against him, eyes tracking the haze of tiny distant lights in the sky. Multiple crafts, by the looks of it. As many as a company of troopers. Even with their sabers, they would be fatally outnumbered. A tiny treacherous part of him urges him to just kill them both, save them the indignity of being dragged out into the mud and publicly executed. She stamps on his foot, not enough to hurt, but enough to make him look at her. He’s too weak to kill her, even if she begged him to. The realization sits bitter at the back of his throat. He’ll never be strong enough. 

After a few torturous seconds, the crafts shrink and slowly disappear into the upper atmosphere. They wait a breath, two breaths, a minute. Then five. Nothing. No star destroyer yawning into existence above them. No cannon-fire lighting up the sky in silence, before they’re atomized as the sound rips the air apart. Nothing. The night is undisturbed once more. He searches, reaching to the edge of his strained perception for any twigs snapping, the rumble of vehicles, the whirr of speeders, anything. Nothing except wind, rain, and trees creaking in the night. Whoever it was, they’d gone. 

She bites his hand, hard. In his shock she pulls away and rounds on him. ‘Don’t you ever touch me again!’ She snarls with rage, crossing to put the fire between them. 

His hands ball into fists at his sides. ‘They’ll find us if you keep shouting like that.’ It’s true, and she hates him for it.

‘I don’t care.’ 

‘They’ll kill you.’ He promises. 

She stares at him, unblinking, chest rising and falling in huge angry breaths. She looks at him with icy disdain. ‘If you touch me again, I’ll kill you.’ 

‘Yes, I believe you would.’ He’d poured all the calm he could manage into the words, knowing it would only enrage her more. He has a half second to query this suicidal compulsion before she attacks him, wrapping strong calloused hands around his throat and weaving a leg behind his knees to topple him heavily to the ground. She presses her body weight onto him. Too little, he notes, she needs to eat more.

White spots fire in his vision as he keeps his eyes locked with hers, pushing them both off the ground as he reflexively tries to get oxygen into his lungs. He could throw her off with the Force, but doesn’t, momentarily frozen. It had been years since someone had gotten close enough to lay their hands on him like this. A voice in his mind sweetly promises him that he will pay for that weakness.

She’s gone in an instant and he flops to the ground, curling to his side to draw in a hoarse blessed lungful of air. He pushes himself up to sit, keeping her in his vision.

She’s put the fire between them again, sat with her knees tucked to her chest, arms wrapped around them, head tucked down into a little ball. She’s crying, or screaming, or some wet combination of the two.

He runs his bruised throat with a tendril of perverse awe. His little smile is short lived. He turns away as he hears her pull her face up for air, desperate breathing unmuffled and clear. He hears her slump to the floor, and glances over to see her clutch her stomach from nausea and cough wetly into the mud with unrelenting hacking sobs.

He remembers a time when he was younger, starting to grapple with his Force awareness, when panic had made him vomit. His mother had been there, to place a cool hand on his forehead, soothe his breathing with a stroke of her fingers through sweaty hair. But there’s no-one to do that for her. They just have to let it run its course. 

Her face is still pressed in the dirt when she speaks, hands hanging weakly across her stomach, too weak to move them. ‘I want to go home.’

His breath catches. He knows what it’s like to long for a home, for the feeling of comfort and security that word evokes. Or what you imagine other people mean by it. He knows that for her, that place simply doesn’t exist. For him, he had destroyed his. It is simply the most fervent and desperate wish of someone who had no home to get to. He feels it himself. It is the same feeling he prays for at night, imploring into the darkness. It is an idea they'd passed back and forth in the dark, before they came to their senses. 

‘I know’, he says. Watery eyes meet his in silent understanding. He’s plummeted down into that abyss of feeling which had seeded his treacherous impulse to destroy his life. Their eyes meeting each other and lighting some slender path to somewhere else. 

‘I’m so tired.’ She sobs and turns on her back, tears streaming freely once more into the blankets around her. 

He pulls the reader towards him with shaking fingers and tries to concentrate on the words swimming in front of him, not the feeling in his stomach of being in freefall. Teeth marks purple on his palm, dotted with tiny spots of blood that don't break the skin. She collects herself, finally, and he attempts once again to read the page that he’s been stuck on as she whimpers a few feet away from him. 

They don’t immediately address it, even if they should. For hours they dance in and out of each other's space, the idea of sleep abandoned for the night, Rey eyes him warily, face an inscrutable mask. She stands to grab the tarp to duck into the rain to relieve herself. He follows wordlessly. He’s accepted the fact that their time is to be spent in tense silence, time to read, meditate, when she surprises him, yet again. 

‘I’m sorry I strangled you.’ A voice emerges from the undergrowth.

‘I’m sorry I touched you.’

She appears again, standing to full height, rain sliding off the tarp in rivulets. She nods and steps past him into the cave. 

‘I want to be able to work together.’ She shucks off her shoes. ‘I want to know I can trust you.’ She breathes.

‘You can trust me.’

She searches his face. ‘Okay.’ She twitched her face into a half smile before sinking to the floor. He follows, close, but still keeping a few clean feet of air between them.

‘I’m not very good at working with others’, he explains, gravely. She snorts wetly. 

Things are somewhat normal again. As normal as they can be. She explains again all the resources they have at their disposal, comforting herself with the vocalizations that they do, in fact, have enough food and water. They have decent defensive measures against people finding them, they’d have warning enough to defend themselves. They are proveably deadly fighting alongside each other. In her mind, too visceral to have become true memory, lifeless bodies slump to the hollow steel floor of the throne room, until only they remain. 

He explains how searches of this kind usually go. The resources fan out the further they get from the last known whereabouts. There are many habitable areas that would need searching, and the more time that passes, the more likely the search has moved further afield. It is encouraging that they have made it this far. It’s probable that Snoke’s pod wasn’t even officially recorded. All things considered, their chances are good that they won’t be found. And if they are, they still have their sabers. 

It calms her to talk like this, even if the conversations are circuitous and he’s wary of attempting to plan for every eventuality. He is purely reactive, which generally seemed to work out for him so far. But her evaluating and calculating approach does lull his brain into a kind of calm he welcomes. She finally stops when the audible rumble of her stomach shocks her into silence.

He stands to grab some portions and bring them to the fire to heat up. They know they have ample, but still her face hardens for a second. He explains the ingredients of a chunky mush ostensible trying for a facsimile of chuba stew. She cranes to peek over his shoulder to get a closer look at the spongy grey chunks in green speckled broth. When they sit back to eat, they’re closer again. She seems to turn the food over in her mouth, puzzling over it.

‘It’s horrible’, she says, perplexed, laughter ambushing her from the dark. ‘Is it supposed to be?’ He hides a smile as she grumbles through her meal. 

He resumes his post at the cave mouth, as she leans on folded forearms against a crate, looking blankly out with him. 

Chapter Text

Neither sleeps, they can’t drag their eyes from scanning the skies for more than a few seconds. But as they try to rub clarity back into their failing senses, the dark slowly lightens, and voices whitter to life in the distance. The rain clears for a few minutes, enough for them to blink in the brittle sunlight and feel its warmth on their skin once again.

The morning is unknown territory. Neither expected to make it through to the dawn. She absently massages her fingers, cramped from grasping her saber throughout the night. She rolls the thing between her palms, still warm from her iron grip as if measuring it, before tossing it lightly aside and curling her arms around herself. 

‘I imagine they have orders to shoot anyone with a saber on sight’ she says, voice hoarse from prolonged silence. Her mouth quirks into a lopsided smile, her gaze flicking down to the saber clipped at his belt. He silently removes it and places it with hers.

‘Is it the sleep deprivation, you think, that makes watching the sunrise so peaceful?’, she gazes up, soothing herself with her own voice. ‘I know we’re still being hunted, but right now I just don’t care. It’s quiet, and calm. There are worse places to die.’ She smiles brightly at him and he freezes where he's sat, feeling as if some large elemental beast had turned its gaze to him, shrinking him into a tiny dot of fragile life.

They agree to bury their sabers in with the provisions. They’re just too recognizable as two Force users. If anyone were to stumble across them, it would be trivial to put two and two together and collect on the massive bounty on their heads. She hands him the sole blaster without argument, before lifting a long branch to hone into a staff.

‘This is more what I’m used to anyway.’ She settles cross-legged to hack at the branch with the knife. She works single-mindedly for a few hours, ignoring her curious audience, testing its balance, looking down the length of it to gauge its straightness. 

‘I’ve never seen you fight with one of those.’ He’s updating their inventory, one more thing to make her feel in control. A necessary exercise in dragging his eyes away from her, to prove to himself that he can. He notes down her increase in restless energy. She recovers quickly, she doesn't dwell like he does.

‘Lucky for you.’ He scoffs out a genuine laugh which shocks her hand still. She wraps leather tightly for a grip, and soaks and toughens the tip in the fire. ‘That's better’, she muses, holding the staff at her side with a practiced ease. ‘It was like walking with one leg missing.’ She arcs it slowly through the air.

‘Can you make me one of those?’ He rips at a tough energy bar with his teeth.

‘Make one yourself! We’re stuck here for a while. May as well do something productive with your time instead of draining our collective resources moodily pacing a hole in the ground.’ She’d noticed that then, his sudden need to keep his body moving and out of her orbit as much as possible. She stills and scrunches her face at his sudden guarded look. ‘What is it?’

He takes a few seconds before speaking. ‘I’ve lived with Snoke’s voice in my head for fifteen years. Now he’s gone and it’s just me. It’s…’ She leans her staff lightly aside. He looks back up at her, gaze dropping to the floor as she approaches slowly. ‘I’m trying to adjust to it. The… absence of him.’ A half truth.

She swallows, thickly. ‘Do you regret it?’ A cold fear trickles up her spine.

‘No, I’m just… I feel unbalanced. I don’t have to compensate for it anymore. Guard myself against it.’ He struggles for words, eyes in the dirt. 

‘What did it feel like?’ She stands in front of him, but doesn’t try to enter his space further. ‘Was it like when you spoke in my head?’

He scrunches his eyes closed, and open again. ‘No. His presence was… cold, somehow. Sometimes he’d talk to me in my own voice. It was hard to know his thoughts from mine. Especially when I have so much to hate myself for, his magnified mine until it was all I could think about.’ Why am I telling you this? What do I expect you to take from the admittance of my weakness? A continuation of a conversation that laid briefly dormant. One we will always have until one of us compromises on our position. One we will have until we die. 

‘How did you stop it?’

He huffs, ‘I couldn’t always.’ A sad smile, eyes glazed and tired. ‘Training. Getting out of my head and into my body.’

‘But now he’s gone...’

‘Now it’s just me hating me.’ He looks up at her and quickly away.

She huffs out a breath and her lungs scream their thanks at her. ‘Do you want to train?’ She blinks in scalding sunlight, trying to hasten the dissolution of the gray shape of him, folded at her feet. 

He relaxes all his tension in one great sigh, she feels it on her exposed forearms. ‘Yeah. I do.’ 

‘Well we better start on your staff then so you can stop moping.’ She pads out into the rain, eyes locked on a likely branch. 

It doesn’t cross her mind that she’s once again arming him, potentially adding another weapon to the arsenal he could use against her. She reasons it’ll be good to have them able to defend themselves without their signature sabers. If he needs it and it's within her power to give it, she will. They survive by clinging to the surface tension above their churning thoughts. A simple, practical compromise. Nothing more to it. Besides, the chances he hasn’t trained with a staff are minuscule. He lies and she lets him. They allow themselves their self deceptions. By lunch both staffs are complete and leaning together in the corner. 

‘Have you had any formal combat training?’ he asks, suddenly resolutely done with his reading which had long since lost the ability to distract him. She looks at him like he’d just asked her to swallow her own head.

He laughs and stands to retrieve his new staff. ‘I’ll demonstrate some forms and explain the rationale behind them, for now just try to compare them.’ She tosses her staff absently from one hand to the other. ‘They’re meant for the saber, so the weight and balance will be different, but you’re familiar with both, so…’

He holds the staff cross body, feet planted in a wide diagonal stance. She mirrors him, shuffling her feet across the dirt and squaring up to him with a nod. He swings the staff down to make contact with hers with a dull clack. She’d been braced for the usual bone-shuddering strike, but it didn't come. She lets out a held breath in confusion. 

‘This is called Form I or Shii-Cho. It’s most favored for attack against an even-handed opponent. It's derived from sword duelling techniques. It takes advantage of two predominantly right-handed bipedal fighters and you can use it's somewhat plodding predictability to launch a sudden crossbody swipe, designed to force the opponent to their non-dominant hand.’

‘That’s a lot of assumptions’ she says. Where is this going? 

He telegraphs said swipe, allowing the staff to tap lightly against her outer thigh. She swipes it away and swaps the staff to her other hand, squinting him a puzzled look he misses, puppeting his limbs to the next pose. 

‘From here, the relatively narrow range of motion and decreased precision, as well as the closed cross body stance, make the opponent more vulnerable to jabbing attacks.’ She tracks the path of the weapon with her eyes as it skims past her cheekbone. ‘Now on the retreat, it is in theory trivial to disarm the opponent and end the duel.’ He steps back to his starting position.

‘It’s useful for open battlefields and close quarters, where it's necessary to keep combat to a minimum. You lead your opponent to expect a longer spar. Then you can exploit that assumption. Make sense?’ She eyes him, core tensed anticipating the real attack. That she would know what to do with. He looks to his feet to model a narrower parallel stance. 

‘This one is Form II, Makashi. You can think of it as oppositional to Form I. If you find yourself under an attack like we just spoke of, you can use the anticipation of your movements to regain the advantage…’ He nods towards her hands for her to swing at him. The staffs clack against each other as she pulls down hard from her shoulder blades and feels the column of muscle alongside her spine tingle with awareness. She’s expected to jolt him out of his passiveness, but he ploughs on, unruffled by the disproportionate response from her. 

‘From here you could use the fact your opponent might be expecting this’ he rolls down on himself and steps a few paces backwards, miming his response to her strike which still reverberated through the bones in her forearm. ‘To do this’ he swipes his body away and to the side, nudging her staff to where his previously unguarded sternum was, now just empty space. 

‘How is this helpful?’ 

His staff drops down lax in his grip. ‘I thought you preferred not to learn from books…’

‘But if everyone knows the same forms and counter forms, how are you supposed to win?’ 

‘By having a better understanding of your opponent's thought process than they do of yours.’

She drops her staff to lean at her hip, loosing a cloud of dust that quickly settles back down. ‘This is stupid.’ She brushes off her hands, eyes on the near constant rain that hovers like a third party. Maybe it would have some idea as to where this is going, if only she could ask it. 

‘This is how I was taught to fight. It’s necessary. You train them until they’re instinctual, pure muscle memory, and then you work against others trained the same way, challenge what you can do with it.’ 

She exhales long and slow through her nose, looking down at his stupid, mud-caked feet. ‘Fine.’

He steps back to his mark, adopting yet another opening stance for yet another form. He explains the theory, suggested use cases and pulls her staff around in her pliant arms to demonstrate her parry. Her reflex if played on 0.25 speed. Then he does it again, and again, and again. On the sixth form she finally snaps.

‘I thought we were supposed to be training’, her voice rumbles out of her, low and dangerous.

He stills in drawing her staff across her chest. ‘We are.’ He answers, roughly adjusting her grip as she scoffs at him. 

‘Really? Because it feels like every fighting instinct I have ever had is being pushed out of my head and replaced with the rules of some game I never agreed to play.’

He squares his jaw. ‘This is how it’s done. You’re re-contextualizing the instincts you have, to understand what underpins them. So you can adapt if they ever fail you.’ 

‘They haven’t failed me yet’, she argues, silently counting to ten in her head.

‘It’s okay if you don’t want to do this.’ 

‘I want to train! I want to improve and I was hoping I could learn from you as you’ve had training, but this isn’t helping me, I think I was better off before…’

‘Give it more time’ he says. She rolls her eyes. ‘You need to be more patient with these things…’

‘Forget I asked.’ She spins, shoulders clenching up to her ears, expecting the wood of the staff to crack under her bone white knuckles. 

‘I’m trying here.’ She doesn’t turn. He sighs. ‘Let’s do one more round and come back to it tomorrow. It’ll get easier...’

‘It’s not difficult, it's boring.’ She turns back to him with a shrug, mouth set in a line, daring him to continue.

‘Fine, it gets less boring.’ He brings his staff down in a light tap against hers. ‘Ataru, weight shifting to the back foot, pushing forward to pivot through the knees…’ Her eyes track him lazily as he dances through the steps, each impact against her body and weapon infuriatingly light. ‘Next form.’ 

She turns her body into the stance and throws her weight into the deflection. His mouth doesn’t so much as twitch, just plods mechanically into the next academic description of her body as she tenses to push back once more. Maybe she had seen the flash of a smile, but it might have just been the broken daylight wandering its way slowly back to them. 

‘Anticipating this’ he moves his staff in a textbook swing, ‘you answer with this…’ She strikes again, jaw clenched. Her teeth ring and her ears hum with static.

A growl rips its way out of her throat. ‘Just attack me! Stop doing whatever the hell this is. This tapping your staff and dancing about is pointless, it’s not going to help me, it’s just confusing the hell out of me!’ 

‘Why is it confusing you?’ 

‘I don’t know, maybe it’s that I thought I knew who I was fighting and now I wonder if you were just running through probabilities in your head and fighting me that way.’ 

‘Maybe I was, but it doesn’t mean you weren’t doing the same.’

‘I’d never even heard of these forms until today!’

‘It doesn’t mean you weren’t using the same principles they’re based on.’

She groans once again. ‘I don’t know how to explain this to you’, she says. She brandishes her staff in a two handed grip, needing something solid in her hands.

‘That’s abundantly clear.’

She strikes before she fully registers the smug smirk on his face, anger boiling up and over in an instant. His hair is falling lightly onto one eye, and one foot is raised in lazy nonchalance. To her immense satisfaction, he lowers it back down at the impact. Every time she tried to find common ground with him, it was like walking into a hall of mirrors. The thwack is warmly satisfying. She brings her staff behind her and arches her spine to put her full force into another one, revelling in the tiny slide of his feet in the dirt. 

‘Just. Fucking. Fight me.’ She punctuates each word with a punishing blow, finishing up panting and taking each hand from her staff in turn to shake away their pleasant sting. Her eyes bore into his. He’d taken each strike with a smile. Bastard. ‘Why are you doing this?’ She brandishes her weapon at him.

‘You fight best when you’re angry.’

She flies at him, a flurry of limbs and teeth, wreaking blow after blow. He twists to finally, finally push back and laughter bubbles from her lips as he answers her swing with one of his own, her wrist straining to absorb the shock. Her toes grip into the dirt as she circles him, acting on a split-second hesitation where he smiles in answer to her. Her skin is beaded with sweat as they weave around the small space, bodies pulling tight and slack on an invisible thread keeping them in a six foot bubble of their own universe. It’s sheer pleasure, to feel her muscles move again, to hold her own against him, speed vs. strength, her opposite. There are shades of the form in their sparring, she can admit that to herself, now her brain is freed by the strain on her body. It was a kind of meditation, the kind she’d been desperately missing for days. 

Eventually winded, they nod a truce and spread panting on the dirt. 

‘Next time you don’t need to do all that’ she smiles at the ceiling. He ‘hmms’ in question. ‘Just try to have a normal conversation with me, that usually does the trick.’ He grins and flings his arms over his face, pale skin flushed pink. 

After training properly for the first time in days, Rey is lazily content to skim read boring combat manuals and carve decorative markings into her staff. She’s boring holes into a strip of leather pulled from his destroyed surcoat when she hears him get up and pace for the fourth time. It’s not the destroyed clothing, she had been good enough to ask him before repurposing the tattered remains, it was something else. 

He had been initially bonelessly tired, but she sensed the tension work its way back into his muscles like cold from a stone floor. By degrees he stiffened beside her, before springing up to pace. She hadn’t beaten him, but he hadn’t beaten her either. This was no shame in defeat, there was no defeat, they were stubbornly, doggedly evenly matched. Each slight advantage being met with another in their opponent. It didn’t bother her. But does it bother him?

A cloud descends further and further upon him. He tries to meditate, but he can’t calm a recursive wave of shame and revulsion churning within him. It’s the shade of his signature she’d known him to have since she first became aware of it. But now she’s close enough and familiar enough to see it choking him over and over again. Repulsion and violent self-loathing, coursing through his veins like blood. She doesn’t know how he stands it. She tracks him sadly in her vision, not wanting him to see. Or if he does. 

He’s frowning into a slab of rehydrated protein block. It’s tough food, but not frown worthy. They’ve been eating the same thing for days now. She looks quizzically at him, trying to catch his eye where he maintains a the generous six foot sparring distance between them. He frowns again.

She takes a sip of water and clears her throat. ‘What is it? Not up to your usual standards?’ Nothing. He doesn’t accept the obvious deflection. Okay, new tactic. ‘Use your words.’ He sets his food aside and places his palms on crossed knees, steeling himself. 

‘What’s wrong with you? You’ve been like a black hole all afternoon’ she asks. ‘Are you sick?’ She scans and assesses his face for signs of illness, fearing the doom it would bring them both. His eyes are deeply shadowed from lack of sleep, pale, but not more than she’s used to from him. His brow is wrinkled from a tension headache she knows the cause of.

‘I feel … bad.’ He starts in surprise by the words as they leave his mouth, as if they leave a strange taste behind.

‘Bad how? Nausea, fever, is something infected maybe?’ She rattles off a list and begins calculating odds and eventualities. Blood infection, sepsis, internal bleeding, shock. She knows that’s not the conversation they’re having, but she knows what to do with those…

‘Bad about what I.. did, before.’ The relief on her face is crowded out by confusion, then surprise. She watches the same emotions overtake him, one by one, as if it were transformed by an invisible shadow. But they're lit as always by the flat waning daylight, the light from their fire failing to reach them for another few hours.

‘What, goading me into attacking you?’ She asks, still enjoying the pleasant ache in her muscles at having exercised them for the first time in days. 'I promise you I don't mind.' 

‘Using the Force hold on you.’ She scoffs out a laugh. He lapses into silence. Danger.

‘I asked you to.’ She says, puzzled. 

‘It scared you.’ 

‘It did.’ So what if it did? ‘That was days ago...’ The thought of her fear snaking up her throat to choke her swims up unbidden. He frowns down into his lap, hair falling over his face. 

‘It bothers you.’ She huffs in surprise. She sets aside her food. She notes a growing complacency to tighten up on. Setting aside food on Jakku could mean a death sentence. She picks it back up and just holds it. She schools a lightness and evenness to her voice, not used to having to modulate tone for an audience. To speak beyond the transactional exchange of signs and symbols. It had been easier to just push into his mind. ‘I know you’re stronger than me’ She begins.

‘You’re just untrained -’ He rushes to mediate. 

‘But you are trained. Which is why I asked for your help. Same with sparring.’ She tries and fails to duck into his shrinking field of vision. ‘It wasn’t a test.’ She shakes her head. ‘I survive by knowing what I can and can’t do and fixing what I can. It’s not a problem for me that I can’t do that yet, it’s just something to learn.’ She reaches out to touch his knee but thinks better of it. His eyes track her hand warily hanging in the space between them. ‘Is it a problem for you?’ She searches his face, again measuring, cataloging, trying to find some tell, some crack in the unseeing mask sliding over his expression. Some hint at the torrent he’s hiding from her.

She stands, an attempt to get control of a situation rapidly slipping away from her into confusion. ‘Stand up.’ He follows, guarded eyes flitting from one eye to another. She grabs his upper arm and he jolts into the present again. Good.

‘Listen to me. I fought by your side, but before that’ she shakes him for emphasis, ‘I carved that scar into your face, untrained and unpracticed as I am. So you need to stop right now acting like I can’t handle myself. I want you to teach me, but I’ll do it alone if I need to. I'm very good at that, do you understand?’ She shakes him again. ‘Do you?’ His mouth falls open in a tiny shell shocked ‘o’, trying to fold out of her bruising grip.

‘You are my equal. So stop making us both look bad by acting like I can’t handle this. Okay?’ His arms are warm under her palms, muscles tensed for combat. ‘Answer me.’ he stutters out a nonsense syllable. With a frustrated rasp she grabs his head in a vice-like grip too hard to be comfortable and squeezes his forehead to hers, eyes scrunched closed. 

‘You can’t lose it’ her quiet voice is amplified in the space between their skulls and puffs out over his face. ‘If you lose it, we both die.’ She breathes a slow breath. ‘I won’t die here. I won’t.’ She mutters. One hot palm closes over hers against his skull. ‘Okay?’ 

She feels him nod against her, ‘Okay.’ She leans her swimming forehead against his shoulder for a second and inhales, exhaling into tiredness and acceptance. ‘Finish your food. We’re training again tomorrow.’

She disentangles herself and takes back her spot, rattled, mechanically eating food now tasteless. Calories, fuel, survival. He follows a few seconds later and they finish their meal, slotting back into routine. She reads as he checks their sensors, face lit by little blinking reassurances of their temporary safety, the bubble around themselves threatening to burst. He’s confusing, the more time she spends with him, the less she understands. Like trying to measure a coastline bursting exponentially with new cracks and pitfalls. 

Chapter Text

They begin training after breakfast, speaking little except murmured corrections and barbs. It’s pleasantly familiar, in the way training with his Knights had been, practicing and polishing new skills only to be rewarded by a reflex of a nod from her, and a redoubled attack. She's relieved to find he seems to have gotten over his wobble from the day before, even if his exhaustion bleeds into his moves and through their weapons where they connect.

She’s untrained in a way that truly challenges him, blurring between forms in an instinctual manner, surprising him with swift changes in momentum that speak of wiry strength and muscle control built on adaptability and resourcefulness. She had quickly learned to twist his increased weight and strength against him, using his own mass to disable him, and the slightest hesitation he has in striking her to push him back. If questioned she would not be able to consciously study this thought process, but it was there in every strike and appraising look in his direction. Her energy carefully doled out in quick bursts, before drawing back to center. If he ever has the pleasure of watching her fight someone else like this, he knows she’ll be a marvel. In their pause he watches a bead of sweat snakes past her jaw and down her neck. 

They dive back into it. He feels the strong column of muscle down her back where she twists out of his grasp to round on him. She wields her staff like an extension of her body, pushing his away and swiping at their point of contact, damp with sweat. 

Later around the fire, she removes her hair from where it had been pulled into a practical bun since on the Supremacy, and with it shakes loose the last part of her that was still there. Her contentment is brought short by the tenacity of the tangles stopping her fingers from combing through as his gaze lands on her. 

‘Don’t laugh at me. I don’t know why I keep it long either, it’s impractical.’ He shrugs and looks away. ‘And now I’ve got half a forest stuck in here.’ She struggles for a few more minutes before giving up with a petulant huff. ‘I never learned how to do what the others do with theirs. Now I’m stuck looking like a bantha.’ She tries again and gives up with a frustrated growl. ‘Just cut it off for me, would you?’ She nods towards the knife, set on the crate with other items she'd annexed as her own. 

‘No.’ He leans back and smiles into the roof of the cave, arms behind his head in quintessential relaxation.

‘Why do you have to be so difficult?’

He looks up at her, happy to indulge in their circular bickering and too tired to query why. ‘You’d regret it if I did. You’re just tired and frustrated - ‘

‘And dirty, and trapped, and…’ She trails off as he pads towards her and sits behind her. She breathes at him as he begins gently detangling one strand at a time.

‘If you help me it’ll be done and then if you still want, I’ll cut it all off for you and we can make it into something nice and practical for you.’ He turns her outraged face gently away from him. She shakes herself out of it and begins working on the tangled front sections.

‘So kind.’ She tries to ignore the ghost of his breath on the back of her scalp, focusing her entire attention on peeling the matted strands apart, feeling dust and dirt accumulate like a corona on her skin. She should feel mortified, but whatever energy her brain usually parcelled away for that purpose has been entirely depleted. She takes the comb he passes her way and curls her nose at the shiver of particles that rain down at its passing, blood, sweat and tears dried and mixed into a powder. 

All untangled she breathes in the feeling of no pulling knots of tension on her scalp. She rolls her neck luxuriating in the relief, not even caring in the moment he’s still in her space. She folds her knees up to her and wraps her arms around them, with a light hand still on her shoulder. She allows herself a terrifying moment of infantile need, before moving to stand again. 

‘Sit. I’ll braid it for you.’ She freezes. ‘I’m not having you immediately undoing my hard work.’ 

She throws her hands up, incredulous. ‘I was helping!’

‘If you could call it that.’ She swipes over her shoulder to hit him. ‘Stop it. Do you want lice?’

‘Fine!’ She raises her hands in frustration before wrapping them back around her knees. 'Can't say I had this on my list of predictions. Sat in a cave with the Supreme Leader as he does my hair.' His fingers are already working, dragging past her scalp like he’s done this a thousand times. 'But I guess that's wrong isn't it? What even is your title now? Do you have one?' Better to ask that than the alternative. It would do no good to pry into this latent yet practiced talent, so she waits, until a slender neat braid is draped over her shoulder.

‘You’re welcome.’ He breathes into her ear before stepping around her and back over to his seat by the cave mouth.

She reasons she’s just too close to the fire and moves back, grabbing her staff to twirl its comfortable weight in her hands and shake something confusing, from her limbs. 

He’s quiet for the rest of the evening, but she pays him no mind, choosing to investigate something she’d spotted on her trips into the forest to pee. A branch of pleasant-looking purple berries. From her knowledge of Jakku’s scant plant life, nothing immediately struck her as toxic looking, but the thought kept coming back to her.

She waves at him not to worry as she pads out into the rain, scrambling up to grab a handful of the fruits to take a closer look. She holds one squishy fruit up to the light and crushes it. There’s a tiny seed at the center, but the rest is soft flesh with a vibrant purple juice. She crushes the seed between her teeth and probes the juice with the environmental sensor. No known poisons or toxins, primarily sugar and trace vitamins. She sucks the finger into her mouth.

‘I don’t think you should be doing that’, he drawls over his reading. She’d felt his gaze following her as she paced back and forth. But it was something she was used to by now, having his eyes on her, even when he pretended he wasn’t. 

‘I know what I’m doing.’ She deposits the handful of berries in an empty pouch and settles back down to meditate, trying to sense any minute changes in her body to indicate an adverse reaction. Her eyes are closed and her face is serene when she replies. ‘In a few hours it’ll reach my digestive system where it might be harmless, or I might vomit up my organs.’ She says, lightly. 

‘What do you reckon your odds are?’

'So-so', she shrugs, 'we’ll know soon.’

The few hours pass with no dramatic reversal of fortune. She eats another small handful, ignoring his shaking his head in her direction. They’re sweet and fresh in a way she hadn’t tasted for days now. She putters around happily working on mending her old clothing and listening to more droning First Order reports, feeling for the first time like she could be back home on Jakku, pleasantly filling her time snacking and mending before heading out in the cooler part of the day. 

She’d quickly grown accustomed to his mediating form in her peripheral vision, as she read, studied their map, or set herself on salvaging what could be rescued from their pile of singed clothes. Dressed in the customary black of their nondescript and shapeless garments, the color was nothing new, but their relaxed fit often clashed with his rigid and immobile form, folded and poised into a stillness she couldn’t come close to replicating. Her spine always rounded, his stick straight, his neck held neutral, whereas she’d break from meditation with an achy stiffness that had to be stretched free. 

But today he is shifting. At first she chalked it up to a trick of the light, but on the third time she kept her gaze on him, watching him tense and relax, pull almost imperceptibly up and back from the shoulder, seeing a balance that was evidently evading him. She knows from his face he hadn’t been resting enough, his already pale face tinged with a bruised gray, even by warm flickering firelight. His hands where they rest lightly on his knees tremble slightly. When they spoke over breakfast and scanned their surroundings, for the terrifying minute the process took his eyes were locked on the readout, but task done, she saw the wave of relief slowly overtake him, and his focus slowly struggle to meet her gaze. While they worked through their forms together, he’d been controlled, but slow. It was only her concern that stopped her from pressing the advantage and trying to goad him into a proper fight. He was approaching the wall. His body would soon impose its needs on him, no matter how fervently or desperately he resisted rest. It was clear to her that he feared it, and she pitied him for his inevitable defeat.

She keeps the reader in front of her, idly twisting a stick between her fingers, but watches him out of the corner of her eyes. He rakes a trembling palm over his drawn face, unseeing gaze on the floor in front of him. He pinches his nose and a trembling breath escapes him. She cannot give him the privacy he needs without drawing his attention to her. If she does that, he’ll know that she is watching him.

He draws in and expels another quavering wet-sounding breath, and a part of her pangs with sympathy. She had done the same herself, in the hush of night, hiding in her rusted husk of the AT-AT she called her home, attempting to reason her way out of an incapacitating wave of emotion. The kind of fear that made her question her strength, her security, all the little trappings of control she’d assembled like an army around her, dismissing them as the delusions of a child. That all her will and plans did nothing to shield her from the engulfing hopeless fear. That she was an animal cowering alone in a hole. And that there she would come to the end of her facsimile of a life.

She parts her mouth to silence her breathing, trying to disappear into the darkness, see but not see him hunch over himself, and hide his face in his hands. His hair falls in disarray around his digging fingers as muffled choking half-breaths replace his usual calm regulated breathing. She wants to look away, leave him what dignity she can. But she has also never seen her sudden companion in anything so close to undone. She’d seen him closed off from himself, withdrawn into himself for protection. She’d seen a hint of lonely need in him as they conversed via the Force, reaching out for a paradoxical companionship they both knew was both desperate and masochistic. She’s also fascinated to see the man she’d seen inflict such ferocious violence and pain, the insatiable predator that had made her blood freeze with fear, see that figure diminished to messy humanity. There again that impulse to reach out to him, half by her own justification to stoke the good in him, but she knew better than that now. It was the dark in him that called her equally, selfishly.

She doesn’t move, she doesn’t blink, just stares, equal parts pitying and coldly gratified as his sobs deepen. She knows that pain, how it turns the lungs and throat into fire, how each sucking breath aches. He clutches his chest with one hand, head falling forward on his shoulders. She imagines hot tears falling into the dirt below, surprised they don’t burn like acid.

Eventually, the punishing pace of his breathing slows, losing its desperate edge to return to the rumble she’s used to, if with an extra vibrato. He rakes a hand over his face to brush away his tears and lets it fall again in his lap, before lifting his face slowly to look at her.

She doesn’t say anything. What is there to say? I understand how you feel, in an innately human way, overwhelmed by panic inducing fear at simply being alive and aware. I know how leveling it feels, to have the body overtake the brain when you’ve told yourself you can reason yourself out of anything, have proven yourself able to set aside any number of terrors, only to be confronted by the naivety of this belief. I also see your relief, at being brought back to square one, scrubbed clean by your own tears, but still somehow ready to do it again. 

She doesn’t speak to the human/monster contradiction, even if she notes she’d stopped considering him a monster a long time ago. It’s as if these two images superimpose themselves on the figure gathering himself in front of her, forlornly challenging her to belittle him or attack him. Judge him. Sentence him to his punishment. But she won’t. She meets his eyes with a neutral omniscient silence. 

He eventually pulls his lips into a fragile half-smile, dropping his gaze. ‘I guess that’s not the worst thing you’ve seen me do.'

She breathes out, amused despite herself. ‘I do listen to you pee every day. Don’t worry about it.’ It’s a reprieve, lightly given, gratefully accepted. 

‘That is true’, his smile almost makes it to a full one.

‘And you’ve seen me cry before, now we’re even.’ 

‘I guess we are’, he speaks into the night. He turns his face away from her, receding into the shadow. His anonymity spurs her to pry a little out of dogged curiosity.

‘Are you okay?’ It’s a stupid question, but still she’s rankled when he huffs in amused surprise, shoulders falling again with a soundless laughter. A no doubt painful contraction of his aching abdominal muscles. He moves a palm to press them again.

‘No I don’t think I am.’ He laughs, audibly this time, a hollow noise that frightens her more than his tears had. ‘I feel...’ he pauses for so long she’s shocked when she gets an answer, ‘I feel like I died on that ship.’

In the silence a gauzy wash of drizzle starts in the pitch black outside, a reminder of the anomaly that was their dry hour, and the persistent storm that traps them. With it comes another temperature drop and the cold damp of night drawing in. She hauls a blanket around herself but enjoys the return to more predictable times. The familiar fight against cold. Safely wrapped in it, she feels emboldened to continue.

‘I think that had probably been coming for a long time. It always catches up with you eventually. Trust me.’ She wiggles back into her covers to continue reading. ‘At least it’s just me here.’ She watches him lay the folded wool blanket over his lap. ‘It helps me when I get like that to find people doing some mundane thing, like polishing, or working out trade terms or whatever, and just sit near them. Observe and be around people that way.’ She settled in to give him her pitch. ‘So I’m going to tell you my plan and you can just zone out over there. I’m sure you usually do that anyway.’ She doesn’t wait for an answer, just launches into it.

Her plan was to get off planet and then travel to somewhere even more remote in the Outer Rim or Unknown Regions. From there it would be easier to evade capture, but get information about the hunt without drawing attention. In general, the FO had less influence in the Outer Rim, from what she inferred from the tone of the manuals, there more people were hostile or neutral to them, there she could hide for a time. There were enough planets to keep her moving without having to retrace her steps. In time, the world would move on. She was wanted for treason, yes, assumed to have murdered Snoke, but the cost of a lengthy pursuit far outweighed what could be gained by her capture. She was a nobody. The FO would find other ways to prove their might. Perhaps they already had.

Her plans only tangentially include him, and are overly detailed and meandering in her thinking aloud. But it seems to help, he relaxes against some crates, sliding slowly into a sleeping position, closing his eyes as her lilting voice fills the air with nothing, yet also her. Her need to plan, to anticipate, to reason and deduce. He falls asleep to her talking about some food she will buy when she gets to the Outer Rim (or steal, if need be) and she carries on for a few minutes, trying to distract herself with nothingness and not stare at his uncomfortably slumped body.

She whispers to herself deep into the night to stop from thinking. 

She discovers that if she concentrates and kneels as quietly as she can beside his curled sleeping form, she can sense the shape of his dreams. She had hoped that his tears earlier might have helped some, she imagined a serene sea when she reaches out to sense him. She finds instead waves of shame and fear angrily clashing in a maelstrom of fury that bely his relaxed expression. Even in dreams he’s tormented, it seems. And silent. She sits back on her heels.

It is hard to know, being attuned to flashes of each other's feelings, if they share them or blend them. She’d registered the stab of his panic as he’d been jolted awake by hers, the night they thought it was all over. But that feeling was natural, they both had reason to fear discovery. But sometimes she wondered if her inconstant moods were somewhat due to his influence, or if they did it to each other, oscillating between detached calm and restless anxiety. The living situation didn’t help. The helplessness, being trapped suddenly in a world of their own making twenty foot in diameter, with only the similarly hunted for company. It could be a product of the bond. She has nothing else to compare it to. She’d never lived alongside anyone long enough to notice the pattern of their moods.

She calls the Force to her and wills it into her fingertips, outstretched above his head. She tries to remember what he’s said about healing, and feels the energy accumulate at her will, urging it onwards and suffusing it with her image of calm. A beach, calmly lapping at the shore, peppering her skin with tiny pinpricks of cool spray. She feels a calm come over her, and watches his sleeping form for a few minutes, allowing herself to look at him properly for the first time. He looks younger than she’d ever seen him, the slightest hint of stubble on his chin and hair in disarray. His face is relaxed from his usual mask of calm, into a slight frown. 

She closes her eyes again to meet his sleeping consciousness, and finds in his aura a slight calming. A storm lightened to a gale. It’s something. Her second of pride is replaced by the taste of fear at the back of her throat. She knows she should leave him to it, hope her efforts has some kind of effect, and will go some way to lighten the gray circles under his eyes that had become a permanent feature. But shame worms its way up her throat and crushes it, restricting the intake of air.

Her hand trembles as she reaches out to shake his shoulder. His eyes snap open, but she speaks before he has a chance to.

‘I’m sorry, I needed to talk with you,’ He slides to a sitting position. She stays kneeling, palms flat on her thighs to steady her, her unfocused gaze averted from his searching one. ‘I tried to do something, and I didn’t know if I could, but I think I can sense your dreams if I try.’ It’s not an apology yet, but she can’t do anything other than just get the facts out without losing her nerve.

‘I don’t know why I did it. I guess I wanted to find the limits of this bond. I know I can feel your emotions at times, and you can feel mine. I wanted to know what you were feeling while you were dreaming, so I reached out before I could think better of it.’ She catches her breath, his hands hang limply in his lap, frozen. ‘It worked. Only feelings, nothing concrete. I didn’t see anything, just kind of sensed your thoughts.’ She plucks absently at the blankets cooling in the night air.

‘I shouldn’t have done it and I’m sorry.’ She chances a flick of her gaze upwards, seeking his, but it flits anywhere except in her direction. ‘It’s not something I should have looked for, and not something for me to try to change.’ His eyes lock onto hers. She feels the heat of her blush blanket her face in one quick pass. ‘I tried to make it calmer.’ It. She knew she was deflecting, hiding the intrusion behind the small, impersonal word. His mind, his dreams, his only truly hidden part of him. The only thing he had left.

‘Please say something?’ She pleads and hates herself for it.

‘You tried to change my thoughts’, he states evenly.

She screws her eyes shut to avoid his penetrating gaze. ‘I’m sorry’ she whispers plaintively. She swallows and awaits whatever outburst is to come, knowing she deserves it. For invading his privacy, trying to influence his thoughts while he was powerless against it. The invasion of it, and the seed planted in both their minds as to whether they could trust their innermost thoughts ever again, knowing what they now know.

‘I think it worked’. Another searing flash of shame rumbles in her eardrums and tears threaten to fall. Selfish again, crying after what she’d done to him, like she was the one violated. 

‘I’m sorry.’ They fall anyway.

He tracks one with his eyes, mouth set into a line, and looks away. ‘I appreciate what you tried to do’, she wants to disappear into herself at his words. ‘I didn’t even know it was possible.’ He puffs out a humorless laugh. ‘But I think we should set some ground rules, for both our sakes.’ She nods frantically. ‘Sit.’

She slumps to the side and unfurls numb legs from underneath her. He waits for her gaze to meet his.

‘I want to test the limit of the Force connection. I’m willing to try to work out exactly what it can do. It has the potential to be very useful to us. Is that something you also want?’ 

She takes a second to really think, eyes wandering to the middle distance. As much as the blurring line between their Force powers frightened her, it was a heady sort of power that accompanied their times working together. She was strengthening her powers every day with him there in her mind to guide her. She’s seen the tremble in his focus at how quickly she’d taken to summoning the Force to her with the kind of ease that had taken him years to manage. She’d coveted her pride in it. Was it their influence on each other, their ease at sharing knowledge between them, or some transferral of gifts between them? Whatever it was, it was power, encompassing and magnetic to her. 

‘It scares me’, she admits, ‘but I want to understand it.’

‘We would have to open our minds to each other. There are defenses you can put up, but if we’re going to truly test it-’

‘I understand.’ Her voice is firm, but her stomach plummets.

‘If we’re going to do this, we’ll do it on an even footing. When we’re training, and when we’re conscious and agree to it.’ He pauses. ‘I won’t go into your mind without asking, and you won’t go into mine. Deal?’ He holds out his hand to shake.

‘Deal.’ She shakes, before folding her arms in front of her and breathing out hard.

‘You know if you want to know what I’m feeling you can just ask me.’ He says, then smiles. ‘Although I probably won’t tell you.’ She remembers the sight of him crying. She’d asked him them, only after he’d fallen apart.

‘What were you dreaming about?’ Selfish again. He smiles at her sadly, but says nothing.

Chapter Text

‘What is the first thing you’re going to eat when we find civilization?’ she asks around a spoonful of something grey and spongy. It was an experimental blend of different rations. It was disgusting, but in a novel way, which had its charms. 

He wrinkles his nose at the food but eats his portion. ‘Probably a fresh vegetable of some kind. Something that had at one point seen sunlight.’ He swallows, with difficulty. ‘You?’

She takes a swig of acrid water. ‘Something sweet. Something so sweet it makes my jaw ache. Preferably fried and warm.’ She slips into a wistful daydream. ‘I traded an old carburettor for this iced dough thing once, covered in slivered nuts.’ He sees a flash of it from her mind, glistening in the sun. ‘I got ripped off, but I’d do it again.’ She smiles. ‘When we get off this rock, I intend to find the nearest cheapest street vendor and utterly abuse my Force powers to gorge on something terrible for me until I vomit.’

‘You have very strange ambitions in life.’

She shrugs. ‘Then I’d pickpocket some rich Core-Worlder and go pay for them. I’m not an animal.’

He scoffs silently at the strange tilt of her moral compass. In all honesty, money was going to be an issue, but it ranked low on their current priorities. But if he had to steal to keep them safe, he would, easily and without question. 

He quirks an eyebrow at her silently and single-mindedly shovelling down berries. The food had dulled his appetite, but it seems to have stoked hers. She shoves the last few in her mouth to begrudging stand for training with the slightest wince momentarily clouding her features. She shakes off his unasked question and crouches into position. 

‘Are you well?’

‘Huh?’ The question struck her as out of the blue as she slips from her meditative pose to a hunched slouch. They’d spent the customary morning in training, physically with staffs, and mentally attempting to hone both placing and escaping Force holds. It had gone reasonably well on both counts, sparring was the usual mix of challenging and routine that she enjoyed, allowing her to feel like she was growing and improving as well as reaffirming her belief in her already strong proficiency with the weapon. It helped to temper the panic that came with the territory of cowering in a cave. The similarity between this situation and her old life would often lead to a desire to flee into the forest and bring some kind of end to waiting. Anything that they could do to feel less like they were cowering she welcomed. And locked in steady if somewhat safe combat definitely helped, even if he was obviously pulling his metaphorical punches today. She doesn’t comment, he has his moods, and he is welcome to them.

Their Force training was similarly satisfying to her, with each attempt it became easy to tune her senses to the flow of energy around and inside her, and finding the fine balance of pressure that allowed her to manipulate it was less of a blind grope and more a practiced grasp with time. She shaken out of his Force grip after a few minutes, in which she calmed the swell of panic and set it aside, as if in audience to it. It was from this same distance that she noted her pride in this achievement, one that had not been possible a few days ago. He would not, however, when asked attempt to cross into her mind…

‘I was wondering if you might be sick. Do you feel sick?’ She blinks at him, curious. What about her throwing her sweaty body through hours of sparring, or straining to shake his hold made him think she might be unwell?

‘Why would you ask that?’ She pauses in dragging a moist towel over her arms to remove the sweat for a second time today.

‘Your blows aren’t as strong as they usually are.’ Her blows had been forceful enough to knock him onto the back-foot more than once today. She’d seen him shake the ache from his wrists after one particularly heavy overarm strike. He shrugs in lieu of elaboration. 

‘I feel fine. I’m as healthy as I ever was. Healthier in fact.’ It was true. For her many years of starvation, she had lived on the very fringes of survival. As a result she’d grown a slim body of wiry muscle and scant fat. It was only very recently, once joining the Resistance and being fed and provided for, that her body had exited ‘survival mode’ so to speak. For the first time in her adult life, her cycle had regulated to give her her period. Oh. That’s it. 

‘Oh, I’m menstruating. It’s probably that. I didn’t used to get them when I lived back home, but now that I’m healthier, I do.’ It doesn’t cross her mind not to share that information. It’s just a quirk of her body’s machinery, and is the answer to his question. She had noticed her own weakness of course, her mind-body connection being stretched to breaking every day by their punishing routine, but for some reason she had assumed he wouldn’t notice a change.

‘That makes sense.’ He carries on with his task, unfurling some rations from their Mylar pouches for heating over the fire. ‘Is there anything you need?’ He hands her the canteen, refilled with filtered rain water.

‘Nothing I can think of.’ She had some weakness and a decent amount of cramping, but training helped with both. Her emotions were somewhat more volatile, but meditation helped with that, and she had plenty of time and space to utilize it as he reads and does the same.

‘Do you want anything particular for food?’ He asks. Their choices are limited, of course. But still today she still prefers the sound of the more fatty stew they have, flash dried and rehydrated into a thick paste.  He agrees and sets to work getting it ready. The rest of her needs are accounted for, the packed provisions are luckily standard issue and account for a range of bodily needs. She’d been glad to find and inventory them for a range of future uses, before realizing that she might need them for herself to deal with this new part of her life. Previously her cycle was unpredictable to the point of being a rarity, light and perfunctory, like her body didn’t want to spare the moisture and knew she had no time to think about reproducing.

Reproducing. It was a horrible thing to think about. How did people find the time to think about the act? She’d never had that luxury. The closest she got was the feverish satisfying of a tension she unfailingly built up for weeks, before finally understanding the source and remedying the issue. Now her body has decided she is in a good place to think beyond survival to reproduction. She’d thought idly the stress of her current situation might have taken it away again, but no such luck. She just has to wait it out and trust that her strength will return, her moods will stabilize, and she can parcel that part of her away for another few weeks.

She shakes her pricked finger once again and growls in frustration. He moves from one stance to another, adapting familiar saber forms to the new weight and feel of a staff.

‘Can you Force heal clothes?’ 

‘Clothes don’t have a life force.’ He grunts and swings a controlled slow arc around his body, bare feet shuffling in the dirt. 

‘But you can use it to float things in mid air?’ She resumes attempting to stitch the gaping gashes in her leggings with a jagged stitch. 

‘Floating you’re manipulating gravity. You do it when you fight and you don’t even realise.’ He shifts the staff to his other arm, shaking out the tiredness lazily.

She flicks her eyes back to her work. ‘But energy destroyed them, a big screaming vibro-blade. Can’t it be reversed somehow?’ She blinks at the fabric bringing it closer to her eyes. 

‘I don’t know the ins and outs of the Force, Rey.’ 

She scowls up at him. ‘Swing from your wrist.’ He stills. ‘You’re distracting me with your wild flailing.’ 

‘I’m used to my saber.’ 

‘Yeah, well you’ll get used to this, too. Stop trying to make it into a saber. There’s nothing wrong with how you fought with it before.’ She tests her handiwork with a forceful tug, pleased to see it hold, before flinging it triumphantly aside. She folds her hands behind her head and leans back. ‘Your grip is all wrong. You’ll break your thumb if you fight like that?’ 

‘Oh yeah?’ He goads, continuing to wave an arc unchanged.

She grabs her staff and readies herself in a fighting stance. He waits, rolling the weight through his wrist. She strikes hard against his staff, raised in defence. She is rewarded with a wince he fails to disguise and a string of mumbled curses that pull her mouth into a smile.

‘Grow up, you’re fine.’ 

He shocks out and indignant retort before experimentally flexing the offending thumb. A memory of the sharp pain of a bruised ligament, but nothing beneath it. ‘Did you do that?’ 

‘I’ve had a lot of practice stabbing myself over and over with the universe's shittiest sewing kit.’ A shrug ripples through her body, and she checks her feet placement for stability, hiding her face in the process. Still not used to receiving compliments. 

‘I didn’t even notice.’ He breathes airily. 

‘Some of us don’t need to make a big song and dance of it.’ She steps forward to brusquely adjust his grip and hand placement before striking back into his space again. ‘And now we don’t have to hold back.’ Her grin is murderous.

‘Do you ever miss your mother? I’ve met her, she seems nice.’ She’d asked him while his fingers carefully unbraid her messy hair destroyed from sparring. She doesn’t trust herself not to lose her nerve if she had to face him properly.

‘I miss what she was to me once.’ He replies, after nudging his fingers back to their task. ‘We’re different people now. The person I miss gave herself over to the war effort a long time ago.’ She had taught him this skill a very long time ago, in a brief period of still between being pulled from one half of the galaxy to the other. These braids have meanings, she’d told him. Said meanings were lost to his memory.

‘I’m sorry about that.’ She sighs as the tightness at her scalp relaxes and closes her eyes in pleasure. ‘Leave it down for a while. I don’t plan to do anything physical until the morning.’ 

‘Fair enough, I’ll fix it before you sleep so you can roll around in the dirt all you want.’

She smiles up at his retreating form. ‘You’ll have to teach me how to do that one day.’

He pivots on his heel to face her. ‘If I do that there’s nothing stopping you from leaving me behind to rot.’ She laughs a tinkling laugh.

She’d taken first watch, enjoying the hush of the rain as it slowly lightened from the previous torrent. She’d been tracking with her eyes the occasional leaf that had fallen into the rain runoff, sometimes catching in the mud, but when she was lucky, drifting lightly away into the night. She began to count them, letting them lull her into a waking meditative calm. Without them, her mind would begin to wander, but they brought her back to the present.

It was an unfortunate side effect of their being trapped here, that the things she most desperately wished to know were barred from her. She had to hope that her friends were safe and alive out there, somewhere, and make peace with the fact she may never know for sure. She could also never return to Jakku, the last link she had with her parents, almost certainly gone. But she would never know. She had had a lot of time to question whether she regretted doing what she did. Effectively gambling her life with the Resistance and Luke on the slender whisper of a hope. She hadn’t died, even though she’d resigned herself to the fact that she might. She’d journeyed to the Supremacy having made peace with the fact that if she were to die, she would die looking into his eyes, and that that would mean something to the general shape of the galaxy.

But that hadn’t happened, she had lived. She’d killed with him. They’d left together, fusing themselves together into something indivisible. All that she can imagine of her life from now one, narrowed to a string of running, hiding, running again with him at the center of it. At least there, if he dies, if they’re caught, she will know. Do I want us to die? It would put an end to the running, it would give structure to an otherwise indefinite procession of pursuit and escape. What is the value of a life like that? Is it worth everything that I’ve lost? She fixes her eyes on a new leaf, and watches it bob along, catching and then releases to zoom away into the dark. Yes.

He wakes and comes to take her spot. She’s startled from her thoughts by a hand on her shoulder, pleasant in its weight and warmth. She shakes her head at his look of concern, not trusting her mouth with words, at the stream of nonsensical contradictions that might flow from them. She stands, pressing at her cramping muscles, before choking down a few pills with a swig of chemical-tinged water. She curls up in blankets still warm from him sleeping, and imagines as she often does, an ocean. Steadily rolling and churning, lapping at the shore. Sand curling around her neck to support her head, her heartbeat resonating down through the tiny rocks to thrum with some elemental life below it. She presses her hand into the earth and digs her fingers into the dirt, his presence humming lowly in the back of her mind. 

Rey is shaken awake roughly by the shoulders. ‘What is it?’ She shoots upwards frantically searching her surroundings for the threat always looming out in the dark. He looks quizzically back at her, leaning back on his heels. 

‘You were screaming.’ 

What?’ She questions blearily, idly stroking the braid slung over her shoulder. 

‘I was keeping watch and you just started screaming in your sleep.’ 

She rubs a hand over her groggy face, wet with tears. ‘I was asleep…’ She muses to herself.

‘Do you often wake up screaming?’ 

‘I don’t know. There’s never been anyone there to tell me.’ She explains tiredly before she huffs back down, feeling her blood flow thick and cold back over chest. 

‘I found something while you were asleep.’ 

‘If it’s not a bar of soap or a tiny flat packed ship, I’m not interested.’ She waves her hand in dismissal from her spot on the ground. 

‘We have soap.’ He says, puzzled.

‘We have soap!’ She shoots up to a sitting position and glares at him. ‘We’ve had soap this whole time I’ve been wallowing in my own filth!’ 

‘Hey, you’re the one who did inventory!’ He shoots back. 

‘Where was it?’ She demands. 

‘In with the items to boost moral. With the holy objects and such. Where you’d never look.’ 

‘You’re right, I never would have looked there.’ She huffs, it becoming clear she’s not going to be able to just go back to sleep. ‘What did you find?’ She concedes. 

‘A book.’ 

‘You woke me up to tell me about a book? You’ve been reading for days, I know you have books.’

‘I woke you up because you were screaming but I have also coincidentally found a specific book’, he drawls. 

‘Is it a useful book?’ She asks, pinching the bridge of her nose between her fingers. 

‘All books are useful…’  

‘I’m going back to sleep.’ She turns over in parody of rest. ‘Are you intentionally trying to annoy me?’ 

‘It’s a book of old legends.’ He ploughs on, pretending to be deaf to her complaints. ‘I learned about them when I was a kid. I wonder if you heard them too…’ 

‘Probably not.’ She replies, through gritted teeth. 

‘How do you know? Stories travel in all kinds of ways.’ 

She sighs dramatically. ‘Go on then…’ She tucks herself more comfortably amongst the blankets. ‘You’ve volunteered yourself as storyteller. Let’s hear one.’ 

It was probably the longest she’s heard him speak. At first she was caught on the sound of it, unfamiliar phrases sounded out by someone who was used to choosing few words carefully. The names and places were, as predicted, new to her, but as time passed she found herself focusing less on the sound of his voice, on the need to stay alert amongst the presence of another. It occurred less to her that she had her back to him, and the last tendrils of panic from her dream slunk slowly away. Eyes closed she began to picture the world as he described it, and fell asleep to the bass of his voice, melding with the sound of her own steady heartbeat in her ears and the crackle of the fire. 

Chapter Text

She lathers the small bar of soap in her hands and works it through her scalp. She sighs, clearly in absolute bliss. 

He laughs at her dark look shot his way through the lather. ‘Didn’t you wonder how I’ve been shaving?’ 

‘I don’t know, I have no idea how long it takes to grow facial hair. I’ve never lived with a man before. When do you shave?’ She begins to rinse the soap through her hair. It thunders on the drying dirt outside. 

‘In the morning, before you wake up.’ He smiles. 

‘Great, what other secret manly have you been doing without my noticing. DON’T ANSWER THAT!’ 

‘I didn’t say anything at all.’ He holds up his hands as she stares defiantly back at him. ‘Something on your mind, Jedi?’  

‘No, and don’t call me that.’ It was on her mind, a restless energy she was no stranger to, but had willingly blinded herself to the cause many times in her life. When there wasn’t the time, when there were more important things to do. When she was too sick or tired. And suddenly, it hits her. She’s frustrated. Nor just in a restless muscles way. She’s horny. Shit. Another human need to be tended to if she’s going to be able to get back in her right mind. But the issue was privacy and their total lack of it. 

‘Can you teach me how to block you out of mind?’ She asks, blush creeping up her cheeks, glad she can blame it on gravity, hiding her face to continue rinsing. He looks worried for a fraction of a second. She wouldn’t have caught it had they not spent the last week exclusively in each other's company. ‘No, it’s nothing like that. It’s not you specifically, it’s people. I want to be able to make sure people can’t get in my mind unless I want them to.’

‘I can teach you.’ He looks down at his reading as she strips down to her underwear, scraping somewhat viciously at her skin, her fingernail leaving little pink tracks in their wake. She’s viscous to herself in strange unexpected ways, he notices. Same as him.

‘Does it work with emotions as well? Can it stop people from picking up what I'm feeling from my Force signature?’ She scrunches as much moisture from her now clean hair as possible with his shirt. 

‘I was going to wear that’ he notes. She shrugs and tosses the now sodden shirt aside. ‘Yes, it possible to hide your Force signature altogether. You’re right, it’s something you should know.’ 

‘Anything else you think I should know?’ She asks, water running over her back as she glances over her shoulder at him.

He locks his eyes to her face. ‘You’re asking the wrong person, I’ve been training in this stuff since I was ten, I don’t entirely know what’s Force and what’s normal anymore. Probably part of the reason I don’t make a tonne of friends.’ He admits, lightly. 

‘I guess I’ll have to do some experiments then.’ 

‘Again.’ They spar through lunchtime, the sun high in the sky punching through to illuminate the drizzle. ‘Again.’ They go until she can’t push herself up from the ground anymore. He pulls her up with a forearm grip, their skin sticking together with sweat.

She scrapes rain-wet hands over her skin to wash away the worst of the exertion and tiredness. She lets the rain run down her neck and under her shirt before changing. They eat in comfortable silence, too tired to lift their necks from their shoulders. Bodies drained, their minds are free to wander lazily.

‘Why did you kill him?’ They’ve had this silent exchange in their minds every day for a week. They trace the same steps yet perversely expect to end up somewhere different at the end, somehow. Somewhere that makes sense. 

‘He was going to kill you.’ 

‘Did you have a plan?’ 

‘I didn’t think, I just acted.’ 

She nods. ‘Did you know what would happen when you took me to him?’ She remembers meeting his eyes as her pod hissed open, knowing she'd find him there. 

‘I had an idea’. He’d said these same words, or words like them over and over, trying to get from one point to another. He’d taken her to him in handcuffs, relieved to be able to finally do as commanded and bring to an end the blinding desire to stand with her again. Now he has her, and his mind and body are tense with a seductive fear, like standing on a cliff at the edge of oblivion. She’d addressed him in the elevator, daring him to meet her gaze. So sure he’d turn to her, trusting in a vision of another man, one already gone. If he'd had the time he might have indulged in telling her, that their conversations weren't conversation per se, more like communing with the past. But there wasn't time and within seconds he was puppeting his own body through movements that felt ordained, grasping for a steady foothold in the present, never truly finding it.

He’d walked with her arm warm in his grasp as she scanned the room, head held high, all part of her plan. She’d looked into his eyes, held supplicant in Snoke’s force grip, strong enough, he knows, to feel like your bones will crack with it. He’d looked back, looking through his own eyes like viewports, the events passing by him as a spectator, muffled and distant. He’d registered the content if not the words of Snoke’s speech, and a tiny part of him had tensed and coiled itself inside of him, curling to protect its vulnerable underbelly. His fingers moved, he breathed, waiting to watch the events play out. Snoke fell with a sibilant gasp of her saber, her knees colliding roughly with the floor. But her eyes don’t leave his, caging him in.

Bodies move towards them, lurching forward in their grief. They fight together, until only they remain.

He’d had an idea, to a point. He’d stand with her arm in his hand. He’d face his Master, for once not bent in shameful deference, but able to meet his face with his own. Beyond that, gray static. He’d had a fragment of a thought, and then nothingness. Maybe it was that that he had wanted. 

‘What changed your mind?’ she asks.

Instinct, a lurch of cold fear, nothing, his body moving of its own accord. ‘I don’t know.’ 

She smashes the Resistance beacon between two rocks, jamming the fragments under a little mound of compacted dirt. From here on out their best chance is to sever any links to the Supremacy and lead her friends to believe she is gone.

‘Teach me how to cloak my Force signature’ she demands, muddying the soil to hide the spot from even herself.

He agrees, gesturing for her to sit across from him. He places his holopad aside and ignores the cloud over her features. If she has a desire to wall herself off even further, he has no right to protest. Even if it sits like a stone in his stomach.

‘Do you remember when you forced yourself into my mind?’ She stares at him with derision. ‘The reason you had trouble is because I put a wall up to shield myself. I always do when entering people’s minds, otherwise…’

‘Otherwise they could do what I did and push right back.’ She bristles at him. That’s fine, he can take it. 

‘Yes, theoretically. Although before you nobody ever tried.’

She flashes a quick smile. ‘Do you think I could do it because of the bond?’

‘No, I think you doing it strengthened the bond. You could do it because you have a strong connection to the Force.’

‘Don’t try to flatter me.’ She lifts unseeing eyes to his. Wherever she is, she’s farther away than she’d ever been.

‘You draw the Force around you and hold it in your mind, still it’s flow. It becomes a kind of wall around you. Anyone outside trying to look in will see nothing. Everything living has a flow. You’re making it look like you don’t.’ She doesn’t respond. ‘If you try it I won’t have to go into your mind to know. I’ll be able to sense it.’ He tries to still his twitching fingers. ‘We don’t have to try now…’

‘No. It needs to be done.’ She looks at his hands, and he stills them once again under her scrutiny. She closes her eyes and holds her breath. 

He closes his eyes and reaches tentatively out to feel her Force presence. It’s churning and cold like a storm at sea. There’s still lightness, but it’s refracted through clouds to a bruised yellow. He’s careful not to let slip his alarm, taking his own advice and drawing the Force around him like a cloak. 

Her presence dims somewhat. He still knows she’s there, but it’s as if his attention wants to slide right off it. Without her humming calmly beside him, he can feel the scream of his own energy, stuttering around him as he attempts to still it. He redoubles his efforts as her signature silences, trying to force stillness and calm through the strength of his panic, drawing it in to fortify his efforts. 

‘I couldn’t feel you.’ She speaks, voice still suffused with bitterness, staring at him through half closed eyes. 

‘Or I you.’ He explains as she nods. ‘I was shielding myself as well.’

‘So it’s not the case that if I shield myself I won’t be able to sense others.’

‘No, it’s less a wall and more a two-way mirror.’  

‘Why were you shielding yourself from me?’ 

‘I wasn’t sure if we could with the bond as strong as it is now. But it’s safe to say if we can shield ourselves from each other, you can cloak your presence from any other Force user.’ She blinks, eyes still focused on the ground in front of him. ‘Are you okay?’ 

She meets him with a smile mired in despair. ‘There’s no way for them to find me now.’ She blinks a few surprising searing tears, catches them on her fingers and looks at them. ‘It’s a good thing. It’ll keep us safe.’ She whispers.

‘You can go to them soon, I promise.’

‘You can’t promise that.’ Her voice is hollow when she replies. ‘But thank you.’ 

‘Get some sleep while I sort the food.’ He stands as she nods, pulling the blankets towards her to stare unseeing into the fire.

She awakes a little clearer, sleep having done its duty of dulling her pain to something that she can shove into the background. Food is the usual, rehydrated with boiled rainwater with the slightest mineral taste to it. ‘There’s a river nearby’ she notes. She smiles at him as she tears at a chunk of bread. 

‘It’s a promising sign.’ He agrees. 

She pulls out one of the blankets from storage. Unused, they’ll take this one with them when they leave, it being the cleanest one they have. She unfurls it to shake out the dust and something falls in the dirt. A pack of cards folded in with a blanket, non standard-issue, left by some previous faceless FO delegate. She flicks through the cards, checking for anything hidden within them, but finds nothing. Shrugging she lays out a game based on a vague recollection of rules. She soothes herself with the tactile feel of sliding each smooth card from the deck, the springy snap as peeks at a corner, cheating only herself. She laughs in triumph as she gathers the cards up towards her, having satisfied a dynamic win condition tilted shamelessly in her favour. He watches over the edge of his holopad.

‘You’re cheating.’

‘I am not!’ She says petulantly.

‘You are, you drew cards and put one back, I saw you do it.’ 

‘Oh really? I thought you were studying quarterstaff techniques to try to catch up to me. Or are you only pretending?’ She raises an eyebrow at him.

‘I can focus on two things at once.’ 

‘Psshhh’. She resumes setting the cards for another round as he recoils in shock. 

‘If you want a proper game, I’ll beat you fair and square.’

‘By all means’ she gestures over the cards and pads away to grab a snack of a handful of berries from a nearby bush, enjoying their smooth skin yielding under her teeth. She pads back over, palm full of the violet fruits.

‘These are our only cards’ he slides them out of her grip, a few berries fall to the ground. ‘You’re going to ruin them'.

‘Fight me.’ 

‘Get ready to lose, Jedi.’ He lays out the cards as she settles lithely on the ground, always more comfortable than him sitting on the ground.

‘Does that mean if I beat you I become Supreme Leader?’ She tips her head back to pour berries into her mouth. ‘That’s how it works, right?’

‘You’re hilarious. Draw.’ 

‘Get absolutely wrecked, Solo!’ She throws down her last card in triumph. ‘I have bested you. I am now Supreme Leader of the First Order.’ She stands and mimes pulling a communicator band to her mouth. ‘Hello Hux, S L here. I’m going to need you and all of your men to put yourself in the garbage hold and jettison yourself into space. Uh huh, uh huh. Await further instructions.’ He grimaces up at her, still sitting languidly on the floor as stands above him, juice dribbling down her forearms in a violet slash.  

‘Are you sure they’re not poisonous?’ 

‘What? Are you implying I had an unfair advantage, I didn’t know you were that insecure. Or that sore of a loser.’ She leans over him, nudging his leg with her foot. 

‘And you are gloating in victory.’ 

‘I happen to be an uncivilized desert rat, I’m allowed.’ She beams. ‘Dinner?’

‘We’re stopping because you’re winning?’

‘Yup!’ She rattles around for their canteen. ‘Dinner, then we train’ She says. He nods. He smiles down into the dirt as she hums pottering behind him. 

It was becoming easier to match their breathing to one another, gather and mingle the Force between them. Sometimes they’d go into her mind and he would try to get a hold on it. Gradually her Force would move around and through his, as easily as they’d fought, leveraging strength and balance, weight and counterweight. More often than that she’d overshoot, lose the boundary between herself and him and push into his mind. Feel the shape and movements as if doing them herself. 

She tries again to heal the still bruised shoulder, palm lightly resting on his arm as she unconsciously mirrors his posture with her body, the feel of her Force outstretching and flowing in her mind. She opens her eyes with a breathless laugh, having witnessed the slight tremor and relaxation of tension in his Force which meant she knew she’d succeeded. She’s tired and giddy with success. He smiles back at her, bright like the dawn.

It must be the bond. Muddying the boundaries between them. The flow of energy between them, give and take, as if drawing from one source, never to be lost or extinguished. It explained his simple, untinged joy, instead of the usual guilt of needing to be healed, the reminder of his failure. He shares her happiness. She pushes him over in the dirt.

It must be the bond, the reason they’d started to touch each other, slightly. It makes it feel less of an intrusion, echoing this bridge between them with little contacts. They touch each other with the same impartial practically they touch their own bodies. To correct form, to illustrate movements, to remind themselves that they are alive. Their living space is so tiny, their bubble of personal space shrunk to beyond the boundary of their own bodies. They step over each other to get past, not around, move each other away like they move their blankets, clothes and supplies. Just another thing shared. What’s another thing? She cups a handful of warm berries into his hand. He pops them into his mouth as he reads, enjoying their sharp fresh tang. 

With his shoulder finally healed, she set about modifying the bags from the provisions for actual use. She starts by pulling viciously at the fabric to test its shearing strength, and once satisfied  reworking where the straps fall, tracing them with her eyes, darting her gaze up from her work to drag over his body. 

‘It says here on Bogano there used to be a vault filled with pilgrims' offerings that can only be opened by Force users. Apparently it became a kind of base for a few Jedi in the past.’ He tries to ignore her squinting eyes tracking up and down his torso like a measuring tape. His stomach twists a little at the memory of being measured by a droid for his leather surcoat, part of his armor as a Knight. He takes a breath and sits up a little straighter from his hunched position, flexing his now healed shoulder. 

‘I’m surprised it says that in the FO records.’, she says through her teeth, biting off a length of thread and yanking violently at her work. 

‘It doesn’t exactly. Previous friction with superstitious natives, potential links to Resistance holdouts, previous Imperial control, sightings of known dissidents…’

‘Any record of recent FO presence on the planet?’ She spreads her pack on her lap to adjust it in turn.

‘The report concludes there’s nothing worth mining there, just an outdated quasi-spiritual site best forgotten.’

‘Along with anything related to the Force.’ He nods once at her. Force sensitivity in FO writings masqueraded as ‘superstition’, ‘outdated ideas’, ‘dangerous individualism’, always something best forgotten to make way for the control and collectivism of the purified First Order. ‘How did you fit in with all that?’ She pricks her finger sharply, shaking it mechanically and swapping the needle to the other hand to carry on working. 

‘Uncomfortably’, his eyes are drawn to the movement, and follow her gaze down to her work as she folds part of her old tunic into a strap to tack on across the body for support. He follows the quick practiced movement with his eyes. ‘I answered directly to Snoke, and my Knights answered to me. As far as I know we were the only Force users. Practically it put me at a level of General, but the entire high command either despised or feared me as a relic of the past.’ She hums in acknowledgment. ‘Snoke sought me out when I was still an student, recognizing the instability that has been growing in me since adolescence. Eventually I fled to him and assumed control of the Knights of Ren. Nobody could outright defy me as his apprentice.’ He smirks, ‘Even if they wanted to.’ 

‘What a weird life.’ She laughs, mouthing ‘what’ at this bemused look in her direction.

She stands to try out the packs. Straps lengthened and secured, she’s confident now the weight will sit comfortably on their backs, the basic utilitarian things previously no more than a water-repellant cuboid with basic straps. She’d added a waist strap to each, to keep the packs sitting flush to their bodies and prevent them moving around as they walk. She shrugs hers on, happy it sits above her belt where her saber is to be holstered, seeing sunlight for the first time in a week. She packs it full with the supplies mounded by her feet. It’s heavy, but manageable, stuffed with as much food, water and tools as can be practically carried between them. She weighs up between the comfort of carrying more supplies at a higher percentage of their bodyweight, vs the extra caloric expenditure of said extra weight. She wedges a few more bars into each pack, sliding them past the tarps and rope that will likely be their only shelter. 

His contains a few of the heavier tools and a higher proportion of the water. She hefts it up in her hands, titling it to test the weight distribution is even and that nothing pokes out of the back to dig into his spine. She fans the straps out in her hands and again fits it to him with her eyes. He stands to shrug it on as she turns around him to test the fit and pinch a bit of slack with a frown. He hands it back to her and she’s already descending on it with a needle and thread, flashing in the firelight. 

An hour later, their packed bags lean against the crates. She’d rattled off their inventory, and they’d checked and double checked it against their list. She nods to herself once more, and drags the blankets towards them. Their sensors blink calmly, nobody is coming. Somehow, nobody had, they’d spent a week here, waiting to be stumbled across any second and turned in for execution. But it has never happened. She reflexively glances out into the night and wonders how quickly she’ll be able to break that habit once they’re finally not being hunted. Whenever that will be…

He finally shows her what he’d been adding to his book all along. She’d had a cursory look for it a few times while he was sleeping, telling herself she was just gathering their provisions, but had never found it. Finally seizing the opportunity, she had demanded to know what it was as he tried to surreptitiously slide it into the crate to be left behind.

‘Just a diary. More of a training record.’ He flashes her a page with a neat table, filled out in small controlled script.

‘I’m in there. Why are you writing about my training?’ She looks at him accusingly. 

He shrugs, ‘it’s helpful to measure progress.’

‘Is this Force healing?’ she gestures to a row of figures.

‘Uh huh.’

‘It worked on the first try and you didn’t tell me’. She stares in disbelief at the tiny ‘moderate success.’ 

‘I didn’t want it to go to your head. It’s an advanced Force ability…’

‘So you’re jealous, that’s why you didn’t say anything?’ She pulls the notebook gently from him and scans through the tables, success, partial success, moderate success.

‘It scares me.’ 

She glances up at his solemn face, shaking her head to clear the confusion there. She shoves the book deep into the crate. ‘No more studying me like I’m an experiment. Clear?’

He nods and they resume preparing for sleep.

The last night before venturing from the cave, they’ll have to sleep at the same time. They’re leaving first thing in the morning. A good foot between their heads, they curl around the remnants of the dying fire in a semicircle, close enough to hear the now familiar sound of each other's breathing, slowly modulated over time to near synchronicity. Tomorrow they seek civilization. Tonight the fire slowly dims and all that’s left is weak moonlight, streaking through trees now only lightly dripping outside. 

Her sigh turns into a shiver. It’s just a place, somewhere she had felt hunted, but also somewhere where she had felt her connection to the Force strengthening, had acquired and began to hone her skills with it, and had felt at times, if briefly, content. There will be other places like it, she knows. They will leave and the branches, animals and rain will cover over the evidence of them being there. She’d lived in the shadow of such places her whole life, the palimpsest of lives layered over one another. For some this transience signaled their mortality, for her she knew she would carve out a new home. This one would live in her memory, and in the subtle circular depressions in the ground around their fire. Now the rain has stopped she can hear distant movement in the trees, the scurrying and clamoring of life just outside of their bubble. She drifts into sleep.

Chapter Text

They awake in silence, the twittering of birdsong in the first properly dry morning, loud and somewhat desperate sounding. She sympathizes. He moves behind her as she gathers their rations and water for a quick breakfast, shrugging into a clean change of clothes and putting the old ones in a crate, folded atop her scarred and stained tunic and leggings. She seals them away with a downcast look of finality. All that remain are her boots and underwear. His dark cloak and arm guards had fared a little better, yet rest similarly abandoned in the cave, sealed against the elements in case they have to return.

They eat and pass the canteen between them in front of a fire falling into ash. They douse it with brackish rainwater and kick the circle of fire scorched stone out into the forest, covering the remnants with dirt. They secure a tarp around the abandoned supplies and run through one last time what they’re taking and their uses. She checks the lacing on her boots and feels for any pressure points, satisfied to find none. She catches him as he picks up and turns over another brick of rations in his palm, weighing up if he can cram it into the already full bag.

‘I know you’re strong, but remember we’re on foot.’ She tightens the straps around his bag as he lets it fall back into the crate. She re-latches it and fixes the tarp. ‘The smaller and lighter and quieter we are, the better.’ She faces him. 

‘I’ll endeavor to make myself smaller.’ He flexes his boots around his feet for the long walk. They’re not made for hiking, but they’ll have to do. 

‘Stop talking.’ In agreement they step out into the light. 

He hefts her into the same tree, her slight form now twenty kilos heavier with her pack. She peers through the binoculars, looking for any thinning of the trees indicating an edge to the forest. They gamble on what could be a balding to the east, or could be a trick of the light. 

‘Good a direction as any’ he shrugs, after she’s clambered back to earth.

‘Let’s go.’

They trudge through dense woodland, occasionally tracing around fallen trees too tall and wet to climb over. Soon the only sound is their breathing and their feet stepping through mulch. Her muscles protest the sudden plodding movement, but soon the burn of lactic acid turns into the comforting hum of muscles slipping into autopilot. They are made for walking, and once their brains still in trying to tell them otherwise, turn them back to the quiet and comfort of the cave, it's soothing to fall into the rhythm of it. Soon they’re both bathed in sweat, rolling up their sleeves to let them cool in the air. 

Their path meanders through natural bald spots, mud trampled and disturbed by hooves and bird tracks. They hatch the deep chestnut of the forest floor with a spongy carpet of moss, leaves and bark. Craning her head, squinting in the sunlight, something jostles in the tree canopy, shedding a light shower of buds and leaf litter that patters to the ground. They pick through it in silence, pointing the way broadly eastward, in whatever direction the forest deigns to let them move. 

The deeper they head in, the larger and darker the trees become, their trunks broken with a ladder of bright fungi, protruding outwards like hands cupped outward in thirst. He stops to observe a mottled shadow of a furred back move deeper into cover and she stills at his side. A pair of eyes placidly scan them and judge them as non-threatening, before picking soundlessly out of their sight. She exhales breathlessly, before gathering herself to keep moving.

Between the hours of walking, the heavy packs, and the ratcheting humidity of the dense tree cover, she begins to lose sense of her feet hitting the ground. Instead she drags a sweaty and sharply sensitive palm over rough bark and smooth exposed new wood in turn, in sublime awe of the place that had been within her sight for the last week. Made of teeming layers of churning life, so unlike the desperately fragile plants she’d find and attempt to nurture on Jakku. Where the resources for life were shared out in meager parcels, and every meal meant someone else going hungry. She has never seen abundance like this. 

She’s reluctant to say anything, for fear of muddying it with her voice. Not having access to the kind of words to describe her terrifying reverent respect for the place, and shameful at her consistent attempts to leave it. Every step takes her further from this place, and back into a galaxy she was coming to realize she has no real desire to return to. A life of suffering she had exchanged for her old one, lit by the fleeting incandescent joys of her new friends and allies, but nonetheless clothed in cold steel, life precariously poised on a knife’s edge. For the first time in her life, she imagines a life of true solitude, forming a little place for herself here amongst the silent animals. It would be as easy as stepping between the gnarled web-like roots and ducking into the dark. 

He moves behind her and meets her faraway gaze with a questioning look. Her heart thunders in her chest, and she closes her eyes as a wave of anxiety creeps up her throat. Stay here with me, a childlike voice in her pleads, too shrouded for him to hear. But like all things she fervently, desperately wants, it is impossible. She wills her screaming muscles onwards once more. 

With the sun at the highest point in the sky, she climbs again, looking east once more for a sign they haven’t been pointlessly expending their finite energy. She lands back down with the faintest squeak of protest in her knees. ‘There’s something over there. But it could be a cliff, or a river…’ He hums and passes her the canteen to drink from. ‘We should rest a while. I want to get there before it starts getting dark.’ She explains, unlatching her pack and peeling it from her back. She stretches with a shivery and contented sigh.

They sit in a patch of dryish mulch and lean against a mossy fallen tree and feel their heartbeats slow to normal. Pack off, his shirt is banded with sweat, arms and nose tinged pink from the sun.  

‘I hope there’s water where we get to, I need a wash. I stink.’ She wrinkles her nose. 

‘Already missing the comforts of our dark cave?’ He asks, flexing his neck with an audible crack. 

‘Hey, food, water, shade, warmth, I’m not so spoiled. I don’t appreciate comfort like that when I can get it.’ She rubs some of the ache from her calves. 

‘So, I’m spoiled?’ He asks, one eye closed as he rolls his still bruised shoulder. 

‘I’ve been on the Supremacy. Even the cells had air conditioning.’ He scoffs a laugh into an energy bar and wordlessly hands her the rest. ‘You ate most of it!’

‘I have higher caloric needs, you said so yourself.’ She scowls at him. It’s pleasantly familiar, tossing little barbs back and forth like a game. It brings her back into herself, and the realization that they need to keep moving if they’re to stick to their schedule.

He stands, shrugging his pack back on and she steps forwards to tighten the loosened straps. 

They make it just as darkness starts to fringe the horizon. Their last breathless approach accompanied by the sound of a river coursing at their side. She blinks to defy the mirage that often undermines her wills, her hopes made manifest, in a quirk of nature that had never failed her in its cruelty. It doesn’t dissolve. 

She peels off her pack and shimmies close to the bank. He holds her forearm in a solid grip as she plunges her hand into the cold water, a laugh of pure joy bubbling up unbidden from her throat. ‘It’s not too strong, I don’t think.’ She webs her fingers and feels the resistance push against her. 

They follow its course, cool air evaporating the sweat on their skin until it narrows to a shallow stream. 

‘Where there’s water, there’s people.’ She says a smile waxing and waning on her face in equal parts.

‘We’ll find them tomorrow’ he says, kicking rocks and branches away, beginning to prepare their camp and forcing proximity sensors into the earth in a ring around them as the sky starts to bloom into a vibrant blood orange. 

They employ staffs and tarp in constructing a modest little tent. Choosing to forgo a fire, they heat their rations over a tiny portable stove, eating in familiar silence. As she washes herself in the stream, he updates their crude map. As he does the same, she briefly checks the holopad and scans for lifeforms, reluctantly tearing her eyes from the dying sunset to do so. 

‘Any news?’ He towels water from his neck and forearms with his shirt. He’s caught the sun. Too pale. 

‘No lifeforms.’ She says.

He shrugs, face hidden in shadow, breath curling visibly away from him. ‘Not surprising, it only has a limited radius. It doesn’t mean much.’

‘We’re both presumed dead.’ She adds. 

He snorts. ‘I guess it would be pretty embarrassing if the combined might of the First Order couldn’t locate two fugitives…’ 

‘Your mother thinks you’re dead’ she says carefully, watching him from the corner of her eye, shadowed against the sun.

‘Probably good that she does. Don’t tell her otherwise.’ She opens her mouth to protest, ‘She’d either want me to run straight to the Resistance, or she wouldn’t, which would be worse.’ She waits, eyeing him as he hangs his wet shirt to dry. ‘We should sleep, we don’t know how far we’ve got to go tomorrow.’ He looks into the night. 

‘Will you do my hair again?’ She asks, curled around the fire in a bundle of blankets. It’s much cooler by the river, and with no cave to block the wind, she’s truly cold for the first time, exhaustion and wind-chill setting her teeth chattering. 

‘Will you stop asking about my mother?’ He retorts, already combing it though with his fingers. 

She enjoys his simple warmth behind her, and looks into the strange green flames. ‘I probably won’t’ she smiles as his fingers graze her scalp. 

When they’d packed the tent, made the camp, cleared the ground, they’d pictured two bodies packed next to each other, the same way their old clothes were packed deep in the crates back at the cave. But now, curled in their blankets they’re aware that to fit they have to slot next to each other. In the cave they were never more than a few feet apart, but now they’re close enough that if they move to breathe they brush against each other. So they lie straight, staring unseeing into the roof of the tarp, defying their need for oxygen. 

‘Are you okay?’ Her voice is quiet, inches away in the pitch dark, seeming to surround him. ‘You’re meditating. You’re trying to be calm, I can tell.’ He doesn’t argue. ‘Is it because you’re dead?’ He smiles to himself, relaxes his arms to the side where they brush hers, curled on her side towards him.

He takes a deep shuddering breath. ‘Kylo Ren is dead.’ he pauses. "I knew that when I left my mask behind. Now, I’m back as myself…’ He pauses and she loses herself in the chorus of the forest around them. ‘But I still did all those things. Now I’m just me, a murderer, and a fugitive.’ There’s nothing to be said, the words hang there in the air, like mist. 

The temperature drops further in the night and she huddles instinctively closer to him. He’s schooling his emotions so as not to wake her, but lets the light touch of her hand on his shoulder selfishly soothe him, ground him, keep his thoughts from pulling him under. He hasn’t slept this close to another person since his youth at the academy, and if he’s honest with himself, he’s unlikely to sleep now. They are decently sheltered from any vantage point, nestled deep in forest, but otherwise only a thin tarp separates him from the eyes of the Universe bearing down on him. How did they not know where he was, selfishly lying in her cocoon of soothing warmth? How was he allowed to sleep, like any other animal, sheltered on this living and breathing moon, like he was one of them, like this was the end of any other day? It was an affront, something he’d stolen and has no entitlement to, resting his tired body as the lightest of rain taps above him. 

When she slowly starts to wake at dawn, he delicately removes his arm so she doesn’t know. She smiles a fragile inward smile as the warmth of the sunlight reaches her face and he steps out to stretch the stiffness from his body. His muscles hum with a sleepless euphoria, brain slowly surfacing from a deep hole he’d dug himself into as she slept. Watching the sky grey through the opening of their crude tent had bathed him in the cleansing scrutiny of the sunrise, and killed any childlike loathing at the back of his throat. His stupid worries feel burned out of him, as he stumbles over his words to break the long silence and greet her as if for the first time. 

She notes the shadow under his eyes as they eat, pouring him the lion's share of the caff automatically, tending to the whims of the temperamental machine that is her temporary companion. She is rested, he is not. She redistributes their supplies with a weighted look and they set off again. 

They resume their trek at first light, enjoying an unobstructed view of the system’s Sun blazing into view, slowly lightening the sky and bringing with it a layered orchestra of beasts greeting the day. In the cave the rock and rain had muted it all, but out of the other end of the seemingly endless storm, the forest creaks and moans into life again. The air is crisp and chilled, they walk in silence, in the hushed awe of sunrise.

Following the path of the river is no easy feat. It quickly becomes apparent that the course is man-made in nature, suddenly narrowing and banking around large hunks of reinforced concrete studded with rusted metal anchors, at some point mounting points for artillery. It is encouraging, even as they’re succumbing to the elements, flaking away in jagged chunks. At one point there had been people here, with a purpose for the land. It had been fortified. 

After a few hours walking, the water abruptly dips underground, but they follow the rumble of it, breath held, until it emerges in a torrent from the other side. They turn to head into the cover of the tree line as the sun climbs to its apex, beating down on them relentlessly, stinging eyes recently unaccustomed to daylight. She fares better, but much of his life has been spent on climate controlled ships. He blinks and squints as the harsh sun reflects off of the water and the damp ground surrounding it. He stills for a moment in relief as they step under cover of the trees. 

‘How far do you think we’ve traveled from the cave?’ He takes a drink from the canteen, wrinkling his nose at the chemical taste. 

‘Maybe ten kilometers’, she answers, kicking the ground clear to sit for a moment on the cool soil. ‘But I think we’ve traveled back on ourselves some.’ She takes the water. ‘I guess we just keep on moving until we find something. Hope we don’t end up back where we started.’ 

‘Those ships must have taken off from somewhere. Did you see which way they came from?’

‘Vaguely east from the cave. So we’re moving broadly in the right direction.’ She blindly grabs a handful of berries from a bush and eats them. 

‘You probably shouldn’t do that.’ He glances to the bush and shakes his head in disbelief. 

‘Why not? It’s energy. And I’ve been eating them for days. We've been eating them for days.’ 

‘I’d rather you didn’t shit yourself to death in the tent we have to share.’

‘I promise if I’m going to explode from both ends, I’ll do it outside the tent. That alright with you?’ He shrugs. 

The terrain is an unchanging procession of water and darkly leaved trees. The mud at their feet at times dries into dusty patches, but for hours all they hear are the birds keeping out of sight and each other's hoarse breathing. 

Do you see anything?

Nothing. 

Let’s keep going. 

It’s easier to speak into their minds than it is to form their scant breath into words, and they’re loath to disturb the introspective calm of pushing their body onwards, through the ache in their muscles and thrumming of their hearts, into a euphoric test of their resilience. They only slow as the light begins to fail them, and when nothing materializes on the horizon, they realize they must once again set up camp and wait to do it again tomorrow. 

They work in silence to assemble the small triangle of tarp, breaking off a few of the remaining fuel tablets to start a smoke-less fire and ward off the wet chill of nightfall. They have provisions for four more days of walking, either they find something tomorrow, or begin the journey back to where they started. Neither are ready to have the conversation about what that might mean. He watches her check and recheck her calculations, counting on tanned fingers their closing window of opportunity. There are more rations back at the cave, a few weeks worth if they’re careful, but much less if they’re to walk. But for him it's the simple idea of going back on himself he resists, the idea of passing again those same trees, the same measuring eyes, cloaked in his failure. 

They eat, passing tin and spoon back and forth between them, looking up at a blanket of stars. ‘The brighter one is Bogano. That reddish one might be Crait’ He supplies. She looks up and imagines her friends looking back at her, wondering if they’re mourning her, or if they have any inkling she’s right under their noses. Or if life had simply gone on in its without her. 

They wash and change, sliding into the blankets as a light drizzle starts up again. 

‘Does it ever not rain here?’ She muses as little rivers of rain trickle off the edges of the tarp to drum onto dried mud. 

‘I think it’s the result of terraforming. Someone at some point set up a weather system here.’ It is strange to think that this novelty for her was less a result of natural forces, but more the fact that nobody had ever judged Jakku to be worth the investment. Here riches of water fell from the sky with them their only witness. He feels it pressure on his chest.

‘Is it true people do this for fun? Leave their perfectly good homes and sleep on the ground for a change of pace?’ She rustles beside him, trying to tuck her feet in for maximum warmth. 

‘It’s true. I’ve done it as a child. I remember enjoying it.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Talked mostly, roasted food over the fire, listened to the rain. It was nice, away from everything my parents seemed to have less to argue about. They could pretend the rest of the Universe didn’t exist, I suppose…’

‘Hmm.’ She shifts to lie on her back beside him. ‘Strange what with all the stars up there, full of people looking down on you.’ She looks up at the tarp as if it’s a window. 

‘I guess that’s part of the reason. It makes you feel small in comparison.’

‘Does it make you feel small now?’ He blinks under the weight of her stare. His heart thunders in his chest and any words die in his throat. How does he feel now? Terrifying small and precious, yes, for the first time in his adult life almost entirely without direction beyond keeping their two bodies alive. But he also feels edgeless, feeling some great expanding balloon of exhilarating fear expanding in his chest, every nerve alive to her tiny shifts beside him. He wants to invite her into his mind, see if she can puzzle out what he’s feeling and help him to make sense of it, understand him so he can understand himself. He feels himself choking on his held breath, afraid if he lets it go he’ll shatter into a million pieces. 

He turns his head to hers, searching in her eyes for something to ground him, and she meets him with a soft smile. His breath eases out of him and he holds her gaze for a few moments before closing his eyes. 

He wakes in darkness that rivals space for its profundity to a body shaking beside him in a rustle of fabric. The rain is gone, and with it the sheltering cloud cover. As his eyes slowly acclimatise to the dark he gets to witness his breath being pulled away by the wind. She's too silent to be asleep. She's mimicking an imagined sleep too still and quiet to pass off as the real thing. Quickly, before the ache of cold and his racing thought can catch up to him, he turns and pulls her body back against his. 

He expects an immediate and furious attack, but that at least would do something to distract her from her suffering. Instead she chatters and apology, wrapping frozen arms over his.

'It's fine. Just try to get some sleep.'

'I know you don't like it when I touch you.'

He's grateful to be able to blame his wince on the cold leeching from her body to his. 'Whatever gave you that impression.' A denial he veils with sarcasm she's too tired not to be taken in by. 'Rey, it's fine. I promise.'

'It's my fault. I didn't bring enough clothes.'

'It's not like we have a lot of options.'

'But I know better.'

'I know you do. Look, if you die I'll never get off this rock. Call me selfish if you want, I'd rather not die here.'

'Okay.' She smiles and he can hear her teeth clack against each other with redoubled strength. 'You're selfish.' 

'Very funny. Didn't know I was marooned with a comedian...'

He focuses on the expansion of her chest, slowly deepening as her body lets go of some of it's tension. Gradually her shivering begins to ocellate between slight and severe, slowly softening and losing momentum. A wave expending all its energy on an unyielding shore. 

'Why are you so much warmer than me?' The barest accusatory lilt to her voice as her brain sharpens and latches onto their current situation.

'I'm bigger than you and you've got less body fat. I'm spoiled remember?'

'Good thing you are. Remind me to send them a gift after we get out of this.'

'Rey. Go to sleep.'

'Didn't work for you last time, what makes you think it will now?'

If he were more petty and more suicidal he would point out to her in the morning how she was asleep within minutes of saying that. But if he did he would have to admit how long he spent in the dark trying to quiet a screaming brain, painfully aware of every minute shift of her body against his as if she were barbed instead of the tiny wiry person he can feel drifting deeper into sleep against him. She would not want to know that he could feel each heartbeat at the back of his throat as he tried to will himself into meditation. A gap in his training, he should be practiced enough to do it at will. It should not matter if she pulls him slightly closer in her sleep. He is warm and she isn't. He should follow her unconscious attempt to bring them to an equilibrium. Take it for the lesson that it is and no more. Just another conversation in the dark they will pretend is a half forgotten dream. 

Chapter Text

He awakes to a feeling like the air has changed around him, the kind of drop in pressure that might signify a storm coming. But the light is clarifying and clear, the sky cloudless for a change. She’s not under the tarp, but she’s close. He can hear her shuffling in her boots and grumbling and the strike of the flint that doesn’t want to take. He toes on his own shoes to head to the river and peer down it, looking for anything unnatural poking out of the trees. They flex in a soundless wave for as far as he can see. 
When he heads back to their makeshift camp, the flames are just starting to consume the fuel tablets, and she nestles a canteen in with them in a seeming attempt to snuff them out again.

‘I slept like a happabore ‘, she pokes petulantly at a handful of steaming kindling.

‘How does a happabore sleep?’ he probes, trying to quietly fold himself down next to her.

‘Shittily.’ She scowls down at the wet wood, sputtering and cracking in the heat. 'But thank you.'

'I'd like to think you'd do the same, but right now I'm not so sure.'

Her eyes widen with a retort she pushes down with commendable effort, eyes climbing to the sky in a silent laugh. ‘Why does everything here have to be so wet all the time?’ He’s gratified to see her scowl slowly weaken into a smile. ‘You know me, I’ll always find something to complain about.’ She shakes her head, ‘anyway, food.’

They eat, and pack away their things, but Rey’s little sighs of annoyance slowly become more frequent and more emphatic. She rounds on him after they’ve slung their packs over their filthy clothes once more. He takes a reflexive step back.

‘What do we do if we don’t find anything today?’ He knows she knows, she just needs to hear him say it.

‘We head back the way we came and get more supplies from the cave.’ She sinks a little onto her heels. ‘We can walk in the other direction, or see if we can salvage anything from the escape pod.’ He tries to catch her lowered gaze, with no success. ‘The moon isn’t that big, if there’s anything here, we’ll find it.’

‘And if there isn’t? If there isn’t anything here?’ 

‘We get a message out to someone.’ She colors with shame at the memory of destroying her beacon. ‘If there’s anyone looking for us, we can send a message somehow. Being found by the Order is marginally better than dying in a cave.’

She nods, and sets off walking, eyes on her feet as they trudge obediently on. She doesn’t contradict him, even as his brain screams in protest against his own words.

There were people she knew, whose lives had briefly intersected with hers, who’d left in search of salvage and never returned. She would find occasionally amongst downed starships and decrepit buildings a crouched and curved skeleton, picked clean by sand and heat, bones polished cream-white. She would search in the craters of their skulls for some resemblance of those who had simply never come back to the outpost, the seam of an old fracture on the tiny bones, a scrap of fabric nestled in the cover of a sagging ribcage. She had thought often, as her stomach clenched with hunger, of the place in which she would fall and never get up, if there would be anyone there to pass by her skeleton and utter a prayer for her spirit before taking the remnants of her pockets. 

This could be the place, she thinks, as an angry cloud looms on the horizon and draws closer to the sun as if tied by a string to their traipsing feet. She would fall into the mud with a final flurry of leaves and moss, raining down soundlessly on her skin. Animals would pick around her, nudging questioningly at her sallow skin before forgetting her in an instant. Nobody to look for her, no genetic thread hiding a piece of her in someone else’s thrumming body, she would die and fall apart like any other animal. She hopes, selfishly, that she would fall first and be spared the knowledge of knowing what the finality of death would look like on his face, the curve of the smile that would tattoo itself onto her brain until her last instant. 

She breathes in deep and reaches out for balance, bolstering her limbs with mental effort, trying to hush her mind and reach a point of black acceptance as the slight contents of her stomach churns. It is suicide, she knows, to give into thoughts like these as she stomps too hard at the ground and feels the ligaments around her knees stab in protest. She squares her jaw and focuses on the sound of the water coursing beside her, and the awareness of his figure walking beside her, eyes downcast and unseeing. 

She spots it before he does, a carved slope leading away from the water, and poking between a thick cover of foliage, a mossy corner of a building. They approach with hushed breath, picking their way carefully into the forest once again, with a borrowed, dizzy lightness. The shape slowly comes into view, a large oblong structure, covered in crawling overgrowth and slowly being subsumed by the life around it.

‘It’s an FO outpost.’

They crouch in the treeline watching for movement. Any lifeforms? Her silky voice in his head momentarily stalls him, before he shakes himself and checks the holopad readout with shaking hands, grateful she didn’t turn her attention to his doom-laden thoughts. Nobody except themselves. There were ways to disguise such things, but a place like this had no need of them, being predominantly, if not entirely uninhabited. FO presence here is simply an exercise in control and visibility. Not invisibility. 

Perhaps it's only seasonally used. She flicks her eyes to his in silent question. She doesn’t need to enter his mind to know he shares her itch for movement, the need to do something, finally. They duck out of the trees to approach the door, thickly riveted and recessed into an aggressively square and artificial structure, a boot stamped into the mud of the lush forest. 

The door? She’s already craning to scan the building for other points of entry. The door is armored, but the walls surrounding appear to be corrugated plasteel. They could slice their way in, if they don’t care about subtlety. 

Could try an engineering code, there are a few system-wide defaults. She watches as he punches one into the keypad, letting out a chuckle as the door opens with a toneless buzz. Her stomach lurches at the value of the information shared with her without hesitation, looking back into the forest with the taste of blood at the back of her throat. 

‘Is the use of those codes monitored?’ she asks, not trusting her thoughts not to change in his mind. 

‘Possible. Unlikely for a base of this size. We’ll keep scanning.’ 

As they duck into the cold artificial light of the base, glow panels flicking on at their motion, they become aware of a stateless to the air. Dry conditioned air, but air that hasn’t moved for a while. Nobody runs to intercept them for walking uninvited onto a military base. A sensor bleeps a low power warning weakly a few rooms over, its tone quavering. 
They pass through one sterile pre-fabricated room to another, a dormant command post, translucent displays frosted with dust. Barracks with stripped thin mattresses laying bare on their frames. A cafeteria with crumbs and water rings still on the tables. 

‘They left here quickly,’ she notes, ‘there’s still pallets on the top racking.’ 

He looks into the shadow, his brow furrowed. ‘Standard procedure, all equipment is to be inventoried and redeployed.’ His eyes track up to the ceiling, studded with cold LEDs. 

‘This seems pretty non-standard.’ She says to herself. 

They do a walking check of each room, hands hovering over the sabers at their belts, silently expecting to open a door to a room of shiny Troopers and a few stammering Officers as the fugitives walk right into their laps. Nobody he would know would be manning a base like this, by the looks of it its a simple regional outpost, staffed with a few hundred FN units to be deployed primarily as a law enforcement. They step past a door, propped open with a crate, to find another command room, floor streaked with rubber in angry swipes. 

She slips into an unyielding plastic chair and taps the power on a monitor. The display blinks into life with a list of clipped communiques stuffing on in sequence. Re-allocation in Paloma system, restructuring on Targonn. They slide and replace, names blurring into one until it gives them vertigo.

‘They’re pulling out of the Outer Rim.’ She frowns at the display. ‘These are all from the last few days, what are they mobilizing for?’ She turns to him, he drags his eyes from the still un-ending string of bulletins to look at her. His hands rests lightly on the back of her chain, hair slightly brushing them as she turns, shocking him out of his hypnotism.

‘I don’t know.’ He breathes. Fear, for the first time in days, pouring into him like a cold fluid. 

‘Well whoever was here is definitely gone’, she says, inclining her head to a pinned communique commanding the immediate removal of ground forces from the Bogano system, dated a few months in the past. 

‘We can stay here for a few days.’ She nods in agreement.

They reseal the door, its bolts thumping into place with a dull clang. They pass back through sterile corridors and rooms, a few scattered leaves stirring as they disturb the air around it. Save for them, there is no hint of the forest inside. The high windows are frosted with the residue from the constant rain, and each room is kept at a steady temperature, slightly below comfort for them, clothed only in thin undershirts. His cloak is back at the cave and the atmosphere is regulated for uniformed soldiers. With the exertion of their hours of walking wearing off, it’s cold. She rubs her tanned arms as they walk. 

The officers quarters are well appointed and self contained at the very center of the complex. Displays spring to life at their urging, proximity monitors and feeds broadcasting in clerical sterility the base empty of all life, as if hundreds of bodies had just stepped off screen into a dead zone between cameras, only to never re-materialize. They are truly alone. 

‘Nothing in the way of weapons except a few broken blasters.’ She brushes off her hands after jamming open a locked cabinet. ‘We could probably fix them.’ He shrugs. ‘Help me get those crates down.’ She jerks her head for him to follow. He stands from where he’s been trawling through the bulletins, trying to get a shape of whatever had ripped the Order out of a huge chunk of the galaxy to leave a charged void.

They head back to storage, he boosts her up to climb off his shoulders and hook onto the racking. She pulls herself up with a grunt and begins working the crates towards the shelf edge. ‘Find anything?’ She’d begun scavenging for supplies, him, intelligence. 

‘They left quickly, no reason given. They’re being pulled back to the Core worlds.’ He reaches out as a gray shape presses into view from the shadow. He hears a hollow knock as she hooks her feet into the racking to stretch the crate down to him, arms shaking with strain.

‘This part of some plan I don’t know about?’ She ducks back into the dark to feed another one down. 

‘Not that I know of.’ She hops down onto the piled crates, grabbing a shoulder for balance. Curled tendrils of hair stick to the sweat on her forehead. 

‘Let’s see what we’ve got.’ Rations, the same as they’d taken from the pod. She tries valiantly yet still fails to disguise her disappointment as she looks at the vacuum sealed foil bricks. Between them and the filtered water system they’d left too quickly to disable, they’d be safe here and fed for the foreseeable future. He digs between a fissure in the tessellated packets, one section slightly raised above the rest. He removes a large box and opens it, breathing out a laugh.

‘To boost morale’, he angles the box to her and she scans the labeled packets. ‘It’s a selection of culturally significant food products from all the major systems. Part of a program to preserve cultural heterogeneity, even through conformity.’ He shrugs and she wrinkles her nose at him.

‘I’ve never even heard of half of these’, she drags her fingertips over them like jewels. 

They store it all in the tiny kitchen. It was clear officers rarely prepared their own meals, the utensils and cookware still shiny with the factory coating, but it was set up with a halogen oven and a cooler, to sustain the illusion they were free to do so. A few doors down they find a well appointed bank of showers, sonic and water, twinned with sinks and basins, and off to the side, the CO’s bathroom.

‘A bathtub. People actually take baths? I thought that was made up.’ She turns to him accusingly ‘horrendous waste of water, you could keep fifty men alive with that water.’

‘Don’t look at me’, he holds his hands up in surrender. The bath is a few steps away from a dry heater, the floor made of silica-sponge. It was intended to be used, after all. His quarters on the Supremacy has been equipped with a sonic shower only. Sufficient to kill any bacteria on the skin, but seemingly designed to leave you with the feeling of dirt clinging to your skin like a corona. Interesting. ‘The water’s recycled, you can use it if you want…’ 

‘I don’t like the idea of stewing in my own filth’ she curls her lip at the tub. 

‘It’s nice, you should try it.’ He moves to the door and she levels one last lacerating look at the tub. 

They sit at the table for dinner, eyes flitting nervously to the side to the readout monitoring the base. Guess that habit doesn’t need breaking just yet. All systems active and running fine. Nobody but them. The isolation is worse here, with thirty walls dividing them from the rain outside, instead of none. They stay in the Officer’s quarters, and then the corner of the quarters, the intersection of the living, sleeping and bathing quarters, a tiny knot of life. 

These quarters have open access to the holonet, and for the first time they look at the world from outside the miopic lens of the First Order, careful not to submit any search requests or pull any data, simply skim what it is freely broadcast Temako celebrates independence as their government announces an end to FO surveillance on the planet. Unrest in Paloma as enforcement patrols disappear overnight. Tension in Corelia as local police are replaced twofold with Stormtroopers.

‘We’re already old news.’ They watch footage of crowds undulating in the streets of jewel colored planets, and gnaw on nutrient bars. Nothing on the Resistance, just signs everywhere of the Order drawing their tendrils into a death grip on the Core worlds, leaving relief and confusion in their wake.

He slices a chunk of cream colored fruit and hands it to her. They watch in silence as the game of the galaxy moves in front of them, their pieces already off the board. It’s a comforting powerless anonymity, she slides back to lean her head against the bench back as the bright tang of the unfamiliar fruit floods her mouth. ‘Help me sort the bath.’ 

Neck deep in clear water, she loses the boundary of where her body ends. Her muscles ripple, the twinge of days of hiking and unhealed training injuries (not much point when they’d probably injure themselves again the next day) soothed from a hum to silence. Her mouth falls open, boneless. 

‘I can see why people do this’ she concedes with a dopey smile, ‘even if it is probably the least efficient way of getting clean.’ He’d waited behind the closed door as she’d lowered herself into the water, unsure on how hot to make the water. He’d settled on scalding. His face was still sweating from it. A search had also turned up new and sealed clothing for them, and a sonic cleaner for the sweaty rags they’d come in in. Finding them alone was worth the blisters, he sets some aside for her. 

‘Getting clean is more of a side effect’ he raises his voice through the door. She hums in response. ‘Mostly it's for relaxation.’

‘I can understand that. I feel like a bowl of scavstew.’

‘I hope that’s a good thing’, he smiles and turns to leave her to it.

‘What would happen if someone attacked us right now?’ He turns back to puzzle over her non-sequitur. ‘I guess we’d regain the element of surprise…’ a splash, ‘unless they come from a culture where nakedness is the default.’ Water drums against the floor. ‘But I guess in that case we’d still have the advantage as you’re clothed. And dry…’

‘Rey, what are you doing?’ 

‘Having a bath and talking strategy with you. Come in here so I don’t have to shout, it’s hindering my ability to commit to relaxation.’

‘Isn’t concentrating on relaxing a little oxymoronic?’ 

‘No more than focusing on clearing your mind is. Come in and close your eyes.’

‘Just a strategic point’ he grasps his way over to her, hand over his eyes, ‘we’re very vulnerable to attack right now.’ He lowers his hand and sets back to rest against the tub, arms folded on bent knees. 

‘Right now, I honestly don’t care. I think I’ve finally reached the point I would just accept if someone found us. Good job nobody’s coming.’ He hears the slosh of her turning behind him. 

‘I don’t understand why they’re not’ he admits into the steam.

‘Maybe you’re not as important as you think you are.’ She smiles and it leeches into her words, softening their edges.

‘Maybe not.’ A pause in which he digs his feet into the lightly padded floor, trying to still his spinning brain with logic. ‘We killed the Supreme Leader of the First Order, and all of his guards. But nobody’s coming.’ 

She moves behind him. ‘You worry too much’, she props her chin on the side of the tub near his shoulder, ‘maybe you need a bath.’ She rakes a wet hand through his hair and he leans back into the touch. ‘You’re definitely greasy enough’ she murmurs into his ear. 

They sit in the warm humid air until the water starts to cool. He fetches some towels and her clothes and leaves them in a neat pile, taking his own blissful shower before heading back to the recreational space to find them a drink. She hears him banging his way through cupboards and cabinets, emerging skin flushed all over, with a languid calm going bone deep.

She falls asleep curled on the bench beside him, forgotten drink still steaming on the table. He’ll wake her in twenty minutes and send her to bed. For now, it’s just comforting to see her draw in deep even breaths beside him as he reads more and knows less and less. In their time in the cave, the world had re-oriented around them. Nothing was familiar now except the whine of her inhale and the drift of one curled tendril of hair at the movement. He can look at her now, in unflinching light, the tan on her face and ears, her frizzy braid curling around her neck. She opens her eyes under the scrutiny, and narrows them at him. 

Her looks is murderous when he suggests he take the first watch as she slept. He dutifully lay down like a board beside her and compromised to watch from here, setting into a night of meditation and calm awareness. It had comforted them both, in the tent, to be within arms reach, in case they were discovered. But it comforts him now, for reasons he can’t fully and practically explain. Perhaps it's the familiarity of it, as their living situation had changed so drastically in the last few days, this hadn’t substantially changed. He is asleep within minutes, readout blinking silently to no-one. 

Chapter Text

It is heaven to wake up in dry air-conditioned air, with readouts dutifully reassuring them that nothing is amiss. The Officer’s Quarters weren’t stripped like the barracks were, sheets and blankets still on the bed, pillows even. He counts it as a small miracle that they do not hold themselves to the same standards as they do their men, even if his nose curls a little at the thought of having climbed mindlessly into the unwashed sheets of career bureaucrats. They could be sanitized, everything can be sanitized.

She smiles in her sleep, and wakes with a happy yawn. ‘I’ve never slept in a proper bed before.’ Her joy is simple and untroubled. He tries to share it. 

They take turns washing in the shower, simply because they can, another decadent display of water. She complains, but she uses it, luxuriating in the same slightly menthol-scented soap used seemingly universally amongst the Order. Someone out there was making a huge amount of money off of their pursuit of uniformity. But even if they smelt the same as anyone else, the Officers slept on soft (still gray) sheets and used the plushest embroidered towels known throughout the galaxy. 

‘I can brush my teeth!’ her shout echoes in the stalls. The bathroom was furnished with enough mylar wrapped toothbrushes that the whole base could be scrubbed with them top to bottom, should one wish to exercise their petty control. It’s something he could imagine Hux ordering.

She kicks her feet under the table as she samples a range of rations, savory, sweet and everything in between. He watches her quizzically as she dips synthetic spiced bogwing in a viscous slime. It’s all variations on freeze-dried and vacuum sealed, but in texture and variety it is miles above what they’ve recently grown accustomed to. But after a few minutes of frenzied sampling, she’s full and onto the next thing, pulling a holopad towards her work on their next move. 

‘There’s a space dock out back.’ She breaks their silence, sitting forward over the screen.

‘Hmm’. He looks up from his reader. 

She turns her holopad to him, zoomed on a clutch of buildings at the base perimeter. ‘Probably cleared out, but worth checking out if we’re going to get off this rock anytime soon…’

They slide on their boots aggravating the map of angry blisters there and trace the circumference of the building, picking through concrete foundations falling into broken muddy fragments. It’s misting with rain, hanging in the air and dampening their clothing instantly without any discernible drops. They feel the wet fabric move against their skin with each step. Still, the fresh air is a welcome change from the recycled atmosphere of the base, tinged with the smell of wet wood and alliums. It would be easier to believe that the last twenty-four hours had been the daydream of their still walking selves than the reality. That they have been disconnected from their true selves, picking back over familiar ground, their remaining days dwindling with each footstep. But she turns to him, the embroidered emblem at her collar shining in the sun. If this were a dream, he'd picture her in white.

What happens if there’s nothing there? The voice in his head is flat, if underlined with anxiety. 

Search further afield. We don’t know what else is on this moon. She nods, curtly. They know what the location scouts for the base had recorded, ‘uninhabited, high moisture and oxygen content, fertile soil.’ All the basis for human life, yet seemingly none to be found. 

The ground begins to slope away under their feet, before curling them round parallel to a raised strip of dirt, reinforced with a cage of metal grating, fortifications against the near constant rain. She digs her feet into the mud to climb up onto the runway, peering down the length of it to nod her head at a cluster of hangars at one end.
The rolling shutters are unlocked and rattling in their frames in their exposed elevation. All bar one is empty, a lone junk shuttle left behind to rot.

‘What do you think’s wrong with it?’ She releases the entry ramp with a short stab of the heel of her palm. ‘Catch is sticky.’ She notes. It is, in all honesty, a hunk of junk. The engines are clogged with branches and leaf litter, most likely blown in by the storm. The exterior paint is bubbled up in a topological pattern of rust and decay. The air smells of damp and mould, even the most cursory of pre-flight checks fail. It stays resolutely silent and still. The solar clock had exhausted its battery two months ago, but the craft clearly hasn’t left the atmosphere in years.

Tramping hollowly off the craft, they peer further into the dim shadow of the hangar. Metal racks are piled with softened boxes turning to pulp, metal shapes poke out, some still wrapped, some caked with grease and oil. She clangs them back down after turning them greedily in her hands. She rips the cover off of a partially dis-addembled cockpit and fuselage, in a flurry of leaves. 

‘You’re not going to try to fix it?’ He ducks into her view as she looks between the two pitiful crafts. 

‘I’m going to try, yes. Once I’ve figured out what’s wrong with it.’

‘Almost everything by the looks of it’ he circles the craft, stepping over branches, tipped over trollies and step wheels. ‘There’s no landing gear, for one.’ 

‘I’ll take a proper look at it tomorrow. I need to figure out if I’ve got the tools first.’ She begins lobbing tools onto the dust sheet, metal clanging jarringly against metal. ‘You can go back if you want. I’m going to gather what I can before the sun sets and get those solar panels out and charging.’ He gives her a weighted look. ‘I can speak directly into your mind, remember? I’m not going to die on this lifeless moon because I’m out of shouting distance.’ 

He turns and leaves her to it, happily naming each gadget before flinging it unceremoniously onto the heap. He picks his way back down the path to the sound of rusty metal dragging against damp concrete. Luke really had been serious about not using the Force to float things. Or maybe she just wanted to feel her body haul the awkward thing into the light under her own steam. 

He steps into the base with a languid satisfaction suffusing his limbs and is swallowed by its soundless yawn. Time since Snoke hadn’t been without silence, Rey oscillated wildly between feverish chattiness and the unthinking silence of one used to a solitary life. But for the first time in over a week, he is alone in his silence. 

He heads back to their little corner of the base to shrug out of his damp clothes and into new ones, setting the rest of the rations and water with the new ones. He tips his filthy clothing in to be cleaned and does the same with hers, setting their sabers down on the table. Much of the barracks area was still largely unexplored, found clear of life, but they hadn’t fully checked yet for anything left behind in the hasty evacuation. They need more options, for getting off the moon, for exploring the forest outside hopefully not on foot. He sets off to busy himself with something vaguely productive.

They did a bad job evacuating. I could have then written up. He sends the thought to her.

Do it. I’d like to see that red-haired womp rat choke on his morning caff. She sends him the image, picked out in obsessive detail. It does work then. 

The rooms are cavernous, thirty beds to a room, close enough to reach from one bed to the neighbouring one with a stretch of an arm. All manner of tales would have been whispered here at night, rumors spread by kids and taken with them as souvenirs before they were absorbed into the First Order. Legends of their own cultural past, distorted through years of telling to a shifting audience of broadly similar homesick youths. Troopers were routinely shuffled and split up so as to ensure homogeneity and conformity. They'd forget whose tales they tell, hands reaching up into the dark to grasp the shape of a fading memory.

A glass is left behind on a nightstand, base frosted with deposit. A sheet is balled up behind a bed frame where someone struggled and failed to remove it in time. A small pile of rations is stacked neatly under another. He scoops them into the bag and heads back to their quarters via the Mess hall. She’d already checked it, but it wouldn’t hurt to look again. He runs his hand along a crumb strewn surface. His fingers still on a carving, designation numbers, Stormtrooper unit, arranged in an acrostic, etched into the table-top, defiantly indivisible. 

There's a few canisters of something, tucked up in the back of the pantry, too high for her to reach without climbing. He chucks them in the bag and heads back to the kitchen of their quarters. There’s something he hasn’t eaten since he was a child, something made by his parents in a rare fit of nostalgia for their days in the Rebellion. A hearty mix of shelf stable rations he’d found surprisingly delicious, and enjoyed it with them during one of their good periods. When she was too happy to have him home to pry into the length of his delay, and he was too excited to share his editorialised tales with a fresh and willing audience for the restless itch to demand his attention. Rey will like it. It’s food. 

She returns sweaty and triumphant, stooping to peek into the pot gurgling away on the heat. 

‘Good news is your guys left behind pretty much every tool we could ever need. Ooooo…’ She reads the cans and bounces on the balls of her feet. ‘Bad news is even a cursory glance and I know this could take weeks.’ Her ‘cursory glance’ had meant crawling into the bowels of the ship and inspecting its tangle of live and dead wiring from inside its guts. He’d seen a flash of her view like a blink, when she tugged a rusted capacitor from its seat and the air filtration system whined and fluttered into fleeting life. Her joy lighting up the scene like the sun. She could do it. He’d resumed scraping the contents of the latest can into the pot, adding another mental note to the tangled shape of their bond in his mind. 

She’s looking at him and he doesn't know what to do with it.

‘We’re good for food, and nobody seems to be looking for us. All things considered not bad for a couple of fugitives.’ He flashes her a roughish smile.

‘I’ll go wash up.’ She disappears into the fresher. He’ll tell her about what he saw later, after dinner. It would only make her uncomfortable about washing, and it wouldn’t make a difference anyway. As if they hadn’t felt nearly every inch of each other’s bodies in combat. 

He hydrates a grainy puck of enriched bread for their meal and sets it at the table. She moves it gently to sit cross legged in its space. 

‘We eat here’ he sighs, moving behind her to dutifully draw her damp hair into the customary braid. 

‘What’s for dinner?’ Her eyes are closed, hands folded limply in her lap. 

‘Endorian Army Stew. The finest mix of military rations credits can’t buy.’ She hops down from the table to slide into her customary seat before leaning her chin in her palm. 

‘We’ll start proper diagnostics in the morning. I’ll make us a big breakfast, you’re not a morning person.’ She smiles brightly at him. He sets the steaming bowl down in front of her, replacing the bread. She tears a chunk from it, dipping it into the broth before shoving it into her mouth. ‘S’good.’ She swallows. ‘What’s in it.’ She listens, eyes glassy, mechanically spooning stew into her mouth.

‘...you’re not listening to me.’

She shakes her head. ‘I’m just relieved we can finally do something proactive to get us off this moon’, she sighs. 

‘Do you know where you want to go? After.’ He asks.

She furrows her brow before chuckling. ‘I hadn’t thought about it. I just imagine myself sat in the pilot’s chair, stars streaking past me at lightspeed…’ She sighs again. ‘I guess I’ll go back to the Resistance, if they’ll still have me.’ He tilts his head in question. ‘After aiding and abetting Kylo Ren for weeks and completely ignoring them all.’ She shrugs. ‘What about you?’ She looks down into her nearly empty bowl, trying to read her fortune in the remnants at the bottom. ‘Where do you want to go?’

He sucks in a deep breath. It’s not like he hadn’t thought about it. But so far his plans had been as detailed as getting from one day to the next. Now there was a timeframe, a loose one, but still. Now there was the need to deal with the ‘after’. Of potentially rejoining a Universe  that maybe wasn’t actively hunting him, but would enjoy to see his murderous self eradicated. She had people to go to. And when she’s gone, it’ll just be him again.

‘I don’t know’, he admits. ‘I guess I’ll see what my options are when we get to that.’ She hums. 

They watch an old holoseries into the night, too energised to train their minds, too tired to train their bodies. There little corner is illuminated in the dim light, a nest of blankets and cups. It’s an old melodrama set in the pre-Republic era, full of tense political murmuring, eavesdropping and layered coded messages.

‘They can’t possibly not realise Thatan is behind the coup. It’s got his grubby prints all over it, are these people idiots?’ She rips off a chunk of veg-leather violently with her teeth. ‘I don’t know why we’re still watching this garbage.’ They don’t turn it off, until shivering with tiredness, they crawl to the bed and fall into a deep blank sleep, her fingers clasping his sleeve in an iron grip.

Chapter Text

He’s awakened by clattering and swearing coming from the kitchen, dumping him unceremoniously into another day. He throws an arm over his eyes chasing the lingering feeling of sleep, before deciding after a string of particularly creative expletives reach him to check she hasn’t chopped something off or set something on fire. 

‘Morning, caff’s on the table.’ He scans her quickly for injuries, finding none and slumping into his spot. Their combined dining, relaxation and strategizing area, somehow in an entire base made for hundreds, they’d allocated themselves even less space than in the cave. They sleep in the same bed, initially a habitual thing, from their days camping and forced into each other's space and warmth. The base is climate controlled and massive, but they didn’t separate. There's no practical reason, its a languid comfort that must bleed over from sleep, he tells himself. That must be why he doesn't care that she'd picked his shirt from the pile in the dark. It's not really truly his, anyway, just something he'd taken with no true entitlement to. He can't blame her for the mistakes of her sleep smothered brain. He left his capacity for thoughts of this kind back in the tangled sheets. 

‘I’ve made round cakes with some mystery preserve, vegmeat, lilac-grain porridge, and dug out the last of that weird fruit we had the other day. After this we’re going straight to the hangar.’ 

He sips a fragile mouthful of caff and clears his throat. ‘Give me a minute.'

She scoffs at him over her shoulder, frayed braid sliding down her back. ‘Why are you so grouchy all of a sudden? You weren’t like this back at the cave.’ She dumps the last of the grilled cakes onto a dish and deposits the dirtied pans into the sink with a teeth scraping clatter. 

‘In the cave I wasn’t allowing myself to sleep fully. I was mostly just meditating…’

She turns back to him and his eyes lazily flick to hers. ‘For an entire week?’

‘It’s caught up to me now. Now there’s an actual bed to sleep in.’ If she comments on it, she'll have to answer the question as to why she sleeps at his side. Instead she heaps a pile of food onto his plate and he obediently begins eating around mouthfuls of caff.

‘What’s our itinerary for the day?’ 

Her face cracks into a grin, launching into it. ‘Well…’

He tries and fails to keep up with her, resorting to trailing behind, holopad in hand, just to have something to do with his hands. The most use he can offer being handing tools up to her grasping hands and learning to interpret the nebulous hand signals she employs to request another. She’s hanging by her knees from the rusted roof rack to peel faulty wiring from its moulding as he hovers somewhat awkwardly. 

‘This will all need to be replaced’ she flings the roughly bundled cabling into his arms, ‘write that down.’

‘What will need to be replaced, exactly?’ She huffs. Another wordless signal he can add to her vocabulary, a slight head tilt and narrowing of her eyes translating to isn’t it blindingly obvious?

‘The regulatory circuits for the thermal exchange.’ She wipes her greasy hands on her thighs. He nods, knowingly. She laughs at him, a rumbling sound that squeezes it's way from her as she hooks her elbow for a better vantage point to measure his body with her eyes. It's nothing new, to feel people adjust their view of him as he fails to meet their assumptions, but they rarely do it with a smile.

‘Hey! I just know how to fly them, not fix them.’ 

‘Didn’t you ever work on the Falcon with Han?’ She curls back to the roof, pushing through crumbling foam to poke her head into the insulated cavity and extract the blockage with a frown. A bird's nest. He steps over it to follow her as she crawls back into the dark.

‘The Falcon is a piece of junk…’ he aims vaguely in her direction, blinking dust from eyes already scratchy from poor sleep. 

‘Exactly’ she gestures towards a grav-wrench through a thatch of tangled wiring, frayed cabling set swaying like grass by her movement. He passes it up into her grasp and once again he loses sight of her to the gloom. ‘Doesn’t matter, we’ll figure it out.’ He smiles benignly up at her approximate position, swiping at fallen leaves with his feet. 

‘I’ve been thinking about that actually…’

‘Yeah’ she breathes, straining to loosen a seized bolt.

‘There’s a Force technique I remember reading about. Mostly used in saber construction. You deconstruct an item in your mind so you can construct it again and intuit how it works.’

‘Did you use it when you built your saber?’ The bolt gives way with a teeth ringing scrape of rust. 

‘Not sure’, he squints, ‘but if it works we might be able to use it to help diagnose what’s wrong.’ 

His eyes are drawn back to the ground, his eyes spotting as she flings a panel back out of the opening before crawling further in. Little puffs of dust fall around his head and onto the boots that mutely follow her, pulled along by a taut string that had woven around them as they slept. ‘What are you looking for?’ He pulls himself around a jagged bolt plate for some removed seating. 

‘Emergency life support reset. It needs rebooting after being drained for so long.’ She drives a lever home with a clunk and fans whirr into life around them. She peers down from above, hair loosened and dangling down above him. ‘One step closer to freedom, Solo.’ 

They call it a day after she falls through the roof of the cockpit into his arms, curling out and away from his accusing glare like it's a blaster bolt. Many of the baseline functions are back up and running in some capacity, recharging the many depleted tanks and batteries needed to test the more sophisticated systems. A few things were somewhat broken, and many more definitely so, and in need of either bypass or replacement. She takes back to their quarters a handful of filthy wire-trailing chunks and deposits them on the table.

‘Once again, we eat here, Rey.’

She shushes him with a lazy wave of her hand. ‘Can we try that technique after dinner?’

He picks up the parts and moves them to a nearby shelf as she gives the table a perfunctory wipe with her sleeve. He raises his eyebrow at her as he catches her in the movement before he's trapped in a quick, tight hug. His arms are still pinned to his side in shock as she bounds off to the fresher.

‘I’m too tired to try any Force crap right now’, she shrugs around a mouthful of something carby and vaguely sweet. He begrudgingly ate it, but she seems unbothered by the gritty and artificial taste of the fortified hyper-processed "nourishment" and eats it with the same frantic energy with which she attacks all food. It's as good a reason as any to stop eating it, so he takes it.

He leans back and folds his arms across his chest. ‘That Force crap has saved us multiple times...’

‘I know, I just don’t want to do anything right now.’ She looks between him and his food with a exaggerated slowness, before relenting with a roll of her eyes. 

‘You could go to bed?’

She wrinkles her nose at the prospect and shakes her head, hand darting out to take the rest of the bread from his plate seemingly without any conscious decision to do so. ‘If I sleep now I won’t wake up at the right time tomorrow.’ She's lost in her thoughts as she tears off a bite, her eyebrows furrowing, blinking through a slew of something he can only vaguely guess at. An assessment of their situation and the ways in which it almost entirely deviates from what either of them view as normal. The itch in her limbs slowly abrading her, telling her to get back to what it known, what is expected, even if it brings pain.

‘It hardly matters, it’s not like we're on a schedule.’ He feels the same tiredness seeping through his bones and leans on his palm, elbow on the table. 

Her eyes climb to the ceiling, working her jaw, gritting her teeth to forge through an explanation ill-fitting and glaringly false. ‘It’s practical if I sleep when you sleep, and you’re not going to bed right now, so.' She sighs, the movement deflating her into a slump. 'What do you usually do at this time of the day when you’re too tired to function?’

‘Read, mostly.’ He aims a tight smile her way. It's not entirely untrue, but he hasn't allowed himself the indulgence of true rest for many years. But there's a time when he did and when reading had been a true comfort, where he could escape his own brain for a few hours and into someone else's. It lost some of his appeal when he found he could trespass for real, found that people's minds weren't like stories, full of little gaps his mind filled in with his own experiences. People's brains are singular and selfish. Their memories rarely reach beyond themselves, with a few faces at the fuzzy periphery. The commonality he found was an mirroring of self-absorbed fear, and one last comfort was stripped from him. But there is a chance for Rey, and a possibility that maybe he could share a part of it. 

‘Good idea, we could do with learning more about what’s going on out there.’ She lazily trails her eyes around the room, still expecting troopers to seep up through the floor or emerge from the shadows, before settling them back on him. ‘Give us your best status report.’ She smiles, glancing at the holopad set aside while they ate. She settles in dramatically, wiggling down in the seat to rest her head back and draws a blanket over her lap to tuck her hands under. ‘In your own time.’ Her eyes are closed, mouth pulled into a closed-lip smile. Relief and disappointment tumble over each other in his stomach. He doesn't get to steal glances of her as she falls into her reading, but the sound of her humming quietly as his voice fills the air is its own comfort. 

The reports are nothing new. He settles in to retracing the same familiar steps. FO troops redistributed from various planets, increased presence in more central sectors, splinter governments calling for unity in an increasingly unstable time. Every now and again there will be a vague reference to them, of the violent coup which the Order continually refuses to make further statements on. He had reasoned and anticipated that Hux would want the unparalleled pleasure of announcing his rival’s death and ultimate duplicity. But his drawl is nowhere to be found in the reports. The First Order states restructuring and re-allocation of resources to strengthen their resolve and control. All is being done, so they say, for the good of the galaxy as a whole. 

‘What a load of bantha-dung.’ He pauses to look at her, eyes still closed though he knows she can feel his eyes on her. She extracts a hand to wave at him. ‘Proceed’. 

He finds a report on them, an informal anonymous piece in a gossip-rag from a minor General involved with the search. A search they can now assume has ended, has become an event to be reflected on with hindsight. Interesting.

‘Our brief was to search any inhabitable planetary body or moon within a parsec of the Supremacy’s location at the time of Supreme Leader Snoke’s death. We scanned and patrolled planets and moons, I’m still finding mud in my boots from traipsing around looking for, for all we knew would be a pile of charred bones. I’m convinced at this point there was nothing for us to find.’ Correct, but not for the reasons you think...

‘Hmm, sounds like they’ve given up looking. It’s a shame, I’d have paid good money to have them realize we were right under their noses.’ Her mouth tries to move into a smile, but she smooths it away and her pitch drops. 'Read me something else', she mumbles.

'What do you want to hear? There's more reports, I can tell you about Bogano...'

'Read me something so I forget about where we are.' Her eyes burn into his as he darts a look her way, seeing her smile break through out the corner of his eye as he's first to break contact.

'That's going to be difficult,' 

'I think you can do it.' She rakes her eyes over him once more, shrinking him with one switch pass of her gaze. 'Try.'

It's a story he hasn't read for years, for over a decade not having any need to. He could remember every detail of it, could call them to his mind as easy as he did his own name. His focus slides from the words on the screen, falling into memory with disconcerting ease. He had read it to himself deep into the night for years, trying to ignore his hands shaking from tiredness, trying not to anticipate the glow of the light under his closed door that would mean his mother had returned home. Always late, always urging him with a kiss and a mumbled instruction against his forehead not to wait up for her, knowing he still would. More often than not she would find him after he had lost his battle, the events of the story bleeding into his dreams, him awaking in the morning with his reading set aside and the covers drawn up over him. This association become ingrained, to the point he would associate the smell of his mother's perfume as it reached his sleeping brain with the description of the dawn from the text, the sun at the eve of battle, impassive and gentle.

He reads to her and she slowly slides onto her side, tucking her hands under the blankets, balled under her chin. She's not asleep, just breathing deeply as she treads into the same world he had inhabited, her brain conjuring a subtly different landscape, picking out different details, taking from it what she needs. She thanks him when he's done after a few moments of heavy silence, pressing her cheek into the bench. 

'I like to hear your voice', she confesses to herself, voice rumbling against her skull. There's a gulf between his eyes and hers as they get ready for bed, and he can guess at some of what occupies it. He wants to ask her if she pictures the sun, like he does, but nothing good would come from hearing the answer. For the first time in his adult life he spares himself from the pain that is due to him. 

Chapter Text

‘This thing was made to transport a small company. Strip anything we don’t need.’ He’s glad to have a job to do beyond tracking her crawling body above him, trying to build a map in his brain of the labyrinth of wires she slithered through, in the eventuality she somehow got lost. It hadn’t been necessary so far. ‘Leave the anchor points so we can put in what we want…’

‘Which is?’

‘Table, couple of chairs, bed, the rest we’ll fill with supplies.’

He sets to work unbolting and hauling out the rows of seating, throwing the padded benches in a dusty heap in the corner of the hangar. The toughened plastic dotted here and there with designation numbers and crude insults. He shares the more colorful and creative ones with Rey as she thuds around above him, occasionally punching through the tiled ceiling to drop cables or rubbish through or point out new items to remove. There’s a satisfaction to scrubbing the place clean, slowly hollowing it out into an empty shell. He’d started off attempting to methodically remove what he could see, but gave up after the fourth screw threaded and span in its hole, and reverted to just ripping at it with his bare hands. The standing hand-holds sheared off with disconcerting ease. What use they’d have been on a rough landing was hard to say. Somewhere there existed a tally for the percentage of stormtrooper units lost to crash landings, expressed in the realms of acceptable breakage. Their safety measures riveted into place through arbitrary points, popping in sequence like a giant zip. It looked good from the surface, but spoke of hurried construction, piecemeal design, and general cost cutting. Only the mounting points themselves were solid and unmoving, the floor bisected with lines of wear from an older interior configuration, the newest one simply pasted over. 

‘The wiring in here is decades old. I'd bet every credit I own that these resistors have never been replaced.’ She pops her head down to scowl at him where he’s gutting the storage bins and chucking innumerable blaster holsters in with the rubble. 

‘I don’t know why you’re looking at me, I had nothing to do with fleet maintenance.’ 

‘Well someone decided to just leave these things to rot…’

‘Troop transport is low priority.’ He thunks the trunk shut to move onto the next, stepping back out of the cloud of loosed dust. 

‘I thought you said you had nothing to do with it?’

He turns back to her, hanging red faced above the landing ramp release. ‘You’re going to fall.’ He turns the ramp release and the metal falls open with a rusty clang, the sudden sunlight stinging their eyes. From the strength of it, it must be early afternoon.

She disappears back into the gloom, little puffs of dust raining down on the scratched flooring as she moves back to the nest-like centre of tangled cabling. ‘What are you even doing up there?’

‘Attempting to clear half a forest out of the air circulation ducts.’ She slurs around something held between her teeth. ‘Looks like it was stored outside for months.’ She shifts a panel above them to push down a rain of twigs and leaves, that shower down in a slow rain. 

‘I was going to sweep that.’ 

‘I wouldn’t. There’s plenty more where that came from.’ The panels bow slightly under what is presumably a knee. He sighs and stands below her once more, talking to the muffled voice behind grey speckled tile latticed with metal strips.

‘You should be more careful. This ship is made of junk.’

‘I’m perfectly fine where I am. This isn’t the first time I’ve crawled around in the rusted up guts of what used to be a ship.’ He hears her slam a palm against hollow panelling for purchase. 

‘Uh huh.’

‘Worry about your own work.’ He registers the thud of something metallic coming loose and falling to rest above him, then a ringing crack as a brittle panel gives way and she falls through in a wave of dust. She falls, her legs tucked into a ball to lessen the landing. As quick as it had happened, she's scrambling to stand in front of him, pulling herself up to full height, leaf bits tangled into hair curling out of her braid and sticking to her forehead.

She brandishes the wrench still in her grasp. ‘Don’t say anything.’ He holds his hands up in surrender. ‘Help me take out the ceiling.’

They work out if she climbs on his shoulders, she can push and rotate each one out of its metal support, before flinging it careening into the sunlight. They make quick work of the checkerboard of panels, her directing them onwards until wires and ducting hangs down above them, held up weakly by the remaining metalwork. He can see clearly for the first time the tangle of colored cables she’d been tracing in the dark, and the accumulation of grime and baked dust dulling their contrasting shades to a warm brown. Holding onto her knees, she treats him like an extension of her legs, pulling herself forward with sweat sheened arms and trusting in him to follow and counterbalance her weight. Last panel removed and lobbed into the stingingly bright nether, she hauls herself up into the tangle once more to separate a knot of thicker cables, using her body weight to pry it free from its neighbours.

‘Power for the weapons system.’ She explains. To him it looks like every other cable.

‘How are there this many cables up there?’

‘The old wiring wasn’t removed, the new stuff was just wedged up here alongside the Imperial era stuff.’ She hops lightly down. ‘Just plain old laziness.’ She rubs brown hands on her trousers to little effect. ‘I’m going to take it all out. That way I can actually see what I’m working with.’ She stretches her arms one by one above her head and rolls her shoulders. ‘Food first though.’

‘Where did you learn to do all this?’ He asks as they slide down the muddy embankment to skirt around the base to the entrance. 

‘Where?’ She laughs, incredulous.

‘When, then.’

‘It was my job to salvage what was usable from piles of rotting junk. You get to know very quickly what’s worthwhile and what’s going to shock you and knock you out for a few hours.’ She takes down her hair and shakes it out roughly with her hands, enjoying the slight breeze cooling the sweat on her neck. ‘In my spare time I’d just kind of experiment in how things fitted together. After a while you start to kind of sense how it all works.’ She ducks into the shade of the base, dropping the hand that shaded her face for the short exposed stretch.

‘Do you think your Force sensitivity helped at all?’ He latches the door behind them to keep in as much conditioned air as possible. She’s silent for long enough he kicks himself for saying it, realising how insulting it sounded only after his intellectual curiosity had gotten the better of him. 

‘Doubt it. I didn’t believe it even existed until I met you.’ She follows their well trodden path back to the Officers quarters, past banks of partially disassembled command readouts and chairs twisted from where she’d jumped up to pry at something new. ‘I’m glad for the years of practice now.’ She nods to the fresher to wash and change. He opens the cupboard to check again their selection of rations to see if some fresh shuura fruit or leafy something has somehow materialised there. He rattles off their choices through the cubicle wall, leaning back to hear her response before dutifully pushing off to get it started.

They return well fed and changed, having shoved the sweaty morning clothes into the sonic to have the filth vaporised away. She perches carefully on the joints in the metal latticework and clips and untangles lengths of cabling to be passed down and disposed of. Slowly the pile of waste around them grows, and a web of cables replaces the messy carpet. She slides effortlessly onto his shoulders to move from section to section, directing him to pass up various tools to strip and meld trailing cables into a manageable, almost intuitive web. Finally she slips down for the last time to gaze up at the web above, tracing various routes by foot before nodding and judging it time to test a few. 

Some do nothing, some hum in a strange way he feels in his ears but doesn’t hear. One pops and bangs, insulation blooming into its original bright purple as heat climbs suddenly within it. She scrambles to isolate it, as he holds the buzzing mass where it is, throwing a wall around it with the Force, leaving it spluttering in place but unable to melt the cables around it. Wrenching a stiff isolating switch into place with a creaking click, they rapidly cool, and he releases his hold on it.

‘Sorry, got carried away.’ She marks the offending switch with a black x. External surveillance. ‘Teach me how to do that.’

‘Isolate each section before testing and I won’t need to.’ She scoffs at him. He breathes in steady to try to slow his racing heart rate, tiredness seeming to weld his feet to the ground. 

‘I’ll teach you later. Let’s finish testing these.’

As with every stage of the project, they were left with a list of passes and failures, some needing fixing as a priority, some needing bypassing or reworking, some not worth the time and scheduled to be removed entirely. The deflector shields and sensors seemed to be in a fair workable state, the air and water recycling systems needing more diagnostics but were at least taking and drawing power where they should be. The image monitoring systems were completely shot, both interior and exterior, closer inspection revealing a rash of teeth marks to the cabling and a tiny fragile skeleton melded with a braid of purple wires. It would be ripped out. They could do without. 

Itinerary set for the morning, they settle in for a few hours of meditation and training. Without it, he knows she would work until her eyes and muscles gave out on her. And although she grumbles and complains as they fold themselves into a cross legged pose, she knows he’s right. 

It is as though the Force welcomes it, welling up to meet her and seemingly leap into her grasp with the same kind of rightness she felt at tracing wires in the dark, knowing their purpose instinctively. His knee touches her and their Force signatures blur into each other. She feels a wave of calm move up her body and up her neck, like warm water.

Show me how you contained the electricity. He doesn’t have to think, simply allow the thought to rise from his head and her to pluck it down to her.  He had grasped the energy and contained it with his own, as he’d learn to do with blaster bolts, in anger. But no anger accompanied it, not even fear, for himself or her, he had simply reached out and halted the process in the wires, like a dam in a river.

You’ve never done that before. She knows, because he knows. It was some combination of a skill he had, but applied with a knowledge that was hers. To his unspoken question, she ushers forth a wave of images, connections and knowledge she’d scraped from the dessert, one piece at a time. From it he gets a sense of it, the idea of a logic behind it that she’d teased out herself, even if he doesn’t share it. But he knows now that it’s here. And that they can pass between them more than just memories, but concepts.

Show me again. 

He tries to put himself back into the bodily memory, feeling himself pull the Force to himself and push it to encircle the heating electrics. He’d felt the strain in his tendons as he contained its furious energy, drawing on that itself to strengthen his grasp on it. 

I have to concentrate to use the Force. You used it like it’s another limb. Her voice rings in his mind and he smiles. He feels her signature flare beside his. 

It’s just practice.

Don’t you worry you’ll lose control of it?

Somewhat. I thought before I knew the limits of it.

He senses her beside him, playing out his moves with her own body, calling and pushing the Force, searching for more signs in her body, as if it were her own memory she was replaying, not his. She does it again, with him as mute spectator, offering forth little shades of feeling, his feet anchored to the ground, her hunched over the isolator panel at his side, sunlight drawing out a strand of honey in her hair. She takes them in, folding them into the memory playing out again in the present beside her, until she feels the crackle of electricity stinging her palm where it had burned him. 

He opens her eyes as she stares down at her tingling palm, rough, but unharmed. ‘Huh.’

I feel his pain as if it’s my own. I see his memories as if they’re my own. A part of her jolts as she looks across at the man sat to her side, and at the seemingly limitless nature of the bond between them. With the power to erode her sense of self and reduce them to just one organism. Everything that is his, she has the potential to share. And the same goes for her. If they’re willing to surrender it.

‘What else can you show me?’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Everything.’

He shows her all the ways he’s learned to use the Force in combat, offering as much sensory detail as he can conjure, pushing past discomfort to try to embody the storm of emotions surrounding each attack or defence. He owes her too much to try to shield her from the panic and self hatred that burned at the centre of these attacks, willing it forward to immobilise attackers and draw them onto their own weapons, syphoning off their dread to fuel his own resolve. There is no mask to hide behind. He will face, as he should, her judgement, after he’s fulfilled his promise to train her in the ways of the Force, and in all the ways he’d turned the tool to hurt others. He feels the sickly wash of shame he’d fed off of in ripping through people’s minds, crushing the air from their throats, leaving behind flailing animals grasping for safety. He feels the flare of searing pain, from wounds since healed, used to morph his own mortal fear into a weapon in the mirror image of his own wounds. Each wave of emotions passes through her and muddies the steady flow of her Force signature into something churning, something sucking, a whirlpool she circles but doesn’t fall into. She is stronger than he is. So much stronger. He’d known it from the very beginning. And a treacherous part of him had wanted to take it from her. And still does. 

Soon all he has to offer are images, feelings, flashes of resolve, decision and reflex. He’s tired in a way he hasn’t felt since leaving the throne room. Since Snoke’s voice had abruptly silenced in his head with a pathetic whimper. He wants to curl in on himself, hide away in the dark. Exhaustion dulls his recall, until it blurs into grey, into shadows, and then into darkness. And then dimly, as if in the corner of his vision, the warm glow of a fire, crackling alongside the beating of his heart. A gift.

He dresses silently for bed as she watches him out of the corner of her eye, curling to cover himself. She hopes he will allow himself to sleep but doubts he will. She climbs in to lie beside him, looking up at the ceiling.

She would be lying to herself if she didn’t say that she had questioned what this might look like to an outsider. She had spent dozens of hours working to puzzle out a bond that she hadn’t known had the potential to exist. She was willingly and systematically surrendering to a process in which they shared ever deeper parts of their minds. All this with a man who had tried to kill her, drew his power from pain and darkness, and recognised in her a shared power between them. A childish part of her wonders at the limit to his intellectual curiosity, if she can be sure that he is truthful in what he offers. To find a limit to the bond, if such a limit exists, even if it means showing someone the true depths of his mind. It causes him pain, a pain she could feel in her chest like a weight. But she can see into his mind. She knows it to be true. He is willing to give up every last defence, risk her hating him, understanding him and condemning him. And she is willing to do so, but cannot hate him, is unable to hate him in a way that rivals his hatred for himself. She struggles to equate the seething mass of rage she’d felt through every nerve in her body with the person sleeping beside her. Whatever he can show her, it isn’t enough for her to not want to see more. No matter the source of the power, she covets it. If she is being drawn into the dark, she will surrender. 

She’s still awake to see the chrono turn over to seven, to watch him as the heating system hums into life around her. Her eyes are guarded as they meet his, slowly blinking into awareness with a body-clock almost atomic in its precision. He hadn’t slept well. She knows his dreams were a torment, but she had promised never to look again and never will. It’s in his eyes, in the slight twitch she can only see as they’re so close. He twitches a smile at her and averts his gaze. 

‘I don’t hate you.’ She breaks the silence. ‘I know you think I do, or I should. But I don’t.’ She pulls the blanket over her hands. ‘I wanted you to show me those things. And even though I don’t agree with them, I can’t look at them like they’re something someone else has done either. I feel how you felt, like I was in your mind as you did those things. That should terrify me, but it doesn’t and I don’t understand why.’ He leans back against the headboard.

‘Nothing makes any sense. I feel like I’m disappearing. Like this is going to destroy us. But I don’t care. I need to understand what this means. Why the Force is doing this to us. What kind of people we will be at the other side. If there’s even anything left.’ She breathes in shallow, feeling her throat wobble with threatened tears, but swallows it down.

‘Does any of this make sense to you? What is happening to us?’ She pleads at him, hands limply in her lap, sagging into her tiredness. 

‘I’m sorry.’ He pulls her forward to rest his forehead against hers as she cries weakly, cradling her head in his hands. She grasps desperately at his shirt. ‘I didn’t know it would be like this. I’m sorry, Rey’ She crumples into his lap and he strokes her hair as her broken sobs pull tears to his eyes. He holds them back and sucks in quavering breaths.

Chapter Text

She’s quiet as she eats, looking around unseeing at the gray interior of their little bubble of safety, in the heart of what was once enemy territory. 

‘I think I should tell you something.’ He pushes past the dryness in his mouth. ‘The other day I saw a vision of what you were working on. I didn’t look for it, but I saw what you were doing for a moment.’

‘Huh.’ Her reply is casual, but her face tightens and she stills.

‘I don’t entirely know why it happened. I think it has to do with feeling strong emotions. I don’t want you to feel like I’m hiding anything from you.’

‘This happened the other day?’

‘I should have mentioned it sooner.’

She shrugs, a tight spasm of muscles. ‘I guess it’s not so different from when the Force connected us. Although I hardly think there’s much point when we’re right here.’

‘I don’t think there is a point, I think it was the emotion itself that did it. When it connected us before it was when we were upset or particularly angry. But I imagine we could shield it, stop it from happening.’

‘Why do that? It seems useful, it would be good to know if anything happened. How clear was the vision you saw?’

‘Clear enough I could see what you were handling and where you were.’

‘Huh, we’ll have to see if we can find a use for it.’

They finish their breakfast and Rey sets off to head back to the hangar. He explains he’s going to hang back and do some more research and she doesn’t press, sliding on her boots with a brief smile his way and walking the familiar path back to her project. He vows to give her space, even as he starts to set aside a little pile of objects he thinks might be of use to her as he scours the base, looking for a computer that was potentially offline when they left and might contain more information about the Order. They boot up one by one to grey nothingness, the only remnants being the sparse bulletins, any links within them severed. 

He finds the office of what must have been their head of engineering, unlocking the drawer to find a stash of rolling pieces, part of a wing assembly for an X-Wing. Fragments of a familiar puzzle, the hours he'd spent staring down at ones just like this laid out on a blanket at one of the many bases he uses to run around as a child. The backdrop varied, but the ramshackle collection of dusty and outdated parts didn’t and he’d pass them up as needed. Here they’re neatly labelled in tiny script and worn smooth. A memento kept hidden away perhaps to turn in someone's hand as they puzzled out a problem, stuffing it out of sight before anyone else saw.

He debates calling out to her, but thinks better of it. She needs space from him in her mind right now. And selfishly he doesn’t want to trigger a conversation he’d rather not have. He carries on, searching for any scrap of information beyond the blank wall they keep coming across on the holonet. He wonders if his bypass codes would still work. Potentially, if Hux hasn’t disabled them. He probably hadn’t, knowing how tempting it would be to him to look into the nearest terminal and gain back access to the slew of information he had previously had unfettered access to, even if he rarely deigned to use it. 

He’s just pushing back from the dusty desk when another image reaches him, a thorny lump of something held in grease-streaked hands as dust tangles in the light behind her.

What am I looking at?  Her voice interrupts his greeting before he can make it, and he smiles. 

A capacitor of some kind.

Can you read the serial? 

He blinks as the image comes into view once more, the skin on her forearm shiny with sweat and oil as she holds herself above the main hold. Should you be up there?

I’m perfectly fine, don’t change the subject. Can you read it? His eyes pick out the pulse at her wrist, and the tiny shadow it casts there. But when he tries to focus his eyes on the etched script, it’s as if it won’t come into focus.

I can mostly just see you. 

That’s annoying. The image fades away and once again he’s looking at the dusty table-top, patterned with water rings and scrapes. That could have been really useful. She slips away and he's left with just himself again. He swallows and carries on with his work.

There's more space than they know what to do with, innumerable corners eerily devoid of life. He'd settled on one such room with the idea to clear it. For reasons he can't adequately explain, since their move to the base they haven't allowed themselves the space to spar. It had started as an anaesthetising balm for their fears of being found, but it became something he came to anticipate, rely on for its familiarity. She will enjoy the chance to exercise her slowly mounting frustration by way of attacking him. It's healthy, he reasons, in imaginary conversation with a third party who curls their lip in obvious disagreement, it's good to have a safe outlet for their moods. After all, he's fairly sure she won't kill him now. A shift had happened so slowly in both of their minds. Careful as he is, he still didn't recognize it until it had passed.

He decides on one of the barracks, reasoning that the beds themselves aren't mounted to the floor, so once cleared they will be left with one large and empty space, evenly lit and otherwise unfurnished. The floor is a problem, but there are no lack of freshers adjoining it, tiled wall to wall with an absorbent rubberised matting. She won't even notice its gone. Even if she has need to go into the room, once she has a target in her sights, the rest of the world could burn for all she knows. He piles his findings in the corner and begins the task of peeling up each tile, leaving behind concrete checkerboarded with mildew.  

He’s just heading back to their quarters when he’s hit with a wall of rage so sudden and potent he clenches his hand into a fist around his little pack of assorted oddities for Rey. He takes a second to step back from it, reminding himself that there is nothing currently to be angry about, before continuing on his way. Whatever is happening to her, she’s furious.

What’s happening over there? He knows she’s not in danger, and that stops him from immediately making a beeline in her direction. The process so far has been far from smooth, but he’s beginning to suspect she enjoys the push and pull between setback and victory. Still, she is the kind of person to be annoyed at having broken a leg and having to stop work, so he pries a little.

Oh nothing. I was doing an experiment is all.

The kind of experiment that caught fire, or…

I wondered if I could push images your way, if I could also send emotions. Did it work?

I’m furious right now, if that’s what you’re asking? Don’t ever do that again. 

Furious because it worked, or furious because I did it?

Is there a difference?

She doesn’t answer and he heads back to take a scalding shower in an attempt to burn away some of his anger. He knows she’s only trying to find the limits of what they can do, but there’s a sickly familiarity to this anger. It had been his sole fuel, for years, crowding out every other emotion to keep him standing. When he couldn’t muster it himself, it was given to him, enveloping him in it until all that mattered was finding an outlet to it in the brutal defeat of others. Hers was a different kind of anger, he can see the shade of her in it, the echo of the anger she had used against him only a handful of times, before everything changed. 

He had never been able to master it himself, had wanted in countless shameful moments to grant his victims peace before their deaths, but was never able to manage it. When they died, it was always in panic, fear tumbling out of their mouths in a wordless scream. He found other ways to lead them to their acceptance, but it was never peaceful. No matter how much he practised he couldn’t change that. But she could.

He knew she was coming as he set about getting their food together for lunch, he felt her coming, her Force signature tinged with concern and shame. She deposits her dirty clothes and comes to sit as he’s placing pouches in the heater to warm up.

‘I shouldn’t have done that earlier. I’m sorry.’ He leans against the counter, not ready to narrow the distance between them yet. ‘I did it before I’d really thought it through, and now I have, I realize it was wrong of me to do it. I won’t do it again.’

‘You’re not the first person to do that to me.’ 

‘I realize now. I don’t know how it didn’t occur to me.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘It’s not. You deserve to have control over your mind.’ He nods, turning to grab their now heated food and hiding his drawn face in the steam. ‘I won’t do it again.’

He sets them down and slides into the seat next to her. She eyes the dishes but doesn’t move to take them, arms folded in her lap. 

‘You might need to do it again one day. It’s a useful skill and one I’ve never been able to master.’ He takes her plate and begins dishing food onto it, ignoring the eyes boring a hole into his face. ‘It’s okay, I promise. Now eat something.’ He finally relaxes when she takes her plate and begins shovelling the food down, settling back into this much more familiar territory. ‘I found some things today I think you might be interested in.’ He reaches to grab the bag and plop it into the table where she’s pushed her plate to the side, taking one last gargantuan bite. She unwraps the bundle hungrily, toying over each piece.

‘They’re from an X-Wing. I found them in a desk, I think someone was keeping them as decoration. Thought they might be useful.’

‘How did you know?’

‘You forget I grew up on Resistance bases. I’ve done my fair share pitching in with the mechanics. I know just enough to know roughly what goes where, but that’s about it.’ He shrugs and returns to her meal as hers sits completely forgotten. As if plucking that thought from him she grabs another spoonful and chews thoughtfully as she squints at the pieces, laying them out in an all too familiar configuration on their fabric wrappings. She leaves with barely a glance his way when they’re done and he laughs in the now empty kitchen.

‘This thing’, she clangs the offending item down in front of him ‘is completely knackered.’ He exaggeratedly shuts off the reader where he’d been puzzling over the outdated schematics for a plausible similar shuttle. It had been equal parts help and hindrance.

‘What am I looking at?’ There’s oil, once again, on the table.

‘Fuel alternator. Stops the fuel from over igniting and exploding the ship. We need it.’

‘So I gather.’

She sighs and settles next to him. ‘It’s completely seized with fuel run-off. I thought we could try the Force thing.’

‘Worth a shot.’

She beams at him, stumbling over her mind for words. ‘I want to strip it, clean it, and then hopefully put it back together…’ She grabs his hand in her grease-stained grasp and shoots him a significant look until he closes his eyes with a good natured smile. Right away it is. 

Her warm Force signature is like sunlight behind his eyelids, thrumming and pulsing beside him. Have you ever done this before? Her voice slides easily into his head, rich with curiosity and the simple joy at wrestling the craft back from oblivion with her own battered hands. 

With small simple things. I’ve tried it a few times since I mentioned it. Nothing this complicated. He reaches out with his mind to appraise the thing, and she follows. 

The casing is metal, but I can’t see an opening or a weld to it. He narrows his focus on it, attempting to attune himself to the interplay of energy between the materials, feel out the shape of the hollow interior. There’s a center to it, the axle I think. He intuits the truth to the statement as she thinks it. 

Can you turn it? 

I don’t know. I haven’t tried. Then she does. The metal hums, the crackle of energy running through its dense material resonant and clear. A tone. She feels her probe, it changing in pitch at her attention.

Maybe it can be moved sonically. The idea blooms between them. They reach outward and cup it, slowing their combined energy with a wobbly adjustment to hum around the jagged object. It rattles, losing dry flecks of oil and dust. Her triumphant joy momentarily destabilised them, but she corrects within a second, hand tightening her grip on his. They strain to intensify their attention, control wavering and failing. With a push, breath held, the thing thunks and juts into a new shape.

She snaps her eyes open, dropping his hand to cup the thing in front of her face like a little animal. The axle protrudes slightly from the body, and she twists it free with another shower of rust and grime. ‘Perfect.’ She stumbles to climb awkwardly from the booth to drop it unceremoniously into a solvent bath, cupping a hand to her face. Her smile as she turns to him is radiant, smears of oil covering her cheeks, eyes bright. He stands to bask in it for a moment, like a lizard stretching in the sun.

‘This could work’, she says, breathlessly. He reaches to smudge a streak of oil from her chin, before encircling her laughing body in a hug. This could work. 

‘Why do you bother with that?’ She tracks his hand as he slowly drags the blade across his cheek. ‘What’s the point, nobody is going to see it.’ 

‘I suppose it makes me feel more normal.’ He replies, rinsing the blade clean. 

‘It seems more trouble than it’s worth… Besides, they have lasers that can do it in a second.’ She kicks her feet absentmindedly where they dangle off the counter where she sits. He inclines his head in a quick shake before continuing. ‘Aren’t you worried someone will run up behind you when you’re doing it and you’ll slit your own throat?’ 

‘I wasn’t until now.’ He narrows his eyes at her, but continues after she nods for him to continue. 

‘Seems an awfully vulnerable position, to me. I’m surprised you’d allow that kind of risk.’ He stills, shoulders slumping in faux defeat. ‘Can I try?’ 

‘You’re welcome to. If you let me finish.’ 

‘Pfft. No I want to try on you. What, afraid I’ll kill you after all?’ 

‘The ship is nearly finished.’ 

She huffs. ‘Hardly. Besides, it can’t be that difficult if you can do it.’ 

‘Fine, go right ahead. Add another scar to your collection…’ he sets the razor down and steps back a step, gesturing for her to continue. She picks it up and drags down a towel from the shelf to lay across one knee. 

‘What do I need to know?’ 

‘Don’t apply any pressure, let the weight of the handle do the work.’ 

‘Got it.’ 

‘Forty-five degree angle from the skin, and shave in the direction of the hair growth.’ 

‘Okay.’ She reaches to him. ‘Come here then.’ 

She shifts her legs so he can stand in front of her at eye level. For the first time she can clearly see the tiny moles across the bridge of his nose, his sunburns finally almost entirely faded. She places a steadying hand on his shoulder as she slowly and carefully lifts the razor to his skin, moving it gently in one smooth swipe down his cheek.

‘Like this?’ She meets his eye, which had been tracking her hand. 

‘Uh huh.’ 

She swipes another pass next to the first, ending it to curve lightly around his chin. ‘This doesn’t seem too hard.’ 

‘The neck can be tricky…’ 

She nods and moves her hand from his shoulder to tilt his head gently back. ‘Here’s where my dastardly plan comes to fruition.’ She smiles as she skims his neck under the ear. ‘Sometimes the oldest ways are the best. A simple shaving accident in the middle of nowhere, no witnesses.’ She hears the slight catch of the hair under the blade in the silence of his held breath. She moves his chin up further to duck slightly under him, skimming over his throat before rinsing the blade. He swallows. ‘Nearly done.’

His hands are planted on the counter either side of her, and his knees feel weak from held breath. She tidies up a few missed spots, feeling for the hair with her fingertips and wiping them on the towel. ‘Done.’ Her eyes flit between his for a few terrifying seconds before she bends to rinse the blade off and set it on the side to drain.

He steps back to rinse the foam remnants from his skin, skin flushing. He turns the water to cold and runs it over his skin enjoying the cooling freshness before patting himself dry. 

‘You know, I didn’t know before that you could Force heal…’ She almost whispers. 

‘Uh huh?’ 

‘But now I do. So I have to ask you something… Why didn’t you heal this? You could have done so. Or had it treated at least. Why didn’t you?’ 

‘I didn’t want to.’ 

‘Could it be healed now, do you think?’ 

‘Potentially.’ 

‘But you don’t want to.’

His mind churns as she lies beside him, warm and clean, the memory of her touch on his skin as vivid as if he’s still there. Her fingers light and warm on his skin as she moved him as he tried to tamp down the joy it brought him. He’s ashamed, at taking such pleasure from a simple and practical touch, born of her curiosity and desire to learn from him. She would be mortified if she knew. He peeks at her sleeping soundly beside him, face relaxed into a small smile. Despite everything, her resting self is peaceful. She doesn’t curl around herself as tightly as she once did, but bend loosely now towards him, chest rising and falling in calm breaths. Whereas he feels as if every nerve ending is on fire. 

He greedily covets any touch she gives him, hard and soft. He would have enjoyed it as much if she had nicked him, but she had turned his face softly in his fingers as if it were something valuable. If she knew it would shatter the fragile alliance they have, and although he knows it will inevitably end, he wants to draw it out as long as he can, add more tallies to the marks she’s left on his body that only he can know of. She can never know. 

Her eyes fly open at his gaze, and his stomach plummets as he closes his eyes, feigning sleep, cataloging to make sure he hadn’t unconsciously reached out to her, as he’s found he has in the past. The kind of brush he could pretend was accidental, hide behind the distance of it. 

‘I can splice the compressor, divert some of the power from the shield into the propulsion. Not enough to weaken them, but enough to kickstart us and bypass the faulty ignition.’ She rips the covers off and begins tugging on her boots and jacket. ‘If it works we’re one step closer to getting this thing off the ground.’

‘Need me to come?’ He asks as she ducks out to thumb on the lights.

‘Of course. I need a second pair of hands. Get up.’  

It’s cool and blessedly clear, the sky a blanket of stars and planets, night air deliciously cleansing on his too warm skin. He can busy himself in the trudge of his footsteps in the silence of the night, and his shadow in her trotting beside him, keeping up with his longer strides with an anxiety to plunge her hands into the ship. She scrambles up the embankment, eyes fixed on the hangar as she rattles through the process they need to follow. He follows it better than he ordinarily would, starting to see the puzzle than she sees as they duck under cover.

‘Up there.’ He hauls her up into the cavity above and gathers an armful of likely looking tools to pass up as needed. He feels the slight breeze through the soft trousers he’d selected as his sleepwear, and shakes out a dusting of leaf litter from where the legs are stuffed into his boots. He reaches a spanner into the hole above him and hears the sound of metal turning.

‘How long is this likely to take?’ 

‘Why? Do you have somewhere to be? Wire cutters.’

‘Bed, ideally.’

‘Won’t be too long, I just need to run this through and secure it. Then we fire it up and see. If it doesn’t work we’ll have nothing to worry about.’

‘That’s very comforting.’

‘Isn’t it?’ 

They finally head back to bed, a little more scraped and oily, cold seeping into their skin. When they climb back under the covers, neither acknowledges the tremble in the other, bodies sighing with relief.

‘You’re very good with that stuff.’

‘Yeah, well, I kind of have to be’ she replies, shrugging a little to hide her face as she pulls the covers up around her neck.

‘Still, its commendable. I would have bet that thing would never move again.’

She pulls him down quickly, arm swiftly disappearing from sight again. ‘Well it hasn’t yet, you might get to keep your imaginary wager.’

‘I don’t think so.’

She flicks her eyes to his and away, blinking away a smile that seems to take her face by surprise, chalking it up to lack of sleep and near perfect isolation. Never mind that she is acclimatised to both, she accepts the easy answer and closes her eyes.

It’s the air of the place, the lack of proper food and scant company. It’s the madness of confinement, the walls that start to speak to you, voice their designs for you. It’s from them that she got the thought to kiss him. They want to see her fall, they want their peace back without her clanging about, disturbing its dust. 

She’s not stupid, she knows what she has. A companion, an equal. Someone to help her and care for her in small ways. The support of being a part of a team, even if that team is one of necessity. She has no reason to compromise it, even she is not masochistic enough to throw away what she has now to hasten a future when it will be gone. 

Nothing good would have come from it. But she can imagine, trusting him to be true to his word and not intrude on her thoughts. He is beautiful and she wanted to be close to that, let some of it reflect back on her like warm sunlight. Would he have shut down if she did it, or would he have come to accept it, like he did her touch? Something to be endured, part of the price, a factor in their bargain. It’s part of their compromise, she wants things that he is reluctant to give, but he does anyway. But what does he get out of it?

Would he have kissed her back, given her another lesson in things she’s ignorant to? Is there a theory to it that he knows and she doesn’t? Would he teach her, if she asked? He’s never said no. Still, first time for everything.

Chapter Text

‘I need your help.’ His head collides with the metal frame of the top bunk with a ringing clang. While she installed the now cleaned and reassembled alternator, he’d been busy breaking down cots in the barracks, absorbing himself in the likely unnecessary act of disassembling them into piping he had a vague idea could be useful. Each one cleared means more space for them, the echo of his crashing lengthening and warbling as he works. Better that than to be alone with his thoughts. 

He hadn’t heard or sensed her creep up on him. Part of the reason being she’s barefoot, and caked in mud and dust from the shin down where she’s rolled up her pants. But it doesn’t fully explain why he didn’t sense her until she's stood in front of him, vibrating with annoyance and stress. His stomach sinks with the realization that she was shielding herself from him. He’d been too busy trying to escape his own thoughts to notice. He rubs the ache from his head, thankful to find it dry. It had sounded more dramatic than it was. 

‘The containment field for the laser cannons is compromised. I nearly fried the entire base running power to it. They’re completely destabilized…’

‘Can we just remove them? The cannons?’ If they got into a position of needing to use them, they’d have bigger problems than a lack of laser cannons.

‘They’re coupled directly with the ion propulsion system. Unless we fix them we can’t take off. Not without exploding into a million pieces. Is there anything about them in the manual?’ They both know it’s a long shot, the manual and schematics are designed for maintenance, not structural or electrical repairs. 

‘I’ll check them.’

She shifts on her feet in front of him. ‘Will you have a look? Maybe you’ll see something I don’t.’ He nods and sets his wrench down before following, wiping dust from his hands.

They pick their way around the base in silence. He strains to make out a bird call in the distance, to distract himself from watching her twist a creaking length of wire in her hands, knuckles whitening with the strain. 

He had been aware before of just how far her mechanical knowledge exceeded his, but placing each careful step down amongst the braided blanket of wires and cables, he can’t even see where the ship ends and the general detritus begins. Some loop up behind ducting, some hang like fruit-bearing branches from the ceiling. She points to a thatch of cables, smeared and melted by heat.

‘It goes through there’, she points, ‘and out back into the reactor core’, a dull grey box even he knows better than to touch, ‘and through all the powered systems.’ Her pointing hand falls like a lead weight. ‘To replace it we’d have to trace it back through practically every system.’ 

His eyes widen. ‘Can we cut out that section and bypass it?’ He’d seen her do the same, stripping cables with her teeth to twist them deftly together. 

She shakes her head, lifting the distorted bundle. ‘In here are the capacitors that regulate the energy transfer. Some idiot wired them all in close enough that they’re heat output has melted them all together. It’s quicker than routing them to where they should be, or shielding them properly. It’s probably why this thing was left behind. Real laser brain move.’ She lets the clump fall from her hands, to bounce slightly on the web of cables carpeting the floor. ‘Without replacing those capacitors, we’re screwed.’

‘Okay, we replace them then.’ She’s opened the door for him, and he dutifully walks right in. 

‘They’re very specific, nothing else in this whole mess uses the same ones. They need to have a very low ESR value and be rated for high temperatures, or else…’ she points again to the offending clump. 

‘Would anything on the base potentially fit?’

‘I don’t know, maybe. Fuck, we’d have to trawl through every system… that could take weeks, if they’re even in there.’ She crouches to a squat and plucks at the melted cables again. ‘I don’t know if I can fix this.’ 

He’s never heard her sound so defeated. Rattled, scared, absolutely, but never so beaten down that she can’t even look at him. He knows she’s no doubt already had this conversation with herself, and was holding out some kernel of hope that somehow if she replayed it for the 1001st time with him, she’d come to a different result. But of course he had disappointed her. 

‘We’re not out of options. We don’t know this is the only ship on this planet.’ If she hears him over the screaming in her ears, she doesn’t react. ‘Come back to the base. You’re going to drive yourself mad staring at it.’ She doesn’t move. He kneels and gently places a hand on her shoulder, and she looks at it. Still, it's some form of progress. ‘Come back and we’ll make a plan.’ She swallows, and nods.

He guides her out with arms not touching, just forming a barrier as she darts her head backwards to look back at it, the mockingly inert clump of plastic and metal that had given her a few days before insisting on her powerlessness. They trudge back through wet leaves and rubble in a silence newly uncomfortable. 

‘We’ll figure something out.’ She says nothing. 

‘I’m going to wash up,’ she says, head inclined in his direction but gaze averted. She trails muddy footprints to the fresher, spotted here and there with something red that could be blood. Needing to do something he sets out their reader, loading up the schematics for the shuttle, as well as two strong cups of caff, a little dish of the dried berries he knows she likes and a blank holopad. She returns pink and flush from a no-doubt scalding shower, and slides stiffly into the seat beside him. 

He takes a deep breath and launches into the little speech he'd prepared for her along with their rations. ‘We know what we need now. If we read the technical specs again, we can make a list of places to check on the shuttle as well as any potentially similar systems on the base. If you tell me what I’m looking for, we can check each place in half the time.’ She nods mechanically. ‘We can strip this whole place if we need to, we have time.’

‘I’ve already been away for so long, what if everyone has forgotten me?’ Her voice, tiny and lost sets something twisting in his stomach. 

‘It’s only been a few weeks.’ It was bizarre hearing those words from his own mouth. Only a few weeks since he threw away his old life and set himself on fashioning a new one with whatever tattered remnants remained. A few weeks ago she had marched into the throne room with no plan except the earnest belief that there was goodness in him. He fears he’s failed her in almost every way.

‘If you’re gone a few more weeks, they’ll still be there when you get back.’ It was a barefaced lie, there was no guarantee her friends had even made it past the viewport from which she watched the ion cannons vaporise the transports like drops of water on hot metal. But in a way he knew it was true, in that there would always be a world waiting for her, when she chose to leave him and return to it. He recognizes with shame the small part of him that’s glad they may be stuck here for a while longer, even as the thought destroys her. Is there anything that pleases one that doesn’t harm the other? 

That’s not true. He’d shared her elation at getting each system wheezing back into life, at an LED blinking back into steady existence, seized axles turning freely once more under her hand. The larger part of him wanted her to succeed because it made her happy. 

‘But if we want to get off this rock and eat some proper food at some point, we should probably get started.’ He sees her forehead lift as she smiles again, relief like cool rain after a drought. ‘Tell me again what I’m looking for.’

Armed with a make, model and preferred size as well as competent technical drawing of the offending parts, they set to work trawling diagrams for any oblique mention of the things. She’s taken the shuttle plans, he skims over page after page of interiors, the spiderweb of life support systems and electrics that spread like veins behind each bland speckled wall. She adds any potential leads onto a small but growing list of places to check and double check. He tilts his screen to her, her raised eyebrow translating to ‘add it’, scrunch of the nose telling him to move on. It’s silent but for the odd scratching scrawl, and irregular yet emphatic sighs. 

Without warning she sits upright from her dejected hunch and blinks, attempting to clear eyes blurry from strain and too much caffeine. 

‘That’s good for today, we can start checking them tomorrow.’ He clicks off the reader as she slumps sideways, head resting on his lap. ‘All I see are wires and diagrams of waste disposal units.’ She chuckles, unseeing. ‘What about you?’

He stammers over himself to speak. ‘Comms units. Endless comms units. Even the freshers have comms units.’ 

A deranged laugh bubbles up out of her mouth and she shakes against him, tears squeezed out of her eyes. ‘I think it’s finally happened. I’ve lost my grip on reality.’ Her hair has dried in tangled clumps under her grasp that he desperately wants to untangle.

‘You’re just hungry.’ He grabs his mug and takes a sip, half expecting her to throw it from his grasp. But she makes a show of mulling over his words, head shifting against his thigh. ‘Up. Your hair’s a mess and you haven’t eaten since breakfast.’ 

She groans but sits, shooting him a glare over her shoulder. ‘I must be pretty out of it to let you talk to me like that.’ He begins the now practiced routine of teasing the tangles from her hair as she perches her chin on knees bent in front of her. 

‘You just needed to take a step back.’ 

‘Wire blind.’

‘What?’

‘It’s when you spend too long trying to fix a problem and when you step back you realize you’re focusing on the wrong thing entirely.’ She smiles at the pleasant feel of his fingers brushing her scalp. She reaches around to feel the braid, a much more complicated one than the usual, and smiles. ‘Food now please.’

Dinner is a grainy rehydrated puck of something crumbled into something fatty and salty, consumed with Rey slumped against his side. She stares blankly at a melodramatic tableau of ornately dressed royals of some kind talking in riddles over miniature cups of iridescent purple liquid. The names are unimportant, the takeaway seemingly being that everyone hates each other and that life is a maze of formal dinners and moonlit confessions. She falls asleep soundlessly beside him, and he considers just staying there for the night, with her warmth at his side, limbs tucked into her blanket. But he knows she won’t want to wake up with aching and uncooperative limbs in the morning, so he shifts to wake her, and guide her to bed. The bed that they still habitually share, cocooned in warmth and the steady background noise of each other's breathing. 

He awakes with blind panic screaming in his ears, only to realise the noise isn’t just in his head. She’s screaming beside him. It hadn’t happened since the cave. She ends each day with her mind and body thoroughly exhausted, but he knows first-hand that that is not always enough. She’s pleading, a girl again watching her parents fly away never to return. Watching their ship recede into a speck and then nothingness, still begging them to recogniser, promising that she’ll be good. That’s what he hears, her curled in on herself beside him, pleading to no one that she'll do better, not to leave her. He shakes her awake by the shoulder, hands still weakly clasping at the blankets, hair sticking to her tear soaked cheeks, blinking up at him in confusion layered with desperation.

‘You were screaming again’, he explains, as the fear in her eyes gives way to embarrassment, her face red, tears and shame fighting for dominion over her skin. ‘You were dreaming of your parents.’

She settles back and closes her eyes, pulling the blanket up to her chin. ‘Same one I always have. Much more vivid since I had the vision.’ She smiles sadly, ‘I can see their faces now before they turn away.’ She turns her head away from him. ‘You can look at my memories, can you take them away too?’ He swallows, freezing next to her, scared to even breathe. ‘Can you take that memory away? Is that something that you can do?’ She turns back to him, expression set and resigned at the same time, lifting her chin at the inevitability of the chill that runs through her. ‘Have you ever tried?’

He doesn’t know how to answer, what answer she wants or needs. So he opts for the unsatisfying truth. ‘I can make people forget things I’ve done, but I’ve never tried to remove a memory. I don’t know if it can be done.’

‘Will you try?’

‘I don’t think you really want me to do that.’

‘How do you know what I think?’ His smile for her is bittersweet. Her statement in anger is a fallacy and they both know it. He knows, because she feels her bond to this memory, as painful as it is soothing. The only clear remembrance she has of them being the point at which she lost them. It is as integral to who she is as her hard earned skills, her strength forged through pain. But even this is robbed of her, the ability lash out, to wrap one emotion up in another. Coat the bitter pill of her anguish with anger so as to swallow it. She turns away as her tears begin to flow once more, at yet another injustice to be endured. 

‘Do you want to see it?’ She asks, before pushing the memory into his mind. The biting sun, sand hot enough to burn, two young faces turning away to step into the shadow of a junk ship, and taking off. Screams of a child she knows is her, lost in the roar of the firing engines and thrusters. It hits him full force with every sensory detail she can muster, scraping, stabbing, screaming, everything hot, hard, loud. She keeps her back turned to him, shoulder stiff with stress.

‘Do you understand now?’ He can’t reply, simply stare at the back of her neck sheened with sweat, spotted with remnants of oil she'd missed in her washing. Her shoulders slowly rise and fall with her breathing, staring into the wall. He doesn’t know whether to reach out, hand awkwardly darting out to hover in mid air. She gives no indication either way if she wants it. She can't, or won't expend the energy required to decide. She knows its there, and he knows that she knows. Eventually he lets it fall back in his lap.

‘I wish I hadn’t seen it. Or I could forget it.’ 

‘I can make you sleep…’ It’s a risky offer, bringing up something he’d done for her in the past in anger, so to speak. She finally rolls onto her back, eyes blank. ‘It’d be dreamless, at least.’

She lifts her eyes to look up at him. All she has to say is ‘please.’ 

He doesn’t know how to comfort her. He doesn’t know if he even can. There's the hope that him simply being near will aid in some way, that somewhere deep in her sleeping mind is the assurance that someone is caring for her body as she takes the rest she needs. But the desire to do so still sits heavy in his stomach. If he held her, it would it remind her of who he isn’t. It would be a facsimile of what she wants, falling somewhere between hurt and comfort. He can’t know where he’d fall on that spectrum, and for once he knows it is one thing he can’t ask Rey. The words once spoken could never be taken back. If she refused him, as she almost certainly would, he would only hurt her more. Better to stay at a distance.

She can never know. His brain promises safety, stability in those words. If she knew it would kill her. Still, the danger in the almost, a crack he can fall down, widening into a chasm underneath them. He’s surviving on worse odds with her at his side, as if her very presence tilts them in his favor. Almost. It’s the word that will finally end him. Such a small thing, it doesn't seem right...

Chapter Text

He wakes alone, a dim headache behind his eyes and limbs leaden. He’d made her sleep just as he’d offered, and watched the unnatural calm slacken the muscles in her face. The weight of the pain that clouded her was removed in an instant, and he was left in screaming silence. He counted the steady progress of her breath, her chest rising and falling lightly, and tried not to think about the pleading girl in her memory and her desperation for a family that would never come back. He hadn’t been successful, and he feels the protest in his muscles when he stretches to go to the kitchen, his neck and back corded with aches that flare with each movement. He sets aside the pain and pushes it back in his mind to go to her.

She studies their list as she stirs something over the heat, muttering under her breath.

‘I’ve divided the list into halves, we’ll start looking after breakfast.’ She glances at him over her shoulder before ripping open a pouch and dumping it in. He lowers himself gently to the bench, grateful that their work will separate them for a while and he’ll be able to hobble around unobserved. At least for a while...

‘What’s wrong?’ He freezes in the process of pouring himself a mug of caff. ‘You’re in pain and you’re trying to hide it from me.’ Guess not.

He leans back in a show of languid "okay"ness, caff flicking onto his fingers where he forces seizing muscles through a pantomime stretch for her benefit. ‘I’m fine, I just slept badly. I’ll be alright when I get moving.’

She grumbles and brings over two bowls of something porridgy and begins shoveling it down. He begins to eat, supporting his arm on the table and avoiding her pointed look. ‘I don’t know why you do that.’ 

‘Habit of a lifetime.’

‘Well it’s a stupid one.’

He sighs and his head throbs. ‘Where am I checking?’

She slides the holopad towards him. ‘These ones should be easier to get to. None of the systems on here are vital, so just detach them and bring them back and we’ll take a closer look.’

The list is a tangle of layered annotations that will have him jumping through the plans, guided by increasingly vehement arrows and circles. He taps through a few at random, each ringed by question marks artfully translating her doubt and frustration into a scribbled crowd. ‘What about you?’

‘Most of mine I can check out in situ, meaning we hopefully won’t have to choose between clean air and a working ship.’ She transfers his list to his reader and shoves it in a bag, already loaded with a selection of tools and snacks. ‘See you back at lunch and scream if something starts burning.’

With her bag slung across her back it feels pleasantly familiar as she shucks off a sheet of paneling and steps out of the cloud of dust to press herself into the wall cavity. Behind the bank of sonics there’s a clutch of cables that may or may not have a regulating system, with the potential of having a capacitor. It’s doubtful it’ll be the rating they need, and she curses whoever wrote the schematics and didn’t think it pertinent to mention what was keeping this place running. To leave the lives, or even the cleanliness, of hundreds of troops to the promise of a system seemingly cobbled together and shoved behind the nearest dull plasteel panel was ridiculous. Behind each uniform sheet she finds a chaos of unlabeled cabling, rusting connections and unshielded thermal oscillators and shakes her head. No wonder the temperature seems to rise and fall at random intervals, leaving her shivering one moment and flushed the next. She exhales and crushes herself further in, locking eyes on her first potential fit. It’s tiny, too tiny, it’s a wonder it hasn’t blown already. One down, many more to go. She allows herself a few seconds to be disappointed before moving on. 

He’s somewhere on the other side of the base, signature dampened somewhat as he tries and fails to hide the pain in his back and shoulders from her. She can feel it like a path of hot water, trailing over her shoulder blades and up her neck. Any luck?

Not sure. They all look pretty different, so potentially.

How’s your shoulder?

It’s not a problem. She feels the echo of the pain in her recede somewhat where he dampens it.

You’re a terrible liar. She gently backs out of his mind and goes back to work.

At lunch they compare their haul, twenty or so pieces laid out on the table, dishes brushed aside as they compare them against the fried one. If they can find one, they’ll know where to find the other. The printed ratings are smudged and smeared by heat and time, and he watches the line between her eyebrows deepen as the discard pile grows larger, being tossed there with progressively less care. She squints and turns one in the light, standing to hold it closer to the cold grey points above them.

‘This one might work. Can you read that?’ He comes over to take the part and scan the slanted stamped writing. ‘I think it matches that one. Where did this one come from?’

‘Canteen.’ She rips it from his hand and sets off in a run, bare feet slapping the ground and receding into the distance.

She returns at full speed and wraps her arms around his shoulders in a tight grip and he flares with sudden pain. She stumbles back in alarm and stammers out an apology as he winces around a smile, attempting to massage the tension out of his muscles. 

‘I’m going to go try them. I’ll be right back.’

He slides back to lie on the bench, letting the hard surface forcibly align his spine, breathing through the pain as he closes his eyes. He reaches out to sense her and ignore his own body, feel her moving through the base and turning to trace around the building at a run. Hopefully she put shoes on. 

He doesn’t have to reach out to know she’s successful, her joy reaching him like sunlight behind his eyes. He exhales and lets his limbs relax and waits for her to reach him.

Half her mind is back in the hangar when she returns, allocating him a little of her attention as the greater part of it is shuffling and re-ordering the slowly dwindling list of tasks she has in her mind. 'Are you okay?' She tacks on her question at the end of a meandering point about the filtration system. He's a problem to be diagnosed, he is a part of the patchwork of repairs that need doing before they can leave.

'I'm okay.' He pushes himself upright, muscles stabbing in admonishment. 'You can go. It's fine.'

She quickly scans around their space, landing on a bottle of water and putting it on the table with a wordless gesture for him to drink it. She's gone before he can crack the seal. 

He heads back to his project at a controlled hobble as she runs back to hers, giving up on the disassembly to haul the remaining bunks out and wedge them into the adjoining room. Then he starts on the corner, dropping each tile with a slap and squaring them against the wall with the toe of his boots. Before long he's sat in the center of an empty expanse finishing his water. 

‘I feel I should warn you that I’ve seen how these freshers are built…’ Her voice is muffled behind the door, and he imagines her twisting her fingers together as he sinks into the scalding water. 

‘Right now I’m really not worried.’ His muscles begin to relax by degrees, and the grime and dust of the day start to loosen from his skin. He will miss this.

‘There’s a non-zero chance of them exploding every time we heat the water.’ She cracks the door and speaks into the steamy room, a little shaft of cold air chilling the sweat on his forehead.

‘I’ll take those odds.’ He hears her move to sit next to him, and lean her back against the tub. 

‘You have a worryingly cavalier attitude to dying.’ She smiles, leaning her head back and breathing in a lungful of steam, letting it displace her anxiety, feeling herself sink a little heavier onto the spongy floor with her exhale.

‘We made it this far, I just don’t think we’re going to die like that.’

‘Oh? How do you think we’re going to die?’ There's dust under her fingernails again, little brownish half-moons it would be fruitless to remove. She ends every day with a little of the place pressed into her skin, seemingly always will.

‘One day I’ll finally piss you off enough and you’ll kill me.’ He smirks at her laugh, the sound seemingly forced out of her against her will.

‘And what will kill me? After I’ve sliced your smug head off of your shoulders?’ 

‘Crushing boredom.’ He feels his body melt in the water, and with it apparently his ability to keep his mouth shut. ‘Rey?’

‘Yes?’

He swallows and takes a few slow breaths before he plows on, ignoring the scream in his brain. She can’t even use your name, what makes you think she’ll answer you. ‘Are you alright?’

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ She shrugs, going for lightness he can tell is forced.

‘You’ve barely spoken all day.’

‘Well, you know’, she glances at his face over her shoulder, ‘habit of a lifetime. You gonna tell me it’s stupid?’

‘No, I was going to tell you you can talk to me. It’s just us here, it doesn’t matter what we say.’ He stares off into the steam, watching shapes resolve and dissolve again, counting his heartbeat at the back of his throat.

‘Stepping on my lines, Solo. What’s up with that?’

‘You were right to say it.’

‘Circumstances are a little different, don’t you think?’ She’s shifting in his peripheral vision, staring resolutely ahead.

‘I wouldn’t say so.’ He watches goosebumps raise on the back of her neck at his words and she slowly turns to face him, eyes locked on his, chin perched on her knee. She’s close enough he can feel her exhale on his damp skin. 

‘I don’t know what to say. No.’ She sighs, heavily, ‘I’m not alright.’

She doesn’t look away as he slowly turns, careful not to spook her with any sudden movement. Her eyes dart between his as he leans and gently rests his head against hers. She screws her eyes shut, breathing hard and fast through her nose against his skin. She hugs her knees even tighter as her diaphragm spasms silently, his damp fingertips lightly catching in her hair. 

He forgets the water rapidly cooling around him until she scrubs at her face, pulling back to look at him, eyes rimmed red. ‘Finish your bath’, she sniffs. ‘We’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.’ He nods jerkily and she pushes herself standing, gone before he can blink through his dimming vision and suck in a panicked damp breath. 

He holds his breath as he slowly climbs into bed. She’s already there, curled towards the wall, leaving space for him. He’d already resigned himself to the thought that she wouldn’t be there, that she’d need her space without him in it. But he finds her, pressed closer to the wall than is strictly necessary. He inches his way down, head still spinning.

‘Did you have a nice bath?’ If he woke her, he couldn’t tell. If she was pretending, he knows her well enough to be impressed by her act.

‘I did.’ It’s true, he feels edgeless lying next to her, feeling his clothes brushing against still damp skin, limbs heavy and still.

‘I didn’t look.’

‘What?’ He breathes.

‘I didn’t look at you.’

He’s supremely grateful she’s facing away from him in the dark and he can’t see his face pinch and flush with mortification. ‘Thank you?’

He feels her shift to sit and face him and he meets her eye with a wince. ‘I wouldn’t, I mean… I’ve never… It’s not like, not that I wouldn’t… oh fuck’, she stammers, hiding her face in her hands. ‘Why didn’t you shut me up?’ 

‘Maybe I would if I had any idea what you were trying to say.’

She groans and shoves her hands under the blankets once more. ‘I didn’t look.’

‘You said that already.’

She steps over her words haltingly, like she’s toeing her way from one to the next in the dark. ‘I wanted you to know that because if it were me, I’d want to know.’ She drags her eyes slowly up to meet his. ‘It’s important you know that.’

‘Thank you for telling me.’

‘No problem. Seriously though, next time you need to stop me before I start rambling.’ 

‘And you want me to do that how?’

She breaks eye contact with him in a blink, peering around into the dark, hoping it hides the answers she needs. ‘I don’t know, I’m sure you’ll figure it out.’

‘Are you feeling any better?’

‘I am, thank you.' She unfurls her fingers under the blanket to emphasise her point, even if he can't see it. 'I never thanked you before.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘You didn’t have to, but I appreciate that you did.’ She swallows. ‘Do you think it’s strange that we sleep in the same bed? We don’t need to, but we do.’

‘I don’t think I’m a good judge of what’s strange and what isn’t. Does it bother you?’

‘No, I like knowing that you’re there.’ It's true, it shouldn't be true. It's a great yawning chasm she can't stop herself from peering into.

‘Alright then’, his gaze drifts to the ceiling, battling and failing against the compulsion to dig a little, the sight of her curling on herself with embarrassment fresh in his mind. ‘Can I ask you a question?’ He meets her eye for a half second, watching her glare at him out of the corner of his eye. 

‘Depends. We’re all alone out here. I don’t have infinite patience…’

‘You’ve never seen a naked man before.’

‘I still haven’t.’ She leers at him, eyes flashing. ‘That wasn’t a question.’ 

‘Why are you embarrassed?’

‘I’m not.’

‘You are.’

She can feel her face flush, but she valiantly ignores it. ‘Why is anyone embarrassed? I know it’s just a body, but you didn’t look at me either. So clearly it’s not that simple.’

‘You’re right.’

‘I know I am. Can we go to sleep now?’

‘I thought you’d be asleep already, if I’m honest.’

‘I was waiting for you. Do you have anymore prying questions for me that can’t wait until the morning?’

‘Nothing springs to mind.’

‘Good, I’m cold.’ She wriggles in close to him, pulling the blanket up around their necks. She peers at him as he closes his eyes, tension melting from his face slowly.

Tentatively, gradually enough he has the time to stop it, she inches her fingers over his and knits them together. She hides her face against his shoulder as she squeezes her palm against his, heart thumping hard enough it seems to vibrate up her throat. He doesn’t speak, not that she’s sure she’d be able to hear him over the roar of blood in her ears, but she keeps her eyes closed anyway. She gradually slides into sleep with the light pressure of his skull against hers. 

Chapter Text

He’s jogging around the perimeter of the base when he senses a surge of annoyance so great it can only have one source. She’s been in the hangar since breakfast, doing a final round of checks on the shuttle before they’d try to fly it. She needed to keep busy and he let her. As soon as she’d left he’d ground the heels of his palms into his eyes, allowing himself a few seconds of swirling panic before setting it aside. Their leaving depends on his ability to do just that. Nothing good would come from keeping them there. It’s a box better left unopened, preferably abandoned on a forgotten moon, slowly falling into mud.

Somewhere she is a burning ball of rage, dimly bobbing around at the edge of his perception. He quickens his pace to go to her, on the off chance she’s injured and is unreasonably annoyed about having flesh susceptible to damage. 

In the hangar, he hears her before she sees her. Or her feet, to be specific, folded into the space above the main hold, now stripped (by him) and strewn (by her) with tools, lengths of wire and twisted hunks of metal. She swears loudly and bangs something against the paneling.

‘Do you know what the recharge time on the life-supports systems is on these things?’ She appears in the hole to brandish a wrench at him. He manages to take a breath and open his mouth to speak before she's talking over him. ‘Thirty hours. It needs thirty hours to recharge the oxygen tanks’ she brutally tightens an already tight bolt with a squeal, ‘re-prime the water filtration and fuel the heating systems.’ She shears off the bolt. Hopefully that’s not essential. ‘We won’t know if it's space-worthy for over a day!’ She curls down to land lightly in front of him. ‘What am I supposed to do until then?’ Her mouth frowns into a comical half moon. He's a lot of things, but even he is not suicidal enough to comment on it.

He inclines his head for her to follow. She narrows her eyes, but does.

He’d been working on it as soon as she’d become lost in her task, filling his time whilst diligently combing the base for materials to take with them. Anything not tied down was a candidate to be packed. Ray subscribed to the "everything including the kitchen sink" preparedness philosophy. She was determined to take with them anything they might use. Once off planet, they knew they had a lot of aimless flying in their futures, so food was precious, as well as clothes, tools, blankets, potentially valuable and trade-able parts, it was all getting packed. But secondary to this, when she was totally focused on wrestling life into the thing, more than happy to be left to it, he’d funnelled a little of his restless energy into his own project now realised. A large padded space in which they could attempt to bludgeon each other to death.

Only he’d be able to perceive (or imagine) the slight shrinking of his muscles. But now they have a place, indoors and spacious, to spar for the first time.

‘I made us a training room.’ He knows he sees what it is with the first sweep of her eyes, taking in their staffs leaned in one corner. ‘I figured we’d have a few days to use it at least.’ The rebuild was going faster than either one envisaged, with the help of their Force skills combining to repair many of the harder to replace components. It was a cascade of pieces fitting together, and she was a wonder to behold, swatting down each emerging problem in sequence. Through their meals she’d only be half there, the larger part of her mind his back at the hangar, turning pieces together in a 4d puzzle. Only in the evenings, when she’s burned out all her energy, did she temporarily stop. Most of the time, at least. For once he can help her beyond just fuelling her body with food she barely tastes. ‘Time to work out some frustration.’ 

‘Is this going to turn into a lesson?’ She crosses her arms in a huff, looking every bit a child and not someone who just accomplished the work of a fleet of mechanics single-handedly.

‘No, it’s a treat. I thought we’d try to kill each other the old fashioned way. No Force.’ His sheepish smile is contrasted with him handing her her staff and toeing of his shoes to crouch into a fighting stance. 

She wastes no time peeling off her filthy jacket to strip to her shirt, kicking her boots into a tumbling heap in the corner. ‘It’s perfect.’ She flies to attack him. 

He parries each blow with a satisfied smile, but won’t attack yet, even as her varied and creative lunges and swipes have them arcing around the entire room. Not until they have rules.

‘Why aren’t you fighting back?’ She pushes him into a slight stumble.

‘New arena. If we’re going to spar, we should do it properly.’

'You promised…’

‘I didn’t but if you stop it’ll only take a second.’

She begrudgingly brings her staff back to her side and waves her hand for him to continue.

‘Scoring is touch point. You land a blow, you score a point, we either go to a set target, or until someone gets a certain lead over the other. Or until someone yields. Make sense?’ He keeps his explanation as short as possible, watching her toss the staff lightly in her grip, itching to go again. ‘First to a three point lead?’ She nods, and crouches back into an opening stance. ‘Chatty today…’ He parries her attack, easily. Were this a lesson, he’d point out how quick she is to anger, but he bites his tongue, literally, as she twists his own staff into his face. 

‘That count?’

‘First touch.’ He can feel her eyes on him as he bends and spits a mouthful of blood onto the floor, to be absorbed in an instant. He hadn't chosen the flooring for that reason, but had to admit it was practical. 

She blinks her eyes back into focus to meet his, lifting her chin and daring him with a silent look to comment on it. He doesn’t. 

They lose themselves in sparring. He had wondered for a second if the sight of his blood at her staff would change something, but it was gratifying to launch back into it. The blood was just blood, spilled in fair combat, as impersonal as any other bruise they’d sustained rebuilding the ship. He was happy that hadn’t changed, their mutual willingness to exert their bodies, even as they grew closer in small puzzling ways. She had sought out his hand in the dark, she lunges to sweep his supporting leg from him, and shouts in annoyance when he dodges. He had felt her shake against him as she cried, he swings a backhanded arch at her and her shoulders shake to block it. She flinches with pain before ducking behind him to take advantage of his slow shift in body weight and kicks him in the spine.

‘Second touch.’ She circles away from him, twirling her staff.

‘Kicking doesn’t count, only your staff.’ He straightens back up, pressing at the point of impact from her foot. She shrugs. 

They continue on like this, a slow push and pull between them. He’s stronger, she’s faster, he has a longer reach, she is more familiar with the staff. Each hard earned point is followed by one to their opponent, as if they’re unable or unwilling to have either feel superior for more than a few dizzying seconds.

Eventually their movements begin to slow, she leaves an opening, which he takes, but is too tired to block her counterattack. Over an hour later they eye each other, panting and playing forms in their minds that their bodies are too tired to put into action. She moves into a telegraphed overhead swing, more out of habit than genuine attempt to land a blow. He deflects it and darts behind her, staff pressed lightly across her throat. 

‘Yield?’ His hoarse breath is warm against the side of her face, and her calves cramp from being held on tiptoe. 

She nods jerkily and he removes his weapon, his free hand lightly trailing her arm as steps out of her space. She slips down to her heels once more, cushioned floor disguising the heaviness in her bones. Her head spins and her arms shake as she leans panting against her knees, staring at him as he rolls his shoulder. 

He towels sweat roughly from his flushed face and neck, going back to idly dab at the blood from his split lip. ‘Feeling any better?’

She holds her hand out for the towel and grabs it out of the air. It’s pleasantly scratchy against her face, and she shivers as the cool conditioned air begins to chill her, heart rate slowly returning to normal.

She hums. She’ll be covered in bruises, her clothes are soaked through with sweat, and the idea of putting her boots back on disgusts her. ‘Much.’ She exhales. ‘What does it mean about me that I like to watch you bleed?’ 

He stills from scooping up his shoes to look up at her. ‘You like to make me bleed.’ 

‘Is there a difference?’ She laughs.

‘Of course there is.’ He beams at her, cut catching the light.

‘I’ll heal that when we get back.’

They pad their way through the now stripped base, she nods her head at all the labeled crates of salvaged items he’d been accumulating over the last few days, lifting a lid here and there to peek at the neatly stacked contents. The scavenger part of her was gratified to list them among their shared assets. There was equipment to weather all kinds of climates, lots of practical clothing and tools, as well as the collected remnants of forgotten food supplies. But the Order's carelessness was her gain. 

They head back to grab a clean set of clothing and towels and enjoy the shower for potentially the last time. She stops to cup his cheek and heal his steadily swelling cut before wiping away the blood with her wrist.

‘Shame.’ Her eyes twinkle at him. ‘You could have had another scar.’ She rakes her eyes over his face, avoiding his eyes. 

‘You first.’ He leans against the counter to wait patiently as she showers, towel neatly folded over his arm and rolling what feels like a slight sprain from his ankle. His mind feels deliciously empty, as he leans and waits, sucking in hot and damp air. He focuses on his breaths in and out, on the small aches soon to be soothed by the hot water, of the energy in his muscles. His fear around leaving tomorrow has receded into the background, he breathes and chuckles at her luxuriant hum under the spray. 

‘What do you want to do with the rest of the day?’ She asks, moving around under the water. 

‘Hmm. Honestly? Nothing.’ He wants to stay as he is, brain scooped clean, nothing but muscle and air.

‘We could find another holoseries to watch?’ She shuts off the water and stands dripping water before shucking the towel from its hanger. 

‘Sounds good.’ Her feet pad lightly as he turns to dry herself, never enjoying the automatic dryers, their heat too artificial for her liking.

She emerges, wet hair hanging limply over her towel draped shoulders. The trousers she’d grabbed are too big but she’d rolled and cuffed to fit, she shuffles with a noisy bunch of fabric, attempting to shake water from one ear.

‘You’re up.’ He pushes his tired body into the stall to enjoy the searing water, feel any remaining tension wash away with his sweat and blood while she waits for him. There’s no need to, she could simply walk next door to their living area, but he’d stayed, for the same reason she does. To hear him moving around, to stay in their pleasant little bubble and feel her blood fizzing in her veins. 

‘I’m going to miss this shower. The one on the shuttle is just a sonic. And I think I’ll have to kneel to get in it.’ He’s shut off the water, voice echoing slightly in the cubicle.

‘I still think it’s wasteful, but I don’t know how I’ll get used to sonics again…’ 

He chuckles, slipping on clean clothes. ‘We could just stay here’, he smiles, before stepping out to see her, perched on the counter where she’d carefully dragged the razor over his face with the utmost care, where she’d healed the wound inflicted at the end of her staff. She’s drying her hair, scrunching it up in the towel in clumps. 

He offers his arm to help her hop down. She does, pain in her knee from one of his swipes suddenly flaring. 

She scowls up at him. ‘Let’s go undo all our hard work.’ She nudges him back to their living quarters. 

She urges him to sit at the edge of their cot, and he watches her close her eyes and reach for his face.

He swallows. ‘There’s really no need to do that.’

‘Stop talking, you’re breaking my concentration.’ He snaps his mouth shut, and her mouth quirks at the audible clack of his teeth and the muscle tensing in his jaw under her fingertips. ‘If I knew you’d comply I would have told you to shut up months ago…’ His eyes slowly close as he feels the honeyed warmth of her healing loosening the rigid muscles around his spine. The hot water had taken care of the worst of it, but he’d felt the bruise of his crushed flesh as soon as her kick made contact. Now all he feels is the pleasant ache of well used muscles. She drops her hand and moves to sit next to him. 

‘You’re getting good at that.’ 

She shrugs, ‘maybe it's easier to take it away if I put it there in the first place.'

‘What about you?’

‘I already healed mine. It was just a few bruises. You were going easy on me. Don’t think I didn’t notice.’ She knocks his knee with her own, before flopping back. ‘With any luck this will be the last time we sleep here.’ She traces her eyes the grid of silvery LEDs punched through panels of riveted plasteel. It suffuses everything with a flat and even light, as if designed to find the theoretical point furthest from cosy. But despite it all, she would miss it in a way. She tries to freeze the sterile constellation in her mind. She breathes out and the lights wink out in front of her eyes, plunging her into a second of darkness before her eyes readjust. ‘Show off.’

She crawls to lie on her side of the bed, shucking her legs under the covers as he moves beside her. It was something she’d always told herself she didn’t want or need, someone else’s awkward limbs next to her, the sound of their breathing interrupting the holy quiet of night. But she’d folded in the muffled rustling of him moving beside her into her mental landscape. The press of his head on the pillow melded with the calm waves she’d conjure to soothe herself, his breathing blending in with the sound of the wave easing onto shore. If she reaches out, she can sense him in the Force beside her, quieting the chant in her mind of her loneliness, her isolation, her abandonment. And when she wakes in the night with the familiar acid of her nightmares on her tongue, the dark shape of him beside her helps to remember where she is, who she is. Occasionally she will allow herself the shameful indulgence of placing a hand on him and feel its solid warmth. 

But tonight she finds sleep eluding her. Her legs are restless, but she can’t even blame it on having a sedentary day, like she usually can. Her legs had always made her immediately aware of the few times she’d been trapped inside by a sandstorm. They argued with her brain which reassured her it was a welcome opportunity for rest, with an itching restlessness that made it impossible to sleep, building and building each time she tried to still them until she was compelled to move them again. They’re restless now, but not in the same way. She can feel the fabric of her pants against her skin, and then the blanket atop, and feel each minute shift as if statically charged. Her hands tingle with pins and needles, and she flexes the misbehaving muscles in front of her in the dark. He’s still beside her as she sits and massages the tendons in her palm. 

Unsurprisingly her mind won’t quiet either, taking up an endless litany of fears around their leaving tomorrow, or not leaving tomorrow, or crashing back down to earth as the crafts comes apart around them like a ripe fruit. Only this time, they wouldn’t fall back at square one, but quite a few steps back from that, with no supplies, and only their borrowed FO clothes on their backs. That’s if the shuttle even starts, and doesn’t set off another string of endless repairs, the smell of burned out electronics and rust still fresh in her mind. And if they make it off planet, what next? They gather more supplies, then hop somewhere else to start the cycle again. 

Unless he leaves you. She notes the treacherous thought, even as she has no effective counter to it. The best case scenario meant they had supplies and transport, and the ability to go where they wanted to go. What would there be to stop him from leaving her? Everyone did in the end. Every shallow acquaintanceship would end as it always did, with them leaving, and her adding another layer of veneer to the shell she built around her, regretful, but not grieving, it never got far enough for that. She never let it. She’d never slept beside someone, she’d never shared her food without assuring each knew their share and didn’t try to exceed it. She’d never molded her habits around anyone else’s whims, their preference for caff in the morning, their grouchiness, their sleep schedule. If he left her, she would snap back to her usual shape, beholden only to herself, and enjoy all the freedom that comes with it. There is peace in it, she reasures herself, albeit a different kind of peace. She will come once again to cherish that peace.

Then why the fluttering in her chest, like an animal is trying to escape through her ribcage. She tips her head back, seeking to find clear cool air. Why the prickle of tears in her eyes and the drone of her heartbeat in her head like a thumping whoosh. Why are her thoughts consumed by this fear of him, of what his leaving will mean, what his staying would do to her, the desire to grab onto him in a steel grip and not let go, bruise his skin and then heal it and watch the tension leave his face by degrees. It is nerves, misplaced anxiety, the fear of the unknown, the sense of her potential death or discovery tomorrow. He has become their outlet, that explains it, she tells herself, as her eyes stare at his still form beside her. She is, after all, a solitary creature. Him being here throws a pebble into the calm surface of her mind. 

She pulls down her hair, hoping it will do something for her brewing headache. She doesn’t recognize her hands as her own as they curl limply in her lap, but they must be. She feels him shift to sit up but doesn’t expect him to bridge the distance between them until his fingers lightly bracket her elbow and she jolts. 

‘Are you alright?’ He whispers.

‘You keep asking me that.’ Her eyebrows lift, sinking a little deeper in her mind. ‘Do you want me to lie to you?’

‘No. Just tell me if I can do anything to help.’

‘Why?’ 

‘Because I care about you.’

She’s bathed in heat, like the sun inching out from behind the clouds. She swallows thickly, blood roaring in her ears. ‘Have you tried not?’ She meets his eyes, warmth draining from her cheeks.

‘No, I haven’t.’ He presses her hands in his to still them where she’s painfully twisting her fingers until the skin creaks.

She stares down at them as she speaks. ‘Maybe you should. If all goes well we’re leaving here tomorrow. We can go wherever we want. Where do you want to go?’

‘Wherever you are. If you’re amenable.’ He brushes the back of her hands with his thumbs and watches the movement sweep through her like a breeze through tall grass.

She laughs and feels bile creep up her throat. She shakes off his look. ‘Yeah, I’m fine with that.’ Her head rolls on her shoulders before he folds her into a hug, stomach swooping as he notches his chin on her shoulder.

‘Let’s go to sleep.’ She shivers as his voice rumbles low in her ear. ‘You’re okay.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah, I’m sure.’

‘Why are you touching me?’

‘Because you need me to and I want to.’

‘You want to?’

‘Yeah, I want to.’

She pulls back just far enough to kiss him on the cheek, eyes on her lap, mouth twitching into a half smile as she tries to catch her breath. 

‘Rey?’

‘Yeah’, she breathes.

‘We really need to go to sleep.’

She nods, trying to shake the fog from her brain. ‘We do, we really really do.’

Somehow they sleep. It creeps up on them stealthily while their brains are entirely focused on staring holes into space, hyper-aware of every time shift in the other. They’re aware once again of all the small places their bodies touch on the bunk only made to comfortably sleep one. She feels each hair move against each other as he turns and brushes her hair from the pillow, a little cascade of feeling she’d only felt at the times she’d become aware of movement too close to her in the darkness. A readiness someone disproportionate, readied at the cellular level to defend herself. Aware of every breath against the back of her neck, hearing them slow into sleep. 

Chapter Text

She wakes alone, something she’ll need to get used to again. But as the thought wraps its cold tendrils around her mind, it is stilled by the sounds of movement in the next room. The clinking of dishes and the smell of warm food reaches her, as well as moist clean air smelling faintly of First Order soap. She steps to the fresher with a quick glance back at the bed, making a mental note to strip it for packing. 

‘How did you sleep?’ He asks as she slides into the booth and pulls a mug towards herself. 

She blinks and aims a brittle smile at him in answer, taking a sip of the bitter drink she was slowly starting to get a taste for. 

‘Me neither.’ He slides in next to her, setting the last dish down. On the counter the rest of the rations are neatly stacked to be packed away, innumerable matt grey blocks of various recipes and cuisines, freeze-dried and crushed into cubular uniformity. ‘I wonder if it's the thought of exploding into a million pieces in the vacuum of space. Or even worse, what you’ll do if the shuttle won’t start.’ He nudges her to eat. She pulls a plate towards her and begins breaking apart a starchy block with her spoon into smaller and smaller pieces. When she’s reduced the bread-like food into a sandy sheet of crumbs, she finally stills.

‘We won’t know if it’s fixed until the evening. I don’t know how to deal with the waiting.’ She shoves her twitching fingers between her knees and squeezes them.

‘It’s only a few hours’, he offers, knowing that won’t make a difference, but needing to say it all the same, just needing to say something. 

‘I thought I was good at waiting. I guess it’s one of the few things you don’t improve at with practice.’ She laughs a little humourless laugh at her crumbs, before scooping a few to her mouth.

‘After we’re done we can pack up our meagre possessions and load the shuttle.' He sets down his drink and nods towards the stacked rations. 'I'm sure we can keep ourselves entertained for one more day...’ 

‘What if it doesn’t work?’

‘We unload it again.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘I know it’s not.’ She rakes her hands over her face, weariness from a mostly sleepless night telling in the twitch of her eye muscles and their slow blinks behind her fingers. 
‘There are always more options, Rey. You know that.’ She nods behind her hands. ‘Come on. We’ve got a few hours left to scour this place for anything of value to trade for drastically under market value.’

‘Your plan is to destabilise the First Order by trading off their resources to the lowest bidder?’ She smiles, moving her hands to fold them back in her lap.

‘Call it a petty self-indulgence.’ 

They split up to gather what they can into any loose crates and boxes that can be reused. It’s probably not necessary to walk the first lot there together, but she reasons she needs to check on the progress of the system recharge, and it would be easier for them both to check out how much space they have left and begin to plan what they'll fill it with. Tucked into the corner is their miniscule living space, having shrunk yet again to encompass a table, two tiny chairs and a thin cot only wide enough for one. They couldn’t count on the luxury of being able to sleep at the same time, not once they left the atmosphere of the moon. Stacked against the walls are a good amount of packed rations, blankets, tools and clothing. But they have space for a lot more. Anything that can be traded for credits is a priority. 

They pick back to the base having stacked their supplies with the others, happy to see that the systems haven’t stalled in their recharging, and that all being well they have around eight hours to kill. 

‘What am I looking for exactly?’ He skids down the incline to rejoin the broken path strewn with mud from a rainstorm he hadn’t even noticed has swept in overnight. 

‘Anything small that isn’t bolted down. Holopads, readers... If you show it to me, I’ll tell you.’ She reaches for his steadying hand as her foot slides under her and she grumbles. 

‘I take the west, you take the east?’ She nods and shoves the door open. 

‘Just don’t break anything in case we’re stuck here for a few more days. And shout if you electrocute yourself.’ She doesn't wait for his response, just immediately disappears into one of the many command rooms and he hears the metal of a popped computer casing clatter to the floor. 

The lights flick on as he heads into a similar office. The place seems to be predominantly offices, this one a ring of computers around a large high desk, designed for projecting plans, now a featureless slate. Any files that were once here are gone of course, the readers access to them revoked with a click of a button. Still the hardware had some value, he begins unplugging and stacking a bank of screens, left behind to slowly gather dust. 

What about these? A set of digital drafting tools, strewn in a thin drawer underneath the central desk. 

Take ‘em. They look expensive. He gathers them in a cloth and stows them with the rest. 

Do people buy things like this?  He moves onto the next room, eying a biometric lockbox before thinking better of it. Too bulky. 

Scavenged tech ends up in all kinds of places. Most people don’t have the luxury of buying it all new. He nods before he can register she can't see him and scrapes a few sealed bacta pouches from the back of a metal cabinet. 

Find anything good?

Got a few decent fuel cells out of some blaster packs…

You know if you blow your hands off, we’re going to have a much harder time getting out of here. 

I’ve done this a thousand times. Worry about your own salvage. Her fingers are tangled in the heart of a tumble of wires spilling out the back of a recharge station, plucking slender wires free from their mounts. She won’t be impressed by his finds, but she wouldn’t have survived if she hadn’t been good at this. If she weren’t here he would have seen doom in the gutted ship and starved to a very depressed and angry death.

What are you worrying about over there?

Who says I’m worrying?

You’re quiet, usually means you’re being melodramatic. 

I don’t know how to respond to that. He feels the ripple of her laughter, even if the sound is lost to the dozens of sound dampening walls between them. He smiles and moves on to the next room.

They meet up again to walk their finds back to the hangar, her nose peeking into his carried box, weighing and tallying it in seconds, with a slight nod.

‘How much do you think we’re looking at?’

‘On a good day, a month's worth of portions. Your guys left behind a lot of good stuff. It was almost worth getting marooned here for the salvage alone.’ They trudge on in silence, footfall weighed down by their boxes of jostling scraps. ‘What’s our plan for that, again?’

‘Fly to the nearest habitable planet and find someone to trade with. It’ll have to be you to negotiate the price. We just have to pray they don’t recognize us.’

‘We’re more recognisable together, so that should work in our favor. I’ll leave my saber with you.’

‘And what do I do in the meantime?’

‘Lie low and not draw attention to yourself. Maybe just hide in a tree or something.’

He climbs up onto the runway first and takes her box from her, surprised by the weight. ‘What do you have in here?’ He asks as he hands it back to her.

‘The guts of about fifty horrendously valuable FO computers. Should help get us a ship that’s a little less conspicuous.’ He glances in at the tangle of pieces trailing wires before closing it up and heading back to do it all again. She pours a string of images into his brain, of the parts and where she’d found them, which ones were easy to remove, and which had meant discharging latent power before uncoupling them in a hand wrapped in her shirt.

See anything like these, show me and I’ll tell you how to remove it.

The base is big, but not so big her more practiced pace doesn't have them meet somewhere he'd favorably call the middle. She'd shouldered open the door to find him pointlessly disassembling a communication terminal she could have told him in a second was valueless. She shifts her findings under one arm and nods for him to follow her.

'You know, you really are terrible at waiting...' he muses, slowly setting out their cards in front of them as she bounces her foot, crossed at the ankle.

She leans forward and yanks the deck from his hands. 'I just like to do things, not wait around for things to happen. I've had enough of that for one lifetime.' She deals him his hand and slaps it to the floor in front of his knees.

'Then what are you planning to do? Are you going to keep your friends waiting indefinitely?'

She frowns, taking a card and shooting him a brief scathing look. 'Is this your decidedly non-subtle way of asking me if I'm going to contact the Resistance?'

'You could say that.' 

'We don't even know if the shuttle will start. Turn the card.'

'I thought you were dealing.'

She tries to drag her eyes away from the scarred stretch of skin revealed as he leans to reach between them. Caught, she instinctively deflects. 'I thought your plan was to go where I go.'

'It is.'

She clears her throat, abruptly squeezed with nerves. 'Then you should know that that somewhat eliminates the option of me walking onto their base and pretending that nothing happened. What do I say? I popped out for a moment, and hey, look who I found.'

'If you want to go back, I'm not going to stop you.' He folds his arm on his knee and leans against his knuckles. 'And I find I really don't feel like trying to kill you. So your options are fairly open, all things considered', he smiles.

'I can see your hand', she jerks her head towards the cards loosely pinched between his fingers, before sweeping around the room, soothing herself one last time that there is nothing left to pack.

'That's because I'm not trying to win. I'm trying to keep you busy.' He lunges forward to grab her cards, riffling through them as she scoffs petulantly. 'Terrible hand, you were going to lose no matter what.' 

'Perfect, I feel much better now.' He smiles up at her as he shuffles through her admittedly awful selection of cards and she twists to blink down at her holopad, registering the time with a dim, unqueried disappointment. 'Deal me in. You can tell me how I'm going to lose to you again. I'm sure you'll enjoy that.'

'Same again?'

A few more heavy boxes of parts, and the countdown that is ticking down in their minds and with each glance at a chrono is finally nearing its end. They walk back to the hangar in silence. After they wheel the rusting and creaking craft into the fading sunlight for the first time in years, he hangs back to stack their new acquisitions and wrap thick banding around it all, securing it through the thick mounting points on the floors and walls. When it’s safely contained he goes to find her, Force signature fizzing with anxiety where she sits in the pilot’s seat.

‘Are we ready?’ He slides into the co-pilots seat, brushing off a layer of dust and leaf litter to scan the controls. Status lights blink in all the right places. The weapons system bleats a silenced warning, but they knew that already. She sits, hands pressed between her knees, staring unseeing at the control panel.

‘Any last words in case we explode into a million pieces?’ He asks, falling back onto humor, an old habit he’d recently become reacquainted with. Maybe it was sitting in the co-pilot’s seat in a rusty hunk of junk. A nostalgic kind of humour, it settles heavily in his stomach.

‘I guess I have a question for you, in case it’s the last chance I get to ask it.’ A smile flicks on and off her lips in a flash. ‘Knowing what would happen, would you do it again? Kill Snoke to save me?’ She feels stupid saying it, closing her eyes. She had meant to say something light, like he had. One potentially final moment of levity to carry her through to what waited beyond. But a little selfish and childish part of her had to say it. It wasn’t about her, she was simply a turning point for a movement that had started long before she came into his life. She swallows, wanting to curl into herself, but forcing her back to straighten, to open her eyes to see him turn to her. The scene has an ethereal glow to it, the sunlight filtered through the scratched transparisteel windshield still strewn with leaves.  

‘Rey’, she lifts her eyes to meet his. ‘I hope you know the answer to that question. But if you need me to say it, I would do it again in a heartbeat.’ She exhales shakily and holds his gaze. ‘Now let’s get off this fucking rock.’

She nods and begins the pre-flight check. With each switch flicking into place and each system whirring into life, they reach the point that all there is left is to ignite the engine core.

‘Here goes nothing.’ It shudders and rumbles into life around them, shaking them in their seats for a few seconds before settling into a low hum. Silently she glances outwards to begin their slow taxiing approach. 

The craft lurches with a shearing clang as it leaves the ground, thrusters kicking in and inertial dampeners engaging to bring them quickly up to lethal speed, heading squarely for a blank and miraculously cloudless sky. The rain had washed them all away, leaving the clean silvery light of the post-storm sun bearing down on them.

Life support?  She can’t open her mouth to speak.

All looking good. How’s our speed?

We’ll break atmo in forty-five seconds. 

From there it’s just only a short flight to Bogano 2. We just have to make it out of the atmosphere.

She counts in her head, eyes closed, feeling their path as they fly towards the upper atmosphere, craft shuddering around her. Behind her her little nest of safety is stripped, the bed she’d woken in as the time ticked past six, with one hand lying on his arm. She’d removed it before he would notice. It’s gone and she would likely never return to it, leaving a little sleeping version of herself behind there. One. If we make it, we can get another ship, one they won’t know to look for. Two. We can trade what we have for credits, buy more food and fuel and roam the galaxy. Three. We can visit other planets, wet ones and dry ones. Four. Maybe one day they will stop looking entirely, and we can stop running. If we only make it through atmo, please let us make it through…

The rumble climbs to a roar and the metal groans around them. Until suddenly, silence.

‘We made it.’ She breathes, hardly trusting her hands in front of her, hovering over the panel as a black wall turns around them, dotted with stars. ‘This pile of rust actually made it.’ She curls over on herself as relieved laughter rips out of her chest. She unbuckles her belt with shaky and numb fingers to go to him, meeting him to stand between their chairs pressing her tears to his chest and wrapping her arms around his waist. He cradles her head in one hand, the other soothing her back, face turned towards the viewport. 

‘I was sure I was going to die there.’ She turns to follow his gaze outwards, voice rumbling through his chest against her cheek.

She stares at the green marble that was their temporary prison, hanging in space like a mossy stone underwater. ‘It’s beautiful’, she breathes, ear pressed against his heartbeat, tears drying on her face.

He gently separates them, bracketing her face in his hands and bending to kiss her forehead. ‘You are amazing.’ 

She nods jerkily, not trusting her mouth to form words. Then the urge to say it, like an un-scratchable itch in her limbs. ‘What if we can’t land?’

‘We will, we got this far.’ 

You should have slowed your work, she rips at herself. You had supplies to stay there for months, safe and hidden. What were you running to? Not a family, not a home, maybe not even friends. You didn’t need to prove anything to him. If you cared less, you wouldn’t be in this situation. If you’d taken your time, you’d still be back there. If you cared less about impressing him, you’d still be there, warm and safe, puzzling over thoughts you’re not ready to take back into the Universe. 

His brow furrows as she slowly but surely sinks on herself, eyes going glassy, sucking in a shivery inhale as he moves his hands to her shoulders. ‘We should get moving’, she mutters.

‘There’s no rush.’

‘This airspace could be monitored. For all anyone knows there’s not a single flightworthy ship on the planet. If anyone is watching, they’ll be coming.’

‘Okay, Rey’, his hands rest heavy on her shoulders with the slightest squeeze. ‘Let’s go.’

‘That’s our next stop’, a topaz moon, looming in the distance. She slides away to set their course, one hand trailing lazily behind her, holding onto the comfort of his touch for a few more milliseconds even as her mind tracks a spiraling path into the dark. ‘Not much longer’ she says to the ship as she checks their readouts and notes a slight dip in its power output. ‘Only a little bit further.’

They touch down on Bogano 2 and she unclips her seatbelt with shaking fingers and switches off their propulsion systems. It hadn’t been any easier to land, despite knowing they’d made it out of atmosphere safely. The earsplitting noise and bone-shaking vibrations of the craft set off in her brain a screaming alert of wrongness. That their fragile bodies were somewhere they decidedly should not be, and for their hubris, they were sure to face their inevitable end. But the end didn’t come, and her vision slowly unflattens, and color returns to the world. The whoosh of her blood thumping in her ears slowly recedes into the background, and numb fingers feel the metal of her seat, awareness returning to her legs like spreading roots. She schools her breathing and tries to ignore her nausea, tipping her head back to flick off the environmental controls and stop the creep of vomit up her throat.

The next part didn’t require much talking. They’d gone over the plan at length. They'll land the shuttle somewhere remote enough nobody will pay it any immediate attention, before making their way to civilization. There's a trading outpost nearby, here she will get whatever she can for their salvage and trade the shuttle for a small utility craft, the kind that would blend in with any other non-commercial ship. The kind a family might use for their errands or short trips for pleasure. The kind of ship nobody would expect them to fly. That bland anonymity would be their shield for now. 

They shrug on their packs and head out into the drizzle. Wonderful, more rain. She never thought she’d miss the dry heat of the desert, the rasp of sand on skin already feeling waterlogged and clammy. Maybe next we can go somewhere dry…

She keeps her eyes on the path ahead of her as they pick their way out of the covering treeline and uphill to the settlement in the distance. She swallows down a yawning sense of dread and pulls her hood over her face.

‘We’re going to need to get rid of this shuttle quickly. The serial is scrapped, if we get scanned somewhere in a scrapped FO transport, people will show up with a lot of questions that I don’t know how to answer.’

‘I know.’

‘I know you do. I’m just sorry we’re going to have to leave it behind after all the work you’ve done.’ She doesn’t have anything to say to that, so she stays silent.

It had been a reward in itself to do the work, but now she’s here and their plans, miraculously, seem to be working out, she feels a kind of hollowness where there was previously joy. At her perseverance and problem solving, at forcing the pile of junk into begrudging life when others had deemed it beyond service. Why can’t she just be happy?  Between them they have achieved the seemingly impossible. Anyone else would have died on that moon. For a moment she wishes she had done, but then shakes it away with a nervous flick of her head. 

The first moment she sees people, shapes moving in the distance the way only people do, they duck into the shadows. They agreed that it would be better to separate, her being more skilled in haggling with their wares, and much more likely to get them a fair price. Whatsmore, together, the chances of them being recognized increase exponentially. They’d done what they could to disguise their silhouettes, but images of them have been broadcast on the holonet for weeks, and still sporadically appear there.

It had become a kind of game for them. Take a drink when they see themselves, her in her gray tunic and leggings pulled from security footage on the Supremacy, the clothes she’d dressed herself in to go to him. His image was easier to find, could have been taken from any number of sources, his mask with its silver inlay as potent an image of power and brutality for the First Order as their monochromatic logo. Mercifully they hadn’t broadcast his face. 

She wears her hair down, and the baggiest, loosest clothes she can still comfortably move in to try to disguise her shape. He is similarly dressed in loose and shapeless clothing, generic base-layers and a boxy windbreaker. It goes some way to diminishing his size. She’d unacclimated somewhat to his height towering over her in the last few weeks, spending more time sat with him than walking alongside him, but catching their reflection in a window, the resemblance to their broadcasted images is still there in her mind.

'I should go.' She shoves her hands deep into her pockets, fighting the near overwhelming urge to grab onto him and not let him go.

'I know.'

'I'll come back.'

He smiles at her mumbled promise. 'If you don't I'll find you again.'

'You promise?' She slowly lifts her eyes to his from the ground where she's digging a stripe into the dirt.

'I promise. Now go, I want to change out of these ridiculous clothes.'

'Didn't take you for a vain man...' She smiles at him, slowly backing away. He visibly bristles and she luxuriates into the sight before turning on her heel to begin trudging towards the trading post. As she walks onwards, she’s aware she may be walking further away from him than she had in weeks. 

Tell me if something feels off. She keeps her mouth in a deliberate line as approaches the trading outpost, decorated with the husks of gutted droids and rusting machinery under dripping tarps. She’d rehearsed the conversation in her head many times. It was nothing outside of what she’s used to, only in this case the result of a bungled deal, a poor judge of character wouldn’t just mean an empty belly and a gut wrenchingly light speeder, but potential capture for them both. Being turned over to face the humiliation of public trial and execution at the hands of the First Order, beamed across the holonet for any of her surviving friends to watch. She knows she wouldn’t give him up, she would shut down their connection in the Bond and walk there alone. As she has always been.

Chapter Text

She approaches the Calamarian after he’s done sending an employee off to assess a craft for sale, clearing her throat with a nervous smile. He scans her up and down and a part of her recoils at it, taking in her dripping form with a lazy drag of his eyes. The first other person to see her since her whole world became thoroughly upended, she watches herself at a distance, slip into the familiar pattern of negotiation. She has learned through years of practice what an open expression and firm clear wording can achieve. Forcing people to look past her appearance, recognise her knowledge and meet her there. ‘I have goods to trade, if you are open to it.’

‘I haven’t seen you before, stranger. Who are you?’ The first trap, familiar in its predictability. She smiles. 

‘Just passing through. I have some salvage I want to get a fair price for.’

‘Fair depends on the kind of salvage. And how exactly you came to possess your "salvage".’ His sarcastic tone manifests in a kind of wet rumble at the back of his throat. 

‘Salvage is salvage. We both know that the value of it doesn’t depend on how I got it.’

He laughs, another bubbling gurgle as he narrows his eyes at her. ‘There is truth to that. Tell me what you have to trade, traveller.’ Not scavenger. 

‘Abandoned First Order hardware, and a shuttle, gutted, but operational.’

‘I guess how you got said hardware has nothing to do with why you want to get rid of your ship?’

‘Nothing at all.’ Her lips lift around the words, taking in a sweep of bruised gray sky as his eyes rake over her once more. For the first time in weeks, she wishes she had the familiar weight of her saber at her belt. ‘Shall I bring it to you, or will you send someone to appraise it?’

‘Park it out back. We’ll see if we can agree on the fair price. Be quick about it, rain’s coming in.’

She bows her head to the shopkeeper and works her way back to him, feeling the thrum of his Force signature where he’d been quietly reaching out to her. He nods to her and relaxes slightly, shoulder falling from where they had been bunched in tension.

‘Hard part’s over. He knows we’re not desperate and we’re not stupid. Now we just have to make sure he isn’t.’

They head back as she shivers lightly in the rain. She’s exhausted, made newly and keenly aware of her body by the merchant's appraising look. She’d imagined the first person she’d speak to would immediately raise the alarm and make preparations to collect the enormous bounty on her head. Now he hadn’t, she realizes with a sinking stomach that to carry on evading capture, they will have to do this, again and again, repeatedly going back into the world to be perceived and work within its systems to make it through. It's an understanding that brings with it the parched throat of Jakku, where her survival hinged on such negotiations, the continual need to look strong, confident and unflappable, any weakness to be used as leverage against her. Her youth, her slender body, her solitary nature, all were things she had to weave into her armor in order to keep her from drowning. An inevitable contradiction, almost comforting but not quite, she walks back automatically, her breaths a rhythmic stress through her nostrils, each heavy foot planted one after another. 

‘Where do you want to go after this?’

She blinks as he interrupts her hypnotising trudge onwards and her gait falters slightly before she recovers. ‘We haven’t come to a deal yet, I know better than to spend credits I don’t have.’

‘We should get as far from this system as possible…’

‘That I agree with. You should wait here. I’ll come find you when the deal is done.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘We can’t be seen together. I’ll come find you when it’s done.’ He stops and she rounds on him, his jaw tightening slightly before he nods stiffly.

She climbs into the craft and starts mechanically prepping for the short cruise to the outpost, biting down on her lips and trying to quell the impulse to reach out and check he’s still there, hasn’t slipped into the crowd to disappear and leave her behind. After all, they are safer when they’re not seen together. 

She falls heavily into the pilot's seat, keeping her gaze resolutely forward as she brings the craft to juddering flight, wiping the rain from her face and ignoring the drip of her coat on the floors. From above she can see the little throng of life that is the population centre of the moon, spreading outwards in a root-like webbing of houses and small businesses, studded with little dots wending their way. People, living like this is any other day. She hopes they have peace. 

She sets the craft down as the trader approaches, walking to meet him as he scours appraising eyes over the outside of the craft.

‘Scrapped FO shuttle. Left behind on a nearby moon.’

‘Bogano 5 I take it? They made a mess of the place before they left.’

‘I found it while passing through.’

‘Nobody passes through Bogano 5. But the less I know the better. Any loss on the Order’s part is a gain in mine.’ Her lips curl a little in humor. ‘It’ll be costly to scrub it, you’re not looking at much for it. How operational is it?’

‘Enough to get me here. You’re welcome to look inside.’ He nods curtly and waves across a younger Calamarian, who sets aside his holopad to join them. She greets him with a smile and they walk in. She keeps herself close to the onramp, locking a sliver of greying sunlight in her gaze as she motions them towards the crates of parts.

She's ignored as they murmur between them, turning parts in their hands before peeking into the tangled wiring of the gutted craft. She notices herself bouncing on the balls of her feet, and forces them down flat, to wait patiently as they debate between them in fits and starts. Rushing wasn’t a good tactic, as much as she felt desperation form a ball in her throat. If they sense it, she’s done for. 

‘Hmm, ship’s not got much to show for it. And when it comes to the salvage, old holopads and readers don’t have much of a resale value. But there are some good components in the mix. There’s a little value there. What are you looking to trade for?’

‘Credits, and a small pleasure ship, fueled, with a working hyperspace drive.’

‘Running from something, are you?’

‘Just downsizing. And looking to trade with someone who will know how to use this stuff.’ He smiles at her again, the lurid tinge to it telling her that he was coming to his conclusion, and that, as always, he was a man who tried to take more than was offered. ‘Do we have a deal?’ she asks in a clipped but polite tone, holding his gaze.

‘I think I have something you will like. And my boy here can get it fueled for you. As for the rest, four thousand credits is my best offer.’

‘Five and I’ll take the ship as soon as it's fueled.’

He laughs again, but waves his child outwards to duck past her and into the rain. ‘Remove what is yours and come find me. I’ll take you to your new ship.’ He extends a hand for her to shake before ducking out into the rain.

She shoves their clothes and tools into the bags and loads the crates of rations onto a trolley to wheel back out to the desk. The credits would keep them fed and fueled for a while, but her mind lingers on the few she had to leave behind. Still, taking too long could risk having the deal turn sour, better to grab what she can and move on.

So far so good. She sends out a short message to him before stepping back out into the rain, now moving in sheets past her. I want to go somewhere dry next.

He takes her in, watching the rain drip from her clothes as she drags the trolley behind her, nodding out back towards a grey light-shuttle, a third of the size of the one she’d traded. It’s patterned with rust, yet appears solidly built, just unused. 

‘It was licensed to a local family who had no more use for it. Good enough to get you where you want to go. Just you travelling?’ 

‘Is she fully functioning?’ She deflects with a smile not reaching her eyes. 

‘Of course. But you’re welcome to check for yourself while you wait. Your chip for your credits?’

‘I’ll need one for those too.’ She thumbs the catch for the ramp release and heads aboard. 

Once her eyes adjust to the gloom, the next thing she notices is the close damp air and thick blanket of cobwebs clinging to every corner. She leaves the ramp open, training her awareness on her surroundings dimly, as she begins to check the systems. It’s small, with a perfunctory cargo hold strewn with dried nest and leaves, but the air and water systems hum into life. Recycled water, she smiles, she won’t have to go back to sonics for a little while yet. The captains quarters are outfitted with a single wide bed, with smaller berths in an adjoining room, pulldown cots with thin mattresses. She’s equal parts envious and pitying of the children who had to fold themselves into these in their travels. The kitchen is a tiny square offshoot of the living area, with a rounded table and booth seating, all built to be folded away. It’s small, but it has everything they’d need. And more importantly, it is blessedly free of any association to the First Order. Where their previous shuttle had etched insignias on any surface that it was possible to add them to, these surfaces are scratched and peeled from use, from a family living in them. She feels her hands behind the skinny wardrobe to find a tiny toy starfighter, and slides it into her pocket. 

‘Your credits. You’re fueled and ready to go. Name?’

‘You don’t need my name.’ Her voice slides like ice as his eyes unfocus, wordlessly moving on to turn back to his work, as if she isn’t there. She nods to the boy as she leaves, as he squints a puzzled expression at her.

I’m coming to get you. Stay where you are. Having slipped into her Force powers, it's as if she can see him like a glowing light in the distance, quietly humming. Flying to him is easy, the ship much more manoeuvrable and responsive than the old shuttle, gliding with a satisfying whirr instead of a worrying jangle. She barely has to shift her focus to fly it, feeling her move it in the same unconscious way she moves her body. Before long she settles the craft a little away from him and he approaches. 

‘How did it go?’ he asks, removing his soaked outer layers to come stand in the cockpit. She watches him out of the corner of her eye as he towels the worst of the rain from his face with his shirt, peering back through the ship before furrowing his brow at her. ‘Are you okay?’ He’d glanced quickly around at the dusty interior, and she’d hoped to escape his look for a while as he inventoried the poky floor-plan of their new ship. No such luck. 

‘I’m good, it went well. This ship is fully fueled and as far as I can tell fully operational, and we got this’. She fishes the credit chip from her pocket and throws it lightly to him. ‘Five thousand credits. Less than it’s worth, but not insultingly slow. Best we could have hoped for in the circumstances.’

A smile flicks over his face as he turns the chip in his hand. ‘Five thousand more than we had. It’ll keep us going for a while.’

‘I used the Force on him. He wanted my name…’ She gazes unseeingly at the controls. ‘I didn’t like doing it.’

‘It was unavoidable.’ He moves to stand closer to her, just out of reach. ‘You did very well to get what you got.’ Her smile is sad and fleeting. ‘It’s done. Let’s get this thing moving so we can have a proper look around.’ He slides into the copilot's seat as she nods absently to herself, a growing fuzziness crawling up her limbs. 

Perhaps it's the newer, more stable ship, perhaps it's the weight off her shoulders, or potentially it's just numbing bone-tiredness, but leaving the atmosphere feels easy this time, and before they know it they’re charting a steady course to another planet in the Outer Rim, plucked at random from an array. She closes her eyes to just breathe for a moment as they drift in space, having surmounted the latest in a string of seemingly insurmountable hurdles. Her hunger suddenly announces itself and she shifts her sights from the gnawing worry she was sure would recede with the milky gray of the Moon’s atmosphere, but didn’t, to the smaller and more manageable task of checking out the kitchen and sorting something to eat. 

They walk through the small ship together, placing their few belongings as they go and discovering little discarded items from the ship’s previous life as a family transport. A few bent spoons rattling in a drawer, a tiny picture book (paper, how antiquated) wrinkled with damp. They compile a running list of things they will need, at a priority. Soap, more clothes that are less First Order gray, bedclothes, blankets. All that they owned between them fit into two bags and a couple of crates. Of what she could truly count as her own, all that remained were her boots and her saber. The rest were scattered amongst Bogano’s moons to be discovered by another scavenger in the future and judged as worthless. She is rootless. 

For once she can fly, but her comfort in that is sharp, as she had anticipated. There’s nothing waiting for her on Jakku except certain capture. The Resistance will have moved on by now and the remains of her beacon are wedged into the dirt of a crumbling moon. Luke made clear his feelings when it came to the two so much as talking. If they went back to him, he’d be able to see the unacknowledged shape of it, looming beneath the surface. She has broken her one rule, and the evidence of that is currently brushing fallen leaves into a pile with his feet, reaching out to her to steady himself. He rights himself before he makes contact and something twists in her stomach.

‘We’ll have to buy a few things when we land.’ He notes, opening a succession of dusty cupboards and watching a trail of dust sprinkle to the floor. ‘Hungry?’

She nods and thumps down into the booth to tear into some ration pouches, some of the nicer ones rescued from the base. He takes them from her hands to set them in the heater before she can get a chance to dive into them cold.

‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ He asks, sitting next to her but maintaining a space between them. 

‘No.’ She breathes out quietly, before letting her face drop into her hands. A warm hand comes to rest lightly on her shoulder, and she feels her held breath release slowly. ‘I’m so scared all the time and every time I think it’s going to boil over, it just gets worse and worse. I’m so tired.’ Her hands hang down limply in her lap as she lifts her face to meet his, with a tentative smile that quickly loses its footing. 

‘I know, it’s okay. Let’s eat and then you can get some sleep.’ He offers, squeezing her shoulder before standing to retrieve their steaming rations.

She curls onto the thin mattress as her stomach clenches, too tired to care about the damp smell or the cloud of dust that she disturbs. She wraps a few stolen blankets around her and falls into a black dimensionless sleep, dimly aware of his presence near her.

When she opens her eyes a few times in the night, gripped by a sudden panic, the first thing she feels is the comforting warmth of his Force signature resonating with hers, and the shape of him reading in the dim glow of a holopad as he leans his back against the bed frame. She allows herself to sleep once more. 

Rey fully awakes at length with a little hum and a rustle of movement behind him. ‘How long have you been down there?’ she asks, smile ringing her voice, deep with sleep. He turns to her, her hair messy, still blinking her eyes back into slow focus. 

‘A little while. I thought you might prefer not waking up alone on an unfamiliar ship.’

‘You’re correct in that assumption.’ She stretches languidly, before sitting up against the headboard. ‘Where are we?’

‘Still on course. We’re going as far as our fuel can take us...’

‘Then we figure it out from there, as far from the Supremacy as possible.’ She wrinkles her nose at the thought of the ship where they had left so much behind. Her place with the Resistance, with Luke, her life as a scared scavenger who had never taken a life. Him, leader of the Knights of Ren, symbol of the ferocious might of the First Order, apprentice to Supreme Leader Snoke. All had been left behind in the tattered shards of broken armor and the tangled bodies of the praetorian guard. 

He nods, face crinkling, not meeting her eye. She squints at him with a questioning tilt of her head. ‘What’s wrong?’ 

He scoffs, leaning his chin against the bunk. ‘If I told you you’d laugh.’ His gaze tracks over the gray woolen blankets they’d stolen to take with them. 

‘Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t say it. I say stupid stuff all the time.’

He looks up at her and flashes on a guarded smile. She’s reminded once again of the first time they spoke like this, and the pull of his sad entreating eyes as they held hers, reaching out. ‘It’ll be the first time I can remember when I haven’t been told what to do, where to go.’ He exhales through his nose as his eyes un-focus. ‘I guess I’m scared I won’t know what to do.’

She holds her breath for a second, a little shaken. She’d been counting on him to not feel anxious, be the steady calm presence she’d recently come to view him as. Somehow. What will happen if they both lose it now?  She swallows and then shrugs. A full body shrug that hides the tremor of cold fear that passes over her face. 

‘If it helps I don’t think we’re going to have much leisure time, what with trying to keep ourselves fed and undetected.’ She picks at a little felted ball on the blanket. ‘Staying alive on your own is pretty much a full time job. Trust me.’

‘And I’ve put you back in that position again.’ He slides back to bring a little space between them, which she immediately counters by leaning forward.

‘I put myself in this position, I came to you, remember.’ She waves a hand over his glassy eyes. ‘We just need a plan is all.’ His eyes finally meet hers and she sinks back a little in relief. They’re a deep brown in the dim orange light of the cabin, and full of the same kind of fear and hopefulness that made her reach for him in the first place, will seemingly always stir that urge in her. ‘Have you slept at all?’

‘I’m okay, it’s not too late.’

‘I don’t know why I’m so tired. I guess I’ve fallen out of the habit of talking with people. I don’t like needing people for things.’ She pouts. ‘But I guess it’s too much to ask that I never have to speak to another person ever again.’

‘I can go if you want.’ He leans back to look at her, a rare easy smile on his face. He’s more tired than he lets on. 

‘You know that’s not what I meant.’

‘I know.’ He murmurs quietly, eyes sliding away from her once again. ‘Shall we go make a plan then?’ 

‘Excellent idea.’ They walk the few steps back to the rec area, with the ghost of his hand hovering at her lower back as she rolls the sleep from her shoulders.

‘Right rules, we agree on how the credits are spent. We don’t hurt anyone, or do anything that could harm anyone. And we don’t do anything flashy that could draw attention to ourselves.’

He pauses for a second in the process of folding himself into the too-small bench. ‘Why do I feel like these rules are mostly for me?’

‘You’re welcome to add your own.’

‘Fine, we don’t go anywhere with overt ties to the Resistance or the First Order. We don’t ask too many questions or appear too interested in what’s going on out there.’ 

She nods and sinks down with a huff, breaking a stale ration block against the table with a snap. ‘Small ports only, only the kind of places any other sightseer might visit. Anyone who sees us needs to think we’re just on holiday, not wanted fugitives.’ 

‘Because we always look so relaxed.’

‘Fine’, she chews on the tough bar with slightly too much force, ‘make it look like we’re on a disaster of a holiday.’ He laughs soundlessly. ‘And no more than a few days, we refuel, replenish our supplies, then move on.’

‘No wandering off, and keep the ship in sight. If it comes to it we have to be prepared to leave everything behind and just run.’

‘Won’t that be a change of pace.’ He furrows his brow at her response, but she just shakes the dark look off her face. ‘Anything else you can think of?’

‘Don’t get caught.’ He shrugs. 

‘And if we do?’

‘We can’t. If we’re handed over to the First Order we’ll both be tried and executed.’

‘But if we do?’

‘I’d expect you to leave me behind.’

‘I won’t do that. Would you leave me if it came to it?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Then stop asking stupid questions. What do we need to get when we land?’

He’s supremely grateful for the change in topic and pulls a cup of caff towards him, knowing he’s looking at a sleepless night with the torrent of thoughts sloughing around in his brain. ‘Clothes that aren’t FO standard for one. Soap, fuel, caff that isn’t freeze dried. What about you?’

She sighs dreamily, ‘underwear.’ He snorts. ‘I set off woefully under-prepared, and now I’m paying the price for it.’

‘Shopping tomorrow, then.’ 

‘Are you going to get some sleep?’

‘Probably not.’ 

‘Suit yourself, I’m going to sit in the cockpit for a while and try to convince myself this isn’t all a dream and that I’m not going to wake up dying on that moon.’

She goes and he waits a few minutes to follow, tentatively trying to get a read on her emotions through her Force signature. It’s as he’s come to expect from her, calm, measured and thoughtful. She speaks as soon as he crossed the threshold, sat back in the captain's chair with her arms lightly resting on the armrests.

‘You know this is still all new to me. Whole galaxies full of people moving past me too fast for me to even register. For my entire life, my universe has only been as wide as my speeder could take me and back. I knew there were other people, of course, but somehow I didn’t really understand until they’re just a shadow in my eye. Do you think if you could look at it, truly look at it, you’d go mad?’ She turns to him, lit in side profile by the blinking lights of the console, the gray of the Universe reflecting in her eyes. ‘Come and sit with me. If you’re not going to sleep.’

He lowers himself slowly into the copilot's seat and mirrors her, his heart in his throat. He un-focuses his eyes and lets himself get lost in the blur of stars and planets moving past them. It feels as if they should make a sound, but the only noise is the whirr of the propulsion drive and the life support systems. Hyperspeed travel is silent, orders of magnitude faster than the speed of sound. Sometimes he imagines that the sound eventually catches up to him, the cell rending roar of launching through the air at light speed hitting him in an atomizing wall of pure noise. That would feel natural, please his sense of balance and order. Of action and reaction. This feeling that it cannot be possible to take such action without a reaction. Now he understands it in the same way he does the Force: as a manipulation of the relationship between things, of them slipping between these linking threads like the treads on a ladder. It works for him. It keeps him sane enough to gaze at it. 

He wishes he could know what she sees. He could ask, but it would be too big of an ask, too private. He could hazard she sees in it an expression of pure freedom, a reminder of the millions of people living parallel lives to her own. A reminder of her smallness, but also her solidarity with a multitude of others. He imagines that it is soothing to her. All he can do, will do, is imagine. So they gaze out together at different universes, different shadows fading in the frenetic blink of their eyes. 

When he glances across after who knows how long, his limbs feel rested as if from deep meditation, which in a way, they had been. His mind feels clear and uncluttered, his eyes heavy but focused. When he sees her asleep, head nodding towards her shoulder, he stands to carry her back to the sleeping quarters and deposit her gently on the bed before picking up his holopad to read until morning. His eyes slide automatically over the words, their sense never gaining a grip on his spiraling mind.

Chapter Text

He wakes with his holopad fallen on his chest and Rey curled next to him in a bed altogether too small for the both of them, their one pillow having been decisively colonised during the night. A cobwebbed ceiling and a ship droning lowly around him. Peace, levelling it its intensity at the sound of her mumbling to herself in her sleep, having slipped deeper into rest at his side. He rolls the ankle left dangling for however many hours and is rewarded with radiating pins and needles, checking the time out of sheer indulgence that for once he doesn't need to know it. They have nowhere in particular to be and a little money behind them. He stretches the cramp from his shoulder and nudges her awake with his knee, observing the smile that pulls across her lips, too comfortable to deny himself. 

‘I remember where we are’, she grumbles, wiggling down into the covers to chase their perfect morning warmth. ‘So this is what it feels like…’

He blinks at her, watching her hand press against the bare mattress, where spotted and dusty he'd had the best sleep of his life. ‘We have shopping to do. I thought we could buy ourselves some breakfast.’

She hums as she works herself upright, pushing down the shirt that had ridden up in the night to show a strip of tanned skin. She blinks as he slowly resolves in front of her eyes, smiling before scooching down to grab her clothes. He lingers, his hand mirroring her thoughtless search for the warmth rapidly dissipating, trying to catch up with conversations that seem to go at a sprint, no matter how few words they exchange. The object of his racing thoughts rifles through their sparse pile of clothing before settling on the same ones anyway, throwing him his without a backwards glance.

She sits, knees folded to her chest as he braids her hair, passing up her caff at his wordless gesture and holding it balanced on her knee, watching the lightly juddering reflection of his face, drawn with concentration. He drinks her tiny mirror before she can come up with an effective means to stop him, twisting to lacerate him with a look. They'll have to buy some more...

‘Do you think anyone will recognize us out here?’ She shields her eyes from the sun and steps down onto sliding sand. Neither had chosen the planet on any more than a hunch, the particular way its name had appealed to them from the list. They chose well. She shakes the cold from her limbs, rolling her shoulders as the sun beats down, weighty and pleasantly smothering. 

‘Doubtful, we’re at the edge of the charted galaxy.' He stumbles as his foot is immediately subsumed, grains following like water to find a no-doubt permanent home in his only pair of boots. 'The Order has very little influence out here.’ While he stares down at his feet, she picks her way onwards decisively, having come to the conclusion years ago that the terrain responds best to a confident stride. It still works its way in, of course, but its a battle not truly winnable. She takes her victories where she can. 

‘You don’t really look like yourself either.’ She turns to him with a bright, squinting smile, walking backwards and ignoring his arms that have come to keep her from falling, despite his own sliding gait. ‘No cape, no mask, only seventy-five percent of your usual broodiness.’ 

‘And you look like a skinned Stormtrooper.’

‘I’d like to remedy that. But I believe I was promised food.’ He nods as they find a stony path that slowly widens into a rough road, up ahead the murmur of people moving around in the haze. ‘It’ll be strange to see people again.’

‘We can go whenever you want to.’ A humanoid figure passes them without a second glance as he's leaning on her, fruitlessly trying to shake the worst of it from his ankles and sweeping the horizon in a lacerating stare. Then the smell of food reaches them.

They have an idea they'll assess their options before making an informed decision. This measured approach is quickly jettisoned at the first cart, drawn in by fragrant spiced air and the bubble of oil in the background. Some kind of skewered animal, brushed with a glistening blend of herbs and turning on a juddering spit. There is no question, just the wordless offer of their credit chip and a laugh smothered against grease stained overalls. Then they’re walking again, nibbling little bits of meat off the slender carcass in silence as they enjoy the first fresh meal they’ve had in weeks. She chuckles as he turns from her, trying to make the decidedly undignified action of prising the tender flesh from the bones somewhat less so, as if somehow that would be the thing she would object to. Her mind unfolds with a sprawling list of the numerous unseemly things they'd borne witness to having been forced into each other's company. But she holds back, setting aside the question as to why to dig at the meat trapped in the spiny ribcage with her tongue.   

After a regrettably brief meal, they dump the bones and brush off their hands where streaks of spiced oil had flowed between their fingers and down their arms. She chases one with her tongue before reluctantly mopping up the rest. 

They are drawn once again by their noses to a stall selling fresh fruits and vegetables, warmed to above body temperature, sloshing heavily with juices where they pick them up to feel them for ripeness. He holds the laden bag against his chest as they marvel at the wealth of colors and smells on display under the hot sun. She blinks in the dry heat, a welcome change from their weeks spent in near constant rain, clothes and hair always slightly damp, making her acutely aware of her every movement. It had served as a helpful explanation for the creeping discomfort that intensified with each passing day. But as she feels her skin prickle with its familiar warning, it dawns that despite everything, she’d missed the desert. There was something to be said for how the lethal temperature suffocated her thoughts, pushed them to the background to join her again in the solitude of night.

She brushes his arm to draw his attention towards a stall selling clothing, skin soft below his rolled sleeves. An action she'd watched out of the corner of her eye, wilfully ignoring the world around her and letting him scan the crowd for them both, before landing back on her with a brief smile. Said smile joins the ranks of the many things that will be waiting for her when she closes her eyes.

They separate, and she walks to her mark with the ghost of his touch on her lower back, light and fleeting. She clears her throat and forces a studious look on her face as she picks out some light flowing trousers and a tunic. He is hovering nearby, picking something off a tablecloth and turning it in his palm, exchanging words with the merchant, lost to the crowd. On the firm advice of the a kindly older lady, skin leathered from sun, she folds a stack of underwear under her arm with the rest. She follows Rey's gaze with a raise of her eyebrow, pushing a bundle of clothes towards her with a shake of her head.

‘They’ll fit. I know how men are with clothes. It’s easier this way.’ He appears back at her side and she brushes off his look, staring up into the sun, letting it erase her blush with its own. 

'Hear that? You're awkward. You don't know how to dress, you have to have someone do it for you...'

'She's not wrong.'

'Who were you talking to?'

'A man selling old war medallions. Apparently they dredge a lot of them out of the sand.'

'That's kind of morbid.'

'I know. I thought you'd like it.'

She coughs around a dryness in her throat she should be accustomed to. 'Do you want to see what she picked?' She nods them towards a barely shaded alley between two vacant stalls, waiting for him to blink the sun from his eyes before reaching into the bag. She lets it fall at her feet as she picks out the shirt, long sleeved and softer than anything she's ever had touch her body. 'Green. Dark green, but still. I've never seen you in green. I've never seen you in anything other than black and shades of black.'

'Can you have shades of black?' He tilts his head in question.

'Put it on.' She holds out the garment for him, stooping to dig around at the rest of the items she's paid for without question under a weighted stare. 

'Right now?'

'I won't look', she beam up at him, braid slipping off her shoulder.

'How courteous...' She roots through his bag as he fiddles with the hem of his shirt, looking over his shoulder and back to the street still teeming with bodies. There's a choice to be made between denying her and having a crowd of strangers see the scars that climb his back like rungs of a ladder. He doesn't have to think twice, giving himself a second to panic, eyes screwed shut before he covers her eyes with his hand, removing it from her flushed skin to find them closed. He can feel his skin tense as the thin sheen of sweat rapidly cools in the air. Then he's yanking on the impossibly soft garment, ears trained on the voices bubbling around them, waiting for a sharp inhale or a smothered laugh. Nothing, just Rey trying to will the smile from her face as she waits in silence. 'Happy now?'

She opens her eyes and they snap to his. It's a new kind of fear he feels waiting for her to speak, rooting him to the spot as his calves ache. 'It looks good. It looks soft.' She steps in close to untwist his hem and lay it flat against his skin. 'It brings out your eyes.' Her palms linger over the fabric at his chest, and he prays she can't feel the thump of his heart beating against his ribcage. 'Say thank you.' Her eyes drift back to his and the air is sucked from his lungs.

'Thank you.'

'You're welcome', she smiles, stooping to pick up the bag and stuff his old damp shirt inside, shaking off the sand with a practiced flick. 

They duck into a barely standing shack to buy some toiletries and spices. He leans at the doorway with their purchases at his feet as she chats with the merchant, one eye trained on the skies as his hands tingle at his sides. No faces turn their way, no hands point over the crowd in their direction, just minds only dimly focused on their tasks. They walk back in calm silence as the sun begins to creep higher in the sky and shopkeepers duck further into the shade, dragging their wares over the sand with a warm hiss. 

She showers the heat from herself with a groan, stepping into her new clothes and luxuriating in how the pale fabric and tighter fit let her settle a little more comfortably in her own skin. Lazily content she tackles one of their fruits and begins trying to cut the spiny peel from the flesh as he moves around behind her. The inside is soft and sweet smelling, pale green flecked with vibrant purple seeds. She crushes one in her teeth and finds them edible if slightly bitter, before slicing the fruit into chunks, sliding the more tart pieces to the side with the assumption he might prefer them over her. They have cured meat and bread, braided into an elaborate swirl, a cheese that had been recommended to them as a regional specialty, and an array of heady spices, selected for their warmth and pungency, all crowded into the tiny cupboard in the kitchen. With no idea how to prepare any of it, it's doubtful any combination will be bad out of sheer novelty. Warmed from the sun, infused with its life, they bring color, creeping into a world she didn't notice was lacking. He stumbles somewhere behind her with a grumbled curse and she pops one of the more syrupy pieces in her mouth, more than happy to leave him to it.

They eat on the floor, unwilling to sit upright, fruit quenching the slight thirst they’d worked up in their walk. Brains too lazy to train, they circle each other in the tiny living quarters, stepping around chairs and tools to try to grapple each other into a hold. She enjoys the press of his hands on her shoulders with the taste of the fruit still on her lips, head light as her muscles hum to life to twist from his grasp. She ducks behind him to try to throw him off balance, feeling the brush of her tunic against her skin where he reaches back to catch himself. Prowling around him, in clothes that show off patches of rosy sunburn on both of them, she celebrates in the sheer pleasure of being fed, being rested, being free on a warm planet in the only way that makes sense. She jumps on his back to try to pull him to the floor. 

They cook and clean off the dusty surfaces, spreading out their new supplies and poring over the little souvenirs felt behind by the previous owners. He turns the little ship between his fingers as they stretch out on the stiff bench, a brainless holoseries about a town dealing with a rathtar infestation burbling away in the background. They peel strange little berries and try not to crush the tender meat inside, enfolded in the glow of the screen as slimy limbs writhe behind doors held shut by screaming villagers. When she falls asleep, he gently carries her to the sleeping quarters. 

She wakes in the darkness with sweetness on her tongue. He’s not far, awake somewhere, and once again she’d fallen asleep without him. She finds him sat in the pilot’s seat, looking outwards at a sky grayed with stars. He turns to her as she hovers in the doorway, suddenly hesitant to take another step. She sought him out because she wanted him close, will seemingly always want him close. But there is a line, there has to be. One she won't know until she's crossed it. When she finds it, will he look at her like he is now? Head tilted, trying to read her thoughts on her face, setting aside his drink to try to puzzle her out.

Before her mind can catch up to the movement of her traitorous limbs, she crosses the few feet that separate them and sits on his lap, pulling his arms across her chest and breathing deep, exhaling a sigh. They had done this before as their pod hurtled to the ground. Both racked with injuries, her stress had blinded her to the feel of him underneath her, the rise and fall of his chest against her back. She’d clawed onto his arms like a seatbelt, both slick with blood. Now she can feel the pulse at his wrists where she holds him, feel his muscles tense as he tightens his grip on her so slightly as to be invisible. But she feels it, and a shiver runs up her body. 

‘Do you remember when we did this before?’

‘It rings a bell.’ He leans forward, cycling pointlessly through readouts that offer precisely nothing new, half for something to do with his hands, half as an excuse to hug her a little closer to his body.

‘I was so sure I was going to die. I couldn’t even remember how to breathe. You had to remind me.’ 

‘It’s natural. Anyone would panic in a situation like that.’ He takes her hands and fits them to the controls, labelling the switches and dials they both know, a smile slurring his words as she goes along with it. He lets his grip go lax, trailing lightly against her skin to fall in his lap.

‘You didn’t panic.’

‘I couldn’t. I had to get you out of there.’

‘What about now? Why can’t I breathe?’ She burns gray spots in her vision staring at the ceiling before closing her eyes.

‘I don’t know.’ I do.

It's too much to ask that he pluck this thought from her mind. Even if he did he'd find it purposely isolated, hacked from a web as if context-less it would be any less terrifying. The seconds stretch and she pulls in a slow breath, releasing it in a wobbling stream before she loosens his hold gently, turning to face him. Snaking a hand to his neck to steady her, half her mind screaming at her to say something, instead she leans forward to brush her lips against his. 

As they touch, her eyelids flutter in surprise. Behind them, the lightshow of a brain trying to force an unwilling body into sleep, unwarranted and oddly comforting in its strangeness. Her stomach lurches as his hand settles on her hip, and she pulls back to lean her head against his, sucking in desperate airless breaths. She shudders as his trembling breath ghosts across her lips, heart thundering in her chest. She pulls back to look at him and trace her thumb across his cheek, watching goose-bumps raise in its wake.

Then immediate screaming panic halts the process of her lungs. Why did I do that?, droning like a heartbeat, smothering her own. She stills, grasping for invisibility, that if she holds still as a stone he somehow will forget her weight on his lap. She’s pinned under his questioning look, lungs burning, waiting for it to turn to rage. Or worse, the deadened blank mask he adopts when he retreats into himself. 

Her mumbled apology barely climbs above a whisper, but she can’t delude herself she stayed silent as his eyes quickly flick to her lips and back, slightly unfocused. She waits for him to push her gently from his, too betrayed to respond with anger. He lifts his hand to her face but doesn’t touch. Maybe there is anger after all. That’s a good thing. That they know what to do with. They can slip into the well-worn shape of it with ease. ‘Why are you sorry?’ 

She swallows, mouth dry. So he’s going to make her say it. That’s fine. He doesn’t owe her any kindness in this. She feels each of his fingertips make contact with her skin, the sensation incongruously heavy, like bolts sliding into place, one by one. Threat and assurance blending in the feather-light bridge between their bodies. 

‘For kissing you.’ She watches his eye twitch just slightly before his gaze lands on hers and holds her there. Mentally twisting under it, outwardly she meets it with a slight lift of her jaw. 

‘Do you wish you hadn’t?’ His voice is low, modulated. Whatever he’s thinking, he desperately doesn’t want her to know. 

She breaths in deep, suddenly, moving in his light grip. ‘That depends.’ She hears her own voice at a distance, holding her breath.

‘On what?’

She flashes him the briefest of smiles, counting down the seconds in her mind before he turns on her and she has to leave another little home behind her. This one person-shaped and warm under her. Hindsight is immediate, it seems, and cruel. The too-late warning of reaching for a step in the dark and finding blank air. She realizes how much she needs him at the exact instant she destroyed the fragile balance between them. 

‘Do you wish I hadn’t?’ Chill pours over her neck like water as she says it. A voice, jaded with age, someone she met, folded into the chorus in her mind. Of course he does, child. Her vision begins to cloud in front of her, swimming with her heartbeat. She hates her panic response, never able to reason her way out of it, her body’s reaction to fear being the systematic shutdown of everything she needs to evade danger. She’d become used to navigating by the wobbling shadows at the edge of her vision. Behind them the ship rumbles on as if nothing is amiss. 

‘Why did you kiss me?’

She closes her eyes and screws them tightly shut, placing one shaking hand on his chest, still selfishly reaching for the grounding feel of his body. ‘Because I wanted to.’ 

‘Do you still want to?’ She nods, soothing herself with the motion. ‘Rey, look at me.’

She does, taking a breath in an attempt at clarity. He holds her gaze and leans forward, slowly. Slow enough she can pull herself back to a point of safety, a flash of a smile twitching on his lips as she doesn't and closes the distance between them in an agonizing few seconds. He kisses her and every muscle in her body tenses, before he pulls back with chuckle. A humorless anxious noise, an outlet, albeit a poor one, for the pressure building behind his ribcage, squeezing his lungs. Then her stomach jolts with alarm as she's pushed into his grip by the force of his kiss, surging forward and tilting her head, stealing her air like it's the last in the Galaxy. Coming to the conclusion at the same time that she does, that she would let him. 

‘Fuck.’ She deflates against him, hiding her face in his neck. 

He laughs again, deep and low, a sound of pure relief, wrapping his arms around her with a sigh. ‘Couldn’t have put it better myself.’ 

'I think I'm gonna have a heart attack.'

'You'll be okay.' She closes her eyes as she feels him gently untangling the hair she'd been too comfortable to braid. 'We've survived worse. You're breathing, that's progress.'

‘What now?’ She feels him tip his head back, searching the cobwebbed ceiling for answers with a scoff. 

‘This I don’t have a plan for. Do you?’ He glances down at her head, as she shakes hers, grinding it into his skin. 

‘Come to bed.'

He exhales shakily and helps her back up, pressing a brief kiss to her forehead before taking her weight as she stands on wobbling knees. He gets a single glimpse of her flushed face before she's fleeing to the safety of the bunk at a near sprint. 

‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I got as far as asking you to bed before I lost my nerve, but I have no idea what I’m supposed to do now…’ They lie next to each other facing the ceiling, arms lightly brushing each other. 

‘I don’t think there are rules, exactly.’ He hooks her little finger with his, unable to give up the point of contact between them now that it exists. 

‘But there’s a way this usually goes…’, she says, wrinkling her nose lightly at the memory of a few stolen holovids of people moving together. Her assumption that they were fighting never quite left her, even when corrected on it. Scrappy and mildly pathetic, this thing that people do. Instinct, they'd assured her. And like most other things she'd assumed that that was something simply not given to her.  

He shrugs beside her and she snaps back into her body. ‘If there is, I don’t know what it is either.’ 

'You don't?' She turns on her side and he follows, too cowardly to look into his eyes, instead they roam over his face, shiny and pink where the sun had touched him. Too pale.

He takes her hand and folds it with his under his chin. 'I don't. Does that bother you?'

'No, why would it?'

He opens his mouth before closing it again, rubbing his chin against her skin. 'Because I should know these things.' His cheek twitches under her lips as she kisses it. 'You're sweet.'

'No, I just like you.'

'I like you, too.'

'Good thing too, otherwise this could get pretty awkward.' She places a hand tentatively on his chest and just looks at it for a few seconds before he covers it with his own, brushing his fingers lightly over her skin. She closes her eyes as she lays her head down to curve her body over his, looping his arm around her waist to draw her closer as she lets out a shuddering sigh.

‘This feels nice’, she smiles, nuzzling into him as he drags his fingers lazily down her back. ‘Your body feels nice against mine.’ She wiggles up to lay over him, trapping his head between her arms, peering down at him. ‘Can I kiss you?’ 

He huffs out a laugh, stroking her arms. ‘You may.’

‘I didn’t ask you before. I thought if I did and you said no, I’d have died.’ 

He swallows. ‘I would’ve said yes’, he murmurs, ‘if that helps.’ 

‘It does.’ She smiles, a rare toothy and squinting smile he’s seen on her once, as she stood for a moment in the rain, catching it in her palm to let it fall again. Her gaze drops to his mouth and she slowly closes the space between them. 

It’s as shocking as it was the first time. The blood rushing to her skin in a sudden flush, his fingers leaving little traces on her skin she can feel even after their removed. She breaks away after a few seconds to bury her face in his neck. 

‘Fuck. How do people do this? I feel like I’m going to catch fire.’ She feels his chuckle rumble through him, sliding off to the side again and waiting for him to shadow her movement, partners in a slow and halting dance.

‘Are you okay?’ 

‘I’m terrified’ she admits, teeth lightly chattering. ‘I have no idea what I’m doing. Do me a favor…’

'Anything.' 

She screws her eyes shut as the blood roars in her ears at his simple, automatic response. ‘Kiss me?’ she pleads, feeling the telltale prickle of tears in her eyes. 

He kisses her, thumb slowly dragging at her jawline, drawing her body closer with every press of their lips, twisting her legs with his, her hands splayed on his chest. 

She pulls away to stare at him, and cradle his face in her hands, pressing soft kisses on his cheeks, his jaw, his forehead, before lightly tracing his parted lips with her tongue. She drops her grip as he reaches up to cup her jaw with one annoyingly large hand, trembling as his tongue touches hers. For a second it's strange, his tongue stroking against hers and hers automatically chasing it. Then her stomach swoops like she'd steered them into freefall. She surges forward, slanting their mouths together, panting into his mouth and darting her tongue to touch his. When she pulls away to gasp for air, she presses her burning forehead to his.

‘You’re gonna kill me’, she breathes, shaking her head against him. ‘Somehow I’m fine with that.’ She blinks, pupils blown wide, before kissing him again. 'Have you ever done this before?' she mumbles against his skin as she scrapes her teeth against his jaw, watching his mouth fall open.

He shakes his head before realizing she's probably anticipating a more detailed response. He swallows. 'I've been kissed. Not on the mouth, nothing like this. On the cheek by a few people. You', he smiles.

'I don't know why I did that', she hides her face against his shoulder. 'You should have heard the conversation I had with myself afterwards...'

'Why? I can't say I minded.' 

'It didn't feel like this. I feel like my thoughts are playing at half speed.' He squeezes her against his chest and his eyes slide shut, making the choice between sight and the smile slowly emerging on his face, perfectly content in his decision. 'I like it when I make you smile.' He opens his eyes to find her looking at him, watching the progress of said smile transform his face into someone younger, more buoyant. 'You're so beautiful.'

'That's kind of you to say.'

'You don't believe me?' He shakes his head. 'Why don't you? Why would you think that?'

'I don't like how I look.'

'Have you considered it might have something to do with the fact you've spent your whole life looking at it? Hiding it...'

'It's a possibility.'

'Do you think I could lie about something like this? I want you. I want to lay claim to you.'

He looks away, blinking around a silent scoff before turning back to her to find her raising her eyebrows at him, running her tongue behind teeth she looks more than willing to sink into his flesh. 'I can live with that.'

They spend the next few hours discovering all the ways their mouths can fit together, separating only briefly to grasp hungrily for each other again. They only break their maddening cycle when hunger lurches in her stomach. She puzzles over the sensation, surprised by the sudden resurrection of other feelings beyond the dizzying pleasure of being able to touch him and feel his hands on her through the thin barrier of her clothing. 

‘Even this is better’, she mumbles incredulously around a chunk of gritty veg starch. Maybe freedom has a taste, maybe it’s the memory of watching his pupils dilate and breathing wobble, knowing that it was because of her.  

‘Somehow I doubt that’ he says, twining their fingers together and taking a luxurious drink of water from the canteen. She watches him swallow, and he turns to intercept her look. ‘What are you staring at, scavenger?’

‘You.’ You’re too pale to get away with blushing. She rakes her eyes over him, her prey having fallen into a trap she didn’t know she was making. ‘Am I making you uncomfortable?’

‘Not exactly.’ He gently sets down his drink and turns to her, her eyes snapping up to meet his. ‘Mostly I just want to kiss you.’

‘Haven’t we done that enough?’

‘There’ll never be enough.’ His response in immediate, grumbling out of him. She huffs with shock, falling silent as his palm comes to rest against her pulse. He kisses a path down her cheek and under her jaw, before finding her neck. She sucks in a hissing breath, fingers finding his shirt and twisting there, before gently pushing him away, as her head spins.

‘You have to stop that.’

‘Why?’ 

‘Because I’ll die’, she replies airly, jaw shaking as she brings it closed. She melts into the bench, flopping her arm over her face to sigh emphatically. ‘I think a week's worth of tiredness just hit me at once.’ 

‘I’m not going to carry you if that’s what you want.'

‘I’m not that that lazy.’ 

‘If you say so.’

‘I’m conserving energy’ she says carefully. He picks up her hand, still twined with his, and kisses it before standing to help her up and leading them back to bed. 

She curls into his side in the dark, slipping off to sleep as he half-heartedly tucks the blankets around them before laughing to himself in the dark. 

Chapter Text

She wakes next to him, something she’d grown used to within days and watches awareness slowly return as the clock ticks over, mouth curling into a smile in side profile.

‘How long have you been staring at me?’ He turns to look at her and opens his eyes, languidly focusing on hers. Her breath catches before she rights herself, ducking to brush their lips together in a featherlight kiss. 

‘I needed to make sure. Breakfast?’ She asks around a stretch. 

He presses a kiss into her hair before shoving his way past her into the fresher, smiling at her wordless protest over his shoulder. She kicks at the door on the way past but still walks through to their tiny kitchen to get started on food as the shower starts up behind her. Gradually becoming cluttered with their purchases, the evidence of their habitation layered over the dust of people past, she holds herself up against the counter as the water rumbles up to a boil and closes her eyes. There's a pressure in the air, each thoughtlessly placed mug or set aside dish demanding acknowledgment from her, the low hum of a crowd waiting for her to speak. She rolls her eyes to the ceiling against the drag of this attention and reaches blindly into the cupboards.

She’s just pouring the dried crystals of caff into a pot when she hears him come up behind her and place a palm on her shoulder. She turns to crane up to him, inhaling damp clean skin as his hand moves to her back. Humming with contentment before plopping down onto her heels, unwinding her hair she shoots him a dark look before heading to wash up. 

She slides back onto the bench, clean and well rested to a table full of steaming food. Her thigh brushes his where she’d borrowed a shirt to dress in, skin pinked and sensitive from the heat, her hair cascading over his shoulder where she leans and chews lazily. ‘Where are we?’ 

‘Somewhere in the Usaita system. Not much out there except rocks.’ The rumble of sleep still infuses his voice and he blinks dragging the caff towards himself. ‘Shall we go check?’ He sets down his mug, and places a hand just above her knee. 

She shrugs, before climbing over him to straddle his thighs, glancing backwards at the cups and dishes behind her and looping her arms around his neck. ‘I have a better idea.’ She kisses him until he thunks his head backward to gulp in a lungful of air. His hands cradle her hips, as she kisses his jaw and neck and his eyes flutter closed.

‘Fuck.’

‘You okay?’ 

‘I think so.’ He cracks opens his eyes, looking down his nose at her. ‘Are you wearing my shirt?’

‘I wear your clothes all the time, not that half of them even are yours... Did you just notice?’ 

‘I was a bit distracted’ he smiles. ‘I like it when you wear my clothes.’

‘How possessive of you.’ She narrows her eyes at him. 

He squares his jaw. ‘Like you’re not'. She glares at him, but her expression softens into an eye-roll, quickly lost in thought. He wants to bring her back to him, body and mind pressed against his, feeling how they sit against each other. 'You're wearing just my shirt, seemingly...' He's close enough to watch the blush erupt like a sunset, his mouth falling open at the sight. 

'I'm wearing underwear, I'm not an animal.' Her legs break out in goosebumps under the sudden attention. She hadn't thought to cover them and now she regrets it, brain robbed of any higher processes by the light brush of his fingers at her knee. He stands carefully, stepping past the table to set her on her feet, her hands snapping to tug at the hem as soon as she's solidly standing. 'You can't look at me like that. I'm not used to it.'

Her eyes flick to his under the weight of his hands on her shoulders. 'Will you get used to it?' 

'Eventually', her hand comes to wrap around his wrist, glancing away as she feels her face heat with blush once again. ‘I’m going to get dressed. I need to train.’ Her eyes search his for a moment as his hand drifts down her side to her back, stepping closer for a moment before shaking clarity back into her brain and stepping out of his reach.

She stalls in front of their tiny wardrobe, stilling for the first time on the task of choosing something to wear. Everything she owns is practical enough to train in so there’s no reason for her to be deliberating as cold crawls up her legs. Something in the back of her mind tells her that people worry about these things, about what they’ll wear to impress their partner, that they want to look their best for them. Is that what it is? Is that something she has to worry about now?  She concentrates on running her hand through the soft fabrics hanging and waiting for her. She can't give in to the fogging of her thoughts, examine the tiny flash of resentment at the knowledge he had given her another thing to be aware of. It's a feeling to be probed only when the danger is passed. But they're not out of danger. There's a distinct chance they never will be. 

She turns back to the task at hand, a simple choice now branching into a ballooning web of decisions. She’d always felt fine in whatever she wore, knowing her strength and her resourcefulness, preferring clothes that allow her a full range of movement. She appreciates beautiful clothes, as objects, and on others, but had never really coveted them as others had. So what is it that freezes her feet to the floor?

She’s sure he doesn’t care what she wears. She lies to herself and says she doesn’t care what he wears. But she likes to be able to see the skin on his arms and the slight flush that the sun gives him. To see his clothes lightly hug his muscles as he moves through their space. They have a space now, that is just theirs, and she can touch him and feel his heart beat under her fingertips, and nobody will see except them that she is aware of every inch of her skin around him. She pulls on her trousers, feeling every place they slides against her, shrugging into her shirt and hearing her pulse thunder in her ears. Will it be that way every time she goes to him? 

The constellation of bruises on their bodies from yesterdays sparring is warning enough, so they meditate. She leaves her hair down, shaking it from her face and feeling it settle against her back.

What would you like to practice? His warm voice slips into her head like a whisper. Sat crossed legged, knees slightly touching, finding her calm had been as easy as closing her eyes and willing it into being. It was intoxicating.

I don’t want to try to block you out. I like having you in my head. She feels distantly that she should be ashamed by that admittance, but it was true, rising unfiltered in her brain. Working this closely had a way of bypassing the barriers that shouted at her to keep herself at a distance, for protection. 

I won’t attack you right now, even for practice....

What does that leave us?

Do you know what Pathfinding is?  Images bubble up in her mind, her feet sinking into loose sand, a constellation hanging in the sky, shadows slowly turning in the dirt. It’s an ability often used to navigate space, traverse asteroid fields, by sensing the movements of celestial bodies and predicting their paths. She tunes dimly to the rush of stars dissolving around them as they journey at hyper speed. You already show aptitude in it, but it’s something you might like to develop. He remembers her leading them competently through the forest, flicking her eyes up to minutely adjust their path by the light of the sun as it passed overhead. Him trailing behind her as she picked cleanly through the mulch as if she’d done it a thousand times, mottled by verdant shadow and glancing back to watch him following her with faltering steps. 

How do we do that?

It might not work beyond light speed… But we can try. We might be able to do it between us. He answers her unvoiced question. I can combine my powers with yours, if you allow it.

He feels her presence answering his, swirling to envelope his in a way that never failed to both frighten and excite him. He feels as if his heart stutters in his chest as it moves through him like honey. He casts his mind back to his training, trying to ignore the flurry of feelings and memories that come with trying to embody that time, the smell of books, the cold at night, his homesickness and desire to be held in his mothers arms. A part of him regrets this partial image she has of his adolescent self, unwieldy and needy in equal parts. But he knew the risks when he agreed to train with her. A part of him had selfishly desired it, to be levelled by her and built back up, improved by her skilled hands. He breathes in deep and searches for a more academic tone. 

You train your awareness on the universe around you. I always found it was easiest to start with my immediate surroundings and then slowly move outwards. I manage it well enough to help me fly, but I’ve never been able to do what others have, becoming aware of every planet and moon moving at once. He feels the tremor of her fear within him, curling a little tighter, pressing a little closer. We won’t try that, just try to become aware of the planets as we move past…

It’s as if the atom thin membrane between them ruptures as she reaches out into the dark. She rifles past the room they’re in, the metal enclosing them and the layers of insulation and shielding as if they’re pages in a book. In the blackness, looming and churning masses come into their orbit and are gone again, their awareness pulled by their passing, as if drawn by magnetism by the over-bright center of energy. They’re buffeted by wave after wave of this pulsing draw, until the edge of their perception is torn into a light floating webbing. She draws it back and he follows, folding in each reaching tendril until they wrap it back around their craft, back to where they sit, cowering in the very center, two tiny bundles of energy. 

It takes a few seconds to bring their heart rate back to somewhat normal and to remember to breathe again, the whine in their ears from a held breath threatening to knock them under. 

That might not have been a good idea. She laughs, a bright and loud exclamation of pure life in their minds. Her Force still swirls around him, shaking lightly with her heartbeat. He returns to his body and sinks into it, feeling as if gravity has become a lead weight on his bones. ‘Nothing like jumping in at the deep end.’

She squints a one-eyed smile at his words before flopping down on her back and running her hands over her face, her arms dropping behind her in a tangle. ‘That was something.’ She closes her eyes and hums on a contented exhale. ‘I like the kind of tired I feel after Force training. Like all my muscles are soup. I like being soup.’ He peers down at her, dopey and squirming on the floor, as she absentmindedly runs a hand through her hair. ‘Do you feel like soup when you train like that?’

He perches his elbow on his knee to watch her. ‘I don’t usually try to push it that far. And I rarely work with others.’ She nods, hand resting on her stomach. ‘We’re Force bonded, so we can access each others powers in a way others can’t.’ 

‘How are you so articulate right now?’

He watches her stomach slowly rise and fall with her breath. ‘Because I’m too tired and comfortable right now to stumble on my own words.’ He hides his mouth in his hand, but stays watching her as she slowly opens her eyes to catch him in the corner of her vision. 

‘I could ask you anything right now, and you’d answer me. How interesting…’ Her mouth cracks into a grin. ‘I have a question…’ He swallows as she leans up on her elbows, hair messy and eyes glassy. ‘What do you want for food?’ He barks a laugh into his hand.

Food bubbling away in the background she stretches her legs over his lap, slumping into her new favorite pastime of watching him. 

‘We need to talk about something…’ He should have known he wouldn’t get off that easily. She recovers quicker than him, it’s a weakness she’d identified while under his interrogation, flipping their position so decisively and completely he never really recovered. He takes another sip of water he doesn’t need, stalling for a few moments. She waits, eyeing the bottle as he twists to set it aside, one hand on her knee.

‘What does this mean?’

‘What does what mean?’ He knows what “this” is, in the same way he knows if they’re not on the same page it will kill him. It’s a danger she wants to face head on, before it creeps any closer. He'd been content to ignore it until it was right upon him. 

‘You know what I mean.’ She flicks her eyes away for the briefest respite before steeling herself. ‘Is it because we’re stuck together? Just easier this way if we get along…’

He takes a deep breath, looking into the middle distance. He opens his mouth to speak but the words die on his tongue. ‘Is that what you think?’

‘It’s what I don’t want to think. So naturally I can’t think about anything else…’ She shrugs and it folds her body somewhat awkwardly against the bench. 

'Yeah, I know that one.’

‘What do you think?’ She takes his hand and turns it in hers, watching the movement of his tendons, safer than watching his face.

‘Rey, I never really minded being trapped with you. But we’re not trapped now. I’m here because I want to be.’

‘But would you want to if we hadn’t been forced together?’

‘We can't know and you'll drive yourself mad thinking about it.' He stretches his free arm and they both pretend its from tiredness. 'But no-one made us sleep in the same bed, eat together, bathe together.’

‘Not together together…’ She rolls her eyes, huffing out a forceful breath. He had a partner then, in the circular and endless internal debate over their overreaching closeness. 

‘My point is a degree of proximity was natural. But truthfully we’ve been way past that for a while now.’

‘It hasn’t been that long…’

He presses her to his side, pulling her half onto his lap. ‘And I don’t want to sleep in a bed without you in it if it can be avoided. I like having you close and I want us to be closer. I'll take as much as you give me.’

She looks at her hands, fit together like she knew they would, from the time all she thought she'd have was the image. 'I was sure you hated it when I touched you. But I could never convince myself you deserved it, I always knew it was a selfish thing I was doing...'

'I won't lie, I wasn't always comfortable with it. Neither of us are used to it. You attack me less now, so I think that helps...' He can feel her staring a hole through his skull like she can see the room through the other side. 

'Would you like me to bring up the average?' Her reply is toneless and slow, brain swimming with images, but she still lifts her chin as he turns to her, blush creeping over her cheeks.

'I wouldn't be opposed.'

She blinks, pressing her lips into a line and worrying at them with her teeth. ‘We’re going to have some explaining to do if we get found.’ 

‘If?’

Another shrug that forces her shoulder into her ear. ‘We made it this far. I think it’s pretty clear we make a good team. They might not find us, but if they do, wherever they take us we’ll go together. That alright with you?’

‘Fine by me.’

‘Good.’ Her serious look quickly crinkles into bemused shock. ‘So you’re not just doing this to shut me up?’

‘If I were, I’d be supremely disappointed as you never seem to stop talking.’

She sits up, shoving him by the shoulders hard enough he has to catch himself heavily against the pitted foam. ‘Fuck you. Not all of us have had Jedi training in the sacred art of sitting still and doing nothing. Some of us have to work for a living.’ When he rights himself he’s in her space and she has to tip her head up to look at him, rolling her eyes at his look. ‘What? Nothing to say?’

‘The food will be done in a minute.’

‘Gods I hate you.’ She mumbles the retort over her shoulder, turning back to hook her hand around his neck and force their mouths together.

‘How is any of this stuff even possible?’ She asks around a mouthful of a bland spiced stew of some kind. The food they’d purchased wasn’t that different, being prepared by unpractised hands. They’d taken to simply augmenting what they had with an item chosen at random. It was safer that way. But it was different enough and hearty enough that they fell right back into consuming it. It was still better than what they’d taken from the pod, and any food at the end of the day was a blessing. He puts down his spoon to answer. 

‘Nobody really knows why the Force is what it is, but with Pathfinding, like a lot of Force techniques, it’s an extension of something you already do.’ She nods, indicating she’s listening as she continues to eat. ‘Particularly when piloting a ship, over time you start to get a sense of bodies moving and interacting with each other, so you’re able to move and chart a path at the same time. Did you always find you were particularly good at flying?’

‘I’ve been piloting different crafts all my life. I figured it was just practice.' The part of him that had worried he’d offend her is instantly soothed by the balm that is her easy acceptance of his question. A question like that for him would set off a slew of self-doubt. If she feels it, she shrugs it off with an enviable ease, folding a knee up to lean on it and listen to him. He feels her eyes on him and looks down at his plate. 

‘Skill is a huge part of it, but awareness of the Force and the energy between things can help you extend your skills. Once you become aware of it, you start to see all the ways you unconsciously draw on it.’

‘Doesn’t that make you worry what would happen if you didn’t have it? Like how much of your skill is your own and how much of it is amplified by the Force?’ He knows she’s speaking more of him than then, her awakening to the Force being recent enough she's still more used to a life without it. He had grown up with it, it had always found its way to set him apart from other. It’s a debate he still has with himself, even as he knows academically that it is pointless. He cannot change it about himself, just as she can’t. 

‘It’s a tool like any other. Being skilled with a sabre isn’t any less of a skill because you’re using a tool to extend your body. For humans it’s built into how we see the world.’ She nods in thought and reaches across to drag his half eaten food towards herself. 

After dinner she slumps against him once more and peppers him with all manner of questions with her head in his lap.

‘When did you find out you were Force sensitive?’

‘When I was ten. I destroyed a toy speeder with my anger.’

‘What was it like to train with other Force users?’

‘The same as any other school, I’d imagine.’ He’d regretted saying it as soon as the words left his mouth. ‘People had different skills and strengths, and aptitude wise, we were all very different. But mostly it was just homesick kids trying to figure out where they fit it.’

‘Did you have friends there?’

‘I was closer to some than others, but nobody I could call a friend.’

‘Is that a part of the Jedi code?’

‘Not exactly. But being schooled in not forming close attachments would have been a part of it.’ He smiles down at her and she mirrors it, unthinkingly. 'Can you tell I wasn't much of a student?'

‘What is a Force bond exactly? You never told me.’

‘From what I've read they can form between student and mentor, or two force users working closely together for some time. Usually it's intentional, but not always.’

‘Then why do we have a Force bond?’

‘I'm not sure, honestly.’

‘Is it from going into each other's minds? The dreams...’ It's the closest they've come to referencing their tandem delusion, conversations where they pulled themselves over jagged glass, daring the other to blink. 

‘I don’t think so. That’s something other Force sensitives can learn. Reading thoughts I mean, not sure about the dreams.’

‘What can we do with it that others can’t?’

‘More effective Force healing. Transmitting our emotions, sharing our power like we did today…’ 

She hums taking his hand, slowly and deliberately fitting her fingers through his. ‘Do you think the reason I like to touch you is because of the bond?’ 

‘I hope not! That would make for an extremely weird mentor student relationship.’ He looks down at her, eyebrows raised in surprise. 

She shrugs. ‘I didn’t go to school.’ 

‘Clearly.’ She swats him on the chest. He catches her hand against him and leans down to kiss her.

When he pulls away, her mouth curls into a wry smile. ‘I did ask you to be my teacher.’

‘Don’t you dare…’ he growls. She smiles and crawls her way down the bench, pulling him over her. 

For a while there are no thoughts in her mind, wiped entirely clean by the feeling of his lips against hers and the weight he had slowly lowered against her body, fitting her limbs around him. But they creep back, as they always do, bleeding in slowly to pull her to a distance, turning her face to break away and gasp into the ship.

'I need you to know this is serious for me. I don't sleep next to people, I don't let anyone touch me.' She speaks to a version of herself standing over them, noting the points of contact between their bodies, running a calculation damning in its result.

He sits back and she pulls her legs to her body, wrapping her arms around them. 'What can I do to convince you it's the same for me?'

She knew he would ask but her answer is still inadequate. 'I don't know. I want to believe it, I do. But you wouldn't have even kissed me if I hadn't done it.'

'I didn't want to hurt you. But my self control isn't infinite. I would have kissed you, you just beat me to it.' He reaches behind them to check the time, shuffling just slightly out of her space in the process. 

'Did you think about it?'

At her words, a blinding carousel of images, for the first time collected, swept together like she'd brushed them into her palm to show him. 'I thought about it.'

'When?'

How truthful do you want me to be?  She tilts her head at him as he sits back, straightening his spine, feeling the ache radiate down it. He had thought about it any time she stepped in close to him, surpassing what was necessary to reach out to him, just because she wanted to. Every time she turned to him before her vision equalized, making him her point of focus, his image a default, familiar, the comfortable point from which she stepped out into the unknown. Every time she tipped her head back to look at him and a few strands of her hair would follow it, dragging against her shoulder. There must have been a time it didn't occur to him, but his perception has rippled back through every image he has of her, shifting them in his mind. No matter where he pictures her, she always has the sun at her back, looking up at him as she breathes in slow and deep. But the version of her very much alive is waiting on him, wiggling her toes against the bench. 

'Most recently?' he asks, swallowing under her look. 'In the desert, watching you pick up fruits you'd never seen before and inspect them like you'd done that every day of your life.'

'What? Why?' she scoffs.

'I don't know. I think truthfully at that point you could have done anything and I'd have wanted to kiss you. I had just watched you do the impossible and that woman was in front of me suddenly worrying about what food we should buy like it was the most important decision you'd ever made. I guess it was the contrast. It's the bit of you I like the most, the part of you that's unsure, wants guidance. Then you looked at me.'

'Well you weren't much help.'

'I know. Because I wanted to kiss you.'

'I wish you'd have told me before I went and tortured myself.'

'Rey, I want to kiss you.'

'Well go on then', she shrugs, 'I'm not going to do it for you.'

He finally pulls away reluctantly to check on their progress. Still another sixteen hours or so before they drop out of light speed and have to take back manual control. He silently counts his blessings as she comes up behind him, craning around him to check.

This casual contact between them was nothing new, in the grand scheme of things. In the very short time in which he’d left his old life entirely to form a two person unit with her, slowly he had begrudgingly and then casually acclimatised to the fact their personal space often overlapped. But he had become newly re-sensitized to dizzying pleasure in her simple touches on his body, a hand on his back, on his arm, her hair brushing his skin. And as if on reflex, each touch of hers he followed with his, a hand to steady her, or trap her hand in its place, to draw her hair over her shoulder.

They lounge through the rest of the day saying little. She naps as he reads, his fingers absent-mindedly twirling through her hair, trying to anticipate the direction of her next line of questioning and meet her there. As he spoke, too few words, shrinkingly inadequate he realized he knew nothing about the nature of the bond between them, had had time to learn, but stopped himself. He'd totted up a small list of its known uses from oblique references in texts, always clouded in caution, always stressing how its power carries with it its own inherent danger. Is this the danger they were talking about? A willful blurring of the boundaries that define his body to draw her close. A quiet adjustment to how he viewed his life, one slowly blurring into two, like unfocused eyes making a mirror of the world.

There is no neat line to be drawn between their bond and his care for her, they blur into each other in a way his mind should resist. It would make sense if this warmth came from the bond, forcing them to share, letting them know each other's minds in a way that makes it feel almost inevitable. They can't know if it would have been any other way. But there is a version of him at the back of his mind, breathing through a pain like fire crawling up his neck, wrapping his mind around the feeling of her hand on his arm like an anchor. Him meeting her eye and seeing a chasm, two people shrinking from their bodies and into their minds and peering out from the cold dark they find themselves in. He was hers before he took another step. 

He walks her to the fresher to get ready for bed, able to sleep, properly sleep with her beside him, their brains finally allowed to let go of some of the feeling of being hunted, of needing to keep a part of them alert and awake for any sound in the dark. Right now, they are truly un- findable, slipping between the fabric of the universe in an anonymous craft, her body leaning lightly against his as she brushes her teeth. Outside of the bubble of the universe, in their own separate world. 

A little of his guilty tension at this aberration slips over him as she climbs into bed, but it is quickly replaced by her comforting weight on him and her hands framing his face, staring as if she can see the treacherous thoughts and wither them with a glare. And maybe she can, maybe that’s something the Force amplifies in her. Or maybe it’s the feel of her chest rising and falling against his, and their hearts thundering against each other. She kisses him again, slowly, as if he might shrink away, and his guilt and anxiety is stolen from him. 

She sleeps sprawled on him like a blanket, loose tendrils of her hair moving with his breath as the ship hums lowly around them. 

Chapter Text

When they wake her hand has worked under his shirt in a sleeping desire to get closer, somehow. She removes it reluctantly, dragging it slowly down warm skin still holding on to sleep.

Her hair is a frizzy mess, highlighted copper in the dim light brightening by degrees to acclimatise them to a day that is only really theoretical. Like many of the things around them, it is a habitual construct, belying the unnatural void they currently reside in. It is a morning, stolen in the truest sense of the word, but somewhere else in the universe others are waking up tangled in each other's arms and blessed with a day in which nothing is asked of them. And they no doubt start it the same way, kissing until their sleepy bodies fully wake, humming contentedly into each other's mouths and enjoying the ethereal warmth and comfort of morning. 

She stares at him almost constantly, watching him drag the razor under his jaw, the movement of his muscles as he rinses the blade under the water. She leaves to let him dress, but the drag of her eyes over his clothed body, still in loose pants and shirt, makes his stomach lurch at the thought of what it would be like if she saw him undressed. She looks at him as if she can see through him to the mess of organs inside, to his heart pathetically hammering behind his ribcage. Like she can see every muscle and sinew working under his skin. It is terrifying and flattering simultaneously. He had spent most of his adult life hidden under layers of metal and leather. But it was the same scrutinising look she had given him from day one, rendering his mask pathetically useless. He’d dared her to look away then, but she’d only faltered for a second, strong, always strong. Stronger than him. To be seen by her was like having every nerve exposed to the world. To catch her gaze and be met with a small smile, was like sucking in air for the first time in his life. 

But like a much needed breath, it is not without pain. It is exposing in a way that only further exaggerates what stays hidden. His body, beyond his face, the evidence of his past life etched into every inch of it. And a certain faltering step in her language he only notices because she makes such an effort to disguise it.

‘Do you realize that you never use my name?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous..’ She frowns down at the reader, straightening her spine. 

‘Not since the cave. When you were furious with me.’

‘I’m often furious with you.’ He watches her shift trying to get comfortable under his gaze. Observed, like him, she has forgotten all the processes which should be automatic.

‘True, but you still don’t use my name.’

She shuts off the reader and takes a few steadying breaths, searching her memory and knowing it to be instinctively true. She’d known for a while, but wasn’t sure how to reconcile how close she had become to a man she can’t address by name. He’s not Kylo Ren anymore, nor is he Ben Solo. This is an argument she'd get no joy from, better to go for truth. ‘What would you prefer I call you?’ 

He slides onto the bench next to her. ‘I don’t know. I’m not the person I used to be, anymore. To go by either wouldn’t feel genuine. Who am I to you? What do you call me in your mind?’

‘I don’t, you’re "you", and I’m "me". You are my counterpoint, it is always “we”.’ She glances around the room in an attempt to soothe the fear at her own words, the dreamlike distance of the last few days collapsed in an instant. 

‘Light to my darkness.’ 

‘You’re not all that dark, for a Darksider.’ She meets his eye with the briefest smile.

‘And you’re a bit unstable for a Jedi.’

‘Careful.’ 

‘I’ve seen the way you look at me.’

She turns to him, watching him shift under her look. ‘And how exactly, do I look at you?’ 

‘Like you could take me apart.’ 

She feels as if the air is ripped from her lungs, gathering what's left to form into a mumbled question. ‘Then what should I call you?’ 

‘I’d rather be Ben Solo than Kylo Ren,' he shrugs. 'I’ve got too many names to choose another one.’

It is decided, an option chosen from a selection. A name he had grown out of, had come to feel ill-fitting, too famous and too obscuring. A contradiction he has the luxury of discarding, stepping back into a previous version of himself. He wants her to know him, he always has. Not a title, but a person. But is he Ben?

He is Ben when he angers her. When he says or does something that highlights his immaturity, his privilege. The weight of the name he tried to shed, wanting to go on his own, wanting to fail on his own. As if doing so would have any more value because he earned it himself. It feels the same, it tastes the same. I could have told you that, if only you'd have asked me. He is Ben when he acts in such a way that she feels old in comparison. Or when they rasp against each other in their familiarity. It's a word she's making a point with. He is a boy and she is a girl. But it's a stretch to call it a name. 

There will come a point in their lives when she will need to introduce him, if they live long enough to enjoy complacency. How will she do it? This is the person whose life I've tied to mine. I could pick his mind from a crowd as easy as breathing. But I do not believe he has earned the right to use his own name. I don't know if he ever will.

They prepare a few scattered rations and random ingredients. She frowns as the tastes all seem to dull on her tongue, but it’s food, it’ll do its job. He watches her out of the corner of his eye as she blinks, seeming on the precipice of speaking, before shaking it away with a sigh. She kneads at her forehead until his questioning look her way, flashing him a humorless smile. 

She’s deep in thought beside him as they watch some holos, unreacting as their own tired image is shared like an afterthought on a segment on a rise of organized crime in a far-flung sector, somewhere they’ve never visited and couldn’t point to on a map. He sees their distorted image wobble in her eye before she turns to him, an emotionless mask over her features. 

They train and she shakes him off like a fly, her eyes constantly roving around their surrounding, seeming to pass over him. When they spar, she dodges him instinctively, stepping out of his grasp to leave him reaching for air. 

‘You’re not up to your usual standard’, she remarks, stretching her shoulder over her head.

‘I could say the same to you. You’ve been distracted since breakfast. What’s bothering you?’

‘Nothing’s bothering me.’ You. There are questions that need answering that should have been asked a long time ago. 

‘You can tell me. Whatever it is, I’ll still like you.’ He leans to roll his ankle.

‘Now who’s distracted. Again.’

A sensor bleeps into life. They’ve entered the Instrop sector and are about to make atmosphere over Rannon. He hadn't put much thought into the selection, the larger part of his mind trying and failing to not catalogue every thoughtless sigh and tap of her foot as if by knowing the measure of them it will give him answers. But she will like it, it’s temperate and largely unspoiled, with a cuisine noted throughout the galaxy for its vibrancy. He slides into the pilot seat and thumbs off the autopilot, engaging the inertial dampeners, muscles still humming. 

‘What are you doing?’

‘Beginning our approach, we’ll touch down in ten.’

‘And you just assumed you’d be piloting us?’ 

He rolls his eyes. Still there's more bite to her words than he's heard all morning. It's progress. ‘I’m a competent pilot in my own right. Plus I’ve done this more than you have.’

‘I’m perfectly capable.’ She moves to stand behind him, hands folded across her chest as she counterbalances against the banking of the ship. 

‘I didn’t say you weren’t.’ He continues through the landing procedure, furrowing his brow at her sudden thunderous look. Rote repetition means he doesn’t have to look at the controls, even in an unfamiliar craft. He gets to watch her as she clenches her jaw, turning to him as the stars twist around them and she joins him in ignoring it. ‘There’ll be plenty of opportunities to do this.’ He turns to adjust their angle of approach as the planet looms into view. No matter how many times he has done this, it always feels as if he's falling to the surface. 

‘You could have asked me…’

‘Does it matter?’ He turns to her, truly puzzled now. ‘Everything I know is yours for the taking, Rey.’ There again that little twist in her stomach, at the offer of knowledge freely given, the sum of which, like everything he offers, having the capacity to destroy. It’s not lost on him either. ‘I mean it, whatever you want, you can take it.’ He ducks his eyes, a faint rosy blush creeping into his cheeks that he can plausibly blame on the red trajectory paths blinking on the readout in front of him. 

He had a way of doing this, plunging their conversations from familiar ground into some yawning, enveloping chasm. The implications stemming from their bond, and their increasing forays into each other's minds and powers, the hidden depths of it she often chose to not notice. They were entering the world again and he had a way of reminding her of the titles associated with their names and their continual refusal to live up to them. The Order's symbol of terror, stepping onto a remote planet with her, surrendering all that is his to whatever they're building between them. 

‘Why do you do that? Why do you always make it so I can’t be mad at you?’ 

He turns in his seat to face her. ‘Do you want to be mad at me?’ 

‘I don’t want to be. Or maybe I do, I don’t know. Fuck!’ She throws up her hands to pace in the small cockpit, anger setting her head spinning, pushing out oxygen to make space for itself. Looks like she got her way after all. She threads her fingers into her hair, trying to press away the headache forming there after her anxiety had hit her like a sledgehammer. What was going to happen now that they’ve finally seemingly got the Order off their trails?  If she was a good person she would run to the Resistance, put as much distance as she could between her and the fallen Knight of Ren, resume her duty to her friends. Or would she slip into a life of blindly following him, nothing stopping him from picking up his old life and sliding it back on, as easy as he took back his name. 

She swallows the bile in her throat. She fears it, even if she can’t imagine the person sitting across from her now could put his armor back on and turn back to where he came from. The person she wakes up next to, warm and content in sleep, one hand always reaching to feel her skin, to instinctively echo their bond with a touch. But things would change now they’re not being hunted, had already begun to. She doesn’t want their partnership to change, see whatever they have morph into the kind of relationships she’d often seen, built on subservience and degrading comfort. See the edges rounded off of them, turning them into something different. 

He watches the minute play of emotions on her face, anger, fear, and longing all warring with each other, saying nothing. Finally she schools her expression, throwing a cover over the jagged shape of her thoughts, knowing politeness on his part is the only thing sustaining the illusion they are gone. 

‘I’m worried about landing. I don’t know what we’re going to do or who we’re going to be now we’re back in the real world again.’ 

He reaches to thread his hand lightly with hers, and she looks down at it as she brushes the back of her hand with his thumb. ‘Whatever we do, you’re stuck with me.’ She huffs a half breath that catches in her chest. ‘And if you don’t like it, we’ll just leave. Fly somewhere else. Just keep flying if that’s what you want.’ 

‘I don’t know what I want.’ She finally meets his gaze with an apologetic squint. 

‘That’s fine too. You want to bring her down, or shall I?’ He gestures to the controls where they’re perched just outside of atmosphere, hanging in space.

She shrugs, sliding into the co-pilot seat, releasing his hand to start priming the landing gear. ‘Take it away.’ 

They land just as the sun is starting to set, a blood red sunset streaking the sky as huge triangular torsoed animals streak screaming into the distance. The ground is blanketed by a soft, crinkled grass as they step off the landing ramp and take in the place that is to be their next refuge. Until they are discovered, get bored, or come up with a larger plan, whichever comes first. The air is loamy and vaguely herbaceous, and a pleasant fresh breeze greets them in the hush of a planet winding down for the night. 

They're a few miles from the nearest settlement, in an area popular with tourists for its scenic views and privacy. The landing of a craft of their size drew no notice, assumed to be holidaymakers or a family taking a short detour. Their arrival wasn’t even documented, they'd simply alighted on the soft ground like a bird. There were no resources here beyond its natural beauty, and scant infrastructure to support a large tourist trade. As such, they were left alone by the Order to tend to their little corner of the galaxy. 

This didn’t mean, of course, that they could simply wander into town. Their faces were still plastered across the known galaxy. As he secures their ship, her gaze drifts towards a cluster of lights winking on in the dusk. Houses, people settling in for the night, perhaps a bar of some kind full of people ending their day with a cool drink. He places a hand lightly on her shoulder to bring her back to him, nodding toward the forest and a rustic cabin he knew to be hiding in there. For a fee, it could be rented for the night, but he had taken a gamble on it and knew it had paid off with a tentative scan for lifeforms. It was empty and waiting for them. 

‘What is this place?’ She asks, skidding on the graveled approach, arms wrapped around herself as the temperature starts to drop. They should unpack some of the cold-weather gear from the base.

‘It’s a holiday cottage. People rent it out to stay in. It’s empty right now, it's out of season.’

‘How did you manage to rent it?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘So we’re breaking and entering.’

‘I guess you could say that…’

‘We could just stay on the ship. We don’t need to steal just to stay under a proper roof.’

‘We’ll leave it exactly as we found it. Nobody was going to be in it anyway, they’re not losing any credits if they didn’t have them in the first place.’

She stops still and his boots grind a little deeper into the shifting stones. ‘I don’t feel right about it.’ 

He tries to nudge her onwards, but she is unmoving and he glances behind them, an instinctual urge he still needs to soothe. ‘We can find a way to make it up with them. But if we’re going to carry on living as fugitives, there are going to be times when we have to take things to survive. It’s just the reality of it.’ 

With effort, he manages to get her moving again, their shadows lengthening and darkening as night sets in. Arms crossed in front of her, she roves her eyes around the woody interior as he closes the door behind them. Her eyes flick to him as the lock slides back into place behind her, glaring at his back as he pokes his head into each room in turn. How many doors does that work on?

‘Most of them.’ He answers her unspoken question, before busying himself turning on the lights and kneeling to set the fire going.

‘Did you just go in my head?’

‘I did. I was worried about you.’

‘Don’t do that. Don’t just take things that don’t belong to you. We had an agreement, remember?’ She sits down heavily on the couch, perched at the edge, seemingly not wanting to disturb the place in any discernible way, even at the expense of her comfort. 

‘I do remember. But I think you’re trying to get into a fight with me again.’

‘Oh really, I’m just a child picking fights now?’

He dusts of his hands as the flames begin to take, rattling smoke fogged glass in its frames. ‘Certainly seems like it.’

‘Just because I have a sense of morals and don’t think it’s fine to just take what I want like it’s owed to me.’ He slowly moves to stand in front of her as her eyes dart angrily up at him and down to the floor again, taking in their environment with an ironic curl of her lips. 

‘Whatever you’re angry about right now, I don’t think it has anything to do with me.’

It has everything to do with you... ‘Oh so you know exactly what I’m feeling now? Better than I do. Are you going to teach me how my own brain works?’ She stares at him, mouth set in a line. 

‘Rey’, he warns.

‘What, you think because you’ve been in my head you know everything about me now, is that it?’ 

‘I think you need to take a few minutes to calm down.’ He turns away as she scoffs, checking out the place with the same sweeping disinterest she had, watching her out of the corner of his eye as her anger has her lean into his space.

‘Really, you! You’re telling me to calm down? Is that some ancient Jedi wisdom you’re sharing with me right now, or can you just not be bothered to deal with me now you don’t need me for your survival?’

‘Stop. You’re just trying to be mean.’

‘I am mean! I’m a mean person. That’s not going to suddenly change now we’re not trapped on that fucking rock.’ She stands to square up to him, annoyed at having to crane up at him to level him with a look. 

He turns to her slowly, some masochistic part of him compelling him to keep his eyes unfocused at a point above her head. ‘I’m not going to talk to you when you’re like this. You’re acting like a child.’

‘I’m a child now. As soon as I challenge you on something it’s because I’m childish. Just because I don’t agree with you stealing from people who are just trying to make a living.’

‘We both know this isn’t about them, you’re using them as an excuse to pick a fight with me.’ 

‘Stop telling me what I think!’

‘Stop acting like a petulant infant!’ She slaps him hard across the cheek, and the sound rings out in the sudden deafening silence. He stays, head turned away with the force of it for a few seconds before working his jaw and turning to look at her, eyes boring into hers. ‘Better?’ 

‘Fuck you.’ She spits, chest heaving, hands balled at her sides, feeling her heartbeat thundering in her still stinging palm. 

He breathes in deep through his nose, once, twice, before speaking. 

‘Whatever you’re upset about, just tell me.’ His words are measured as he lifts a hand and extends it to her, sliding back into a version of himself that had been his armor for years. She eyes his hand warily as it closes the space between them, cupping her neck in his palm. ‘You can’t push me away.’ He pulls her slightly closer to stare at her wide eyes. ‘If you want to fight, we’ll fight. But I will still find out what’s wrong even if I have to rip it from your head.’ He tightens his grip. ‘Is that clear?’ His voice trembles with barely restrained threat, and her breath comes out in a wavering huff against his face, still fizzing with the ghost of her slap. She narrows her eyes at him, and he crushes his mouth to hers. 

Her eyes snap shut as she grasps at him, struggling to stay standing under the onslaught of his mouth on hers, stealing the breath from her lungs. She’s brought down from her dizzying head-rush by him biting her lip hard. She yelps and he pushes her off him, far enough to watch her eyes flit between his.

‘Now we’re even.’ He looks down his nose at her, at her parted lips and flushed face and questioning hunger in her eyes. It dawns on him in its blinding obviousness and he laughs, throwing his head back to breathe for a second as his vision shakes.

‘You don’t know how to be around me if we’re not fighting or running for our lives.’ He grabs her upper arms as she tries to turn away from him, a little hair falling from her braid to frame her face in the firelight. ‘Don’t worry, Jedi. For as long as we live you can hurt me as much as you like and I will always be there to match you, blow for blow. You are my equal, remember?’ He presses his forehead against hers. ‘Do your worst.’

She snakes her hands up to close around his throat, stepping onto tiptoes to put her whole body weight into it. He laughs, and it vibrates through her hands, before he darts behind her to clasp one palm over her throat, the other gripping her hips as she scrabbles at his arm, leaving angry welts with her fingernails.

‘I always knew you enjoyed hurting me’ he breathes into her ear as she screws her eyes shut. ‘But from how fast your heart is racing, I think you like it when I hurt you too.’ He squeezes and the foot moving to stamp at his feet, hovering off the floor, forgotten. ‘Very interesting.’ He releases her, catching her in his arms where her knees buckle and laying her on the sofa. 

She stares, eyes wide at the ceiling for a few moments, one hand ghosting over where his hand had been and the little pinpricks of heat left by his fingertips, before pulling him to her, hauling his body on top of her and rolling up into the kiss. When they finally disengage, his head flops forward and she laughs breathlessly into the ceiling.

‘Glad we figured that one out.’ She cards her fingers through his hair, mouthing along his jaw, lip still throbbing lightly from his bite.

The pleasure of it had run through her like a sword to the gut, hot enough to rob her of her higher brain power. It was nothing like the kisses shared before, hypnotic in their dizzying effect, leaving her weightless and euphoric. This made her aggressively aware of every nerve ending in her body, every place her body touched his, and the blood rushing through her veins. It made her want to slap him again, even harder, and simultaneously be forced to ground by his arms. She wanted to struggle against his grip, and she wanted to lose, but leave her mark on him as she went down, with her teeth and nails. It burned up something incendiary she didn’t know was in her, and every throb of her lip, every trace of her fingers over her throat brings an echo of the pleasure in it. 

‘Take me to bed’, she breaths, hands roaming over his shoulders and neck. One hand spread on her stomach, he kisses down her neck to breath in the crook of it, before nodding. He moves with one last kiss through the fabric at her sternum, and stands to hook an arm under her knees and walk her through the cabin. 

Her fingers twisting the hair at the nape of his neck, she takes in the low dark-wood ceilings, veined here and there with a mossy green. It’s pleasantly rustic, all wonky walls, uneven flooring, squeaking as they make their way from one room to a smaller one, laid with thick ruby carpets swirled with branching patterns. It’s noticeably quieter and colder without the heat of the fire, and the windows rattle in their frames with a low flutter. 

The bed he lays her on is wider than any she’s ever slept on, and so plush it’s almost suffocating, as if it’s some viscous fluid that will envelope her. Nothing like the thin mattress she’d salvaged on Jakku from a fallen ship, the one so like the bunk they share on the ship. Softer than the technically improved if sadistically firm one in the Officers quarters. Behind her the headboard inlaid with unfamiliar creatures, burnished and highlighted with the kind of care that feels excessive for a piece of furniture to sleep on, a utilitarian space for necessary recuperation. She strokes the wood lightly, and it’s smooth as glass. The pads of them trace the precise carvings as they sweep through a tableau she sits to take in properly. Creatures writhing beneath a huge tree with a fractal like web of branches, behind them, a cluster of suns and moons fan out their rays over the scene as smaller critters bend and curve in a mosaic of tessellating bodies. Each whisker, hair, paw, eye and fin, etched in the finest detail and with utmost care, yet betraying the slight quirks of human made work. Someone had woven this picture around the grain and knots of the wood, carving it by hand, to become a decoration for a bed. 

‘Who made this place?’ She whispers.

‘The locals, but it’s been a guest house for some time.’

‘Why would anyone put so much work into decorating a bed?’ Her fingers continue tracing in a swirling pattern, eyes unseeing. 

‘Most likely it’s a family heirloom. Something designed to be passed down through generations and kept for its symbolic nature.’ He runs a hand up her back and she shudders, closing her eyes. 

‘Is it right for us to be staying in it?’ She turns her head to him as his thumb grazes the top of her spine. She hears the rustle of the covers and feels the mattress dip slightly as he shrugs and stretches out beside her.

‘This hasn’t been anyone’s home for a while…’

‘But it was once. This was built as someone’s home, for their family. I’ve never stayed in a home before.’ Her hand reaches for his and he threads their fingers together. 

‘We can leave if you want to.’ 

She shakes her head and opens leaden eyes to meet his, shadowed with concern. ‘No. I don’t want to leave. It’s beautiful here. It’s the kind of home I’d dream of making one day. But right now, I just want you to kiss me.’ 

She sinks into the weightless feeling of an impossibly soft bed beneath her and the woody smell of the fire as he folds her into his arms. The ache in her lip soothed to a pleasant tingle, a little beat of a reassurance at their point of contact. She closes her eyes and feels his comforting weight on her, the thump of his heart, hands coming up to cradle her face and lightly swipe along her jawline. Her hands rest on his arms like an anchor, until she pulls away to try to breathe and bring down her heart rate before it crosses the point she’s sure she’ll have a heart attack. 

‘I need to know you’re not going to leave me behind’, she admits into the dark. ‘Up until now we had to stay together and work together to survive. I want to believe that now we don’t need each other in the same way, you’re not going to just forget me.’

‘Why are you worried about that?’

‘Because it’s what we do. It’s why we’re still alive.’ She hears him move beside her behind her closed eyelids, squeezing her hand in his as a chill runs down her neck. ‘I stayed with you before because it was the only way to evade capture. But that’s not why I’m here now. But if that is for you, you need to tell me.’ She swallows audibly, counting her heartbeats, loud and slow. 

‘I told you. I’m here because I want to be, Rey. It’s true we’re safer together, but I can’t imagine a life without you beside me. If that means hiding for the rest of it with you, I’d gladly do it.’ 

She opens her eyes to his. ‘We hardly know each other.’ She holds herself still under his look.

‘That’s not true, is it?’

She shakes her head just slightly in answer, free hand soothing circles against her own heart.

They dine on the couch in an aura of nervous shyness, a slight tension at the corner of their eyes that has their eye contact flit away like a skittish animal. Now it is said, it's like holding a knife to their chests, daring the other to push it home. She wishes for her saber, for the space to train and pit her body against his. Bodily hurt she knows how to ignore, compartmentalize, smooth away until it’s just a memory. Cuts and bruises are familiar in all the ways that this isn’t. She pushes away the last few tasteless bites of food and curls her head onto his lap, where his hand comes to stroke her scalp. 

‘Should we talk about what happened before?’ She doesn’t open her eyes, for fear of losing her nerve.

‘We can if you want to.’ She feels him shift in the rocking movement of his lap. ‘Did it bother you?’

‘What, me hitting you and you seemingly enjoying it? Or you choking me?’

‘I did enjoy it.’ He lifts their clasped hands to his lips. ‘Did you?’ He asks against her skin. 

‘What part?’ He snorts. She opens her eyes to him to peer up at him for the first time. She didn’t know he was capable of such a thing. Scoffing incredulously, the occasional sarcastic laugh, but nothing so peculiarly leveling as snorting. ‘Well did you?’ 

Her gaze slides away as she feels a blush form on her cheeks. ‘What does that say about me?’ she murmurs.

‘It doesn’t say anything at all. If anything it just shows that we trust each other.’

‘For some reason.’ Her mouth pulls up into a wry smile.

‘For some reason.’ 

Her sigh is deep and wavering, huffing out of her in one massive exhale. ‘I’m not used to talking about this stuff.’ She closes her eyes and holds his palm where it cradles her face. ‘I don’t know what’s normal and healthy and what’s some depraved thing I should be punished for even thinking.’ His thumb drags over her lip to drag there as she meets it with her tongue before he traces a line down her chin. ‘But I know I liked it when you bit me. It shocked me, but it also flipped a switch in my brain and all my other thoughts were just, gone. It was very nice to get a break from my own brain. What did it feel like when I slapped you?’ 

He tips her chin up to look at him and waits for her to slowly open her heavy eyes, dilated pitch black in the dim light. ‘It reminded me of how strong you are, and what it felt like to be bested by you.’ He kisses her lightly and smiles there. ‘And as if all my blood has suddenly rushed into my pants.’ 

She pushes him off with a laugh. ‘You’re such a boy!’ She shoves his shoulders and he catches her wrists. 

‘What? You asked me what it felt like. It felt fantastic, I’d love you to do it again sometime.’ He pulls her protesting body in to hold against his chest. ‘Now tell me about your depraved thoughts, sand rat.’ 

She laughs into his shirt as he strokes her braid absentmindedly. She squints over her shoulder at it. ‘Oh, that needs redoing, it’s falling out all over the place.’ 

‘I’ll do it for you.’

‘No, that’s not what I was getting at. I need to take it down actually.’

‘Le me do it.’

She looks at him quizzically. ‘Don’t tell me that gets you going too? I’ve been letting you braid my hair for weeks, if I find out you’ve been unwittingly satisfying some desire of yours…’ She sits to start unwinding the braid, shooting him a glare. 

He reaches to still her hands and with some tilts of his head and eye rolls in answer, gets her to turn around so he can set to work nimbly unbraiding her hair. ‘I like to do things for you. There’s no ulterior motive, I promise.’ He combs his finger through each loosened section, laying it down against her back. Where his fingers occasionally trace little lines against her shoulders, it’s pure bliss. If she were a species capable of purring, she’s sure she would be. Finally all untangled and the tension has been unwound and stroked from her scalp, his arms worm around her torso and his chin rests on her shoulder. 

She hums, supported against his chest and boneless. ‘I like having your hands on me.’ He lays a path of shiver inducing kisses down her neck as she clings onto his arms. ‘I like feeling your skin against mine.’ She swallows. ‘Can I touch you?’ He stalls for a second against her neck, breath cooling the skin with the warmth of his lips suddenly taken away. 

He murmurs quietly in her ear, low and rumbling, setting off another full body shiver he’d have felt move through her. ‘You can do whatever you want to me.’ 

She swallows around a mouth suddenly totally dry. ‘Let’s go back to bed.’ 

She keeps her back to him for a second as he complies, hiding her face as she gathers her nerves, eyes screwed shut. She kisses him, hand holding his jaw, then moving down his neck where his pulse quickens perceptively, pushing his shirt up and off his chest.

‘What happened to you?’ She traces the ridges of scars that slice across his chest with tickling lightness. She’d caught glimpses of course, they didn’t afford themselves enough space for her to have not caught sight of the odd curling scar or patch of shiny skin unaffected by the flush of exertion, training or otherwise. But she never allowed herself to linger on them until now. 

He’s shifting under her, voice seemingly reaching her from a distance. ‘Training mostly. When I was younger.’

‘How young?’ He smiles at her, eyes glassy, but doesn’t answer. ‘Was it your Knights?’

‘It was the only time I fought un-armored', he shrugs. 'He believed it was good for us to know the result of our failures. That it would make us stronger in the long run.’

‘These are from a blade...’ She traces the shape of them, where the weapon had turned and dragged along the curve of his ribs.

Of course she would know. She doesn’t have the luxury of not knowing. ‘They are.’ He sits up at her gesture and she follows the curve of the scar around his abdomen, going up onto her knees to hook her chin at his shoulder as her fingertips catch on the stripes of thick scars that cover his back. 

'Did he do this?' Her voice is thin with strain at his ear.

'He did.'

'Why did you stay with him?' Why didn't you come to me?

'Because I deserved it.' He feels his skin pinch where she squeezes him in a hug, her balled fists pressing against his skin.

‘And this?’ She sniffs, brushing at her nose with a hand she seems surprised to find clenched tightly. She feels the raised skin of a wound on his stomach, above the angry splay of his bowcaster wound, skin stretched and shiny. ‘Someone tried to gut you?’

‘They tried.’

‘Who was it?’ 

‘That one’s not from training. It was one of my first assignments for him. Clearing out a village, looking in people’s minds for a face. They stabbed under my armor.’

‘Did you find who you were looking for?’

‘There was no-one to find. It wasn’t the point of the exercise. The aim was to see if I’d do it.’

‘I’m sorry. This wasn’t what I imagined when I asked to touch you. I wasn’t planning an interrogation.’

‘It’s okay. I knew we’d have this conversation at some point.’ He tries to catch her eye but she dodges him. 

‘Yeah, but I don’t want a conversation right now, I want to touch you.’

‘Then touch me.’

‘I wish this hadn’t happened to you.’ She watches him smile and then blink rapidly before finally looking back to her. ‘What is it?’

‘No-one has ever said that to me before.’

‘Well, it’s true. And just so you don’t feel left out…’ She pulls his hand to her ankle. ‘This was tangled up in a wreck. It looked like I was wearing red pants by the time I got it free.’ She holds her forearm to him, turning the deep pink gouge to the light. ‘This is much the same. I lost my balance and fell on a huge rusted sheet of metal. Little green bits worked their way out of it for weeks. It was disgusting. This’, she shucks her trousers down a few inches and draws his hand to her upper thigh, ‘I fell and just barely saved myself from slicing up my vagina.’ He chuckles. ‘You don’t have one but let me tell you, falling and putting your whole bodyweight into it, not fun.’ She roughly tugs them back up.

‘I can imagine.’

‘There are more, but it doesn’t matter. It’s just a body. Right now I’m very much enjoying finding more things we can do with them. Any objections?’ He shakes his head. ‘Good.’

There's a wall they reach together, gradually building the courage to scale it. It's a slow surrendering of control that gets them there, for both it starts with their eyes. They approach this with academic curiosity, cataloguing new feelings, building steadily more detailed maps of each other in their minds, eyes open to catch unconscious movements in the other and learning what put them there. Then the image is too much and they close their eyes, to find as they always do that the dark is worse. It shrinks the border they trace around themselves until it catches and winks out of existence against their skin. Then they are gasping, trying to catch their breath, scrabbling to pull back to safety, holding themselves up against each other, sure if they move they'll collapse. 

'We should stop.' His breath is hot against her cheek as he encircles her wrists in his hands, halting them in their maddening process of pushing further and further down his body.

'I don't want to stop.'

'I think you will in about five minutes when your brain takes back over.'

'Five minutes.' She smiles at him blindly. 'Is that how long it takes for you?'

'It can do. What about you, scavenger? What's your record?'

'Whatever it is, I'm sure I'll break it soon.' She swallows, opening her eyes, focusing on his in the dark. 'What are you afraid of? What do you think I'm going to do to you?'

'I don't know.'

'Has anyone ever touched you like this?'

'You know the answer to that question.'

'Then why are you afraid? You've got a partner in cluelessness.'

'I should know these things...'

'Says who? I've never said that.'

'It's what people will think.'

'Yeah well they're not in bed with you right now. I am. I'd still be here if you'd been with a thousand people. But for the record, I'm glad that you haven't. Because if you had I've have had to wonder if everything I do you're busy making comparisons in that sucking black hole of a mind of yours.' 

'You're so nice to me...'

'I try.'

They're stuck in a cycle of suffocating feeling when she speaks to him, a shiver running through her at the sound of sudden rain being whipped against the window. She speaks out into the dark, her legs folded under her with no real desire to deal with her numb limbs. 

'I need to tell you something. This is going to sound bad...' She hides her face against her shoulder. 'I'm not trying to hurt you.'

'I'm sure I'll be fine.'

She sighs. 'I don't know Ben Solo, not really. The person I know hasn't been him for a while. I'll call you Ben because you want me to. But in the interests of being honest with each other, it bothers me that you have the option of taking back your family name after everything.'

'Thank you for being honest.'

'I don't blame you for what's happened, I'm envious of you. But I don't see the names as oppositional either. It's not like one is clean and one is dirty. Not to me, anyway. You can't become the person who you were without losing some of yourself, and some of it I value. I hope I have at least a little say in that.'

'Some of it?'

'Your power, your strength your training. You're a killer. I can't help but see the value in that in a partner.'

An anxious smile contorts his face, gone in a blink. 'What are you saying to me, exactly?'

'Call yourself what you want, to me you are both people. You were made out of pain, that doesn't go. It stays with you. I know. If you didn't have it, I wouldn't have gotten close to you. It was similar enough to mine, I was too close before I could even register what I was seeing.'

'You make it sound like I tricked you...'

'You didn't. I tried to trick myself. It was easier to think of you as two different people. Someone changed, corrupted by darkness. Easier to think it was Ben I was talking to, calling for help...' A borrowed cold sweeps over her, a damp chill that had embedded itself in her skin, seeped into her thoughts. 'But it wasn't. It was you. A killer asking for help from a girl hiding in the dark. Offering understanding I shouldn't want and shouldn't be justified, but is.' She turns to face him, needing to read this eyes. 'We're not good people, are we?' He shakes his head with a smile. 'We're dangerous. Unwell.'

'Yes.'

'That should scare me. But it doesn't.' She laughs, hollowly. 'I'm glad I don't have to be worried about scaring you.'

'It's balance.'

'It's going to get us killed, you realise that?'

'Does it bother you?'

'Not particularly. I'm not owed a meaningful life, why should my death be any different? I want all of it from you. I don't want you to think I expect you to act a certain way. I came to you knowing who you are, you don't have to be someone else just because we share a bed.'

'Alright. Are you telling me you came for Kylo Ren on the Supremacy?' 

'No, I'm saying I don't agree with the idea that you're two different people and I'm only allowed to want one of them. I've never been very good with people telling me what I should want.'

'So I gather...'

'I was coming to you. I knew it was equally likely you'd kill me rather than coming with me. I'll take anything you want to give me, Ben. I want all of it.'

'I can live with that.'

'Just tell me one thing. Why do you want me to hurt you?'

'What do you mean?'

'You like it when I do? How can you like it?'

'The same reason you like it. Because you can move past it. You've learned how to move past fear. It reminds you you're strong.'

'What if I don't want to be strong?'

'You don't have to be. I don't expect anything from you. But you can hurt me if you want to. And if you want me to I'll hurt you back. I want to make you happy.'

'And if I can't be happy?'

'That's fine too. You're allowed to not be strong. You're allowed to be angry. There's nothing you could do that would push me away.'

'Famous last words...' She lets herself collapse against him, any desire to move leeched from her limbs, fitting her ear against his heart as her head pounds, trying to will the disjointed rhythm into harmony. He gently manoeuvres her limp body when it becomes clear she won't do it herself, reaching for the blankets as the fire extinguishes itself, the smell of smoke wandering its way over to him as he unwinds her hair from her neck. One second he is reaching out into the darkness for the crunch of footsteps, or a mind puzzling over the smoke as it climbs over the treeline, the next he is pulled back to the present as she squeezes him a little tighter. Then there is nothing.

Chapter Text

His ears ring as searing pain rips through his mind. It was always like this, but knowing what to expect didn’t make it any easier, his muscles contracting in agony as his breath burns in his lungs like acrid smoke, too seized with pain to release it. It had a way of robbing him of everything except the feedback loop in his brain; pain, fear, panic, pain. He knows he has arms, and when he comes through this they will feel as if his bones are sliding loose from his flesh. He knows he has legs, thick rods of iron he will have to work pliable again by excruciating degrees as the burn radiates up his stomach and back. But in the moment he is only a screaming brain and a senseless litany of useless warnings. Pain that will feel for all its familiarity that it must be fatal. But as much as he wishes for it, death never comes and as the seconds stretch on and his mind wipes of any sense of causality. 

Until something unfamiliar robs him of even the flimsy comfort of routine. His arms, or something touching his arms, pulling his focus from the dirge of pain, to the burning heat there. It stutters between his mind's rote labelling, with something else, a vague shape of something cowering, shielding it’s body in self-preservation. 

Another label, a name that could be is or could be the caller. Louder now, closer. Louder than his mind's own voice, pain pain pain, like a heartbeat. 

A shout, a word he doesn’t recognize, but the tone panicked, in a different shade than his, similar, but alien. That shout again, tinged with something, he examines it like a specimen. Turns towards its solid novelty in the swirling ocean of his pain. And then there is only white. 

The ache in his jaw and teeth is first to come back to him, then the pressure in his ears, then arms and legs come screaming into life, expounding their pain in a roar. Pinpricks of light fire behind his eyelids, and he breathes in, feeling his ribcage strain to expand and contract. The pressure on his arms still, something warm between his hands, the edges of his body coming back into sharp relief. 

‘Are you okay?’ The voice again, this time he can resolve the sounds into words and meaning works its way to him, even if he can’t yet fathom what to do with them. ‘It woke me up. I was sure we’d been found.’ He hears his heartbeat in his head, ringing with the smallest echo of its previous chant. ‘Like something had gone terribly wrong.’ Terribly wrong, he rolls the words in his mind, enjoying the way they swing like a pendulum. 

‘Please say something.’ Something presses against his forehead and his head throbs weakly. He understands the words, but has no framework to form his own in return. 

Please, the voice pleads at him. It is fearful, it has pain, familiar but not his own. Hot wet points strike his face and fall into his eyes. They’re not melted down his face as it feels they should be. A thin slit of light reveals itself, another sense slowly blooming to life. He had forgotten about it after all.

The first thing he sees is a face streaked with tears, lips parted on a wobbling breath. Perhaps this time he had been allowed to see himself. Tears continue to track their burning paths, following in the wake of their brothers. 

‘Is that what it was like?’ Eyes draw together in panic, ‘like you’ll die from it. Is that what it was always like?’ Searching eyes dart back and forth, trying to read something and falling back. ‘Please say something…’ All that comes out is a broken gasp, dropping off sharply into nothing. 

‘I felt it. Even just your memory, a dream spilling into my mind. I felt it and I thought I would have done anything to make it stop.’ A hand comes to stroke his face, sliding wetly there. He’s not looking at his face, but someone else. And they’re looking at him like he might be dying after all, a pale face pulling on a mask of reassurance and hiding behind it.

‘You’re okay.’ His vision goes black again as the face presses towards him, again that low throb of pressure on his forehead. ‘You’re okay, I promise you’re okay.’ It bubbles like an unbroken stream. Soft presses to his cheeks, his head, his jaw, a wetness left in their wake, salty against his lips. ‘You’re okay.’ Slowly the world bleeds back in from the edges, a cosy wood-panelled room looming out of the darkness. His jaw trembles as tears slide down past his cheeks, tangling in the fingers on their way down and sliding sideways along them. 

The sound that leaves him is a guttural release of tension, immediately followed by a nauseating folding in his stomach. He breathes in, through a throat fluttering and constricting, pulling in crisp smoke tinged air. How had he not recognized that face? The same one that had brought him back before, not a mirage, not a fervent desire, the memory of a grime streaked face coaxing him back to himself. Her eyes are rimmed pink, her cheeks muddied by a striation of angry red paths, mouth parted and sucking in shallow breaths. Was this something new his brain had created for itself? His mind searches to grasp it, a memory, and a present happening simultaneously. If he could only be so lucky as to always be rescued by that face. Can it always be her face that he sees, reaching for him and dragging him back up to the surface.

‘It can be, if you want it to be.’ Wet lips press against his. ‘I will always bring you back.’ His head drags at his neck like a stone as it's lowered back down, a pleasant weight draping across his chest and a hand pressed to his heart.

For a while all he can hear is their breathing, hard and uneven as they try to force their brain into a belief they don't truly hold, that they are out of danger. That somehow there will be no lasting damage, the muscles still tensed can let go of their vigilance. It is passed and the reality is stranger than their belief. They are safe under a roof lightly spotted with rain, a soft bed cradling sluggish limbs, their existence having been ignored to give the pain the honor it deserves, pushing everything else into the dark. He pulls himself upright and she follows, waiting for his eyes to sharpen, to come out of the other side of the fog of adrenaline and settle back into himself with an ironic smile.

'Is it my fault? Did I do that?' She whispers down into her lap, waiting for an answer that roars in her eardrums, lifting her head to ceiling, picturing the stars. The shapes others could trace in them, her imagination insufficient to share in them. 

'I don't know, maybe.' A whistle of teeth, a chuckle that can't find strength to fully form. 'I'm sorry.'

'Don't be sorry.' She gives in to her desire to hold him, squeezing him against her in a hug, her hands balled into her sleeves. For a moment he tenses and she hooks her wobbling chin against his shoulder, holding her breath as her ribs seem to catch in her chest. Then he melts against her and she takes his weight. 'Are you going to go back to sleep?'

'I don't think I want to.'

'Is this okay?'

'Yeah. You can touch me. It's okay. I trust you.' 

Slowly she unfurls her cramping fingers to ghost over his skin, fingertips catching on rough bands of scar tissue as they pass over it. Deep enough she can feel them in the dark, deep enough to form little ridges and valleys there, another pattern to memorise. 'Ben, what was that?'

'Pain. Pure distilled pain', he says, mouth pulling into a smile against her cheek. 'A memory I was pulled into.'

'How can you stand it?' she gasps.

'I can't.' He laughs against her and the sharp movement of it jolts, a laugh like the surprise of nicking yourself in a routine task, blood where it shouldn't be. She squeezes him in her arms before unwinding herself from him to look at his face. 

'Let me get you something to eat.' He shakes his head, slowly, gaze lowered and blinking, stuck in a loop of some circular argument with himself. 'You should eat. Drink something at least. You're shaking.'

'Just stay. Please stay.'

'Okay, I'll stay. Whatever you need.' He nods distractedly and she keeps a hand at his elbow as she leans to grab his shirt and help work it over his body. 'So you're not cold, at least...'

'Are you sure you just don't want to look at me?' His eyes flick up to hers before they drop again, a nervous smile gone in an instant.

'It's not that. I want to make sure you're okay, right now you're not. So maybe now is not the right time for you to be half naked.'

'I hoped it wouldn't happen with him gone.'

'You just need to give it time.' She parrots advice she'd been given herself, how it had mocked her still persisting pain. Still they are the only ones she can offer that aren't an outright lie, reaching for his hand and slumping forward against him, forming a listing triangle of whispered platitudes, warm and damp between them as the chill of the room finally makes itself known.  

'I know. I just... It's in my brain. I don't think it'll ever be gone, not really.'

'You just have to be patient.'

His eyebrow quirks at how easily she falls into her role, offering the same faceless comforts, trying to delude them both with the lie. 'Did it work for you? Did it ever get any easier?'

'It's starting to. I don't wake up alone anymore.' He lets himself be lead, curled loosely on his side, his head in her lap as he combs through his hair, letting her nails trail lightly down his back, stilling where he flinches. 'Does it hurt?'

'No, it tickles.'

She smiles down at him as his hand finds her ankle and wraps around it. 'You're ticklish? That's very dangerous information to let slip, Solo. I'm surprised you'd make such a fatal error.'

'I'm trusting you not to do anything nefarious with it.'

'There's your first mistake.' She gently takes the hand curled against his chest and begins kneading at its joints.

'You don't need to do that.'

'It's for purely selfish reasons. I can feel it. Not as bad as you can, presumably, but still. It's funny, not even our pain is just ours anymore...'

'I guess it makes sense', he says around a hiss as she digs at the joint at the base of his thumb. 'Well, none of this makes sense, but I guess it doesn't surprise me, exactly.'

'Nor me. We have the same bad shoulder. Maybe we favor the same one, but it never really gets better, I wonder if this has something to do with it. It hurts me now, so I'll go out on a limb and say it's hurting you too.'

'Nothing I'm not used to.' 

She turns her attention to the offending shoulder, the muscles hot and solid, his pain a substance she sets to break apart with her fingers. 'You really should get it looked at, you know.' She kneads through the tension and follows the burning path of it as it trails up his neck. 'Resetting joints is not what most would call minor first aid.'

'I will if you will' he mumbles.

'In that case I guess we'll be sad and in pain until we die. I'm not spending our credits just to be told there's nothing they can do. Stop tensing your shoulder.'

'It hurts.'

'So deal with it.' She pulls him upright to kneel at his back and roll said shoulder back until it clicks with a low thud of muscles moving back into place. 'Better?'

'Much.'

'Good. Now I don't know what you do when you can't get to sleep, but I'll tell you what I do. There's a little cabin I've been building in my mind for years. Every time I see someone making something I had no idea how it was constructed, I add to it. Have you ever seen thread being spun?'

'Can't say I have.' 

She moves to sit at his side and lets him lean against her. 'You start with fibres and you comb them until they're all aligned.' He watches her out of the corner of his eye as she moves through the motions absently, taking slow even breaths as his panic ebbs and flares, letting it expend all its energy with her voice in his ear, low and wistful as she falls into a memory. 'They they're twisted together under just the right amount of tension. Too little and they'd fall apart, too much and it snaps. Impossible to teach, they told me. It's just something you get a feel for. You get good enough you can roll the fibres between your fingers and your brain and your muscles will just know how much tension, how much pressure to apply. Like there's a conversation has between you, bypassing your brain even.' His mind drifts to similar such processes, the moment his mastery of a second language had slipped into intuition, an awareness of the absence of the step of translation, his first thoughts in the language. His mastery of his saber a close second, the time he was looking for the shift and found it, the day his perception of his body subtly shifted as he ignited the screaming blade, no longer compensating, but seeing it as just another part of him.

'It's one of the things I imagined myself doing. In my cabin, rain pouring down on the roof, too wet to do anything outside, I imagine myself spinning, then plying them together and rolling them into perfectly round balls. One day I'll have enough to weave into something. Somewhere in this process I inevitably fall asleep, picturing this perfect thread running through my fingers. So I carry on the next night, and the next, slowly building it out with items I've made beginning to end. One day I'll be able to look at every object and know how it was made, from materials gathered or harvested, up to the thing I imagine holding in my hand. I'm sure it sounds stupid...'

'Why would I think it stupid?'

'Because that place is the closest thing I have to a home and it's a product of my imagination. It'll never exist.'

'It could exist.'

'If it did exist it would have a lot in the way of woven baskets and clay pots, not a lot of anything else. I'm a way away from a blanket as it stands. Have you ever seen a loom up close?'

'No', he chuckles.

'Nor have I, hence the trouble. I mean I could look it up, but where's the fun in that?'

'What do you have so far?' He closes his eyes as she launches into details about the place, the trees hacked and carved to stack on top of each other for the walls, the roof made from piled branches, huge leaves that fan out like fingers, woven together. The bundles bound with strips of bark to thatch it where even in her mind the water crept through. 'You've put a lot of thought into this.'

'I have. I've never told another person about it. I don't want them to correct me, tell me I've done something wrong. Of course I have, that's not the point of it. The point is a place that's mine and no-one else's, and that maybe left to my own devices I would have all the knowledge in me to make somewhere comfortable.'

'Then why did you tell me? Not that I'm complaining. I love the sound of your voice.'

'I'm not asking for your input' she scoffs, latching onto the first half of his statement, familiar vaguely combative ground over something sinking and warm. 'It helps me, maybe there's a chance it might help you, too. Give you something to focus on when you need it. It doesn't always work, but sometimes it does.'

'How did you start yours?'

'Gods, that was years ago. I'm pretty sure it started with just a triangle of branches and a pile of leaves big enough to keep the rain out. I didn't know rain then, I didn't realise there were kinds. The sort I pictured fell like little balls from the sky I just needed to deflect. It didn't know it creeps like it does.'

'I can't imagine not knowing rain. I've always known rain. One of favorite feelings is at the point it just starts and the temperature drops and the pressure lifts and you feel it shiver through you in sympathy. I've always wondered if there was a word for that feeling. If there is, I've never found it.'

'I know that feeling. At least I do now.'

'I know. You close your eyes when you feel it.'

'I do.'

'You do.' He fits his fingers slowly through hers. 'Rey, thank you.'

'Why are you thanking me? You're the one listening to me ramble on.'

'There's never been anyone there to wake me. There's never been anyone there when I have.'

'Does it help to have me here?'

'More than I can put into words.'

'Well, we've got a few hours before we need to leave here. Maybe it would help to try.'

'You just want me to compliment you.'

'Hey, I want to help you feel better. If an unfortunate side effect is you telling me a little about how you feel about this, it can't be helped.'

Aching self doubt smoothed over with a flippantly light tone. He had promised to try with her and he meant it, pulling at a loose thread from the tangle, imagining her rolling it between her fingers. 'Just your presence calms me. There's a part of me that worries I'll come to rely on it. Come to lean on you because of what you do and forget who you are. Because it's so easy to exist with you near, there must be a catch. It can't be as simple as that. There's a trap to it, somehow.'

'Why? Not every good thing is a trick. I think this is a good. I hope it is.'

'Because I don't deserve to forget for any moment what I've done.'

'I don't agree with that.' A response toneless and thoughtless, a volley for the sake of it.

'I know you don't. How is that fair? After everything I can still feel it, know that you accept me. That comfort, it doesn't belong in me. It's something existing where it has no right to exist.'

She lets the statement sit for a moment, opening her mouth and closing it again with a half sigh. She doesn't want to give him words for the sake of words when silence is more fitting. But it's a pain she wants to answer with her own, let him know threaded through her incandescent joy, there is a dark core. 'It's strange for me too. I wasn't prepared to feel how I feel around you until I did. I trusted you because I had to trust you, there was no other option. Something I'd assumed had to be earned, begrudgingly built, I just handed it over. Everything I thought I knew about it, just wrong. It was easy. And I know why it was so easy. Because in that moment I truly didn't care if I lived or died. I looked at the place where that fear should be and it was empty. Habit got me through, but I was prepared and expected to die in that room with you. I gave you what I had left with no expectation I would ever get it back. Everything since is uncharted territory.'

'I'm sorry I brought you there.'

'Don't be, it had to be done. We'd have ended up there sooner or later. I needed to see him. I had to know his face. Know the creature that did that to you, made you view pain like it was something owed to you.'

'Did he meet your expectations?'

'No', she chuckles. 'So old, thin. The feeling of him in my mind. He wasn't even looking for anything, he just wanted me to feel the violation of it. He knew everything he needed to know about me the moment I stood in front of him. He knew me from your mind, didn't he?'

'He did. There was nothing I could hide from him. I could muddy things for a time, but any tampering was obvious, especially when it came from me. Change things, remove things in someone's mind, there's a voice there, there's authorship. He always knew when he found my work. He let me do it because I think it was amusing to him that I'd still try. He knew my mind better than I did.'

'Do you ever miss him?'

He smiles, rubbing his pounding head against her shoulder, beginning to earnestly insist on it's exhaustion. 'Only you would ask me that question.' She shrugs against him. 'I do. I wanted to meet his expectations of me. Now I never will.'

'I don't know. If he wanted you to live up to the Skywalker legacy, I'd say killing your master was pretty on brand.'

'Yeah, I guess. Still, he was surprised. For once.'

'What did it feel like?'

'Nothing. I thought it would. I was braced to feel this great shift in my mind, a splitting of my life into a before and after, like with... Like with my father. But there was nothing and I was drowning in this sea of nothing, just waiting to feel something. He wanted to kill you, he wanted me to do it, he had given me years of pain, for nothing. All that for nothing. Isn't that amazing?'

'It's not nothing. You're out of there.'

'I'm alive, with all the pain and knowledge of what I did to please a man I killed anyway. I don't regret it. I would have done anything to save you. I hadn't been as certain of anything in years except knowing that you needed to live.'

'What about you?'

'I thought it would finally break me. When it didn't the only think keeping me going was the need to keep you alive. You really didn't need much help, not that I truly expected you to.'

'Apologies. If we get into that position again, I'll try to be more helpless.'

'I don't even know what that would look like', his voice begins to slur with tiredness. 'I will always choose you.'

'I know.' She guides him onto his back, drawing the blankets around him as he slides out of consciousness, staring out into the dark to the foot of her bed. To the version of herself she still expects to find, digging sand out of her nails, raking her eyes over herself as she curls in next to him, turning still aching hand in front of her, finally letting her eyes close. 

They awake in air perfumed with wood-smoke and strange spices, and drink caff as trees soundlessly shudder outside the window in the lightest beginnings of a shower. They take care to return it exactly as they found it, wipe away any water clinging to their washed mugs and smooth the fabrics where they had been sat moments before, still clinging onto a ghost of their body heat. Her mind is on the ornate bed nestled behind the mossy stone walls and the people who created it, now forgotten, as her mark on the place is already being lost to the settling dust and cleansing smoke. The vestiges of their scraped ashes cling little half moons under her nails. She wants to leave payment, but realizes the most value she has to offer is the illusion that she was never there in the first place. Ghost-like, she picks her way back to their ship, nestled in the treeline. 

‘We should refuel’, his measured voice, half question half statement draws a sigh from her as she wakes the ship. 

‘We can’t exactly wander into a busy tourist town, you said so yourself’, she scowls as the engines shudder around her with a discomforting quietness that sets her teeth on edge. Lack of sleep turning everything harsh, and once again the feeling that what should be automatic has become alien to her. 

‘They don’t have to see us.’ He's half in his head, had awoken with a part of him somewhere below the surface. She's understanding, but still a lick of resentment. A question of if she tried to close the distance, would he pull away to safety.

‘I’m not stealing to get us off this rock, if that’s what you mean.’ 

‘No, we’ll pay for what we take. They can look at us and see any other person.’

‘Show me.’ Her eyes unfocused, jaw set, she sits stiffly in the pilot’s seat, poring over his memories of learning to brush people’s attention away like flies, subtly twist their perception in front of his eyes into something different. ‘Did you do this often?’ She accuses, watching him run through pre-flight checks, gaze focused beyond the scratched windshield out into thick forest. 

‘It was better if people didn’t see my face. He said it was too humanizing.’ 

She scoffs quietly. ‘He had a point. Let’s go.’ 

The port is small but bustling, families and individuals of all shapes and sizes moving through the light drizzle with laden arms as bubbling laughter spills from the orange glow of a nearby inn, firelight giving the shadows their own threading pulse. They walk together with enough distance between them it can be plausibly assumed they head the same way by chance, two individuals with the same destination, ducking into a cluttered antique store to pore over the remnants of lives no doubt fuller than their own. Items owned for their beauty alone, now displayed in skewed arrangements, jumbled together, a wall of scratched and tarnished treasures pressing around them.

She walks under a blanket of hanging chandeliers, all illuminated, bulbs spotted and discolored, drooping pendants twisting as they produce their own heat like a body. She finds him turning the pages of a book, edges hand cut with a jagged line, the impatience of a forgotten reader carved into it.

'Get it if you want it.' She speaks but can't drag her eyes from sweeping around the room, trying to take in more details as her mind smooths the edges into a churning mass, eyes giving up before she does.

'We can't afford it.' 

'With how little you eat, we can afford it. How much is it?'

'Twenty credits.' 

She slides it from his hand and leaves him where he stands, peering round labyrinthine corners in search of the owner. 

She leaves him outside, handing over the book and leaning against rough brickwork, unsure what to say. Already decided she would try the Force technique, there is nothing left to say that wouldn't breach the distance they leave for a vague sense of their protection. She pushes off with a nod. 

She walks up to the lone attendant of the fueling station, scanning his lined face and hunched posture as eyes watch her before heading back to the ship. He looks kind, if frail, his limbs thinning under clothes bought for a fuller body and kept in dogged obsequiousness to a person he no longer is and won’t be again. Her stomach lurches in fear at the weakness of age, on Jakku a slow death sentence, an association she wonders if she’ll ever shake. She clears her throat and wraps herself up in a muffling blanket of the Force, watching his eyes slide over her face, swimming over her skin, never making contact with her. 

‘How much are you needing?’

‘We’re nearly dry’, her mouth curves humorlessly, staring out from behind her armor like a voyeur. Just beyond is the messy web of him, regrets that wake with him each morning, faces lost to the past, the memory of their skin against his. She grits her teeth and pulls at these messy tendrils, dragging forth a face, around the same age as hers, smiling a lopsided grin in the sanctifying light of a silvery sun. She draws this face between them, and watches a shadow twinge over his features, a quiver in his sunken jaw, a glassy blink. 

‘Where do you come from, child?’ his voice wavers as the hands previously setting to their task fall at his sides. ‘You remind me of someone I haven’t seen in a very long time.’ He flexes his fingers at the memory of them, filled out, supple and twined with those of a memory, at the static charge where they made contact. She swallows and watches happiness and sadness war over his features, before he snaps back to himself to grab the fueling equipment. 

She pays half of what she should, her credit chip pressed back into her palm with bony fingers, voice thick with emotion. He watches her board the ship and doesn’t look away even as he becomes an ant-like speck in her view. Still she can feel the thread between their eyes, wavering like spider’s silk until finally he turns away. 

She has the cockpit blessedly to herself as she pulls them out of atmosphere and begins scanning a random region for planets habitable to them. Perhaps its the cold sickness in her stomach that makes her choose a planet little more than an ice-ball, notable features: huge glacial shelves, triple-coated packbeasts teetering on the edge of extinction, and snow-covered volcanic mountains spewing acerbic smoke. A barren kind of beauty, she plugs in the coordinates and reaches out to trace his movements through the ship. 

Ostensibly he’s reading, turning the little toy spaceship in his hands as he tries and fails to not to give into his thoughts in such potent surroundings. Waiting for his father as he refueled, poring over his latest treasure, recognizing it as the stalling beginning to another goodbye. She pulls back before he can sense her slight intrusion into his mind, sitting back to watch the galaxy move past her in the unnatural night of space. She waits for guilt that doesn’t come, breathing in deep and unhurried, clean cool air she doesn’t deserve but gets anyway. 

She finds him sprawled languidly on the cot, and takes the book from his hand to straddle him. His palms come up to brace her thighs as she cranes over him, his eyes narrowing in question as she wordlessly presses back into his space.

‘The man at the fueling station. I took a face from his mind and made him see it. I wanted to see if I could, and I can. What does that mean?’ She searches his face for answers. ‘I should feel guilty, but I don’t. What does that say about me?’ 

His nerves bubble out as a laugh under her icy stare. ‘You’re asking me?’ He cradles her face in his palm. ‘I wish I could do what you can do. What takes you a day took me months. I just hope I’ll never have to stand in your way.’ He holds her gaze and smiles and she gives in to the desire she'd been suppressing since she woke beside him, bringing her lips to his. They are back to softness, back to the sense that they have found something fragile amongst the dust, every touch careful to protect it, a desire bubbling to do the opposite. She slumps against his chest and he wraps his arms around her, breathing around a sigh.

'Every time I kiss you I want to take your head in my hands and just crush it' she confesses against his shirt, feeling her voice rumble back through her skull. 'Is that weird?'

'I wouldn't expect anything different' he says, carefully tucking her hair behind her ear.

'Do you want to train?'

'Yes please.' 

'Food first.' 

They spar to drain the restless energy from her limbs, grappling in the tiny space of their living quarters. She huffs as he squeezes the air from her chest with a well timed grapple as she tries to hook one ankle around his knee and press the other heel into his flesh. She twists herself free and gains back her air as she stalks him and they slowly circle one another.

A satisfied shiver rolls through her as her muscles warm up, crouching to throw her weight against him in a lunge. He stumbles briefly but rights himself, pinning her upper arms to her sides in his grip. She slams her forehead head against his mouth, hearing a crunch as she slides to the floor, head ringing with the impact.

She takes in a second of his blood-tinged leer before she is pressed against the riveted wall by her throat, legs scrabbling for purchase, his mouth on hers, pushing the coppery tang of blood past her lips. Her heart thunders in her chest where he loosens his grip and her feet touch back down to the floor in a shower of pins and needles. He fists his hand into her hair and pulls her neck taut, her gaze hooded on his, wrinkled with the slightest pain at his fingers pulling at her scalp. 

‘Hit me back’, she stammers. His eyes rove over her face, her eyes, her lips, a smudge of his blood at her jaw. ‘What are you scared of?’ she challenges, watching his cut lip as it begins to swell in front of her eyes. He swallows. ‘I know you want to, you can’t hide from me.’ She blinks, slowly, watching with some satisfaction as her words hit their mark. ‘You said I could have whatever I want.’ She smiles, grinding her teeth as all her blood rushes from her head, and her hands claw at his arm.

He slaps her across the cheek, hard enough her head rings and her jaw falls open, tongue dragging against her cut skin, eyes shining. Her hands fall away until she is held up only by his grip on her and his eyes boring into hers, worry slowly falling away from his look as the second pass, turning into a breathless laugh. When he kisses her his palm slides in the sweat at her neck and she wobbles on unsteady knees. She breathes for a few moments, feeling the pulse thud in her injured cheek and smiling at him. 

Her fingers are featherlight on his skin as she turns his face in the light to heal the bruised and broken skin she’d put there. She feels the same warmth suffuse her jaw and knit the flesh back together until it is gone with a lazy blink of his eyes.

‘Where are we going?’ He leans his head on his palm, thumbing a smudge of blood from his jaw.

‘Carlac. A random ice ball. Felt like something a little different. Any objections?’

‘None at all.’ 

They take turns washing the blood away, tiredness settling heavily on their bones as their broken sleep catches up to them, playing cards until they're frowning down at their own hands utterly confused by the logic of their past selves, in doubt as to whether there was any to begin with.

They eat and he reads to her until her breathing evens out into sleep and he wakes her to steer her gently through to the bedroom. They’ll land early in the morning and he knows she’ll want to see the approach. She watches in hushed wonder every take-off and landing, every world new, every one a treasure she turns to share with him. She curls against him, clean and warm, so small for such power, humming as he wraps his arms around her.

Chapter Text

He can feel her eyes on him as he stands to dress, how she pulls them away when his skin is on show only for them to drift back as fastens his belt.

'Something on your mind, Jedi?' He sits and snags his boots, beginning the process of lacing them with the warmth of her at his back, leaning in but careful not to touch. 'Dress for the cold, it's snowing.'

She clambers over him to get ready, turning to meet his eye where he keeps them on her face as she pulls off her loose shirt for a more form fitting one. 'You think you're better than me, huh? Is this you being respectful or are you trying to make a point?' She hops to pull on her trousers, tottering slightly to tighten the cuffs at her ankles. 

'Am I not usually?' He traps his hands between his knees as she steps in close to fix the collar at his neck.

'I'd prefer it if you weren't...'

He lets his eyes wander over her barely clothed chest at her invitation, down her body hugged by the slightly stiff layers of the cold-climate uniforms stolen from the base. 'You're beautiful.' He blushes as he says it and she ducks to keep him in her eyeline.

'You're just saying that.'

'No, you've always been beautiful', he lifts his face to hers, 'it's just nice to be able to say it.' 

She kisses him because she can, hands on his knees as she pushes her weight into it, pressing him back against the bed. She walks her hands up to stare down at him before rolling away to grab a sweater and shove the itch in her skin into her waistband.

They narrow their eyes as the glare of the sun off the pure snow stabs at their tired eyes. A milky, almost featureless ball, like an eyeball without an iris, they slide down to the surface in awed silence. 

Their feet break through the thin crust atop the snow and sink with each step, snow sloshing into their boots. Blood peaks in high pink points on her cheekbones as she scans a ruler flat horizon, breathing out a visible plume. They walk for the sake of it, turning after twenty minutes to find their ship still easily within sight with a chuckle. They stop to watch the slow procession of shambling beasts on the horizon, spreading like a string of beads across their vision before shrinking behind a snowdrift.

She runs, enjoying the rush of blood through her veins and the whip of cold air on her skin. Her footfall crunches through untouched snow, a canvas scrubbed clean by constant snowfall. She falls but gets up again, scraping away the clinging snow with a rough brush of her hands, running towards a receding vanishing point until her limbs refuse to move any more, throbbing with pain as her pulse thunders in her ears. She presses at her swooping stomach and smiles as he trudges to meet her. 

‘Hey.’ She smiles, snow clinging to her lashes and blurring her vision. 

‘Cold?’ 

‘Not really’, she scrunches her pink nose, yanking off her gloves. 

‘Do you want to see the mountains?’ She furrows her brow in question, following as he inclines his head to walk them back to the ship. 

‘Have you been here before?’ She walks back alongside her own blurred footsteps, stamping a deliberate print alongside the flurried smudges. 

‘No, I looked at the topology while we were landing. The other side of the planet is mountainous and volcanic. There’s a few settlements, too.’ She hums.

The buildings they find come in a rainbow of colors, perched on leg-like struts driven into the snow, scattered and angled like a hand full of dice allowed to settle where they fell. Some are open, a mess of footprints at the foot of their ramped approaches catching tiny weak shadows, a wet trail of feet leading to an interior, smoke climbing steadily into the sky. Most they pass over, their invitation implicitly not for the likes of them, but they follow a solidary trail into a squat museum.

Shielded as they walk, the only evidence they leave of them ever have been there will be the water that will have to be mopped up later in curious silence. All that can be gathered about the ancient people of the area has been gathered into one wide room, at the center, a model of a village made of ice now rendered in plastic bricks, the glue dripping down its sides, frosted with frozen prints. A family trapped in an ice floe and preserved, their clothes on faceless mannequins, their shoes and weapons sat at their feet, fixed at the point of returning home or stood around a fire, letting warmth push out the cold. As she reads the plaque detailing how they were found, the tremendous fortune in the eyes of historians in that their tomb conserved their bodies for future study, he peels off from her side. Food, still in their stomach, it says. The last meal they had shared and delicately adjusted to their needs and preferences, their bodies unable to be saved, but their clothes and the meticulous effort it took to render them enduring. So that future generations can feel with a self-congratulatory warmth a commonality with those passed, a pride in their compassion, then step away, minds already on to the next thing.

Sensors pick up on his approach, their tricks only effective on the sentient, piping through a wobbling recording of a voice as he peers into a case at the open pages of a book, paper the color of tanned skin, crumbling to dust at the edges. The voice of the last remaining member of their tribe, a narrator explains, less fortunate than the beasts that cross the horizon. Efforts were not successful to save them, discounting the few items they're surrounded by. Their practices always questioned in a way the animals' weren't. Their words remains, but their meaning is lost, although they're assured efforts are being made to revive the language. 

They find a bulk of the local inhabitants, stepping through a heavy door and into a warm inn, wood panelled walls damp with breath, condensing and carving path alongside the grain. He leaves her in a seat by the fire, returning as she wiggles her feet from her boots and tucks them under her. A few minutes later they’re sipping a steaming drink that seems to heat their veins from within.

‘Some mineral in the ice floes here, apparently,’ he supplies as she turns her tingling palm in front of her, feeling a lag between her thoughts and movements not entirely unwelcome.

'I like the fire', she muses to herself, slowly reaching her mug down to the table. 'How's your shoulder?'

'Bad.' She smiles at him, shouldering out of her jacket to hang it next to the others, steaming in the heat. 'Don't look too concerned.'

She takes his drink from him and helps him out of his own jacket, curling at his side to heal him until his head comes to rest against hers. 'Have we given up on not trying to draw attention to ourselves?' she asks at a murmur, dimly aware she should be concerned about the people that move at their backs.

'No-one is looking.'

'Says the man who has his eyes closed.'

'They're not thinking about us. They're too busy looking out the window.' She follows their lead, turning her eyes to the snow silently falling past thick glass, golden where it catches the light. 'Certain things, they knock people down to a kind of baseline. Storms, fire, snow, no matter how often they see them, people can't help themselves, they always look.'

'I'm not looking.' She stares down at his hand, creeping hers towards it to tangle lightly tingling fingers through his. 

'No, you're looking at me.'

'Sorry.'

'Don't be, you're welcome to. Although I have no idea what it is that you see that you like so much.'

'I know you don't.' She gasps when he kisses her, back aching where she pulls it straight. 'You shouldn't do that. Not when we're outside.'

'Are you ashamed of me?'

'No, it's not that. It's ours, I don't want other people to see.' He doesn't press and she leans against his shoulder as he darts his eyes around the place. They are forgotten as he reaches her drinks back into her hands. 

They stand shoulder to shoulder beside the frost-bitten building as the sun disappears into the angry clouds at the mountaintop, coloring the scene a cold grey.

‘It’s night already…’ She sighs, as the sun re-emerges, slowly but surely dipping towards the horizon. 'It's weird. It's dark but it's not at the same time.' 

They buy a bottle of the drink and some food to take back to the ship, sitting on the floor of the cockpit as snow falls noiselessly outside the viewpoint, blanketing them in an other-wordly hush. She makes a list of places she’d like to go and things she’d like to see as she shivers under his touch, seeing the reflection of the snowfall in his eyes before her eyes slide shut and her head spins.

She dreams of the snow, her feet sinking into the numbing embrace of it, it not wanting to let her go. How her skin stung with it, her eyes watered, and seldom used muscles shuddered in an effort to curl her heat inwards towards her organs. She wakes with the lingering cold chilling her to the bone to an unfamiliar view of pockmarked metal and plasteel. 

It takes her cold fogged brain a few seconds to realize she’s on the floor of the cockpit and she’s breathing out tiny puffs of cold. She peels her arm up from the floor and it's as if the skin has been slapped. She pulls aching muscles into action to wake the shivering form next to her.

‘The heating’s failed, we need to move.’ She watches realization work over his face as she tries to rub some warmth back into her legs. She fumbles for blankets for them both and shoves her frigid hands into her armpits with a flinch. They gather everything warm they have, their bulky down jackets and blankets, pulling layers on indiscriminately. She grabs the last of the strange drink as he hauls down a packet of emergency chemical heaters. ‘Hope this works’, she shivers, tripping over numb feet to clamber into bed. 

‘Hands.’ He wraps her aching fingers in his as she scowls at him in pain. ‘Sorry.’ Little clouds puff out of his nose as he hears the ship groan and shift with the cold around them.

He cracks the seal on the heaters with a fumble, presses it to her stomach and curls around her, pressed into the mattress by the leaden weight of layered blankets, forcing cold air in and out of his lungs with concerted effort. Finally, his chest begins to relax, and his breathing becomes reflexive once more and he feels her squirm against him. She breathes in deep around ribs slowly letting go of their aching tension and smiles against him.

‘That wasn’t so bad. Do we try to fly?’

‘We should. This isn’t an ideal place for repairs.’ 

She burrows out of their nest to drag in a fresh freezing breath. ‘Drink.’ She orders, handing him the last of their mineral liquor, hoping it’ll bring back the dexterity they need to get off the ground. ‘One of these days we’re not going to be in mortal danger.'

They shamble through to the cockpit and click the ship through takeoff with chattering teeth and hands screaming in protest before retreating back as it judders on on autopilot to the closest warm planet, whose name they don’t waste the half second to read. 

She whispers nonsense into the dark of their cocoon as the drink spreads through their veins with most likely borrowed warmth. She’d felt cold, she tells him, in the desert night, when a storm had ripped the roof off of the ship she was sheltering in and the wind whipped away any stolen heat. She’d fallen in the ship, slipped a hold and landed heavily on her knee, and was forced to stay through the storm instead of heading back to her home. She’d counted her breaths all night, losing count in the thousands, feeling like a mechanical beast, made only to inflate and deflate and count. When morning came the warmth of the sun scared her, and she uncurled her cramped and corded limbs as if seeing them for the first time, walking into a light that shone into her little hold, the tiny gap between plastic and metal that had been her entire universe. The injury had long since healed, but in the cold it comes back up, the association burned into her brain.

'It hurts now, like it’s one big bruise. If I look at it my brain will tell me my eyes are playing tricks on me, even though it was a long time ago.' 

‘How long ago?’

‘At least five seasons. What about you?’

‘At the academy. We’d sleep in ancient stone buildings. They had a way of stealing all your heat as soon as you decided to sleep. Like they knew.’ He smiles. ‘It was a part of our training, to learn to regulate our body heat, throw away fear of cold like we do any other fear.’

‘Did it work?’

‘I don’t know, I could never do it.’ He laughs. ‘So every night I just lay there and cursed the world. He would talk to me a lot then, and I was too tired to argue with him.’

‘Is it getting any easier? Him being gone…’ She mumbles her question in their little dampened  bubble. 

‘It is’. She lets out a held breath. ‘But it's harder to think about the past. It’s like all the pieces don’t fit together anymore. He told me that if I cut ties with my past, I would be free from pain. So now I find myself believing the advice of a man who poisoned my life. It’s a puzzle.’

‘Yes it is.’ She presses her ear to his heart and curls around him. ‘I wish I knew you before.’

‘In a way you did.’ He thinks of the gift of his dreams, at times the only thing mooring him to his sanity.  

‘In a way.’ She swallows thickly. ‘I would have liked to have a friend. I always wanted one, even if they were a danger. It wasn’t always an easy choice, deciding to tackle another day of loneliness for the sake of survival. I would ask myself what the point of it was, who was counting, who was checking that I was suffering like I should be. I know how that sounds, but I’ve spent my life waiting for a family whose faces I wouldn’t recognize if they stood in front of me. It isn’t faith that motivates me. It’s a sum I calculate at each sunrise and just barely squeak through most of the time.’ She swallows, cold having plunged her back there, everything since feeling like a dream. ‘Why couldn’t you have been there…’ Her eyelids flutter, refusing to let her tears fall as he strokes her hair in the dark and presses her face with his trembling lips until they fall asleep, feeling themselves turning faster and faster in the dark. 

The next morning, they dry their snow soaked boots on a desert planet, light linen clothing contrasting with their sunburned cheeks and noses and encasing thawed limbs suddenly diminished to their usual size. They tread through the bustling market ready to divert the attention of passers-by, but with no need to. They’re brushed by bodies as they weave with the narrow river of people past an array of pungent stalls, her hand held in his behind her back.

‘Anything we need?’ She asks over her shoulder. 

‘Not that I can think of,’ she feels him stumble as a hair-cloaked boar pushes past his legs, throwing a sour look back at him over its greying snout.

‘Anything you want then?’

They weave out of the main thoroughfare to breathe in the relative quiet, surveying a stall of delicately turned hair pins, details fine as silk strands. She holds one in her hand, pressing her thumb against the point experimentally. 

‘Three credits for that one’, a voice emerges from behind piled furs and milky eyes find her face. ‘They’re made by my husband. He sacrificed his vision to be able to make things such as this. You won’t find any finer in the galaxy.’  She smiles at the craterous eyes, at a sharpness she can tell sits behind the clouded lenses, squaring her jaw under its searching stare and nodding. She slips the wrapped pin into her pocket as they wander their way towards a junkyard, past a procession of inactive droids in various decrepit states.

She nods to their keeper and strokes her fingers over a fading serial number as quarrelling voices raise a few feet away. She spots the coupler they need in a rusted hunk atop miscellaneous treads and gears. He watches her plan a route in a few blinking seconds and boosts her up to climb. Within a few moments she’s back in front of him, part in hand, focus already drawn to the conversation loudly pressing into their space.  

‘I paid good credits for you to fix this.’

‘And I’ve spent hours of my time on it. It can’t be done.’

‘I paid you to make it happen.’

‘You paid me for my time, which you have received. It can’t be done. Take it anywhere and they’ll tell you the same.’ She ducks her head towards a droid, crouching to inspect its gutted torso as eyes swing their way and back again.

‘Look, this isn’t just any speeder. I could buy another one today if I had to, but this one is important to me.’

‘It’s a machine, they break. Cut your losses, you get a better one and you’ll forget about this before you know it.’

‘You’re not listening to me.’ The speeder lies dormant between them, dusty hand-prints smearing the bodywork and a sheet kicked with dust underneath its kickstand. ‘There has to be something we can try.’

‘I don’t even know where to start. Everything I try, she’s just dead.’ She catches his eye where he listens to the exchange, rolling a rusted motor absentmindedly in grease streaked hands.

Shall we try?  She crouches next to the droid, working sand free from its treads with a piece of loose wire.

We’re not supposed to be attracting attention. He sets down the rusted motor on a teetering pile and looks over their heads as the gesticulating pair circle the doomed machine. 

He seems upset. She counters, standing to track her eyes up a stack of sagging tires.

You just want a project. He stoops to inspect a gutted fuselage that crumbles into dust under his fingers. 

We need that thermal coupler. And we could always use more credits… She comes to stand at his side, peeking at his profile with a tentative smile on her lips, feeling his resolve weaken and her mouth pull into a grin. 

‘I might be able to help.’ Her voice stills their conversation, and three pairs of eyes turn to her flushed face. ‘I used to have one just like this that I repaired myself. I could take a look…’ She shrugs. 

The keeper opens his mouth to protest but is cut off. ‘I want it fixed, I don’t really care who does it. It’s not like you could do it any damage.’

She smiles and nods her head for him to follow as she circles the craft. 

They leave for their ship as the sun is setting. Grease streaked, dinged and scraped, with a replacement coupler a few more credits to their name and the begrudging respect of the junkyard keeper. They shower the grime from their skin and drop a pin for this location, with the promise that if they ever need a favor, they have at least one friend out there. Later as the man recounts the story to his family over dinner he will realize that he doesn’t know their names, and the vision of their face dissolves in his mind the more he tries to focus on it. But he knows he would recognize their faces, and they way they seemed to work in conversation with the machine, between the pair total silence.  

Coupler fitted they step from foot to foot, letting the ship cough into life around them as they spar. Her laugh rings out as she slips from his grip, sunlight carving a slice into their arena, drawing out the honey in his eyes as they track her dancing footsteps. She throws herself at him, climbing his body to wrap around him and cover his mouth with her own grinning one as he rights to hold their weight. 

‘I like that you’re strong.’ She clings onto his shoulders as he tries to follow her mouth as she pulls away. ‘I’d still like you if you weren’t, but still. I like it.’

‘Good, I’m glad you like it.’

‘You’re a little too tall though. It’s annoying I have to pull you down to kiss you.’

He gently unwinds her limbs and sets her back on her feet, walking her backwards until her back hits the wall and she has to tip her head up to glare at him. ‘I don’t think you mind that much.’

She swallows, urgently aware of every inhale through her stretched throat as she peers at him through her lashes. ‘Do you ever get tired of being right?’ She pulls his hand under her shirt to press against sweat damp skin. 

‘Not really.’ He kisses his way down to her neck as his fingers drag down her spine. 

‘You can’t do that while I’m standing.’ She mumbles, clinging to whatever parts of him she can reach. ‘Yeah, I know I started it. But you’re the smart one, remember?’

‘Then come and lie down.’

It’s marginally better, she doesn’t have to worry about falling, so her attention is drawn to the mortifying heave of her chest as he skims his fingers lightly over her skin. As her thoughts begin to circle on themselves with worry, the body she knows is markedly different from others, not rounded in the places she feels it should be, peppered with goosebumps she feels catch against his fingertips, he silences them with a kiss. 

‘What’s going on in there?’ She shakes her head in answer, mouth pulling into a goofy smile. ‘I never thought I’d get to touch you.’

Not just her then, trying and failing to wall off that desire with all the strength they had in them. ‘Well don’t stop now. What if you never get another chance?’

He flops to his side and brings her leg over his hip, tracing a path from her neck down her side and to her foot and back up again, inhaling hard against her cheek as he kisses her. It’s hypnotic in the same way terror of heights is, feeling as if she’s shrinking in her body as he touches her. She traces her own path over his chest until her fingers spasm against him, abruptly overwhelmed. 

‘I feel like I’m burning up. Feel.’ She sits and pulls his hand to her cheek, pointlessly fanning herself with her free hand. She flops down to the bed with a groan, trying to get some air circulation under the hem of her shirt as her clothes feel like they’re constricting against her skin. ‘Again I have to wonder how people manage this.’

He watches her, weight on one hand as he tries to will calm back into his own muscles. ‘By taking their clothes off, I imagine. Not that I’m suggesting it.’

‘Would it help?’ She tries to stretch fuzzy discomfort from her limbs with a shaking stretch. 

‘No, it would give us different problems.’ 

She pushes onto her elbows to speak to him, jerking her chin. ‘What kind of problems? I’m aware you have a penis. It’s not going to scare me off.’

‘You noticed that, huh.’

‘Kind of hard not to.’ She kicks him lightly. ‘Is this as frustrating for you as it is for me?’

‘I’m not sure if I can answer that question.’ He kneads the muscle at his neck, squinting at her. 

‘I mean, we could. We are in rather a unique situation, you and I. We could find out...’

‘Wouldn’t that just make it worse?’

‘You think it would double it?’

‘I think if it did, I’d fucking die.’

She flashes him a toothy smile, more of a quick baring of teeth than anything. ‘I like it when you swear. It sounds better when it comes from you. So what do we do, just ignore it until it goes away?’

‘Pretty much.’

‘Or we go in separate rooms and deal with it. Is that what you usually do?’

‘Please, that would make sense. No, I just wait it out.’

‘Same for me. I got it from you, I don’t really want to get rid of it. So I guess we just wait.’

‘Afraid so.’

She lasts ten seconds before she opens her mouth to speak. ‘You know’, he shakes his head at her, ‘I really don’t know anything about this. I don’t know what to expect. Do you know anything?’

‘Not firsthand…’ He swallows. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘What happens next?’

‘There’s not really an order we’re supposed to follow. But I guess we’d start by getting comfortable with each other clothed, and then… not clothed.’

‘Then what?’

‘Touch each other. Learn what the other likes and try to replicate it. Do that until we’re comfortable enough around each other to, you know...’

‘Okay, that’s terrifying.’

‘It is.’

‘I don’t even know how to do that with a man.’

‘You don’t have to. You know that right?’

‘I know, but I want to find out. I trust you. With my body. With all of it. You can show me. We can show each other.’ He curls to lean his head on her stomach, distracting himself from the spinning with the steady rise and fall as she breathes. ‘Are you alright?’ she asks, threading her fingers through his hair.

‘Yeah.’ His reply is not massively convincing, wobbling and airless. 

‘What do you need right now?’

‘Sorry?’

‘What do you need? What would help? Can I do something?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come up here.’ She urges him up her body, lifting her arm and laying his head on her chest and curling around him. His arm works around her waist and squeezes. ‘This works on me, does it work on you, too?’ She whispers, carding her fingers through his hair, around his ear and down his neck. He closes his eyes and she doesn’t press him for an answer. ‘You’re allowed, you know. You look after me, I’ll look after you.’

Her chest squeezes as she feels him shake silently against her. She blinks away the prickle in her eyes and continues gently dragging her nails against his scalp, breath held as she waits for the damp of his breath to reach through her shirt for her skin. It does, and it’s followed by a squeak at the back of her throat, fear crushed into a little ball there, needing to release its energy. He squeezes her hard enough to restrict her breathing, but she won’t stop him, pressing a kiss to his forehead as she loses feeling in her feet. She’ll wake with a headache beating in sympathy with his, but she won’t care. 

No-one’s every held him like this, including her. No-one has treated him like he might need comfort, distracted by his size and strength, assuming that means he’s moved past that need. Like it’s something someone can grow out of. Like it’s something to be surpassed. A goal he’d found before her. That’s how she saw it, before him. An urge that signified weakness, a moral failing to be avoided at all cost. Before she experienced it. Before she felt herself sink into it, growing smaller in her mind, falling soundlessly as her ears rang, feeling the movement of his hug crest in a wave over her body. Hearing her blood fizz at the base of her neck. Coming back to her body wrapped in this feeling, wondering how she went without it for so long.

She never truly did the same for him. Quicker than she’d thought possible she’d fallen into step with the rest of the world. He hadn’t expected her to ever step out on her own, simply taking what she thought to give him, as if kissing him would be enough. Like he could draw everything he needed from that contact. As if he needed less than her, for some reason. Where had that assumption come from? It was easy to point to binaries, even if they’re ill-fitting in almost every way. True, he is strong, but so is she. They are both inexperienced, they are both more used to violence than softness, they are both toeing their way to a cliff of their own making. Still, she hadn’t quite believed him. He must know how this goes. He plays his part perfectly, how could he not? He gives her what she needs. How can he know if not through experience? He gives you what he needs, her brain supplies. How else would he?

Chapter Text

Continually moving has its benefits and drawbacks. For one, they’re rarely if ever appropriately dressed for the weather, and the clothes they do have are in constant need of being cleaned. As such, a significant chunk of their time has come to be allocated to the acquiring of clothes and food so as to reduce to a minimum the minutes they lose standing in their underwear waiting for the cleaning cycle to end. Minutes that are better spent on more important things, said things currently undecided but no doubt important in some cosmic sense. The Universe, it can be assumed, did not bring them together for them to share a ration bar waiting for their only practical pants to be sanitised. 

‘I can do a good deal on that one, beautiful. It’s a crime for someone as lovely as you to be walking around in those clothes.’

‘I’m good.’ Her eyes snap from the garments to the man’s face, sliding from its impervious surface like the waxed jackets she had been measuring with her eyes. He wants her attention, good or bad. It’s aggravating that he got it, even for a moment. ‘Have a nice day.’

‘Course, I’m sure you’d look good in anything. If you want to take them off I’d be more than happy to make you comfortable. Find you something more appropriate, what do you say?’ He jerks a stubby thumb back to the flapping fabric forming the entrance to his shop, a sliver of dim shapes revealed by the wind and gone before she can form the angles into an interior. 

‘I’d say I have no idea why I’m still talking to you.’

‘Maybe you see something you like…’ He strokes his arms lightly down the front of his stained coat, resting them above his stomach.

‘Maybe she’s too polite for your own good. Does that approach often work?’ She takes a step back and tips her face to the sky, hoping the ceaseless rain will cool her heating skin. 

‘Apologies, I didn’t realize she was spoken for.’

‘She’s not and she’s standing right here.’ Both sets of eyes are turned to her momentarily, before their eyes lock once more.

‘My apologies, miss. I spoke out of turn.’

‘Really? What’s changed? Is it because he’s here? You had no problem before, it’s different now, is it?’ She steps forward and grabs a jacket, digging into Ben's pocket for their credit chip and flinging it towards the merchant who catches it with a fumble.

‘Look, I don’t want any problems.’ He scans their chip and holds it out towards her. She eyes the outstretched hand until Ben takes it back. 

‘Nor do we, we need to go.’ She shakes off Ben’s hand but follows him anyway, keeping her eyes on the man until they scream at her to blink. ‘We really do need to go...’

‘Do you think I don’t know that? We can’t go yet, we didn’t get any of things we came for.’

‘Why are you annoyed at me? What did I do?’

‘Over there.’ She points their way under a stall, it’s roof sagging with water, bubbling and creeping along its seams. ‘Do you think I can’t handle some creep? Funnily enough it’s happened before, I don’t need you to step in for me. What makes you think I’d want you to? Get some clothes for the weather, you look like a drowned rat.’

‘He was making you uncomfortable.’ They continue their conversation as a merchant tracks them with their eyes, pushing a few items his way and betting he’ll take them automatically. He does. 

‘Yeah, so what if he was? I’m not a child, I don’t need a fucking minder. Not that, it doesn’t have a hood.’ He looks down at the jacket in his hands, shaking off his surprise and setting it back with the rest before selecting another. ‘Hood. Are you dumb?’

‘Next time I’ll let him drool all over you, is that what you want? Thank you.’ He offers their credit chip, staring at her as he waits palm outstretched for it to be returned to her. She exchanges a quick smile with the seller when it is clear that he won’t, appending it to a sprawling list of arrogant things he’s done today. He'd begun grating at her the moment she woke for reasons she can't realistically put into words. She'd become aware once again of any moment he crossed into her space, taking her train of thought and immediately derailing it. She'd stumbled her way through their morning, stepping out into the rain buoyant with relief. 

Maybe they just need to train again, she reasons with herself as she stomps out from their inadequate cover. Maybe she needs to temper her growing cloying feelings for him with something hard. ‘I don’t want you of all people feeling the need to fight my battles for me.’

‘Then I won’t, problem solved.’ He jerks his head towards a general store, holding the door for her and waving her through with an exaggerated wave of his hand. 

‘You don’t even get why this bothers me, do you?’

‘Not particularly.’ He reaches above her to grab some of the soap she’d come to like, floral and slightly woodsy. She stares at the damp skin at his collar and considers doing something about the blood teeming below its surface. He grabs her hand and slaps the soap it into her palm before moving her by her shoulder to get to the bottles at her hip. The display wraps around them, but of course he has to get the one behind her. 

‘Of course you wouldn’t.’

‘What do you want from me?’ He walks backwards, grabbing items as he goes as a lady folded with age steps out of his way. ‘Just tell me. Tell me what behaviors you deem as acceptable from me. Put it in a nice list for my benefit.’ He turns and comes to abrupt halt in front of the lady who is glaring up at him with impressive fervor. She jerks her head towards an item high on the shelf and he hands it to her as Rey tuts behind him, arms folded.

‘You pompous arse.’

‘Noticed that, have you? Took you a minute.’

‘Oh fuck off.’

‘Can do.’ He turns to carve his way towards the shopkeeper, loading items onto the desk and keeping his back to her. ‘Come find me when you’re done being insulted.’

‘We’re not done.’ She follows him back into the rain which redoubles its effort with them as witness.

‘What, because you say we’re not? I don’t know if you realized but I have a say in it too. I don’t have to stand here while you turn your annoyance onto me. What do we need? I want to get off of this ugly planet.’

‘You still don’t get it. Has it never occured to you that I don’t want someone jumping to my defense unprompted? Over there.’

‘Why not? What’s so deplorable about me wanting to stop that?’

‘Because I can do it myself without you coming and staking a claim over me.’ She picks up a few fruits giving them a bruising press for freshness, digging fingerprints into their skins. She begins piling them in her arms. ‘Get one of those bags, we need some more of this.’

‘I don’t even like that stuff. It tastes like wet leaves.’

‘I don’t care if you don’t like it, we’re getting it.’

He digs out a few sliding scoop-fulls as she watches, running her tongue against the back of her teeth in an attempt to dampen the rage that simmers in her blood. ‘Satisfied?’

‘Yes.’

‘Fantastic. Anything else?’

‘Why are you asking me? You’re eating it, same as me.’ They pay and leave with a bag loaded with items grabbed thoughtlessly, something to keep their hands occupied. They’ll find out what they have when it comes to preparing them. She takes the bags from him and he stills crushing his hands into fists as they step back into the downpour.

‘I don’t know what you want. Tell me what you want. Do you want me or not?’

She stills on the threshold and the door bumps into the back of her heels with a clatter. ‘I don’t know what I want, okay?’

‘Then how am I supposed to? I don’t know what I’m doing, alright. I don’t know how to do this. Do you?’ He quickly out-paces her making clear his attempts to slow his own pace to hers, now exposed as an effort he doesn’t want to expend. 

‘You know I don’t.’ She quickens her step and feels her body begin to heat, sweat trapped under moist layers and pressing sickeningly against her skin as she moves. 

‘Then do you not think that mistakes are inevitable? Am I supposed to feel like every time I fuck up you’re going to be keeping track? If that’s how this is going to go, just tell me.’

‘I don’t know, okay. I don’t know. Is that good enough for you?’ She stomps over and pulls him off of the main street and under a dripping awning. 

He allows himself to be lead, head tipped back as he works his jaw. ‘Then why do you think I do? Why are you allowed to be clueless but I’m not?’

‘You should know.’

‘Because I’m older than you? Or is it because I’m a man. Do you think there’s some innate knowledge that we all get?’

‘No and don’t patronize me.’

‘I’ll patronize you, you’re patronizing me. Do you think this is part of some grand plan? Do you think with me backing you up I’m somehow trying to put you in your place?’

‘I’d kill you if you tried.’

‘I’m figuring it out as I go along, same as you. So why do you hold me to a different standard than yourself?’ He spots another stall in the distance beginning to pack away its wares and sets off without a glance her way. 

‘So it’s my fault now? I’m supposed to be happy to be treated like your property? Don’t get that, you don’t like it, you’ve had it before.’

‘What exactly did I say that gave you that impression?’ He puts the package down and pick up another, the ones with seeds in that they both enjoy.

‘I can speak for myself.’

‘I didn’t speak for you.’ He exchanges a few words and walks the few paces back to her with a bag pull of sugary baked goods. ‘I barely said anything and I have to wonder if you’d have ever put an end to it or if you were happy just to stand there all day being demeaned.’

‘You didn’t need to. Just you being there meant suddenly I’m not to be bothered, not because it’s wrong, but because I’m “spoken for”.’

‘I never said you were.’ He reaches out for her with laden hands as if to crush her skull in his hands before dropping his arms crinkling and damp to his sides.

‘You didn’t deny it.’

‘Why would I? What would that have achieved? I can tell you one thing, we’d still be having this conversation. If you’re so uncomfortable with the idea of being anything other than on your own, we need to have a serious conversation.’

‘Then let’s have it.’ She crossed her arms, fighting against the weight of their combined purchases. If they don’t get inside quick, many of them will be ruined. She should care about that, she should do something.

‘Do you want to be in a relationship with me?’

She rolls her eyes, blinking the rain from them. ‘Not right now I don’t.’

‘You only want a relationship if it’s perfect and never crosses any of your boundaries. Boundaries let’s be clear, you won’t tell me about until I get too close.’

‘I’m still a fucking person!’ She unzips her jacket with a sharp yank, feeling a few of the teeth knit and pull free, making a beeline for a patch of stone untouched by rain, sheltered by an intricately carved bridge that in any other mood she would take the time to admire. 

‘Do you think people become less than a person if they take a partner?’

She begins trying to scrub the rain from the skin around her neck, feeling as if the thin coating of water is squeezing at her. ‘No, they become weak, they become needy. They become half of something.’ Her words are bounced back at her by the stone, flattened and wooly.

‘Why do you think that?’ He takes the bags from her, face averted from hers and out into the diagonal rain as she tugs at her ill-fitting jacket.

‘Because I’ve seen it and I don’t want it. I don’t want to change myself for you.’

‘I never asked you to, and for the record, you started this.’ 

‘And you just went along with it, you had no agency…’ She yanks her arms free from her jacket, needing to feel the air on her skin and get some distance from this conversation pressing at her from all sides like the rain, finding it’s way to them under their cover in the form of a creeping airborne mist.

He towers over her, because he can and because it annoys her to have to look up at him. ‘I’m not the one freaking out because a nameless merchant on a backwater planet-’

‘-Like me, you mean.’ She anunciates the words clearly and carefully, knowing he’ll barrel right over them anyway. He does, and her mouth lifts into a sneer as she folds her jacket over her arms, rocking on her heels.

‘-selling overpriced rags, assumed, correctly I thought, that we were together. Do you not want to be?’

‘Stop asking me that!’ 

‘Then work out what you want.’

‘I want you. But not if you’re going to act like an overbearing dick.’

‘You want me. But I’m not allowed to say anything or do anything without your permission, is that right?’ He counts off his points on his fingers, waved lazily in the air between them. She slaps it away to the side.

‘I’m asking you to consider how it might have felt for you to do that. To treat me like I can’t handle myself, which I will point out is a conversation we’ve already had, several times.’

‘I don’t know what’s going on in your mind if you won’t tell me.’

‘Then take it.’ She steps in close enough to see individual droplets of water on his skin lose their drip and slide under his collar. ‘You’ve said it before, you’ve done it before.’

‘You still don’t trust me.’ His pitch drops dangerously, and she lightens her tone deliberately, adopting the voice she uses for overly familiar strangers and the arrogantly stupid.

‘I trust you, I just don’t understand why you can’t grasp this really very simple concept.’

‘Because I want to look after you, you insufferable shit.’ The words echo, and the faces that until now had been as least attempting to sustain the illusion they’re not watching them turn to them fully. Her mouth erupts into a shifting smile she tries to smother by pressing her lips between her teeth. She watches him drip and wince, counting in her mind. ‘I’m glad you find it funny.’

‘It is funny.’

‘Can we go now? Have I done enough to convince you I’m just bad at this?’

‘I guess.’ She hides her smile as she reluctantly inches her arms back into her sodden jacket, looping her bags over her arm and shivering as the damp chills her within seconds. 

‘Wonderful, let’s go.’ 

‘You’re annoyed at me.’ She talks to his back as he winds his way back to their ship.

‘Yes, I have a right to be, same as you.’

‘What will help?’

‘I have no idea.’

She grabs his arm and he stops, still holding himself from back from facing her. He finally does after she tugs at his sleeve. ‘Look, I want you to look after me. I’ve always wanted someone to care like that. But I don’t need you to. I know you know that.’

‘Of course I do.’ His eyes track back to the sky, at the edgeless shapes merging and dissipating into endless obnoxious rainfall.

‘Good.’ She tries to catch his eye. ‘Look, I know I’m bad at his. I promise you I’m trying.’

‘Do you think we’re likely to get better at it?’

‘It’s a skill, hopefully we pick it up. Until then I guess we’ll argue on nameless planets. Not particularly good for the whole “not drawing attention” thing.’

He shrugs. ‘There are about a dozen people watching us right now.’

‘I would hit you if I didn’t know you would enjoy it.’

‘This propensity for violence you have, I do question sometimes why that is the case.’

‘I like to see you shake it off when I know anyone else would be on the floor. Let’s go see what shit we bought.’

They eat a mishmash of ingredients which predictably don’t blend into a cohesive whole, but having ticked off their one objective for the day they’re free to work on their second. Pushing the boundaries of how far they can frustrate each other as the memory of their argument shifts to amusement. They’d stepped over the previous limit that is their waists in the dark, eyes closed, one last layer of plausible deniability that they’re not hurtling blindly down a path neither of them truly know the end to. Their brains lag behind their bodies on a slack string, colliding back together as he slides his hand between her legs over her underwear. She pulls away with a gasp.

‘Is this okay?’ he murmurs. She nods and goes back to kissing him, breathing turning shallow as he gently strokes her. 

Her mind scrambles for what to do with the feeling, him taking the cue from her own shaking fingers to apply just enough pressure she feels her skin heat under her shirt. She pants against his mouth, achingly aware of the wetness he’ll be able to feel as he gently swirls his fingers. Her hands not knowing where to settle, her head falls to his shoulder. Dimly, a voice at the back of her mind croons about the embarrassment she should feel at the way her body reacts to his wobbling breath in her ear. Two points of focus, bleeding into each other and blending into confusing soup. The throb between her legs as she pulls his fingers to circle her; her hand wrapping around the back of his neck as he whispers in her ear something too low to pick up. 

‘What is it?’ she asks through chattering teeth. ‘Am I… Is this okay? Ben?’

He pulls his hand out from between her legs and she clamps her knees together, the clench of her muscles sending a lick up her thighs. But her mortification is pushed to the background as he kisses her, pouring all his desperation into it until she’s sagging against the grip under her skull. When he pulls back his eyes are on her mouth, his own lips parted, taking deep rattling breaths as he brushes her hair over her shoulder and notches his chin there.

‘Do you want me to keep going?’ he whispers. She can’t trust her voice so she just nods against him, feeling her body expand beyond the confines of her skin and her nails digging into the back of his neck and just… holding. He nudges her head back and kisses her until her hips begin tilting against his hand, her becoming aware of it as a stranger to her own body, watching it take the lead with some gratitude, still eclipsed by her mortification at how she presses against him, silently pleading. 

‘Can I take these off?’ Ben asks. She gasps out her assent, clinging to his shirt as he moves her to wiggle them down over her hips. It’s awkward, neither wanting to pull away far enough to make the process any easier nor let their thoughts swim into that gap and make a home for themselves. She feels the fabric peel from her wet skin as he presses his head against hers, grinding it there, trying to dislodge something in his own mind before it can take root. 

What is it? He smiles as her voice slides into his mind, breath puffing over her face, making her achingly aware of the sheen of sweat there. What’s going on in there?  

Flashes of his thoughts find her, too close, too frayed to consider pulling up a barrier between them. Blood between her teeth where she’d smiled at him. Her body curled on itself in the cave where she’d put the fire between them. The glint of something cold and shining in her eyes when he’d shown her all the ways he’d learned to use his power, his body, in the pursuit of ever increasing pain. How can you trust me? 

Because I want to. 

He flinches when her hand finds his, helping him in the process of inching her underwear down her thighs. The ache of the fabric bunched against her muscles grounds her somehow, her focus oscillating between the taut press of it and the fingers that trail slowly up the inside of her thigh. And then his hand is on her and she buries her face against his neck before pulling up to breathe, exhale shivering against his ear.

‘Gods, the sounds you make…’ He sounds just as wrecked as she does, but not so much her question doesn’t work its way out of her like a splinter.

‘Is it okay?’

He crushes her close to his body, pressing one warm cheek to her neck. ‘Rey, I think I’m losing my mind.’

‘Implying you haven’t already.’ Flippancy is a little ledge she imagines climbing up onto in her mind, watching their thoughts degrade at this contact. It is not so different from anything else they’ve shared, not in theory. Every touch that had started out with an itch of discomfort is slowly soothed: every one crackling like something was passing over this bridge between their skin. She shivers, twisting against his fingers as they drag through her wetness, mapping the little gasps she makes against the version he has of her in his mind.   

He squeezes her, smiling into her hair before urging her down on her back and slowly trailing his hand down her body as he kisses her. Her nails catch against his skin as she drags them down his arm, the little stab of fear as he slowly circles her entrance something she wants to turn outwards. He kisses her jaw and watches her eyes flick unseeing over the ceiling, deep in some conversation with herself he wants to pull her out of. 

‘You’ve done this before,” Ben observes. ‘You must have done, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘But it didn’t feel like this.’

‘No’, she gulps, throat parched.

‘Rey, look at me.’ Her eyes drop to his, glassy, but holding. ‘I want to make you feel good. Do you trust me?’

‘I trust you.’

‘Tell me if you don’t like something, alright?’

She nods absently, head falling back and fingers finding the hem of his shirt to twist it tightly. She groans when he pushes a finger into her and the hairs on his neck stand on end. 

'You know, I think I prefer this to arguing.’ She chuckles, blush covering her cheeks in a flush. ‘But it's a close call. It also has its moments.' Relief so thick he can feel it crawl over his skin as he drops his cheek to her chest, listening to the steady thump of her heart as she comes back to herself. ‘I like this. But I also really like shouting at you. Just so we’re clear.’ She drags her fingers against his scalp, taking a lock of hair and turning it between her fingers. 

'You sure I can't make your mind up for you?' He crooks his finger firmly inside her and her breath hitches, before she smooths it away with a little clearing of her throat. 

'This is alright', Rey replies, trying to lighten her tone, betrayed by her voice immediately cracking. She digs her fingers into his bicep with a wince of pleasure, razor sharp in its intensity. Nothing like she had been able to achieve herself, setting her pulse in her ear to a demanding roar.

'Just alright?'

'Yeah, it's alright.'

She is aware of her panting breathing and her hips stuttering against him, blindly seeking a rhythm that eludes her but not enough to care or do something about it. She clings to his hair as he kisses down her neck, running her tongue over parched lips and sinking into their thin mattress.

‘You’, she pants, trying to catch her breath. ‘I’ll come if you keep doing that.’

He lifts his face to stare into hers, smile twitching as he takes in her flushed skin and eyes she’s fighting to keep from closing. ‘Do you want me to?’ He knows, but a part of him rolls warmly at the thought of having her say it. 

‘Yes’ she hisses, closing her eyes and grinding her head into the sheets. He’s made dizzyingly aware of the throb between his legs, a sensation he’d been valiantly ignoring, rushing back to the forefront. But he will keep his mind in service of watching her lose hers, gladly.

When he manages to synchronize the movement between slowly curling his finger inside her and swirling his thumb against her twitching skin, her voice drops into a low groan. As beautiful as the sound is, it’s even more maddening to hear it ramp up again as she gets close, clinging to his shoulder and riding out the feeling with her eyes closed as his breath shakes in her ear.

It’s good, but it’s not enough. She hooks her ankle around his and works her hand between their bodies, pressing his fingers harder into her skin in tighter and quicker circles as her thighs begin to shake. Familiar yet not at the same time, a sensation she’s no stranger to, but fingers slightly unsure, without the feedback loop of pleasure that would guide her along its subconscious path and quietly mortified of the sounds she made into the dark. He follows her lead, but doesn’t increase his pace where she would, dragging her slowly towards it as her toes curl and dig at the mattress. She can’t pick up whatever he mumbles into her skin, not even sure if they are words. She drags her nails up his neck to hold his face and he shakes against her. Whatever it was that was holding her back, keeping her on the edge, is abruptly gone with the feel of him pressing a shaking kiss to her cheek. The man she had watched step over fear and slide into a craft with her, his blood still crawling down his skin. Swallowing with nerves, because of her. She swears up to the ceiling and feels him chuckle against her.

She can feel him as he pulls back to watch as her rapid breathing fractures into a gasp, sucking in a lung-full of air so desperate her whole body moves with it. Then she turns her face away, working the stiffness from her jaw and pressing at the cramp in her abdomen before falling into a low laugh that moves the tangled sheets in front of her face. She gulps around a dry throat before she turns her head, her eyes flicking up to his, feeling the heat radiating from her skin. She inhales through her nose, trying to slow her heart-rate before she speaks.

‘I think I needed that.’ He kisses her temple and she deflates with a throaty sigh. ‘It’s um… It’s been a while’ she smiles at him, eyes closed.

‘How long is a while?’

He moves aside to let her shimmy her pants back up with the last of her strength before flopping back down. ‘I don’t think you want to know the answer to that.’

'Does it have anything to do with you biting my head off back there?' he asks, settling back on the pillows to look down at her. 

'No, you just annoy the shit out of me.’ She smiles at him, face scrunching. ‘Whether I have or haven't done that recently doesn't really factor into it. I'm used to it.'

‘Well now I’m even more intrigued.’

‘Of course you are.’ She turns to peer up at him, folding her hands over her chest. ‘Put it this way, we lived in a cave about twenty feet in diameter, then a tent, then the base, sleeping in the same bed, at the same time, every night…’

‘We weren’t always together. You had’, she hears him lightly clear his throat as he shuffles through options in his mind. ‘You had opportunities.’ His smile as his eyes drift to the ceiling quickly sets off one of her own.

‘So did you. Did you take them?’ She wiggles herself upright to watch him as he breathes out slowly through his nose before answering.

‘Once.’

‘When?’

‘That’s a bit invasive, don’t you think?’

‘You started it’, she shrugs, rolling her neck.

He sighs and she knows she’s got her way again. ‘In the shower, the first proper morning. You were in the hangar. Of course this was before I realized we could send images to each other. After that…’ he shrugs.

‘Is it the same for men as it is for women? Does it dig at you if you don’t?’

‘Yes.’

‘So why don’t you?’

‘Because I am enjoying being frustrated with you.’ He kisses her with a little self-satisfied hum, evidently unsure of what to do with his hand and curling it lightly against the sheets at her side.

‘Well you’ve ruined it now, you may as well’, she knocks him with her foot. 

‘No, I think I’ll keep it a little longer’, he sighs, a smile creeping his way over his face as he blinks, sliding into his thoughts for a few seconds before dragging himself back to her. ‘ How are you feeling?’

‘Like all of my bones have turned floppy.’ She tips her head up to him with a goofy smile and he kisses her again before the thought even has time to register. 

‘Do you want to do it again?’

‘Yes’, she smiles. ‘Does that make me selfish?’

‘Incredibly selfish. You’re lucky I like you.’ 

She groans into his kiss as he lays her back down, untangling her hair from around her neck and laying it over her shoulder. She wraps her arms around him as he drags his fingers against her, skin still holding onto little fizzing spots of pleasure, quickly flaring back to life. She whimpers as he slides his finger back inside her, lifting one knee and stretching the other as her arousal itches beneath the skin, urging her to move.

‘Your fingers are much bigger than mine,’ she states flatly, eyes open but unseeing. Her blindness embolds her, hyper aware of the little gasp he makes at her words. ‘I can feel you hard against me.’ He moves to shift his hips away but she grabs him by the thigh. ‘No, don’t. It’s nice. To know it’s not just me.’

‘It’s not just you.’

‘I can hear it. That’s… I couldn’t really hear anything before. My mind was too busy screaming at me.’ She shakes her head as said discomfort tries to curl around her neck.

‘I love that I can hear it,’ he confesses breathlessly. ‘I want to make you feel good.’

‘Mission accomplished,' she assures him. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been this wet between my legs in my entire life. I feel like I should be embarrassed.’ 

‘Please.’ He presses his mumbled response against her temple and she feels her damp skin cooled by his breath. ‘Don’t be embarrassed. You’re perfect.’

‘You’re just saying that.’

‘Rey, I… All I wanted was to be close to you. Everything I imagined, and trust me, I did imagine. It doesn’t even come close to the reality.’

‘Did you imagine I would talk this much?’

‘I like that you talk. I know I’m doing something right when you stop.’

‘Shut me up then.’ She shifts as he presses another finger in alongside the first, the slight pinch of pain giving way to a sensation of fullness that glides over her skin like hot water. She falls silent with a little groan, hand bracketing his wrist as it moves against her. Her thigh shakes wildly and her knees don’t know where to settle. One twitches against him as the other tenses, her foot slides against the bed before she inches it back up again to dig her toes against the padding. 

Her brow furrows as she comes and he presses against her hip, drawing it out as she bears down on his fingers. He kisses the little line that appears on her forehead as he lets his hand trail up and down her inner thigh, lazily. She drags his fingers into her mouth and sucks on them until his face falls against her shoulder.

‘What? Do you think I’m disgusting?’

‘No, I think you’re unfathomably beautiful.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means I can’t describe how beautiful you are to me.’ He pants against her neck.

‘Well in the desert we preserve moisture. Of course back home I wouldn’t have let you anywhere near close enough to touch. Still, old habits…’

‘Do you miss it?’

‘It was my home. Of course I miss it.’

‘I’m sorry, that was stupid of me.’

‘It was. Lucky for you I’m in a good mood.’ She works her hand between them to curl against him over his pants. ‘You know, I’m beginning to wonder how this is going to work down the line.’

He tips on his side to hold her jaw, leaning close and forcing her to tip her head back to face him. ‘You are trying to kill me.’ Her eyes half close as he drags his thumb over her damp lips and as it passes, she gently scrapes her teeth against it..

‘I want to see you come. I want to hear you. Let me help you.’

‘I won’t need much help.’

‘Then let me touch you. Please?’

‘I don’t know if that’s a good idea.’

‘Why not?’ her face falls and kisses her.

‘Because we’re going slow. It’s good that we’re going slow.’

‘Don’t you want to?’

‘Of course I want to. But I didn’t touch you so that you would touch me. I touched you.’

‘And I want to touch you. Please, I want to make you feel as good as you make me. And I wasn't the only one making a scene on that damp turd of a planet.’

'Rude.'

'My point still stands. You're going to have to at some point, presumably. Why not now?'

‘Okay.’

‘Are you sure?’ she asks, eyes glinting. 

‘Well, you're very persuasive. Yes, I'm sure.’

‘You don’t have to say it like that. You make it sound like I’m twisting your arm.’

‘Would you prefer I beg?’

Her eyes bore into his. ‘I don’t have the brain power to deal with that right now. Lie down.’

She doesn’t wait for him to comply, just keeps her eyes on him as she pushes him onto his back, working her hand under his waistband. She huffs in surprise as she wraps her hand around him for the first time. ‘Now I definitely have some questions…’

‘Rey’, he warns breathlessly.

‘Tell me what to do,’ she urges, voice grumbling out of her as she settles against his side, squeezing her thighs together as his hand snakes around her waist to pull her closer, gently but firmly.

‘You want your hand to be wet.’ Without hesitation she pulls her hand away and spits into her palm before wrapping it back around him.

‘Like this?’ She sees him nod out of the corner of her eye, her eyes unfocused on his shirt. ‘Then what?’ She runs her palm along him, feeling his size and how different parts of it have him jolt against her. 

‘You should probably take these off,' she suggests, biting her lip to disguise an intemperate smile. She helps the best she can to work them down his broad thighs, trailing her fingertips over soft skin and admiring the shift of muscles as he moves. ‘Show me what to do.’

‘You don’t have to do anything. You can let me do the rest.’

‘But I want to.’

‘Then hold me like you were before.’ He waits for her to comply, speaking into her hair, eyes closed. ‘Then do this’, he fits his hand over hers, moving it through one slow pump, his skin shivering like every nerve has been dialed up to the extreme.

‘Like this?’

‘Yeah, like that,’ he sighs. He lightly holds her wrist as she takes over, tentatively at first, then gaining more confidence as his other hand twists in the hem of her shirt.

‘Talk to me.’

‘What do you want me to say?’ It comes out as one long garbled string and she smiles.

‘I want to know if I can shut you up like you can.’

‘I’m sure you can manage it,’ he stammers, his throat bobbing and his lashes fluttering.

‘What does it feel like?’

‘I don’t know… I don’t think it’s poss… I don’t. Fucking hell.’

‘Gorgeous’, she smiles around the word. ‘Nice to know there’s something that’ll make you incoherent. Do I keep going like this?’ He fits her fingers a little tighter around himself and bites lightly at her shoulder before hiding his face against her shirt. She fits her knee over his legs for balance, running her free hand through his hair. ‘You’re a biter. Why didn’t I know this?’

‘Not sure.’

‘You’ve bit me before, but I figured you were just angry with me. Would you like it if I bit you back?’ He nods and she lifts his face to hers, lips slightly parted, eyes flitting between hers as he swallows. ‘Gods, you’re beautiful.’ She dips to kiss him, taking his lower lip between hers and gently dragging her teeth against it, his hand coming up to hold her jaw. ‘Does it feel good?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you want me to go faster?’

‘Please.’ She smiles at him, so achingly earnest even as he blushes under her look and tries to turn away. She brings him back to her, gently turning his jaw and watching his eyes snap back to hers. Then she bites her way along his jawline before moving down his neck and back up as his breathing gets heavier, a raspy rumble underscoring it, quickly becoming her favorite sound in the world, eclipsing all others with the intensity of a supernova. Everything else that she prized, every other sound previously treasured, the trickle of flowing water, the ringing tone of polished metal buffed to a mirror shine, the click of her speeder, cooling at dusk, all thrown away in service of this.

It’s hard to say what she imagined, her idea of this being nothing more than fragments knitted together. Something between their legs to rub against like she does. But it’s warmer and heavier than anything her mind could come up with. When she extends her finger to trace against his abdomen, it quivers against her. His eyes track hers as she spits once more, damp skin starting to drag against hers. He is beautiful, eyes twitching as he tries to keep her in his vision as she kisses along his jaw, licking into his mouth and feeling his tongue chase hers with a moments lag, one hand twisted in her hair, the other lightly bracketing her aching wrist. The contrast she always finds in him and prizes, hard and soft at the same time, always in balance. 

‘I’ve never held a cock before’, she mumbles, smiling around the word. ‘Glad it could be yours.’ She hides her flushed face against his neck, hearing him swallow. ‘I will say my wrist is getting tired, though. I’ll have to work on that.’ She watches in real time as her words tread a meandering path to his brain and he squeezes his eyes shut. 

The ache in her wrist is a present if ignorable annoyance, effortlessly pushed to the background as she gently tightens her grip and he begins to twist against the leg thrown over his thigh. ‘Faster?’ He nods, grinding his head against her shoulder and she drags her nails into his hairline. ‘Not so different’, she muses, clinging to the lightness of her words as he digs his fingers into her shoulders. ‘Lie back down.’ 

She pushes him down onto his back, lips brushing against his where his breath comes in little panting puffs, kissing him where his arm wraps around her neck to keep her close. As if she’d want to miss the half whine he pushes into the kiss before his focus wanes. 

He pulls her to his face to his neck as he breaks, his voice deepening, his exhale hitching. She marvels in how it quickly loses momentum and turns into a whistle of a controlled exhale, wobbling into a wave. He jolts when she drags her fingers up his abdomen to feel the wetness rapidly cooling against his skin. She rubs it between his fingers as he slides his arm from around her neck, squeezing her arm as he passes before letting his arm flop on the bed. 

Then he swallows and she expects him to speak, something self deprecating, something insecure like she had done. But he doesn’t, he laughs and gently removes her hand from him, fitting their fingers together and pressing them at their side, leaning up to kiss her slowly, still catching his breath.

‘I don’t know what I expected’, she mumbles into his ear as he flops onto his back. ‘Less wet, I guess.’ She watches him out of the corner of her eye as she rubs her fingers together. ‘Do we taste the same?’ He grabs her wrist where she pulls it to her mouth. ‘What?’

‘You don’t have to do that.’

‘I don’t have to do anything. Are you ashamed?’ He shakes his head, eyes never leaving hers as she twists her wrist free. He scrambles onto his elbows as she ducks her head and swipes her tongue over his stomach. Unfamiliar, not entirely unpleasant, a taste she would willingly have on her tongue if just for the look he gives her when she does it. Distant and penetrating at the same time, fixing on her like she is the only thing in the universe that makes sense to him, the edges crumbling away into nothing. 

She kisses him, pushing the taste into his mouth with one hand fisted into his hair, the thought resolving in her mind with blinding clarity that they are not going to get anything productive done for as long as both of them are breathing.  

Chapter Text

She leans next to the shower as he washes, respectful enough to turn as he undressed, but not enough to fully leave him to it. She crosses her arms and waits as goosebumps cover her bare legs. ‘So I’d say we’re making good progress', she says, eyeing the steam as it curls up towards the ceiling.

He clears his throat before he replies, unsuccessfully attempting to mask his laugh. ‘Is this your latest project, then?’

‘No, I just think we’re doing well for a couple of virgins.’

‘What scale are you measuring us against exactly?’ He turns and her eyes are drawn to the movement, peering at the flattened shape of him, trying to fit the pieces of him she has in her mind into a whole. A little clearer each day, a little further before her mind dumps her back to her present, to whatever inconsequential task she had been doing before her mind circled round to him. Always to him. 

‘Well, considering I was getting overwhelmed just kissing you, I’d say this is a step in the right direction. We had a little fight, made each other come, baby steps.’ She tries to kick some of their fallen clothes into a pile as she speaks with the vague idea that a future version of herself might deal with them properly. 

‘I’d classify it as more of a leap. We skipped over a few steps in my mind.’

‘How so? Didn’t you like it?’

He sets his mind resolutely on the task of washing his hair, the undercurrent of anxious neediness in her voice something he absolutely cannot dwell on and stay sane. ‘We haven’t even seen each other naked.’

‘I’ve seen enough to put together a decent image. We’re not that careful and I’m not that polite.’

‘I’ve noticed.’

He mouths her response to himself before she even makes it. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ At his chuckle she smacks against the door to the shower and it rattles in its frame.

‘I’m getting so used to you staring at me, scavenger, it’s almost weird when you’re not.’

‘Well I’m not now.' She slams her back against the wall with a sharp huff. 'And don't call me that.’

‘That’s because there’s a wall of frosted glass between us. You cannot, as yet, stare through solid objects.’

‘You don’t know. Maybe that’s some application of the Force we don’t know about yet.’

‘Let me know if you make any progress.’

‘You’re a pain.’

‘I’m your pain now, get used to it.’

‘I should have left you behind.’ She jumps as he quickly slides the door and pulls her into a kiss before shoving her away and closing it again as several venomous retorts pop at the base of her throat. ‘Unbelievable.’

‘Did you get a good look or do you want me to do it again?’

‘Aren’t you done yet? I would really like to go to bed sometime soon.’

‘I’m done, I just like arguing with you.’

‘One of these days you’re going to have to just tell me what you like so we don’t spend an eternity figuring it out.’

‘Where’s the fun in that? May I have a towel?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’ He steps out and she keeps her eyes locked on his as he rips a towel from the holder and wraps it around himself. ‘Your turn.’ He ignores her sucking in a breath as he turns from her to brush his teeth, staring down into the sink until she’s safely in the cubicle.

He reasons to himself generously, that it can't be helped if he catches sight of her reflection as he shaves. Just an unfortunate side-effect of the tiny ship they'd been compelled to accept. He can't see much more than a vague shape, her hair conforming to the shape of her back as she wets it, wrapping around her arms as she rinses away the lather, twisting to let the water do its job, exposing the shape of her body. Nothing he hasn't already seen in fragments knitted together imperfectly. He drags his eyes back to his task as he nicks himself, rewarded for his lapse in concentration with the sting of soap irritating his cut and a stripe of red cutting down his neck. Too small to bother healing, he locks his mind on the task, limbs pleasantly heavy. 

‘Oh, you’re still here’ she says airily as she steps out, carefully stooping to pick her clothes from the tangled pile at her feet.

‘Did you want me to go?’ He'd debated it himself, having grabbed some clothes and dressed, shifting from one bare foot to the other with the thought that something had shifted between them. No longer sure where to draw a line between them, what was once a thoughtless need for reassurance having become conscious once again. 

‘You’re dressed. You shaved.’ She drops her filthy clothes back onto the floor with a scowl, stepping in close to tilt his head with one hand still holding her towel around her body. 'You did a bad job', she states, scratching at spots of dried blood with her thumb. 

'I did.'

'I wanted to do it. Means I can stare at you all I want and you can't say anything about it.'

As her eyes lock on his whatever he wanted to say evaporates away. All he can think to mumble is an olive branch of sorts. ‘I brought you some clean clothes.’

‘Thank the Gods.' She watches her hand as it drifts over his shoulders, following the movement as if the need had acted on her body without her input. 'I couldn’t stand the thought of having to put those ones on again. I think the only thing worse than wet underwear is cold wet underwear.’

‘Well now you don’t have to. Are you coming to bed?’

‘Are you going somewhere?’ She jolts invisibly as his hands rest lightly on her hips. 

‘I was going to let you change.’

‘Why? We’ve changed in the same room before, just don’t look. Close your eyes.’

‘If you insist.’ He does as he’s told, waiting for her to brush her hand against his arm before opening them. She’s shifting on her feet in front of him, trying to untangle her braid. He helps her, gently separating the knots until she can run her fingers through it without them catching, then he folds her to his chest and sighs. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

She sleeps with him curled around her back, twisting her ankles with his, dragging her nails over the arm slung around her waist, feeling him shiver. She falls asleep with the roar of her pulse in her ear as he presses a kiss to her neck, feeling him smile against her skin. 

'Are you coming, scavenger? Or do I have to go on my own?' She smiles at his words, burying her face into warm blankets that smell like sleep. 

'What's the hurry? You in a rush to deplete our dwindling credits?' She twists onto her back to face him, finding him mostly clothed. Good thing too, her reluctance to watch him dress is waning to dangerous levels. 'Got somewhere to be?' She tuts as he untangles her from the covers and lifts her in his arms. She rolls her eyes at him but enjoys being pliant in his hold. 'I can walk, you know. What's your deal with picking me up?'

'You like when I do it.' She's caught red handed in the truth of it.

'I'm heavy.'

'You're not.' She yelps as he throws her up a few inches and catches her again, smugness radiating off him like heat from a campfire.

'That's enough of that'. Her eyes are closed and her breathing is strangled as she clambers out of his grip, smoothing frantically at her clothes. He laughs at her back as she stoops to grab a few scattered items with a mumbled statement about getting dressed. She returns fully clothed and stares at him for a few moments before wordlessly turning to let him fix her hair.

'So what else do you like before we stumble across it?' She crunches a mouthful of a grain they're moderately sure doesn't need cooking as she looks at him expectantly.

'I wanted to bite you, so I did. There really wasn't much more thought put into it. I had no thoughts to muster at that point.'

'I liked it. I wish you'd do it again sometime.'

'I'm sure that can be arranged' he says, peering intently into his bowl, moving it around in hopes of finding something more palatable hiding at the bottom.

'You're blushing.'

'I'm pale, there's not much I can do about it.'

'What else?'

'What do you mean what else?'

'Is there anything else you've wanted to do to me but haven't because you're not sure if I'll like it. Maybe I can answer the question for you. I know you hold back with me.'

'What makes you say that?'

'Because I know you. You treat me like I'm breakable unless I beg you to do otherwise.'

'I want to take care of you.'

A phrase that never fails to take over her face in a toothy smile. 'You know I won't fall apart if you touch me a little too hard, right? When have I ever given you any indication I can't handle it?'

'I don't know what I'm doing, okay?'

'Nor do I, that's part of what makes it fun.' She slowly works her way over his lap when it becomes clear neither of them can summon the will to finish their meal. 'We should get going. We have things to buy. We always have things to buy, seemingly.'

'Then let's go.' He presses at the base of her spine to bring their bodies flush, waiting for her thighs to clench around him. He takes it for the invitation that it is, sliding them to the floor and grinding their pelvises together as he kisses her. She can feel her pulse at every point her clothes bunch and press against her, biting into her hips as she wraps her legs around him, looping her arms behind his and holding him there until all she can hear is the roar of blood in her ears. She can feel him hard against her, rolling them together in juddering presses as the sensation flips between pleasure and pain, holding them at the edge of it, stomach tensed, anticipating a fall that doesn't come. She breaks away with a hiss and he pins her hands by her face.

'Does that hurt a little?' He knows the answer, the fabric of their clothes rubbing against sensitive skin with a delicious pain-tinged friction. 

'Yes', she smiles at him, lip curling as a shiver infuses her voice.

'But you like it?'

'Yes.'

'I like that. There's your answer. Come on, let's go.'

'I hate you', she spits as he stands and straightens his clothes, leaning down to help pull her to her feet and let her shake the itch from her limbs.

'I like that too.'

She turns to him, stilling in the task of trying to poke her loose hair back into its braid, stepping into his space to rake her eyes over him and spit at his boots. 'What about that? Do you like that?'

'Come back to me on that one.' She swears at him and he smiles at her over his shoulder, making a beeline for the cockpit with her gaze pressing at the back of his neck. 'Bocce. Been a while since I've been called that.'

They’re furnishing the ship with extra provisions at an ex-mining outpost when the shopkeeper narrows them in their gaze. ‘You two in any particular hurry?’ They freeze in the process of loading their arms with clothes and food. ‘I need something doing and I have a good sense that you two could get it done.’ The worker leans on the counter into their space. ‘Am I wrong?’

‘What do you have in mind?’ Ben asks, glancing at Rey.

‘I need some inventory moving. I’d pay you when it’s been safely delivered. Wouldn’t have you going far, over within a day. I won’t lie, the route’s a little tricky. You’d need a good pilot for it.’ She awkwardly shrugs, stumbling to catch the falling parcels. ‘Drop off your stuff and I’ll tell you where you’re going.’

‘Is this a good idea?’ He asks, shading his eyes against the sun as they walk back unburdened. 

‘Probably not. But we’re going to do it anyway.’ They duck back into the cool and dark shop, receiving a chip with their coordinates, two heavy crates and a couple hundred credits as a deposit. They slide the crates into the cargo hold and crane to see the nav computer track their route.

‘Tricky is an understatement, we’re skirting pirate territory through an asteroid field.’

‘Can we go around?’ She leans, hair falling loose over her shoulders where she'd ripped it down as soon as they set foot back on their ship. 

‘We’d waste more credits than we’d gain in fuel alone.’

‘We could give that lot back and carry on…’ she nods back through the ship towards their innocuous looking cargo. 

‘Where’s the fun in that?’ 

‘Fun being manually flying us through lawless space dodging asteroids?’

‘Aren’t you curious to see if you can?’

‘Me? You keep saying how you’re the more experienced pilot…’

‘And you’re younger with faster reflexes. We’re going there and back, remember?’

‘You’re suicidal.’ She scoffs, clipping herself into the pilot’s seat. 

‘You forget we're already dead.’ He flashes her a grin and she huffs good naturedly, smiling as he stoops to plant a sudden kiss on her lips before buckling himself in.   

They drop out of lightspeed as a shower of debris peppers their shields. She tries to tune out everything except the view in front of her, and his voice in her mind as she swerves them into shrinking patches of clear space and he reaches out to plot a path through the endless writhing mass of rock. 

‘How do people do this?’ She asks, eyes widening as they’re pressed into their seats by a last second sharp turn. 

Most people don’t. Why do you think they asked us? Two random unattached strangers…

‘Fair point. You might need to get a move on if we’re going to get the rest of those credits.’ A larger impact sets the ship shuddering around them with a wince. She reaches out to his calm Force signature, curling next to it and bringing down her breathing where her racing heartbeat had begun to make her vision quake. 

She nods as a route outlines itself, a four dimensional ribbon pulling into the future, swallowing and ramming the accelerator home, as rocks stream past her vision quicker than her eyes can perceive. She closes her eyes. If this doesn’t work, they’ll be smashed into atoms. 

Any last words?

This was your stupid idea. She senses him smile beside her and fails to suppress her own grin. 

They’re ejected into a featureless void with no fanfare and no noise. On the readout she can see behind them an artifacting band of objects, too numerous for the computer to render and separate and them blinking solidly away like a heartbeat. She turns and folds over her armrest to vomit onto the floor before thunking her head back on the headrest with an accusing look in his direction. 

‘I would happily never do that again.’

‘Go wash up, I’ll take us down to the planet.’ She grips the basin as they shudder through atmosphere, heading back in with a cool face and fresh annoyance she stares into the back of his skull. 

‘Whatever we’re hauling, it better be worth all this. If it’s not medicine for the poor I’m going to be paying someone a visit.’ She slumps back into her chair and watches a silvery thread widen into a river in front of her. 

‘You’re a very strange person, did you know that?’ She ignores his look in her direction, fixing her eyes on the riverside shack that is their drop-off point. 

They touch down on a soft and sagging jetty, and a bug-like man rushes to meet them.

‘How did you get here so quickly? Don’t tell me you went through the asteroid field. If you did you’re either dangerously stupid or suicidal with awful luck.’ Ben presses his mouth into a line suppressing a laugh as she shields her shining eyes from the sun. ‘Let’s have it then so you can be on your way. I wouldn’t want to keep you from your stupid preventable deaths.’

They walk the crates into the swollen shack, painted in the blue-greens of waterlogged decay, depositing their cargo on the clay-like floor. ‘I’ll pass on the word you’ve done as you said. Somehow…’ He cracks a lid on one of the crates and peers inside, receiving the delivery with a quick exchange of binary keys, shrill like a bird call. He begins the thankfully short task of stacking the crates into the corner as they hover there, unsure of their next steps. 

‘Only one man I know who could fly that route and live to tell the tale.’ Her blood freezes, air seemingly robbed from her lungs and replaced with fresh nausea. ‘Him, and the lad, I should say. Something in their blood that made them crazy, I suspect.’ He turns, chuckling in his reveries, the faintest widening of his eyes of dawning recognition and sucking of breath before she steps between them. 

‘Forget him.’ She shoves into his mind, grabbing his slumping shoulder in her grip as she rifles through his memories of Han, pulling them free like plants, tendril-like roots twirling in the air, trying to reconnect. 

‘Rey’. Sweat prickles her skin as she sees young Ben, ducking shyly back onto the ship as his father lingered behind, his face blurred by fading memory. She squeezes her fingers into the man’s flesh, smothering his brain in blackness as she pushes the Force through his synapses, flaring and failing. Ben rips her free, pulling her out into the air and back towards the ship as the man slumps dumbly to the floor. 

The curve of the black door frame is burned into her eyes as she blinks, a redacted square over whatever she focuses on as she’s pushed into a chair and belted in, passing her eyes over a face drawn with a worry she doesn’t understand. The planet recedes in silence, and that face again, staring into her eyes as if trying to read something there.

‘Rey, please talk to me.’ A warm hand smoothes over her cheek. ‘What did you do?’ Her face is an emotionless mask as his eyes desperately rake over it. She looks up lazily as he presses his head against hers, fingertips shaking against her scalp.

‘What’s happening?’ A tear tracks an itching path down her cheek. 

‘You did something. You didn’t mean to. We had to leave.’

‘What did I do?’ She watches him turn his face away for a moment, before swallowing and meeting her gaze with effort, opening his mouth once on words dying on his tongue.

‘You were just trying to make him forget. You went too far’, the corner of his mouth jerks into a nervous smile, sliding away in an instant. ‘Are you okay?’

She becomes aware of a swinging pendulum, recognizing it has her own accelerated breathing as she desperately tries to suck in an airless breath. He holds her face as her eyes widen in panic and her heart clenches in her chest, forcing a pained gasp from her, quickly subsumed by wet sobs. Her fingers twist painfully in his shirt, nausea dripping like acid behind her ribs. She sags against his grip, brain screaming and whiting, as realization creeps back in, at the blankness she’d watched sweep the man’s gaze under her grip. She’d smiled.

Her eyes scrape in her head as she closes them, her chest fluttering around aborted breaths, spine arching like a bow. Then there is nothing. 

He transfers the received credits mechanically. Much too little, for what it had cost. His fault. His idea. The familiar taste of shame on his tongue, he looks at her tear streaked face where he’d pushed her into sleep before panic fully overtook her. 

He hadn’t recognized the planet, or the person, the region in which a little version of himself had lived until this day in the mind of the scuttling man. How had he not known? Maybe he did know, maybe that’s why he did it, that treacherous Solo blood in his veins… The same blood that made him hurt her at every turn. He watches her, the way sleep has smoothed away the tension from her face, muscles previously taught with pain, lax like a puppet whose strings have been severed. He brushes against her mind, a wordless whirlpool of desperate grief he shrinks from in cowardice.

He carries her to bed and sits at her side, trying to heal a hurt not bodily. His efforts slide away making no purchase. 

He wakes her when silent tears begin to track silently down her face, holding her gaze as fear turns to regretful recognition.

‘I need to fix it.’ Her eyes search his, pleading. 

‘I’m sorry.’ She blinks through more tears. ‘You can’t make it better, I’m so sorry.’ She nods and her face contorts with understanding, shaking with quiet tears. 

They don’t sleep much, just cling to each other. When the computer bleeps its proximity alert, she observes the blue green planet with her arms folded across her chest, taking up her place as co-pilot in silence. 

They land on a dead dune, long given itself over to the creeping forest. The silken sand slides between her toes as she walks towards the shore and wades into the water and closes her eyes to the sun. She’s closer to the surface when he stands next to her, letting her slowly meet his eyes with down-turned eyes. She sways at the end of his grip, eyes opened to the cloudless sky they were until recently floating in. She ducks under the water to scrub at her muddy face and emerge, salt bitten and raw. She kisses him, all scraping teeth and bruising pressure until he wraps her in his arms and carries her back to lay her on the hot sand. 

They doze under the hot sun until their skin is dry and they can brush the sand from themselves. Tiny creatures wriggle out of the sand around them, judging them as non-threatening and treating them as they would any other inert object. 

They head back onto the ship as the dark begins to darken with clouds, and a storm rolls in to lash at the shore, replacing what was once calm with a frothing blanket of spray. 

‘I don’t know why it bothers me so much. It’s hardly the worst thing I’ve done’, she smiles humorlessly as a cresting wave dissipates into a pathetic cough of foam, all bark and no bite. 

‘He was an innocent.’ His eye twitches. ‘I won’t say you’ll forget about it, but it will dull somewhat. You didn’t kill him.’

‘It would have been better if I did.’ She sighs. He doesn’t argue and she’s grateful for that. ‘The world is better off without me in it. Maybe that’s why the Force brought us together.’

‘I don’t believe that, but we should lay low for a while…’

He passes her the canteen, her salt cured body drawing the entire contents down in a frenzied gulp. He refills it and returns with a handful of ration bars they dutifully chew through in silence.

Before they can get too tired he leads her through to their tiny fresher. In the dark he washes the salt from her hair, her eyes closed and hand brushing thoughtlessly against his chest as he leans her head back to rinse the soap down the drain. He does what he can for the skin of her face and arms, folding the limbs to lie forgotten in her lap. He dries and braids her hair slowly, her leaned back against his knees, towel around a body that shivers with tiredness. 

He feels the tension leave the muscles of her neck and shoulders as he massages them, her dropping back into awareness in her own body, holding her hand to flex it in front of her eyes, relearning the connection that had felt muddied and distant. He slides to the floor and squeezes her in his arms until they shake.

They don’t sleep, they fill their hours with the content of other sleepless nights. Hours lost to illness, hunger, recounted as their teeth chatter. She reads his palm via rules only half remembered, walking her fingers along the creases and ascribing them a bittersweet significance, a prelude to a fall, a destiny he was born with. She closes it with her own and holds it, fingers twitching. 

They speak of animals they’ve seen, the fragments of their first recount-able memories, their scale of pain and how it stretched over the years. Foods they’ve enjoyed and one’s they haven’t. The kinds of things that would struggle to justify their space in the daylight, thoughts with no resolutions, points that loop back and erase themselves. Two streams running in parallel and occasionally crossing into each other to divide again, a little of their content absorbed into the other. Their silent as they watch daylight snake its way in.

‘Let me take you somewhere’, she says. 

They camp in a forest, a small natural clearing ringed by tall thick trees. There the air smells of wet foliage, dirt and damp rock. They sit and watch a triangle of birds careen out of the canopy and away into the crisp blue sky, mutely watching their procession and holding their breath until they’re out of sight.

The clack of their staffs echoes like dull thunder as they step over cushioning mulch, displacing small stones with a whining rasp. The wind whispers through the leaves, setting them into undulating motion, drying the sweat on their skin with a chill shiver. She feels the muscles at her back tense into life, the iron column alongside her spine flaring as she swings her weapon, tipping lightly onto the balls of her feet as her centre of gravity shifts to outside the confines of her body to accommodate her new lethal limb. The shock ripples through the bones of her wrist and forearm as they collide, sliding back in the dirt, teeming and writhing with insect life, picking over her boot as if it’s a mountain. Her mind blanks as she stares at the silvery sun breaking through the tree cover, blinking before fixing her eyes on him once more and shifting her grip. 

They peel their sweat damp clothes from their skin where they slump with a late breakfast, as human-like screams sound in the forest. They eat the last of the wrinkling fresh fruit from the market a week and thousands of miles ago, when they were different people altogether, wearing the costume of civilian clothes. At the last outpost they bolstered their stores with various dull grains, prized for their stability if not their flavour, they heat some over a modest fire, drying their boots and socks on sticks stabbed into the clay-like mud. 

They walk for the sake of it, pulling their boots back onto swollen feet and picking through the trees in a rough loop. She climbs to pick out the clearing through the trees, and the thin ribbon of smoke curling up into the sky from their fire. A stream burbles alongside them for a while in companionable conversation with their feet, as well as the invisible eyes of curious creatures stabbing at the backs of their heads and the pinking skin of their necks.

It’s nice to move, even if they know they’ll eventually loop back onto themselves. They suck in hot breaths as the ground takes them up and down again, kicking their toes into layered mounds of leaf-litter, hot from decomposition, sliding down slick banks of marble like stones, smoothed from sliding past each other at the bank of the swelling and thinning stream. She catches herself with a rasping scratch to her palm, sucking the metallic blood into her mouth and grazing her fingers over damp bark. 

They turn sharply back to camp as the sun begins its descent towards the tree cover, returning to the orange glow of the fire as their only illumination becomes the darkening grey of the sky. They set up camp in much the same way they had before, the shadow of their ship, looming over them in the darkness as they tarp flaps like a sail in the slight wind. 

She sits by his side in the firelight, crossed knee touching his as she strips a fallen branch into strands she drops into the flames to be consumed.

‘I like you best like this’, the dancing fire burns into her retinas. ‘Sat under the stars, nothing between us and the rest of the universe.’ She turns her blinking eyes to his, watching his glowing profile resolve out of the white. ‘Something about it makes us the most honest.’

‘I don’t lie to you.’ His eyes slide to the glowing centre of the fire.

‘No, I know. But you can say things to the fire that you wouldn’t ordinarily. It eats them like it does everything else.’ She throws another branch into the crackling heat. ‘I know how sad you are. How you always have been.’ Her eyes unfocused as she whispers the words like a benefaction to the inky black sky. ‘Here it’s like I can really see you. Like your chest is cracked open and I can see your heart beating in front of me, writhing and bloody.’ She turns to meet his wide-eyed gaze, ‘I met you in the forest’, she smiles ‘but you were too scared to show me your face.’ She searches his eyes as flames dance there. ‘You still are, it seems.’ 

They press numb hands past muddy layers to reach skin, needy little mumbles swallowed up in the dark, breath hitching in their throats as they try to crawl into each other. She winces as his fingers tangle in her knotted hair and she kisses salty tears into his mouth that could have come from either of them as the fire cracks and dies behind them. She curls against his side feeling as if they’d crawled clamoring from the earth and were trying to return. When they’re too old to run anymore, she promises, they’ll come back to the forest, and let cold verdant air be the last they take. 

Chapter Text

Her nightmares return and she is too exhausted to be woken from them, he simply pulls her pliant limbs to his body as she cries. His nights are broken, the days full of a silence he’s unaccustomed to. She shields her thoughts and he knows better than to press. He returns to his meditation, his attempts to heal her finding no purchase, collecting like oil on water. Still he tries, still he fails, and falls into a comforting kind of impotence.

He follows his routine with Rey doing an impression of herself, unsettlingly accurate, just slightly fuzzy, as if there is pause before every action she makes. Every smile, every kiss that turns biting, every slide of her skin against his. He gently pushes her away, so soft he comes back round in her mind to being rough, reminding her of her weakness with his unwillingness to hurt her. They grate against each other, both used to bearing pain in solitude, both coming to realise with a hurt that feels inevitable, that despite their wishes, it is the only way they know how.

For the first and only time they stray too close to the Core. A planet still tensed from the withdrawal of their support, streets empty and echoing. The only sign of life being murals of graffiti, angular Aurebesh hastily painted over by someone not paid enough to care that the job is half finished, jagged lines poking through, frozen at the point of dripping, defused at the edges like a cough of blood. 

‘What’s happening out there?’, she asks at a whisper. The Universe another place they have resolutely set themselves apart from with each action, a mass of people she’d divided herself from with her power.

‘I don’t know. Nothing good.’ He tracks his eyes up a blasted building as he speaks, shattered glass hanging in its frame. ‘A struggle, them leaving. I’m not sure what came first.’

‘They still haven’t named a leader,’ she says carefully, words squeezed under the weight of the walls that tower over them like a silent crowd. 

‘I think they’re waiting.’

‘Waiting for what?’ She watches him swallow before he turns to her, but he says nothing. ‘Is this because of what we did?’ she asks as they step carefully over marbled glass, grinding it into the concrete with a squeak under their boots. 

‘The Order is a mess.’ He ducks his head to watch the movement of his feet. ‘I think he was the only one pulling it in any direction.’

‘So what is this? They have no leader. Why are they giving up planets they’ve held for years?’

‘I wish I had an answer for you. I didn’t pay enough attention when I should have done.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘No, Rey. In this case I don’t think it is okay.’ A facade, deeply fissured where the plaster has been hacked and scraped, curved and jagged in a way only people can make, digging their anger into it, just wanting to leave a trace.

‘Let’s go back to the ship. There’s nothing here we need. We can go somewhere else.’ He nods at her, a distracted movement more for his benefit than hers.

She slides into the pilot’s seat and he mechanically moves through his own duties as she drops a pin for their location, hesitating on what note to put before leaving it blank.

They don’t have to leave the system to find a world screaming its contrast from every angle. People so numerous she’d began shielding herself before they broke atmosphere, able to feel them teeming below her like a carpet. Fueled, they spend a few more credits than they usually would on some higher quality food, his eyebrow quirking in a dejected sort of humor as it turns tasteless on his tongue.

‘We could have lead them. We could have prevented whatever that was.’ It’s not really a conversation, he’s talking aloud, just needing to air his words.

‘We don’t even know what that was, Ben. You don’t want that life.’

‘I don’t think it matters what I want anymore.’

‘It wouldn’t have gone how you think’, she rolls her neck at the sting of her own words, falling into the steps Luke had taken, realizing she can’t deny their truth any longer. ‘They’d still have done this, just made you the face of it.’

‘Unless I stopped them.’

‘Kill for them again, you mean?’ She pushes aside her food and stares at the side of his face until he turns to her. ‘Do you think I would have stayed for that? I wouldn’t, and if you’d suggested it I would have killed you.’

‘I know.’

‘You still want me to kill you.’ It’s not really a question, it’s digging at a fresh wound to see if the nerves have anything left to give. But it’s pain with a freshness to it and she wraps her mind around it hungrily.

‘Sometimes, yes.’

She rolls her eyes and her head throbs with the effort. ‘You know, there’s such a thing as being too truthful. Right there, a normal person would have lied.’

‘I’m not a normal person.’

‘I’m aware.' He's shifting under her gaze. Just a boy in wrinkled clothes, seeking to disappear into the flaking upholstery, willing himself to shrink into the cracks and be passed over. But she wants him with her in her pain. 'I guess it would be nice to feel that I give you a life worth living, despite everything.’

‘You do', he murmurs, eyes on his food, arms on the table before he straightens his spine and tucks them to his lap. 

‘Look whose getting better at lying’ she says with a smile, puppeting the movement to see if she still can. ‘Are you just waiting out the clock with me?’

‘No.’ He shakes his head, eyes in the middle distance as he sinks into himself. 

‘Then what future do you see with me? Do you see anything?’

‘There are things I want but I don’t know how possible they are.’ He turns to her and she jerks her head for him to continue, grinding her teeth together until they squeak. ‘I want us one day to be able to stop.’

‘And then what?’

‘Live, like regular people. Know people, be known.’

‘We’re known all right.’ Her own slightly grainy image had become so familiar now it elicits no reaction from her, no lurch of recognition. Devalued with every reproduction until she can hear a crowd of comments in her head when she looks at herself. Skinnier, smaller, lesser than they imagined in every way. 

‘We’re feared. That stopped being appealing to me a long time ago.’

‘Then why did you do it?’

‘Because he told me I was good at it.’ He chuckles to himself at the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. ‘I know it’s pathetic.’

‘No, I understand. It’s just… Sometimes I forget. Somehow, I forget who I’m talking to.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll remember for the both of us.’

‘You don’t need to do that.’

He scoffs. ‘Actually, I do. The things I’ve done can’t be made right, Rey. You know that.’

‘What does that say about me?’

‘I didn’t mean it like that', he grumbles out, spine rounding. 

‘I know, you didn’t think about me at all when you said it. So, what’s your plan exactly? Kill time until they bring you to justice? Do you think that’s fair to me?’

‘It’s not, but it’s what will happen. You don’t have to stay for that. You can walk away, no-one will blame you.’

‘How dare you', she murmurs, vision clouding. 

‘You don’t owe me anything.’

‘I’m not talking to you when you’re like this.’

‘That’s fine too.’

‘Stop it. Don’t just passively take shit with this idea that you deserve it. Do something.’

‘What would you have me do, Rey? Go help rebuild the homes I had burned to the ground, visit their graves, talk to their families?’

‘I don’t know, anything.’

‘We’re hiding. I’m doing the world a favor by letting them believe that I am dead. I’d argue that is doing something.’  

‘But it’s not what you want?’

‘No, it’s not what I want’ he mumbles, head falling between his shoulders.

‘And you want what? Do you want me? Do you want a partner because that’s what normal people with normal lives have? A partner, a house, a kid. Is that what you want?’

‘No, I just want you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you make me feel like I’m not alone.’

‘That’s what it all comes down to, doesn’t it? Neither of us want to be alone. Is that a good foundation for a relationship?’ She keeps her aching spine straight as he rakes his hand through his hair, squeezing at his skull. 

‘It’s a start, it’s not everything.’

‘No, I think generally people love each other. Are you capable of that, do you think? Is that something I should come to terms with, that maybe we just don’t have it in us to love?’

‘I hope not.’

She reaches for his face but doesn’t touch, breathing out hard through her nose as the shadow of her clawed fingers falls over pale skin and bloodshot eyes. ‘Do you want me to hurt you? 

‘Yes. What’s stopping you?’ 

‘You want me to.’ She kisses him, her jaw shaking with rage. 

Another nightmare, no less draining for its familiarity. He can see the cloud of it behind her eyes as he pulls her in close, eyes swimming when she opens them, tears set on their unending stream where he brushes her hair from her face.

'Do you want me to take you home?' She digs her nails into his arm as she shakes her head. 'I can take you somewhere, wherever you want to go.'

'I don't have a home' she grits out, turning her face against his shirt as he tries to breath through a chest crushing around his organs.

'I don't like to see you like this...'

'I'll do better.' He folds her to her as she breaks down, mumbling reassurances ripped from him with a sting, head pounding until his own words are lost to him.

Slowly they move back to their old habits, visiting isolated planets, their inhabitants so desperate to fix any new faces in their mind they crush them in their attempt. They buy what they need and move on, paying less than they should and more than they can afford, ignoring the looming question as to what they will do when they run dry. Live on lies and borrowed faces to skip over the world, never leaving a trace. But they’re already dead, each other’s sole witness to the anomaly of their existence.

‘Is it enough?’ She intercepts his thought like she’d plucked it from the air, hand loosely closed over it, turning her wrist to watch the bones twist.

‘Were you reading my thoughts?’ She’s stretched on the bench as he reads, needing to keep her in his sights as her eyes shift like she’s scanning something in the rusted and sagging ceiling. 

‘Yes, I prefer them to mine. If this is all there is, would that be enough for you?’

‘Why would you ask me that?’

She inhales and it whistles, always slightly damp with tears. ‘Because I’ve been asking myself the same question. I want you, but not if I’ve trapped you in some life you don’t want.’

‘I want to be with you and I want to make you happy.’

‘And if I can’t?’

‘I’ll still be with you. You just need time. Lucky for us it’s about the only thing we don’t need to pay for. Come to bed, I’ll read to you.’

Over the course of the tale, many volumes, uncounted hours, they are largely unchanging. Around them their environment skips between hot and cold, dry and damp, the clamor of storms and the silence of lightspeed. Chapter by chapter she comes back to herself, until the drag of his nails down her arm draws out a shiver, a tiny breathless gasp chasing it. She looks at him and she laughs, hand pressed to her stomach as he kisses her, her sharp inhale aching there. Breathing slow, then insistent, opening her mouth to let it mingle with his. Then he feels her lip quirk against his and he knows he is done for. 

Things return to a kind of normal. They find desolate planets, where they land unnoticed and unmonitored, or where anonymity can be bought with a few credits and a mental nudge in the right direction. They sit at the periphery and observe slices of the lives around them, the ways in which they’re impacted by the Order’s ever more desperate need for control and the ways that they aren’t. The flicker of hologram conversations from other worlds, and the way the light bleeds from their eyes as the connection is severed, sharing a silent nod to another doorway cluttered with dusty shoes.

A conspicuous lack of youth, on worlds like that they’re examined in their civilian clothes, sitting a little straighter and meeting the quantifying gaze before it moves past them. The image of those gone pinned over the pattern of them, ill-fitting and stifling. She sags as the bracing weight of their scrutiny is removed. Some worlds are unmarked by people, soft and dark earth undisturbed by tracks or footprints. The animal life observes them curiously, rain snaking down furred and shivering backs. Water, mineral, animal and plant life warring for space and growing over each other in layers. The only resource they lack being the only thing the Order truly has need for; people. 

They observe all the ways people make their homes, gathering their things around them, some pressing close together, some picking their way to settlements shimmering with distance. They are gone before anyone has a chance to see them more than once, have the time to puzzle out why they seem familiar. The name on the chip is nobody known, buying a few meals and basic supplies. These are the places people don’t stay long in, if they can avoid it. Far from the deafening noise of the galaxy, in places where nothing important happens, the home planets of relatives of relatives who were caught up in the last great Galactic struggle. Brave, for sure, but stupid to think their blood would be noticed seeping into the soil of alien planets, context-less and pathetically hot, trying in vain to reach it’s way back to its home. Better to stay still, they promise themselves as the sun dies, better that than to be swept away. 

It came on the tray with their credit chip and invoice, trade negotiated and goods ready to be taken to the ship. A tiny blue piece of paper, folded into a flower, one line in elegant curling script. Are you with my son? She folds the piece of paper into her pocket with what she hopes is a diffident shrug, and tries to kid herself it’s not the equivalent of fire burning a hole into her thigh down to the bone. 

‘Let’s leave.’ She pours all the calm she can into her voice and leaves with a parting wave to the shop keeper, and a sickening push of blankness into her mind. Forget us. 

He quickens his pace. He has no ill feelings towards using their powers when necessary, but they take a toll on Rey, her steps less sure, her answers taking a meandering path before she voices them. She’d left a part of herself behind in that muddy shack that they could never retrieve. The second the ramp closes with a slight lurch, she springs into life, sprinting to the cockpit and initiating the take-off sequence.

‘What happened? Who did you see?’ He catches up and runs thoughtlessly through the process of helping to bring the ship into the air.

‘It’s who saw us.’ She drags the paper from her pocket and thrusts it into his hands. He unfolds it with a furrowed brow that smooths in front of her eyes with shock, as she banks the ship around to leave atmosphere. He sinks into his seat silently, note still wrinkled in his fingers. ‘Somehow your mother did what the whole of the First Order couldn’t.’

‘She’ll have our ship code.’ His voice is clipped and mechanical. She’d half expected him to shut down, or break down. She’d left her seat belt unclipped and stayed tensed to jump to her feet. To do what?  She extends the same offer he had given her, the only thing she can.

‘Which is why we’re leaving to buy us some time.’ She plucks a planet at random at sets their course. They're lucky they just refueled. Anything she can do to stretch the thread tying them to that shop the better.   

‘She’ll find us again.’ His eyes are glassy, chest fluttering with short shallow breaths. 

‘Okay. That’s why we need to figure out what we want to do about it.’ She launches them through the atmosphere, gripping the yoke so hard she feels her joints squeak. They’d been found, the bubble had finally burst, and the real world is shimmering into focus once again. ‘What do you want to do?’ Her voice quavers as she looks at him out of the corner of her eye, like he’s a cornered and wounded animal. ‘We can trade the ship…’

‘She knows we’re out there now, together. She won’t stop until she finds us.’ His voice is cold and emotionless, speaking words that roll of his tongue as if they’ve been written and lodged into memory before he was born.

‘So we split up?’ 

‘No.’ Her blood roars in her ears with relief, pressing her into her seat under its weight.

‘If she’s looking for the both of us…’

‘We’re not doing that and it wouldn’t make a difference anyway.’ 

She loses the war with her twitching fingers and pulls herself from her seat to go to him, climbing onto his lap. The muscles around his eyes and jaw twitch with tension as she pulls his face up to face her. ‘It’s okay, we’ll come up with a plan.’ She soothes her thumbs over his cheeks. ‘We made it this far, we can do it again.’ 

‘She’ll find us again. She has eyes everywhere. Before she thought I was dead, now she knows the person who murdered her husband is alive, she’s never going to give up.’ 
She pressed her forehead to his and tries to breath through the tremble in her jaw and air that seems to have lost all its oxygen. He’s as tense as stone beneath her, the only sign of life being the slight tremble she feels through her fingers as he holds on to the precipice of total dissolution.

‘I’m not going to leave you. We will do what we have to to disappear again.’

‘I can’t make you do this forever.’

‘You’re not making me do anything. We can get a new ship, get more supplies, hide out somewhere for as long as it takes…’ He shakes his head under her and her tears finally start to fall and she pulls back to stare into his eyes. ‘Don’t do this to me. Don’t give up and leave me alone. I can’t do it again. It’ll kill me.’

‘All I ever do is make you cry.’ 

‘That’s not true.’ 

‘Isn’t it? Everything that I do or have done finds a way to take more and more from you. But I’m too selfish to stop.’

‘Stop saying that. I’m here’, she forces her arms around his neck to pull herself closer, close enough to feel her heart beat against his. ‘I’m here because I chose to come to you and stay with you and I’ll always choose to do it again.’ She pulls back as his hands lightly rest on her back. ‘Now stop wallowing and tell me what you want to do?’ She pins his head in a slightly too hard grip, knowing the little flare of pain will so some ways to jog him from the low place he’s flung himself into. She’s gratified to see his eyes come into focus and meet hers.

‘I’m done running.’ She blinks at him. ‘It’s done, she’s found us.’

‘So what happens next?’

‘Wait for her to reach out. It won’t be long.’

She tucks her head onto his shoulder and breaths as his arms fold around her in a comforting too hard squeeze. Tears slide from her eyes silently and she buries them in his neck. When her heart has finally slowed to near normal, she pulls back to hold his face once more.

‘Are you okay?’ She asks. His face is tired and mottled with dried tears, but his gaze flicks to hers automatically. He shakes his head, not trusting his words to come out as words. ‘It’ll be okay. I promise you. We’ll figure it out.’ She leans to kiss him, lightly, lips trembling once again and stinging with salt. He kisses her back as his shoulder heave with sobs, and she pulls back to push his face into the crook of her neck and screw her eyelids closed as he trembles beneath her. 

They sleep, somehow, curled tightly together as the ship coasts on to nowhere in particular. She wakes in the night, pulling him even closer, willing to hold his body together with her bare hands, wishing she could reach into his mind and do the same. But she won’t. 

They wake in the early hours of the sunless morning and head to the cockpit, knowing what they’ll find. 

‘A message. Recognize the sender?’

‘It’s her personal code. I haven’t seen it in years, but it’s her.’

‘Let’s get it over with.’ She says, lightly. It rings falsely in the air between them. 

‘I have some free time on Tangenine if you’re both available. The blossoms are beautiful this time of year.’ It's over as soon as it began, Leia's calm voice imperfectly disguising the layers of conflicting emotion underneath it. How many times had she recorded and re-recorded the same two sentences, trying to smother what was screaming in the pauses.

‘She wants to meet. Do we go?’

‘We don’t have a choice in the matter. There’s a bounty on our heads. The Resistance could do a lot with it.’

‘Do you think she’s planning on turning us in?’

‘It will have crossed her mind. But no, she chose somewhere we once visited when I was very young. She’s a skilled tactician, but I hope she’s not cruel enough to lay a trap for us there.’ 

‘So we go and talk to her?’

‘I guess so.’

‘Set the course. I’ll reply.’

We have some time. She punches in the spartan reply and silences the buzzer. ‘How long?’

‘Eight hours. I know where to find her.’

She nods and stands, pressing her ear to his chest to hear the thump of his heart. ‘Come back to bed.’

She doesn’t know what to say, so pours all of her confusion into pulling him down on top of her and trying to pull him as close as he can get, surging up to kiss him as if she’s running out of air. ‘Take this off.’ She tugs at his shirt and flings it away, roaming her hands hungrily over his skin, and over the crisscross of scars on his back before snaking out of her own shirt and pulling their skin flush. 

It always has a way of calming her mind, wiping it of anything but the desire to get close to him, feel the electric connection where their bodies touch and melt together. She rolls them to kiss breathlessly along his chest, waking goosebumps flare into life in her wake and he pants underneath her, before following them with a swipe of her tongue. She moves to attack his neck, thrilling at the hand that springs up to clasp at her shoulder, the other hand trailing a path up her side that makes her shiver into him. Before long she is biting marks into his skin, shiny with her saliva, and sitting back to admire them, ripping her hair down to fall over her shoulders.

‘I love doing that’ she breathes as she boxes him in with her arms around his head. ‘Leaving my mark on you.’

‘I love it too.’

‘Will you ever let me heal that?’ She murmurs, eyes lifting to trace his scar.

‘Of course not, you gave it to me.’

‘When we were enemies.’

‘We were never enemies.’ He pulls her face down to his, delving into her mouth with all the restrained hunger and insecurity pouring out into her panting mouth. ‘I have a question though.’ His mouth curls into a smirk against her cheek as his breath brushes her ear in a rumble that sets off another wave of hungry shivers in her. ‘Did you enjoy it, when you gave me my scar?’

She laughs, a quavering laugh, jaw shaking as the question lands in her mind. ‘Yes.’ She breathes out, before slanting their mouths together once more and delighting in the delicious pressure of his fingers against her skin, and the little bruises she’ll find there in the morning. 

Chapter Text

They coast down in a clearing next to a patchwork of fields, swelling with threads of red berries. A rough circle of buildings surround a paved courtyard and a tall greenhouse shimmers in the heat. They linger in the cockpit as the ship creaks around them, settling in to rest.

'That's her ship, I take it.' Tucked half under the shade of a flapping awning, nothing much to look at. But every surface gleams in the sun, mirroring a cloudless sky and swaying fields, half-disappearing into its surroundings. 'Smaller than I thought', she adds, taking a deep breath and unclipping her seatbelt. 'Who have they got parked in the trees over there? Should we expect a guest?'

He follows her gaze to the tiny corner of a ship poking out of its cover, too small for him to notice. But she noticed. 'We're the guests. They'll be security.' 

'Why here?'

‘Some old family allegiance’, he bristles, as they step down the ramp, heading for the one entrance, propped open with a crumbling pot of soil. He falls into step beside her, flashing her a quick half smile as his eyes roam around their surroundings. Only one other ship perched on the soft ground, a calculated showing of hand, betting on them being too stupid to notice the deception or fatally willing to trust them. Neither bode well for them. Predictably, the conversation had started before they even broke atmosphere. He brushes the back of his hand against hers as they step into the room, oppressively hot and humid. 

‘General.’ Her heart thumps in her chest as she spots the small lady, running the fronds of a fern between delicate fingers, head turned slightly in their direction. 

‘It’s nice to see you again, child. You have been keenly missed.’ Leia nods towards a flaking wrought iron dining set, a pot of tea steaming away. She sits after a seconds pause, with the ghost of a smile on her lips. 

Rey lowers herself into the offered seat, actively summoning each muscle in sequence. ‘I apologise. I had to make a quick decision which separated me from the Resistance.’ She gestures to the pot and Rey shakes her head. Even if she had wanted to, there would have been no way to coax her squeezing throat to swallow. Rey watches tiny fingers take up the teapot and pour a delicate cup full, china skin-like in its translucence as she counts her breathing. 

‘So I gather.’ Leia’s mouth forms around a letter, but she thinks better of it and shakes her head before looking around the room for her answers instead. A hothouse, full of exotic and pungent flowers, shining in the scattered sunlight. A house of glass, had she chosen it intentionally, it had done its job of unsettling them both wonderfully. After weeks of hiding from view, it was almost suicidal brazen to meet here. But Rey knew better than to assume the woman taking a delicate sip in front of her didn’t have the place well defended. ‘Are you aware that both of you are presumed dead?’ She sets her cup down soundlessly, her muscle control absolute as Rey shifts in her seat with a squeak.

‘I am. And I am deeply sorry there was no way for me to tell you otherwise that wouldn’t have compromised our safety.’ Ben is unmoving at her side, summoning the unnatural stillness he reaches for only at the greatest stress, a slight lift at the corner of his mouth, hands neatly folded in his lap as his eyes flit between the two of them. 

‘Yes, I would have appreciated knowing. We are at war, losses are to be expected, but you of all people know the singular pain of not knowing.’ Rey ducks her face to hide the shameful blush that has erupted there as Leia leans to pour them both a cup anyway. At the beginning, there was truly no way to let Leia know they’d survived beyond her singular transmission, but they had successfully miraculously shed any link to the moon and the Supremacy. There were avenues she could have taken, but chose not to and the result was pain on the part of the lady who had cared for her. The cowardly part of her wants her to run, as fast as her feet can take her, back onto the ship and back into obscurity. Leia sets the pot down carefully, her reflection crisp and unmuddied as she folds her hands to her lap and takes a breath. A bird trills behind her, a thin little cry with no answer. 

‘Fugitive.' Rey falls back into her body as Leia turns to him. He squares his jaw after a little huff of amusement, lifting his gaze from the teacup to the face of his mother. ‘Where do you stand?’ Her eyes hang in the middle distance between them and he breathes out sharply from his nose, feeling ice settle in his stomach. 

‘I stand with Rey.’ He reaches out to feel her presence next to him, feeling it twine with his like a held hand. 

‘And if she resumes her place with the Resistance?’ Rey bristles, having already been reduced to a form of leverage in the few seconds it took for the General to change gear. 

He exhales another long steady stream through his nose. ‘I will stand with her there.’

‘You agree to work with us?’

His eyebrow quirks at the word. Us. The messy band of people rolled into a kind of family from which he was always subtly excluded, likely always will be. ‘I agree to work with Rey. And if that work involves you, I will still stand with her, for as long as she will have me.’ He dares his mother to meet his eyes, just once. Face neutral and impassive, waiting for her gaze to glaze over him, even in the swift pass of formal greeting. He knows such formality is baked into her bones. That she won’t tells him everything he needs to know. 

She lifts her chin in the slightest jerk before her eyes drift around their surroundings and for the first time Rey is struck by the resemblance between them before the General catches herself and settles back, lightly clasping her hands on the table-top. ‘If she asks of it, will you help us with what you know?’

‘I know what Rey desires. You don’t need to wrap up your aims in her words and pretend that we all have a choice in this matter.’ He meets Rey's eyes with a small smile, a slight tensing above his lip he knows she’ll perceive. It’s okay. 

‘Why don’t we ask Rey?’ She tears her gaze from him to take in the General, every bit the coldly calculating machine she knows she has to be to keep them clinging onto life. She wishes she could see the kind lady she’s more used to, but she’s walled off by an invisible armor of pain and incalculable loss.

Rey takes a breath before speaking, a new habit she knows the cause of, warmth from the friction of their brains rubbing off on each other. ‘My circumstances have changed since we last spoke. I would have to consider what working together would look like. In what kind of way do you think we can help you?’ You don’t have to do this. She shakes her head at him, holding his gaze before looking back to Leia who eyes them with a slight tremor at her jaw. Rey rolls her shoulders back, daring her to say something about it. She doesn’t.

‘I need information. The kind of information that skilled Force users would be able to get without making too much of a mess.’ Rey presses her palms flat against her thighs to keep them from shaking. Leia knew about her interrogation, the memory of her comforting arms around her rings with bitterness now. 

‘And what would we get in return?’ This she’s comfortable with, bartering for a fair price, especially when they both have an equal amount to gain. Never mind that they have infinitely more to lose. 

‘Supplies. Our protection should you ever need it. And a promise that nobody within the Resistance will alert the Order to the survival of their fugitives.’ She rattles off the list tonelessly. This part at least had been predictable enough to rehearse. 

‘And how would you ensure the Resistance keep up their bargain?’ Can she be trusted?, she sends him, palms itching to reach for him, but unwilling to give the General the power she would lose in the gesture.

‘By keeping up the appearance that you are both long dead. You would liaise with me and select individuals whose discretion can be counted upon beyond a doubt. Would you like me to give you some time to discuss it?’

She believes what she's saying, at least. It's true. She knows as well as Ben does that this isn't an action taken lightly, she had had the time to form a tentative plan. She rakes her eyes over the lady as Ben's words still ring in her head. She had had the time to be taken in by her own words, convince herself that them working together was the safest option for them. But it's a belief she only indulges in some of the time, one of the versions of herself she can step between, the version she's embodying now, staring out at her with concern clouding her eyes. But she could have shielded them at a distance, no doubt had been. She reached out for a purpose. She has a use for them.

She's known where we were for a while... She has had the time to question, to catalogue all the ways in which they failed to hide themselves. Rey picks up her cup and sets it down, close enough to hover her fingers over it and feel them being coated with hot steam. She was always going to find us.

'Rey. Do you need some time to think this over?' The barest hint of a smile toys at the corner of her lip. They could feel her eyes on them as they volleyed questions between themselves. Their audience blessedly, unable to know the contents beyond her own assumptions.

‘There's no need. Provide us with a means to contact you and we will be on our way.’ 

Leia holds out her hand for Rey to shake before withdrawing it smoothly and unshaken. They stand and for a second she questions if the General will try to grab her, dig her fingers into her flesh as their faceless audience emerges from the foliage like loth-cats. The image melts from her eyes as Leia folds her arms into her embroidered cardigan.

‘Rey, it really is nice to see you. I can’t tell you how much I’ve missed you.’ She steps forward into Rey’s space, and she takes a reflexive step back. ‘I will leave you now, but Rey, I wondered if I might have a word? In private.’

She nods curtly and tracks the lady as she leaves, sunlight illuminating copper strands in her braided hair. So much smaller than she remembered somehow. She falls into the cold chair and leans her elbows on the tiny ornamental table, crooking her chin on her palm to look at him. 

We’re being watched, his voice slides into her mind. There's no need to pick the faces out from their hiding spots. It's a sense they've trained to lethal effectiveness, feeling a dozen eyes on their skin as soon as they stepped into heavy air.

I won't touch you, just know that I want to. She smiles at him, eyes roving over their surroundings, a bounty of beautiful fragile things, that should wither under the weight of her gaze, but don't. Is this the right thing to do?

We don’t have a choice. But at least for now we can keep our distance. His eyes drift to the ceiling, the bright sun the color of bone digging at his retinas. 

Are you alright? She wouldn’t even look at you.

He swallows, and she watches the movement under skin lightly sheened with sweat. My mother always chose the work first. It’s not a surprise to me now.

But she thought you were dead. 

Her job was probably a lot easier with me out of the picture. I can’t envy her the headache this is going to cause. He smiles, a hollow movement that doesn’t go below the surface. 

What do you think she wants from me?

Probably to make sure I haven’t kidnapped you and held you as a prisoner. Are you going to talk with her?

Wait for me outside. I want to get out of this humid hellhole.

She finds Leia just outside in the pleasant courtyard.

‘It really is a beautiful place. I regret not spending more time here. May I speak with you, my dear.’ Rey bristles at the abrupt dropping of her General persona, at the falsity of it. It bothers her in the same way she’d occasionally see other scavengers put on and take off an act like it’s an item of clothing and meet her with suddenly cold and distant eyes. A feigned ignorance, an affected weakness, she’d see acquaintances adopt these mannerisms and put distance between them, as easily as blinking their eyes. She nods and follows Leia’s unhurried steps into a small sun room, and takes a stiff seat at the edge of an ornate couch as Leia sits opposite her.

‘I’m not going to ask what’s going on between you two.’ Rey opens her mouth but is stilled by Leia mutely lifting her hand to hush her. A small subtle movement, conveyed with a smile, but inviting no comment. ‘Luke tells me you two have a Force bond.’ Her gaze softens at Rey’s small nod. Everyone knew except her, it seems. ‘There isn’t a person alive who knows what that feels like, except you two. And you’re entitled to your privacy in that matter. I just want to ask you one thing.’ She looks down at Rey’s hands, folded in her lap, but doesn’t reach out. ‘Are you okay, Rey?’

She holds Leia’s weighted gaze, with effort. Something questions dimly at the edge of her mind, at her discomfort. She dismisses it, softly.

‘Is he…’ She watches the impossibly poised lady choose her words with utmost care, weighing each one in her mind before speaking. ‘Is he kind to you?’ Her heart thunders in her chest and she feels the air seemingly sucked from her lungs, fighting through grey dizziness to speak. She opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. ‘We can help you, if you need it.’ Leia explains. ‘There’s a way out of here only I know about.’

Rey shakes her head, clearing it from the strange swirl of emotions at war in her mind. Gratitude at Leia’s almost parental concern for her twirled with the obvious gulf between her assessment of the situation and the truth, and the outright hostility with which she addressed her son. She swallows, mouth dry. Hence the tea...

‘Thank you’, she tries to pour all her gratitude into the words and swallow down the bitterness, quirking her mouth into a small sad smile. ‘I’m okay, I promise.’ She puts her hands on the table, looking at them as she continues. ‘I came here with him willingly. I had every opportunity to leave him, but I don’t want to.’ She squares her shoulders to meet her eyes fully. ‘I don’t expect anyone else to understand, but I have no intention of leaving him. I understand the consequences and I’m okay with them.’ Leia nods at her, and Rey feels older as she meets the powerful woman with an equally unwavering stare.

‘I understand.’ She leans forward to briefly press Rey's hands warmly under hers, leaving behind a blinking beacon, so like the one she’d crushed into the dirt. ‘Is there anything you need?’ 

'How did you find us?' She swallows past the lump in her throat, straightening her spine to meet Leia's eyes and hold her gaze there as her stomach twists on itself.

'You weren't overly cautious, child.' Can't argue with you there. 'I am blessed with many friends and knowing my son, if he is still my son, I know the kind of things he would find it difficult to resist.'

Embarrassing, yet hardly surprising. ‘Guess he is your son after all...' She rolls her neck with a crack and reaches out for him, still outside, unmoving from where she left him. 'When?'

'I knew you made it off the Supremacy. Luke had good reason to believe you were together. When you didn't return, I had the answer I needed.'

'How long have you been looking for us?' What did you see?

'Your beacon was destroyed. You didn't want to be found. Most were happy to leave it that way. I wasn't.'

'You looking for me or him?'

Leia doesn't answer and for once she's grateful not to get one. She deflects, and in that glancing not-connection suddenly they are two women again, navigating the world at an unpassable distance. 'You seem hesitant to join us. I was lead to believe you had an interest in our work.'

'And I was lead to believe we were invited here to talk. You've said about ten words to him.' Rey picks a leaf from a bush at her side and turns it between her fingers. A nervous habit she'd rather the General not see, but the alternative would be pushing her into the mud and counting through the five seconds it would take for them to pull her off her. Not enough to have them working with them, she wants her to want it, too.

'You're a little more amenable.'

'Then you don't know me very well.' She holds Leia's gaze and tilts her head, reading something in her eyes. 'Who do you think I am?'

'The brave woman who went to bring Luke back when no-one else could.'

'I failed.' A man at each door, two crawling like vines over the metal framing above them, she flicks her eyes to them in sequence with a bright, humorless smile.

'Not exactly. He made contact.'

'Did he tell on me?' Rey leers, all teeth, eyes widening.

'He told me you two had established a means to communicate.'

'We didn't establish anything. It happened, we endured it. He was good enough to answer some of my questions and in return I didn't try to kill him.' She gives up on sitting primly at the edge of the coach, swinging her legs up, dragging soil-caked boots up onto the upholstery. Leia's eyes flick to them and her mouth tightens just slightly and something warm settles in Rey's stomach displacing the chill of nerves. 'Did Luke tell you what he did?' Rey leans on her elbow, trying to knead at the throbbing behind her temples.

'I'm aware.' Rey drops her hand, feigning interest, waving for her to continue. 'He told me after... He told me when it happened.'

'It.' She raises her eyebrows. 'Then why didn't you go get him?'

'I tried. Rey, believe me I tried.'

'Not hard enough.'

'How is he doing?'

'Who, Ben?' Her eyebrow lifts in surprise, but she knew it would. She kept her eyes locked on Leia's face as she said it, waiting for a reaction as inevitable as a sunrise. 

'You call him Ben?'

'I'm not going to call him Kylo Ren, am I. He's okay. He's coping, and that's about as much as he'd want me to tell you, so I'll leave it at that.'

'How are you, Rey?' 

Her painted on half smile gradually dissolves, a crowd of answers all screaming in her mind. To voice any one would break the tension keeping them all contained, have them all pour out at a torrent. 'I'm fine. Are we done?'

'Is there anything else I can do for you?'

'I would like to see a med droid, if you have one.’ She bounces the beacon on her palm, sitting to stretch out her arms and feel sweaty clothes peel from her back. 

‘I’ll send in my own.’ Rey nods, attempting to clip the device to her wrist his numb fingers, drawing it back into her lap as Leia reaches out to help. She waits, feeling the prickle at the back of her neck as Leia stands and looks at her, on the precipice of doing something before thinking better of it and leaving in silence. 

Everything’s fine, we’ll leave soon. She feeds him the thought before reluctantly shielding off her Force presence, sinking back into the cushions, all the fight sapped out of her by the heat and the unfailingly kind words that had dragged her into her rage before it could even register. 

A chirpy med droid comes beeping into view, trundling over the loamy ground and effectively pulling her back to the present, skidding on dirt-packed treads. 

‘Hello friend. Thank you for taking a look at me.’ She explains her recent injuries and her lifestyle, rolling up her sleeve for the droid to draws her blood for analysis, dispensing a strip of vitamins for her. ‘Do you mind if I have some more of these?’ The little droid chirps and another strip appears. ‘Thank you.’ 

He twirls around her and gives her a general scan, happy to report her injuries are well healed and there’s no lasting damage. Her anger had left her as quickly as it came, leaving her in her own heavy body without it to bouy her. ‘I have another favour to ask of you’ she smiles at him. ‘I’d like a contraceptive implant. I’ve started menstruating again and would prefer not to have to worry about it.’ He beeps and whirls around to her arm as she rolls up her sleeve a few more inches. ‘I’d appreciate your discretion in this.’ He looses a string of vaguely indignant binary. ‘I know, I know, I just had to say it.’ 

She leaves with a tiny invisible bandage on her arm and a handful of vitamins, as well as some liquid suspension to aid sleep. She suspects him of doting on her somewhat, and waves as he wheels away happily beeping to himself, picking his way around sprawling flowerbeds and discarded tools. 

She finds him in the shade of the greenhouse, squared against the panopticon of faces watching him, wondering if it bothers them to see him breath, see him flush with the heat. It's worse, isn't it? He answers them in his head. Now you know why we hide it... She watches him relax as she approaches. 

‘Vitamins’ she shows him as he stands to meet her, worry written over his face, ‘something for sleep. Apparently I’m in remarkable health for hiding in a damp hole’, she shrugs. ‘Ready to go?’

‘Are you done?’

She flashes her new beacon, dangling loosely on her wrist. ‘They’ll reach out when they need us.’

He gestures for her to walk in front as they head back to their ship, meds rattling away in her pocket. ‘Sorry I blocked you back there, your mother was prying. I didn’t think I could get that embarrassed or that furious.’ She glances to the side expecting to see him tense at her mention, but he doesn’t. He’s remarkably centred, all things considered. 

‘She’s good at that.’ They file back onto their ship and she slides into the co-pilot seat to run through the pre-flight sequence. There's a shadow of something looming behind her view, a number of piled crates that are new. She squints at him.

‘I negotiated some provisions, in the spirit of cooperation.’ He grimaces at her. 

‘That must have been difficult for you.’ She clicks the belt across her with a scoff. She waves at him to start the engines. 

Safely coasting on their way to a nearby sparsely inhabited system, she steels herself to address the tense ball of a person sitting leant over the control panel, spine ramrod straight and taut as if to take off running. She flicks the controls into auto-pilot, peeking at him in the edge of her vision.

‘You alright?’ She holds her breath. He pretends to have not heard her, shuffling automatically through a loop of navigational readouts. She doesn’t recognize the planetary formation, but that’s no surprise. ‘You don’t have to talk about it.’ The cabin is silent but for the hum of life-support systems diligently working in the background. ‘I’ll go pack away our supplies.’

She leaves him alone with his thoughts for a few moments. His own mother couldn’t even look him in the eye, had brokered a tentative peace with him with a calculating coldness Rey felt rasp against her nerves. What little she knew about families, you shouldn’t be able to switch off your love for them like a switch. It was this belief that had kept her going, knowing that the thread that bound her to her family was unbreakable and innate, that their love for her endured even if they were far away or long dead. It endured even as he made her face the truth she always knew, that they had left her behind, judged her as expendable and shed her. There was still something between them, and if she ever faced them again, there would be something that would pass between them, something in their eyes that spoke of this bone deep connection. But she hadn’t even looked at him. 

He’s quiet, Force dampened somewhat, slumped on the bench on his side, too tired to sit upright. His eyes find hers and she walks over, sitting to pull his head onto her lap and run her fingers through his hair in soothing strokes.

‘It’s okay, you don’t have to say anything.’ She infuses her touch with the gentlest of healing energy, to try to lessen some of the tension in his head building towards a headache. He’s boneless against her, strung out from the meeting at the suffocating humidity. ‘We’ll wash up and have some food. I don’t know about you but I can’t wait to get out of these clothes.’ She feels him smile against her leg and sighs with relief. ‘That didn’t come out how I meant it.’ A warm hand comes to rest on her knee.

She closes her eyes, still comforting herself with his warm weight on her, centering her. ‘I’m sorry she spoke to you like that. I know you probably think you deserve it, but I don’t.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘I won’t lie and say I’m not happy for us to be working with the Resistance. But I want you to know that if it goes wrong, I will leave with you. My allegiance is to you, and nothing will change that.’ He finds her free hand and fits his fingers through hers, bringing it to his mouth to kiss it. 

‘I don’t deserve that from you.’ His voice is gravelly, throat tight. 

‘It’s not your decision to make’, she counters, softly. ‘Come wash up so we can eat and laze about for the rest of the day.’ He lifts his head, pressing it briefly to her shoulder before sitting up with great effort. He looks as if his limbs are made of iron, but still makes the effort to flash a little crooked smile her way. ‘Come on’, she beckons him into the fresher. 

She grabs clothes for them both as he washes the itching sweat from his skin. The planet really was beautiful, but she doesn’t know how people deal with such humid heat, it feels as if it robs her of her higher brain function. She leans against the counter, eyes closed, concentrating on her fingers as they hold her upright, anything but the storm of questions in her mind. She hears the water shut off, grateful once again that they’d opted for a ship with a proper shower. She truly doesn’t think she could go without one now. When she opens her eyes to see him, flush from the shower, the thought to kiss him bypasses her brain and before she knows it, she’s looped her arms around his shoulders and is pulling herself up to kiss him. She smiles and buries her face in the clean skin of his neck, exhaling her worry in a big deflating exhale as his hand comes up to brace her lower back.

‘I guess it was too much to ask, we'd never be found’ she whispers into his skin, before slumping back onto her heels, trailing a hand over his chest over his heart. It’s quickly joined by his. ‘I don’t regret it. Running with you.’ He pulls her to his chest to fold her in a warm and damp hug. She presses her ear to his heartbeat and just lets it hum through her, reaching out to him in the Force, feeling it vibrate alongside hers.

Go wash up. His voice slides into her mind and she smiles. I’ll make us some food. He removes his arms before planting a quick kiss to her forehead, and she hums in response, before he’s stepped away to leave her to it. 

She returns, blissfully clean to what has become her favorite sight, steaming food waiting for her and the clean smell of soap in the air. They eat, finally feeling a languid calm truly return to them, and with it a desire for closeness, ever more closeness. She climbs onto his lap and wraps her arms around him, his chin resting on her shoulder as shaking hands come to brace her lower back.

‘That must have been difficult’, she strokes her fingers through his damp hair. ‘I appreciate that you went’, she whispers to him, ‘and that you stayed.’ 

‘I haven’t been in a room with my mother for a very long time.’ She breathes in deep as her stomach clenches and pulls back to look at him once more. ‘I have no idea what I’m doing.’ His admission comes wrapped in a watery smile. She smiles back and kisses him, on each cheek, his forehead, his jaw, finally his mouth, salty with silent tears.

‘We’ll have no idea together’, she murmurs, ducking down to hide in the crook of his neck and melting into his arms. ‘We're smart. We’ll figure it out. Come to bed.'

She pulls off his shirt wordlessly, climbing over his lap to yank off her own and throw it aside, just needing to press their skin together. Half dressed from her shower, it doesn't occur to her she hadn't put a breast band on until his nails up her spine bring her out in a shiver. She bites it into his shoulder as his arms wrap around her, keeping her close. He pushes her onto her back with her hands twisting in his hair, gasping as he kisses across her chest, swiping his tongue across her nipple. 'Too much?'

'No. Just new.'

'Do you want to try something not new?' He mumbles against her skin, nipple hardening as his breath skims across damp skin. She nods and he leans over her, pushing his hand under her waistband and stroking his fingers over her, giving her enough time to say no before curling his fingers inside her. His eyes flit between hers, narrowed in concentration. 

'Trying to read my mind?' She says airily, reaching for his bracing arm as the other drags up his side, watching him shake off his shudder.

'Just wondering what you said to her to make you like this.' He nods his head to her hand squeezed around his arm, knuckles white and skin pinched into folds.

'Shit. Sorry.' She loosens her grip, but doesn't remove it.

'Don't be. I like you a little desperate. As long as I know you're okay.'

'I'm okay. Fuck that feels good.' He kisses her, lips shaking as she pulls her focus between the two sensations, her hips twitching under his, jaw shaking as she chases his movements, never quite catching up with him. She pulls away with a groan and he kisses her jaw. 'I want you.'

'You have me.'

'I want to feel you inside me.' She cracks open her eyes in an attempt to focus on the blurry shape of him with no luck.

'Not right now.' He kisses between her brows, murmuring against her skin. 'Slow, remember?'

'I don't want slow. Slow is for people who can be reasonably sure they'll still be alive in a week.'

'Alternatively,' he trails off at the sight of her writhing underneath him, pushing her pants down and kicking them off with a thoughtless kick. 'It's a good reason to work hard at staying alive. I want that with you. But I won't do it just because you're scared.'

'I'm not scared', she watches her fingers disappear into his hair, his eyes half close as he keeps them on her face.

'Rey, I know you. I know what scared looks like on you.'

'Then can you make it go away?' She meets his eye, hers prickling, eyelids twitching.

'For a little while, yes.'

She smiles, never gaining a stable hold as she mouths through her responses. 'Please.' 

She bites at him as he kisses her, one hand hooked behind his neck hard enough the muscles throb. He pins her down with his weight as she swears between them, her nervousness quickly forgotten, the space they'd left between them over the last few weeks quickly crossed by her fitting her hand over his between her legs and rolling into it. She hisses, eyes closed before rolling her jaw, meeting his eye where he watches her with a look of pure rage she growls into his mouth. 

She claws at him as she comes, grip shifting to his neck, then his arm, digging her nails into him as he kisses down her neck. He's warm and hard against her hip, and before the thought can register she's pushed her hand into his pants to stroke him, craning up to lick at the blood crawling between the muscles of his arm, feeling him twitch in her hand.

'Well now. Isn't that interesting.' She pushes him onto his back, sitting across his thighs to work his pants down a few inches, spitting on him and curling over him to stare into his eyes as she strokes him. 'I knew you liked a little pain, I figured the blood was just a by-product. But I think you like it.' She pins him down by his shoulder to suck at the still bleeding cuts, stretching a stream of blood-tinged saliva onto him. 'What does that do for you?'

'Umm.' His eyes are on the drop that flicked onto her chin, mouth quirking into a brief smile as she finds it with her tongue.

She shakes her head. 'My word. The things we are going to do to each other. Let's make sure he get there, yeah?' She chuckles into his mouth as he pulls her face down to his, muscles tensed to hold her to him. He needs her close when he comes, close enough to imagine the thoughts he can't voice hop between their skulls and blend there. Close enough she moves when he moves, takes his damp breath into her body. She grinds their head together and he pulls her palm to his neck, spine arching as she sweeps her thumb under his jaw to span his throat, just holding. He comes with a heavy gasp and she leans back to gently mop at his skin with his discarded shirt as his eyes scan the ceiling. 

She leans on his chest, waiting for their skin to cool and their vision to come back into focus, with his fingers combing through her hair. She's yanked from the meditative calm of it by him laughing. 

'What is it?' She perches on her chin and waits for his eyes to find hers.

'It's nothing. You're incredible.'

'You're just saying that 'cos I made you come.'

'No, its not that. I'm happy, with you. For the first time, I'm happy.'

She blinks, pressing her lips between her teeth before speaking. 'I'm happy too. Thought I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do with it.'

'Nor me.'

She crawls into his arms, deflating with a sigh. She can't bring herself to do anything about being filthy again, or care that she's naked, sprawled on twisted blankets with her hair a mess. She closes her eyes and hears the lights shut off above them and darkness settle over them like a sheet, mind blessedly empty save for his smile as he said it. 

He wakes in curious silence, without her breathing steadily beside him. He finds her easily, sat at the table and feeling the weight of their one blaster in her hands. She turns her head slightly towards him in acknowledgment, looking at the cold light reflecting off of the scratched metal of the barrel.

‘You know, for some reason I thought I wouldn’t have to fight anymore. That maybe I’d be allowed to stop for once. Isn’t that stupid?’ 

‘It’s not stupid.’ She nods thoughtlessly as he slides to sit next to her, feeling her shivering with tiredness and cold. ‘You know you don’t have to do it.’ He takes the blaster from her fingers and she eyes it, magnetically holding her gaze. 

‘I want to live in a Universe at peace for once. The way people talk about it, it sounds like a paradise. If I want to know what that’s like I have to do my part.’

‘You’ve already done more than most. You’re allowed to stop.’ He threads his fingers through hers on the table-top. 

‘The longer it goes on, the more people suffer and the more people die. Now I know that I can’t just sit back and do nothing. They need our help, what kind of person would I be if I refused?’ Her jaw tenses as she swallows. ‘Just tell me it won’t be forever.’ Her mouth snaps shut as tears roll silently down her cheeks.

‘It won’t be, I promise.’ He turns her face to him and waits for her glazed eyes to slowly find his. He feels her cheek twitch with a flash of a leer under his palm. 

‘Liar.’ She looks down her nose at him, eyes flicking coldly between his eyes, scrunched in confusion.

‘You really believe it…’ she chuckles around her awed whisper, her stomach sinking. ‘You poor boy.’ She closes her eyes as something screams in her chest, crumbling against him, feeling him carry her lightly to bed, her toes tingling with cold. All the while nausea presses at the back of her throat. 

Chapter Text

They breakfast at a tiny outpost, sharing some kind of grilled waxy vegetable and syrupy juice on a shaded bench, watching the planet wake up around them. Decrepit trade route turned smugglers haven, signs of covert life begin to flourish as the First Order’s control moves further and further afield. Hushed conversations in doorways, ships taking off silently in the morning quiet. Here people pay careful attention to not paying attention, they still take precautions, even if they’re not strictly necessary. He’d shown her how to divert people’s attention like water, and have their look slide away with a subtle, nothing to see here. But it’s as if the people here live under that aura on their own, even as the vendor had smiled at her with a welcome warmth. It was if they’d exchanged their few words in a timeless bubble universe with no past or future, simply a few credits exchanged and a warm drip of grease turning the paper translucent like skin. It was easy to pretend they were still anonymous here. They leave as two of the three suns reach their peak in the sky and the searing heat begins to prickle at their skin.

‘Maybe they won’t contact us. I don’t know what use we can really be to the Resistance as fugitives.’ They duck into the welcome cool of the air-conditioned ship and peel their dusty clothes from their skin.

‘I highly doubt it. I’m sure it’ll be easy to find some use for two Force users…’

‘Yes, but why us? Surely there’s others she can use.’ She flumps heavily onto the bench, pressing her overheated cheek against the cool of the table top. He huffs and grabs them some water, placing hers in front of her and sliding to sit next to her. 

‘Potentially. Did you meet any other Force sensitives when you were working with them?’

‘Other than Luke and Leia? I wasn’t with them for very long.’ She looks at the warped reflection of their surroundings refracted through the water, lightly bubbling. 

‘But you’d have been able to sense them, did you sense anyone else?’ She furrows her brow, searching her memories. She hadn’t been looking, but it was true. She’d sensed Leia’s connection to the Force, even as she’d sworn off exercising it for years, like an energy that hung around her. That made her feel some connection with her even before the two formally met. The same with Luke, she could sense him as soon as she approached Ahch-Too, his energy muted, no longer seeking or expecting acknowledgment. 

‘No, I didn’t sense anyone else.’ She blinks and swallows, lifting her leaden head from the table. ‘What does that mean?’

He shrugs. ‘Force sensitivity in itself is very rare. And on top of that, not everyone recognizes the ability they have or wants to develop it.’

‘Can’t it be taught?’ She narrows her eyes at him. 

‘To an extent, to those with a sensitivity to it.’

‘I can’t imagine not. It’s strange to think of all the years I lived without believing it existed.’

‘It was always there, you just didn’t have words for it. Once you know it’s there, it’s a skill you develop like any other. But not everybody does.’

‘Why not?’ 

‘There have been attempts to purge Force sensitives from the Galaxy and erase their bloodlines. Not everyone is born with it, but for many it’s something to be feared.’

‘How many have you met?’

‘Those I trained with at the academy. The Knights. Snoke. Occasionally I would sense someone amongst the First Order troops, but any Force connection was purposely quashed in the Order. It was a danger to uniformity. I never crossed paths with anyone who was awakened to the Force in my time there.’

‘So we may be the only Force users working with the Resistance?’

‘Almost certainly. I highly doubt the General would not find a use for such an asset. Especially one she has such effective leverage over.’

‘There’s nothing stopping us from just running again.’

‘We’d never be able to stop. She knows that’s the last resort. I don’t want you to have to always run because of me.’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘One day you might. It’s okay. We don’t need to worry about that right now. We have more important things to consider. Where would you like to go?’

‘Somewhere away from people.’

A beach as a blood red sun hangs just above the horizon, colouring the sky fruit-like shades of purple and green. Sand is so fine it moves like silk over her fingers as she sinks them into it. 

‘Do you want to swim?’

‘In this?’ She looks down at her baggy base layers she’d thrown on in her desire for invisibility.

‘Our ship’s right there, it doesn’t matter. But you don’t have to…’

‘I don’t know how.’

‘I can show you.’ He offers an arm to pull her up and takes off his boots, leaving them in a pile with hers. She fights to drag her eyes away from the horizon, water that recedes into the distance until her eyes can’t focus on it anymore. She’d had an idea of an ocean for as long as she can remember, and a sense of the calming oblivion of it, the circling comfort in the idea of wading into the water and disappearing. Here it feels as if every detail is etched in fine detail in the cooling dusk light, as if the sun will set and never return.

She understands an innate reverence for the sun, fear in the idea the dark will be eternal, and joy at its return. A genetic memory that makes her watch her long shadow as she toes over the damp sand and notes her footprints there, filling with a shallow seeping puddle and slowly erasing her mark. She swallows and holds his hand as she takes her first sinking step into the water, sucking in a long deep breath and feeling her heart throb in her chest. 

They wade slowly out until she’s at waist height with the odd sliding step. Her free hand absentmindedly sliding through the calm water.

‘Do you want to go further?’ She nods. They step out until the water crests her shoulders and a shiver moves through her body as it laps around her neck.

‘Move your hands like this and try to pick your feet up. You can keep yourself above the water.’ She lets go, feeling the not-wholly unfamiliar sensation of resistance against her muscles as she moves through the water, tentatively lifting one foot off the sand with an explosive laugh.

‘Now kick your feet.’ He smiles at her roughly bobbing in front of him, shrinking away as she splashes her face with the spray.

‘Don’t laugh at me. I’ve never done this before.’

‘I’m not laughing at you.’

‘It’s not so hard.’

‘Do you want to try to float?’

She nods, momentarily dipping a little lower into the water before catching herself. ‘How?’

‘Lean your head back, bring your chest up and just relax and let yourself float upwards. I’ll keep a hold of you.’ She narrows her eyes at him before looking up at the now star-strewn sky with a gasp. It’s still strange to look up at a blanket of entirely unfamiliar constellations, but it still has the effect of blanketing her world in a calm she covets. She leans back and feels herself float slowly to the surface, relaxing her muscles to bob under an endless sky. 

For a few unquantifiable moments she's suspended there, only his hand in hers linking her back to the shore. She closes her eyes and listens to the muffled waves in her ears and feels her spine loosen a tension she didn’t know she held as the cool air chills her skin. It’s over in a second of sudden and blind panic, and she folds on herself and dips below the water for a moment before being gently pulled back up.

‘That wasn’t so bad' she splutters, coughing the rasp from her voice from the water that had wasted no time in crawling into her mouth. 'I don’t know what happened, my brain just took over.’ 

‘It happens, you alright?’

‘Yeah’, she treads water, clumsily trying to find a rhythm. ‘How long can we stay out here?’

‘As long as you want. We have nowhere to be.’

By the time they leave she can pull herself through the water with some degree of splashing. Stepping onto the shore it's as if her brain has re-orientated to a buoyancy now gone, and she feels her knees wobble as they head back in dripping silence onto the ship. 

The warm shower replaces the salt on her skin with a saturating warmth and a languid tiredness as his hands smooth her clean hair away from her face. She’s too tired and relaxed to care that she stares at the droplets of water on his skin. The cubicle is too small for the both of them to both effectively shower, but he’d pulled her in with them both in their underwear, and she lets herself float with his hands on her as a sigh rumbles out of her throat and she loses sense of her legs below her.

They dress back to back, misplaced shyness flaring as a blush mixing with the flush of heat as they step into the cold. Goosebumps pepper her skin as she pulls on a loose shirt and roughly towels her head before flopping onto the bed with a stretch.

‘Come and kiss me.’ He laughs, before lying down next to her. She curls to press her hands against the bare skin of his chest and twist her bare legs with his and tuck her face into his neck. ‘This feels amazing.’ She smiles against his skin as his hand smooths up her spine, holding her to him as her laziness is replaced with singeing want. ‘I feel like my skin is on fire.’

She mouths at his pulse thumping at his jugular before pulling back to look at him, mouth going dry. ‘I want to see you. Can I?’ Her eyes bore into his as he nods minutely and she shifts back to pull off her own shirt, reaching out for his arm desperately after having to break contact for a stretching second. He stokes a hand up her bare arm to rest at her neck as she smiles shyly at him, trying to calm her breathing. ‘Now you’, she smiles.

He shrugs out of his loose pants with a swallow and downcast eyes, before meeting her gaze with a nervous smile and a thundering heartbeat as they sit together naked for the first time. She cups his face and stares into his eyes before pushing him backwards to press their chests together and kiss him with trembling lips as her fingers twist into his damp hair. 

‘Is this okay?’ She whispers, shaking fingers stroking his jaw and feeling his nod. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. I just want to feel close to you.’

‘I know.’ Hot tears spill onto his chest where she presses her ear to his chest, eyes crammed shut as he strokes fingers through her hair. ‘I’m scared too.’ She hears his voice rumble in his chest, and feels her chin wobble.

‘I don't know why it feels different. I've been naked before...' She'd done it before her brain could catch up to her, her anxiety smashing into her in the dark, pulling her from sleep. 'I’m sorry for crying,’ she chokes out.

‘Why are you sorry?’ He soothes her with a hand down her bare back, leaving shivers in its wake.

‘I don’t want you to think I’m sad. I’m not sad. I don’t know what I am.’

‘Can I kiss you?’

‘Please.’ She rolls onto her side and pulls him with her, pushing forwards into the kiss and trying to push some of her petrifying joy into the kiss as her stomach flips violently and shivers shake her entire frame. She pushes her tongue into his mouth as his palm rests at her waist, stroking there. She strokes his strong legs with her own, and hooks them closer together, pressing their bodies flush together, a stab of arousal flaring in her as she feels him hard pressed against her and his hands tighten their grip against her skin.

‘You okay?’ She strokes his face, swallowing around a lump in her throat. 

He nods. ‘Are you?’ His voice shakes.

She nods desperately, tears drying on her face. ‘Please touch me.’ Her eyes are unfocused as if her body has had to choose between touch and vision under the onslaught of new sensations. 

‘Where?’

‘Everywhere.’ She learns the borders of her body for the first time under the pass of his fingers, smoothing over her slender hips to graze her butt and spanning her thigh in his grip. 

‘You’re beautiful. Did you know your teeth chatter when you’re turned on?’ He pushes her gently back to kiss her stomach and graze her ribcage with his hands as she pants under him, arms thrown over her face. 

‘Come back.’ She folds to meet him and bring him over her to kiss him, pulling his palm to her chest and pressing up into it, grappling at his arms to bring them ever closer. ‘Can I touch you?’ She begs into his mouth, jaw chattering as she claws at him with bruising strength. 

He pulls back to look at her, brushing a thumb over her jaw. ‘You can have anything you want when you ask that nicely.’

She holds his gaze and trails her hands down his arm to his waist, down his thigh as it twitches under her nails, pulling them ever closer and attacking his mouth with hers.

‘Your voice is shaking. Is it always going to be like this?’ She chokes out, sucking in desperate breaths in the space between them.

‘I have no idea.’ He murmurs. ‘I’m sorry.’ He looks away.

‘Why?’ She pulls his face back to look at her.

‘I wish I had answers to give you’, a smile flits over his mouth, and she follows it with featherlight kisses that make him shiver over her.

‘I’m sure we’ll figure it out.’ She kisses the corner of his mouth where it curls into a smile. ‘Do you trust me?’

‘Always’, he swallows.

She takes his hand in hers and draws it down to her crotch. Her breath catches at the feeling of his fingers against the hot skin there, thrilling with little licks of pleasure with every heartbeat. She shivers and presses her forehead to his chest as his finger presses with a tentative pressure against her wetness and lightly circling her. Her perception narrows down to the feel of his fingers gently stroking her and slowly dipping inside of her. She burrows into his neck and pants there as he pulls her tightly to him and mumbles in her ear.

‘Slow this time?’ His voice is cracked, shivering around a smile. She nods against him as his finger lightly curls within her and she groans. He leans her back and kisses from temple to jaw as he pushes in and strokes her as her breath deepens and she clings to his forearms, nails digging little half moons into his skin.

‘Please keep doing that’, she urges as she kisses him, breath hitching in her throat as his thumb swipes over her clit. She swears, laughing into his mouth and pulling at his hair.

His fingers curve deep inside her as her toes curl. When he crooks his fingers to press against her wall she pulls away to gasp for air, hearing her heart beat in her eardrums.

‘Fuck. Let me touch you.’ He laughs, and removes his hand with one last toe curling stroke. She pushes him back, stroking his chest, before dipping down to leave a bite there and smoothing it with her tongue. ‘Later I’m going to show you how good that felt.’ She grabs his hand and places it at her waist and he take the hint with a gravely chuckle.

She traces the warm flesh with gentle fingers, feeling the surprising hardness of it and dipping her fingers into the wetness there. She watches with fascination as the muscles of his stomach spasm in front of her, feeling his hands shake as they lightly stroke her side. She swipes her thumb over the head and looks at his face with worry as he jerks under her. He hooks her neck and pulls her down for a breathless kiss.

‘That feels amazing’, his pupils are blown as she continues her slow place, tightening her grip and watching his lips tremble where he struggles to maintain eye contact against his eyes trying to slide shut with pleasure.

She swallows. ‘I think I could come just watching you like this.’ She whispers, half shrugging around the blush that flares on her cheeks. ‘Do you want me to show you?’ She strokes his cheek, sliding over his parted lips. She presses her forehead to his and pours forth a torrent of feeling, the dizzying pleasure of his finger inside her, the enveloping closeness of feeling his skin against hers, awe at his muscles twitching underneath her, the terrifying question of what it would do to her mind to feel him come apart inside her.

She grips his skull with her hands as his hands pull her chest to his, pushing the air from both of them and gripping bruising points into her upper arms. Show me. She pushes his hand to his cock and slumps to the side to watch him, her own hand moving to her center as he presses their heads together once more and stares into her eyes. 

In a few seconds they’re clawing at each other, and forcing their eyes to keep contact as they come panting into the space between their bodies. She’s the first one to laugh, a too-loud shout that forces tears from her eyes, as she curls against his chest and feels silent laughter rack through his body. 

They wake tangled together and peel sweaty goose-pimpled flesh apart shyly. He loses the unspoken argument as to who is to check for messages as she heads away to shower and dress.

‘Anything?’ She emerges, toweling her hair dry roughly, crinkling her eyes at him. She knows the answer before she asks it. He clicks the communicator off and peels the towel from her rough hands to take over as her fingertips graze his chest.

‘Shower’, she instructs, ‘I want to train.’ She fights a blooming smile on her lips as he tilts her chin up to face him, and swipes a thumb over her damp cheekbone. He brings their lips together gently and she sinks a little into her knees.

Something in him tremors at the pleasant domesticity of her feet padding around the tiny kitchen, pulling things from the cupboards and mumbling over assorted unfamiliar ingredients. He shaves as the smell of caff reaches him and he hears her footsteps approaching him, letting herself in to stretch languid against the door, hair curling around her ears.

She sips her drink and pops hunks of sweet bread into her mouth as he brushes and braids her hair into a shiny rope he folds and pins above her nape with the slender pin. Her hand finds his at her shoulder. 

They sit cross-legged, facing each other, practicing placing and throwing force holds until sweat pricks their skin. She narrows her eyes at him as she swallows down the by now familiar panic as he seizes her limbs in an invisible grip, pressing out with the Force against him. 

‘I know you can throw it.’ He drags his eyes over her face, at the tense muscles at her neck and her fingers twitching at her knees. She comes to realize she can, she just doesn’t want to. Her cheeks flare with blood. She waits a moment, before deflecting his attention with a lazy blink as a predatory leer blooms on her face

‘I’m beginning to think this might not be the advantage we think it is’, she muses, digging languidly through his mind and drawing snatches of sensation to the surface. The press of her skin, her dark eyes as they crumple with pleasure, her strong body bruising his, before slinking from his mind. An invisible hand closes around her throat and her blood thumps in her ears as he leans forward to mouth against her skin and chases the shivers with a silent instruction to keep still. 

They touch down on a random salt flat, a craterous void stretching as far as the eye can see. They allow themselves the indulgence of using their sabers for the first time since the Supremacy, plucking the thoughts from each other’s heads in an endless string of feints and dodges, until he takes the mental bait she lays for him and falls into her attack, twisting away with her blade millimeters from the pulsing skin of his neck. 

‘Clever.’ He sweeps her legs from her and she falls heavily to the ground, air presses from her lungs. ‘But now you know, I know.’ He kneels over her gasping form, pulling her snarling face upwards as the point of her pin presses at his pulse. He kisses her and it falls to the salty earth. 

He pulls her twisting and swearing back onto the ship where they grapple as a strange stew bubbles away in the background and the sun begins to dim to a polluted red through the viewports. Finally exhausted they watch holos slumping their tender bodies against each other and enjoying the steady thump of their blood at every point their bodies had come into scrabbling contact. She skims her fingernails over his forearm and shivers at the feedback of pleasure between them at each featherlight touch. 

'Do you think we’ll ever get tired of this?’ She rolls her neck and  walks her fingers over his palm to thread their fingers together as he folds to kiss her exposed throat. ‘I’d never even kissed anyone before you’, she smiles, ‘for all I know it always feels like this the first time. Like the whole world has changed around you.’ Her chest heaves with a cold shiver. She straddles his lap to mash their mouths together and press their bodies together through the thin layers separating them. His grip bruises her and a grumbling groan spills into his mouth and desperation flows through her blood, shaking her grip.

‘Has there been anyone other than me? Anyone at all.’ She searches his eyes, darkened with desire as they crinkle in question. ‘I need to know if there has’, her voice is frayed in desperate anguish. It doesn’t matter that she knows the answer, she still needs to hear it.

‘No-one’. He holds her burning gaze. ‘Only you. It’ll only ever be you’, the muscle under his eye twitches as he struggles to not turn away under a look that feels as if it’s burning away his brain. 

‘What are you doing with that? She’s running her nail along the seam in the blaster, trying unsuccessfully to pry the battery from the housing.

‘We’re going to meet your mother tomorrow…’

He sits down next to her and takes it from her hand, clicking the catch and setting the pieces down in front of her. ‘Again I ask, what’s with the blaster?’

‘I’d feel more comfortable if we were armed.' She lets the pieces fall with a clatter, head rolling on her shoulders. 'Why can’t I do this?’

The little part of his brain that had held onto the process of disassembling the weapon sets him to work breaking it down with a smug satisfaction. ‘You can. You’re just distracted…’

‘I am.’ She snatches one of the pieces and squeezes it in her hand. ‘Constantly. By you. By being around you.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. I’m just restless, she laughs with a airy huff. ‘The part of me that’s worried about tomorrow is losing the war with the larger bit of my brain that just wants to stay in bed with you and push our seeming limitless capacity to be frustrated.’ She lets her head fall back against the bench, closing her eyes. ‘For some reason I thought it would give us a break after, you know…’

‘I take it that’s not the case for you?’

‘No’, she enuniciates the word so clearly she’s shocked into a smile by her own emphatic response. ‘That image is seared into my brain and now I don’t know how I’m supposed to think about anything else. Thanks for that.’

He wraps his arm around her shoulder and pulls her into a hug. She melts against his chest, voice small against his shirt. ‘What about you, Mr Control?’

‘Me? I’m faced with the reality of meeting with my mother and knowing she’ll be able to see it on my face. Times like this I really question why I got rid of that mask.’

‘How about we just don’t go? Make an excuse. We’ll have a few days before she finds us again. We can get a lot done in a few days…’

‘So this is just a box ticking exercise for you, is it? I see how it is.’

‘Fuck off. I’m just looking forward for a time when I can do literally anything without thinking about it.’

‘Let me know if you figure it out. You’re just lucky people can’t tell if you’re turned on.’ 

She rolls her eyes. ‘How do you deal with it then? You seem to do fine.’

‘Years of training I never thought I’d be grateful for.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Do you want me to show you how to assemble that?’

‘Yes. Please.’ 

He talks through the assemble of the blaster as if he’s done it a thousand times, the words having become devoid of all meaning. She takes in the information given, even as her brow slowly furrows. She’s not surprised by the knowledge, he answers her questions exhaustively and with clinical specificity, knowing she’ll meet his knowledge easily. It’s useful, she can learn from him and he’s willing to teach her. But still the niggling resentment at its existence. He should never have needed to know it. 

‘Why do you know this?’ If she were stronger she wouldn’t ask it.

He sags a little at the question. ‘Proficiency with a range of weapons was required. It’s dangerous to rely too heavily on any one.’ He sets the now re-assembled and inspected weapon back in front of her, eyes drifting to the ceiling. ‘You know why.’

‘You’re a soldier.’

‘Mercenary, if we’re being specific. I didn't serve their cause, I just killed for them. Does it bother you?’

‘Yes.' Her answer reaches him before he's even finished voicing his question. 'You’re smarter than that. You could have been anything.’

‘What would you had me be, Rey?’

‘Use your brain, use your voice. A teacher maybe...’

‘I’m not that good with my words.’

‘But you’re good with your voice. You could tell me to do anything and I’d do it.’ He turns to meet her look but she won’t let it weaken, holding his gaze. ‘I mean it. Tell me and I’ll kill them all for you.’

He waits for a wobble, a crack in her facade to show it for the joke it is. There is none. ‘You mean it.’ A statement, something heavy passing between them, big enough to make space for itself in their chests. 

‘They should never have done that to you, and she should have come for you. I won’t ask you to fight for me. I don’t want to be like them. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘I’m taking this.’ She grabs the blaster and sets it none too delicately on the shelf behind them in a little flurry of dust. ‘Problem?’ She meets his tiny half smile with a thunderous look.

‘No.’

‘Good. Come back to bed.’

‘What are you going to do to me?’ He sits down at her urging, trying to keep a view of her as she moves around him. 

She fusses with their destroyed bed before crawling behind him to fit her chin over his shoulder and squeeze him in her arms. ‘Wouldn’t you like to know.’ She smiles against his cheek before moving to mouth at his neck. ‘Will you let me watch?’

‘That depends…’

‘On?’ He walks his hand over the arm at his waist, waiting for her to turn her palm to knit their fingers together. ‘Okay. I’m not going anywhere.’ She swallows, mouth dry. ‘There’s no getting rid of me, remember? You’re stuck with me.’ 

'Something which continues to surprise me...' She twists around his body to meet his eye. That's when he finally says it, with one hand on her back to keep her from falling onto his lap. 'Every day I wonder if today will be the day. You'll come to your senses and you'll leave me.'

'I'm not going to. How can I convince you?'

'I don't know. I trust you. I know you wouldn't lie to me.' He sees her shake her head through unfocused eyes. 'I want to be close to you. I want to believe there isn't a line somewhere that I'll cross and it will be too much for you. I've done things that there's no coming back from.'

'I know.'

'How can you trust me?'

'Because you've shown me I can. I know what you've done. I can't forgive them but I won't pretend there isn't an appeal to sharing a bed with someone I know could defend himself and me. But I meant what I said, I won't ask you to fight for me. I know wouldn't need to. I would give up my life for you and I know you'd do the same. I hope you know how hard it is for me to admit that. But I wouldn't have it any other way. You get my life, you get my body, I've give you my mind. Death is the only thing that would keep me from you. It and pain have been the only things that haven't left me. You fit quite nicely into that puzzle...'

'Because I bring death and pain.'

'Because you can listen to that and not be scared by it.' She smiles. 'You see me and I see you. If you were going to scare me away it would have happened a long time ago.'

She stretches out next to him, shrugging out of her shirt, something in the back of her mind urging her that she should be uncovered. Let him find the truth in her words, that if their is deceit, there is nowhere for her to hide it.

'Touch yourself for me.'

Her mouth lifts into a half smile, even as her body reacts to the words like a fire is simmering below her skin. 'What makes you think I want to take orders from you?' she replies, eyes closed.

'You're covered in goosebumps. You were as soon as I said it.'

'Well maybe I'm just cold, have you considered that?' She stretches with a groan and opens her eyes. 'What are you gonna do?'

'Watch you.'

'I'll warn you it won't make much of a show. I've never thought about how this might look to an audience.'

'You're stalling.'

'I'm nervous.'

'Then close your eyes.' She does and he kisses down her neck slowly. 'I don't know if closing my eyes is going to help much.' He huffs against her skin, taking her hand and guiding it between her legs. 'I know what I'm doing, thanks. I think I can take it from here.' She holds her cupped palm out to him. 'Spit. My mouth is too dry.'

It's hard to overstate what it does to him to see her take his saliva and part her knees, rubbing it against herself without a second thought. 'Is this what you wanted?' she purrs.

'Uh huh.'

'What you expected?' He breathes out hard through his nose as she begins circling her skin, lightly tilting her hips towards her hand. 'Did you ever picture it?' She swallows, free hand reaching for him and curling around his forearm. 'Would it bother you if I told you that I did?' She mumbles her question against his arm, damp lips dragging against his skin.

'When?' His eyes are locked on her hand as she presses her fingers into herself, rolling her hips to meet it.

'I don’t know if I can tell you that.' She scrapes her chin against her shoulder, mouth falling open. 'You know I don't usually do it like this. I can, but it takes a while. I prefer to have something between my legs.'

'Show me what you usually do.'

She sits and wiggles the pillow out from under him and he presses his back against the wall, smiling at her promise that she is going to ruin it and the automatic choice to use his instead of her own. 'Don't know how I figured this out, I just know it feels good.' She punches it into shape and wiggles onto her knees to squat over it, rolling herself against the scratchy fabric, the delicious friction immediately squeezing a rumbling sigh from her. 

'What do you think about when you do this?' He can't look at her face, so he watches the dimples that appear at the juncture between her hips and thighs as she rolls her body, slowly finding a rhythm.

'Not much', she digs her nails into the pillow as she speaks, before letting her head drop on her shoulders. 'Are you wondering if I ever thought about you when I did this?' She lifts her face to him and he has to drag his eyes from the wrinkling pillow as she clamps it between slender thighs, wide shelves of muscle taut under the skin. 'What answer would you prefer I give? You'll have to be quick. You don't have long...' She is radiant with her face flushed right into her hairline, every muscle engaged as she pushes herself forward, panting heavily, eyes dark and waiting for his response. 'Where are your words now?'

It's a challenge and he's losing, she jerks her head towards his hand as it thoughtlessly presses at the bulge in his pants and she slowly rolls through her hips. 

'Stay still.'

'Why?' She argues, but she obeys. Beautiful.

'Because you're going to wait for me. You're close, aren't you?' She narrows her eyes at him, but they quickly un-focus again. 'Answer me.'

'Yes.' She lets a little of her frustration into the word, simply needing whatever outlet she can get. 

'Good, come here and be quiet.' He wiggles his way out of his pants and squeezes at himself and her eyes drift down to the movement. He inches himself down the cot, spreading his legs, annoyed that to do so one leg has to dangle awkwardly off the side by the knee. 'Sit on me, and when I tell you to you're going to make yourself come against my thigh.'

She lets herself be led, forehead dropping to his shoulder as she settles against his skin, and immediately the warmth between her thighs flares back to life, blindingly hot. 'You okay?' She nods her assent against his body, eyes drawn to the patch of his stomach visible where his shirt is pushed up. 'Give me your hand.' He takes the hand that lightly shakes in his grip, spits in her palm and wraps it around himself, keeping his grip over it and sliding her slender wet fingers over his length. 

Her muscles are shaking in an attempt to keep still, as if the more she turns her attention to them, the more they itch to move. She jolts when he shifts under her, tightening her grip. She can't see his face without lifting her head, the concept a distant impossibility. So she focuses on his accelerated breathing as it stirs her loose hair, the pop at the back of his throat as his free hand drags along her folded leg and over her hips. 

'This is how I would do it. Like if I'm quick enough I could pretend it didn't happen at all.' He drags wet fingers to her wrist as he speaks, wordlessly instructing her to keep going as he shifts under her, face tipped back to the ceiling. 'But it's not how I pictured it with you.' He slows her movements, and quickly the tendons of her wrist begin to heat with warning. 'I pictured slow. Torturously slow. That we would break each other when we did it.' He gently untangles her fingers and resumes his own slightly slowed pace. 'I want to watch you come.'

She walks one hand to his shoulder to lean back on a spine aching with protest. When she rolls her hips, his hand comes to lightly bracket it, feeling the muscles move under the skin then gradually tightening his grip until she's moving as much under her own failing strength as his. 

He pins her face under his eyes as she comes, watching her face crumple with it as her thighs stutter against his. He squeezes himself, holding off on his own pleasure to watch hers, how it takes her from her body for a few seconds and he gets to view the process of her groping her way back to herself and narrowing her eyes into a glare. 

'You didn't', she accuses.

'I told you. I wanted to watch you.'

'Lie down.'

'Why?'

'Because I’m wet for you. I want you to feel it.' She manoeuvres on shaking thighs to let him sprawl out next to her, pressing her back against cold metal and grateful for the slight lightening to the clouds that blur her thoughts. She spits in her palm and rubs it over him, not caring to be gentle. 'It was nice to come against your thigh, it would be even nicer to feel you against me.' She slings her leg over his hips and slides herself haltingly along his length, skin wet, hot and hard against her. 'Does it feel good?'

'Yes.'

'Will you come like this?'

'Yes.'

'Good, because I don't know how long I can keep this up.' He leads her to lean boneless against his chest, tilting his hips to slide against her, pace gradually increasing. There's a sharp little inhale when he rubs against her clit, and he presses at her lower back to keep her there, maintaining the pressure. She groans when he circles his hips, and that's the thing that sends him over the edge, a groan half pain, half acceptance, rumbling through his chest.

Chapter Text

It’s waiting for her in the cockpit as she knows it will be, a clipped communique flashing a red pulse. Location, a non-descript cantina, time thirty standard hours from now. The General will have received confirmation of her opening the message and in just over a day she would know if she needed to cripple the smuggler code-scrambler she’d left silently on the table under muddied sunlight and track them down once again through the questioning looks of a thousand disparate eyes spread throughout the universe. It wasn’t just sheer bad luck that had crossed their path with hers. They had known of each other’s continued existence, a tone ringing out in the Force that they’d only become truly aware of at the point it becomes silenced for good. They had to move to survive and said movement garnered scrutiny, and through scrutinous eyes Leia held a web of alliances across countless systems, just waiting for them to brush past. 

He reads the tightness around her eyes where she heads back to him and doesn’t comment beyond a sigh at the back of his throat. They spend the day eating little dried fruits full of tart seeds, not bothering to go through the fraudulent motions of a standard day. They hang unnaturally in space, waiting out the clock. His low voice weaves around her as he reads fanciful circuitous tales to her, full of near-misses, last minute escapes and telegraphed betrayal. She smooths her braid between her fingers and dips in and out of a comfortable sleep.

She shows him images of her tiny home, peppered with tiny broken objects saved from the desert sun. A dying flower in a cracked pot, threadbare blankets patched and spliced together, the dolls she wove, the soft things she draped over every surface in an attempt to soften hard edges. She didn’t know she was leaving it for the last time. Her socks lay on the floor, the sand will have moved in by now and buried much of what was hers. She talks of the things she wants in her future home, one day. A garden, full of thick green plants. Cupboards bursting with foods from every corner of the galaxy. Blankets so soft they'd catch on her skin, a bath big enough to swim in, a little place she can put things that no-one else can see and no-one else knows of. She presses her ear to his heart and closes her eyes.

‘What should we wear?’ 

‘Hmm?’ Her question jogs him out of his thoughts, peacefully weaving little images together as he slowly traces letter by letter against the skin of her back, seeing if she'll notice. 

‘We should probably try to blend in…’

‘I don’t think it matters too much. They already know we’re coming.’

‘So we just wander in and hope nobody decides to collect on the bounty on our heads?’

‘Pretty much. Just wear whatever you’re comfortable in.’ 

‘Your mother thinks there’s something going on between us.’ She smiles against his chest. ‘She didn’t pry too much, but I could tell she wanted to.’

‘That doesn't surprise me. She’s a horrendous gossip. It doesn’t help that she’s right…’

‘Plus I did ask her med droid for an implant. That probably didn’t help.’

She moves with him as he huffs, dragging a hand over his face. ‘Yeah, that’ll do it.’

‘What? I was being proactive.’

‘You didn’t need to.’

She walks her hands up his chest and beside his neck to stare down at him. ‘Okay, maybe we should have had this conversation a while ago, but I kind of figured we’d sleep together at some point.’

‘We already sleep together’, he smiles.

‘Fine. I was under the impression that one day we would have sex. Admittedly I didn’t ask if you were, I just sort of assumed, what with’, she gestures between them trying to burn his laughter out of him with her eyes. ‘Was I wrong? Are you a wait until marriage kind of guy? Gods, you are, aren’t you?’

He shakes his head and her head falls on her shoulders. ‘You didn’t need one because I have one.’

‘What? Why?’ She glares at him, voice dropping dangerously low. ‘You told me you’d never been with anyone.’

‘They’re standard issue in the Order. I thought you knew.’

‘Why would I?’

‘It’s in the manuals, the "respectful, professional and productive work environment" they love so much. It helps keep people loyal and unattached. Of course in reality it means everyone is fucking everyone else. Still, works in theory.’

‘Everyone except for you, you mean?’  

‘I didn’t have much downtime.’

‘So this is just a pastime for you?’

‘Obviously. What else would it be?’ 

She narrows her eyes at the line but they can’t find a stable hold on his. He can feel the heat from her flushed face as she gives up and collapses against him, screwing her eyes shut. ‘Well, if she didn’t suspect before, she definitely will now. She’ll be looking for signs.’ She props her chin up to look up at him. ‘What if she can tell?’ She watches his face pink with blush and his mouth press into a line of suppressed laughter. 

They meet in a dusty back room of a cantina, past the stacked casks of ale, the tang of cleaning chemicals in the air.

‘Thank you for coming. I hope you know that I don’t enjoy putting you in this position…’

‘What position is that?’ Rey asks brightly, taking the opportunity to put the older lady on the back foot and enjoying the incongruity of the regal lady standing stiffly on sticky and stained carpet. 

‘I would prefer if your working with us was entirely of your own motivation.’ Leia's eyes are on her feet, as if expecting something to come crawling around her ankles at any moment.

‘You don’t enjoy having leverage over us?’

Her gaze drift over the blaster at Rey’s hip before working their way back to her face. She’s met with a raised eyebrow and a cold silent challenge to comment on it. ‘I don’t. Even as I can assess the utility in it. I didn’t intend for us to be working together under these conditions.’ She wrinkles her nose at their current immediate "conditions" as a door loudly slams open behind them and someone takes a hacking wet cough a few rooms over, spitting the contents of their mouth onto the floor with a heavy splat. ‘Don’t worry, we are safe here’, she soothes herself more than Rey, who's peering at the boxes of miscellaneous foodstuffs and serve-ware around them. 

‘What is it that you want us to do?’ She paints on the thin veneer of an open expression that fools no-one.

Leia takes a breath and slides back into her part as the General. ‘I have recently lost contact with one of my advisors in the Outer Rim. I fear the worst, but I need to know if any of the information they held has been compromised. Until recently it was thought that the Order presence in the area had been withdrawn, but now I suspect they may be employing less ostensive measures. If that is true, I would like to know the nature of this new threat to us. If they were taken, I’d like you to try to find out by whom and how it was done so I can warn the others.’

‘How would you like us to do that?’

‘I have their last known location. See if you can unobtrusively find the information we want.' She turns to Ben and Rey watches something heavy pass between them as she meets his eye, hers lightly twitching with the effort. 'I hear you have experience in extracting such information.’

‘You know this how?’ He drums his fingers on the table behind him at the question, eyes boring into hers.

She shakes it off with a blink, peering back through curving corridors, cluttered but thankfully empty. ‘From people you have spoken with.’

He huffs a hollow laugh, eyes lifting to the cobwebbed ceiling. ‘Is that how you’re putting it? Then you would know my methods are not exactly subtle.’ 

‘The situation is different. I’m not asking you to prove a point. I simply want information. And you’re not the only Force user in this room.’ She turns her steely look from him, to Rey. ‘Rey, is this something you are skilled at, or could learn?’ Rey blinks, swallowing down a lump in her throat at the instinctual revulsion at the idea of revealing any part of their training together. ‘I don’t want to put you in danger. This information isn’t more valuable than your lives. If it cannot be done, we will find another way.’

Rey crosses her arms in front of her chest, leaning at his side. ‘It can be done.’

‘Are you willing to do it?’

‘I don’t have a choice.’ She turns her eyes to a shuffling movement behind them as raised voices reach them, contents muffled but irritated tone unmistakable. ‘I think we’ve outstayed our welcome, General.’ Is there any danger?  She flits her eyes to his. 

We’re interrupting the opening shift…  His mouth pulls into a slight curve, and Rey chuckles under her breath. 

‘Send us a time and a location, we’ll find out what we can. Tell me how I can reach you.’ Fancy a drink?  She forgets Leia is there almost entirely, mouth slowly pulling into a grin as she stares at him, pulled back to the task at hand by her voice.

‘I’ll send the details across. I apologize we can’t talk in more depth. I’d like to keep an open channel of communication between us, if you’re willing. There are fewer and fewer places I can’t truly trust nowadays.’

‘May we go?’ Rey asks unfolding her arms, her hand inching its way through the air to his. 

‘Yes, I must leave now. May the Force be with you.’

‘And with you.’ They watch with a puzzled expression as Leia ducks out through the maze of wonky, broom strewn corridors to disappear into the sunlight. Rey slumps back against the table piled with softened boxes and leans against him. 

‘You don’t have to hate her for my sake, you know.’

‘I don’t hate her. I’m used to being at someone’s beck and call. I just wish she wouldn’t pretend to be my friend.’

‘I don’t think she is pretending.’

‘But she’s ordering us around anyway. As if we have a choice. Do what she says or be turned over to the First Order. I’d hardly call that reciprocal.’

‘It’s a better offer than we’d get from anyone else.’

‘Do you think we were convincing enough?’

‘No, you’re terrible at this.’ She clicks her tongue at him in answer. ‘Come on, let’s get you that drink.’ He cradles her head and plants a quick kiss on her crown which she answers with a wonky befuddled smile in his direction, before pressing up to head back into the bar.

‘You know I don’t really drink. It just felt like the kind of thing to say in that moment.’

‘I bow to common consensus. And if my mother thinks this place is safe, I think we can stay here for a little while.’

They slide into a sticky booth in the corner as an older humanoid comes to greet them.

‘Kitchen’s not open if you’re wanting food.’

‘Just a drink if that’s okay?’

‘What can I get you?’

‘Something strong. We’re traveling through, I apologize I don’t know what you offer. Just wanted some shelter from the sun.’

‘I’ve got something strong, but if you drink it you won’t be flying out of here for a few hours. Same for you both?’

‘Sounds perfect. Thank you.’

As she speaks Ben slips into his role at her side, him training his awareness over the place as she talks for them, a pattern they'd adopted without any conscious thought with no real desire to break. A few high windows, shuttered against the sun, thick curtains to keep the heat out at the one public entrance. But people pour in and through the place like a liquid. Still with thick clay packed walls at their backs they have a fair vantage point, and by the unhurried pace of their server, slapping a wheezing air conditioner on his way past, the minds of those running the place are clearly elsewhere. 

He brushes off the table as best as he can before putting his arms on it, having rolled them up against a heat he'd continually unable to acclimatize to. 'This place is... Interesting.' He relents on removing his jacket, folding it across his lap.

'Is anyone watching us?' He looks at her, puzzled. 'Fine, arsehole. Is it a good idea for us to be here?' She'd dressed for the weather, once again he hadn't and is reduced to trying to fan some of the sluggish air under his collar. 'Why did you wear that?'

'Because I'm an idiot.' He slumps back, wrinkling his nose at the feel of sweat-damp fabric making contact with the small of his back. 'They know the General. They're friends of the Resistance. They saw us meet so we are also now assumed to be friends of the Resistance.'

She rolls her eyes at him, by now used to the petulant strop he slides into when he's uncomfortable, the sarcastic emphasis he puts on the phrase. He straightens his spine with a curl at his lip as if the words themselves are acidic. 'So we're reasonably safe...'

'That and we can assume everything we do will be fed back to her one way or another.'

'I see.' She takes the blaster from her belt and thumps it on the table, leaning on her elbow to watch him as he shifts, trying to wiggle himself comfortable as his eyes dart around the room. 'I take it this place isn't exactly what you're used to?'

'I wouldn't say that.'

'Who are you, exactly?'

'Bit late for introductions, isn't it?' She works herself out of her own jacket, shoving it away, all tanned arms and crisp linen. He'd watched her select her clothes for once without a thought as to how they would look together, him in dark loose layers, her lithely beautiful. Too close to the image they'd still occasionally come across. 'Why here and why now?'

'You look uncomfortable.'

'That would be because I am uncomfortable.'

'Do you not normally drink?'

'Generally, no. Drinking is for people who have fun. Thank you.' He takes the drinks offered and sets hers in front of her. 'What are you getting at?'

'Guess it's just weird to see the resemblance between you two.' She runs her finger through the frost of condensation on the glass, watching him out of the corner of her eye as he huffs and rolls his neck. 'Fine, I'll put it another way. I've done some reading on her, Senator Organa.'

'Ex-Senator.'

'An important woman, a lot of influence. So what does that make you?'

'Growing rapidly pissed off is what it makes me. I've gone pretty far out of my way to be seen as someone other than her son.'

'I don't know how this works. I guess it just interests me.'

He deflates, taking a sip with a roll of his eyes. 'I know. I'm sorry. To answer your question, no, this is not the kind of place a Senator's son would generally frequent. But my father was a smuggler, so that comes with it's own set of quirks. For instance, I know they served us the watered down stuff. So they know who we are, to an extent.'

'So she was honest about not telling anyone...'

'Or her trust in them or us is not absolute.'

She nods in thought, taking his lead and giving the place a quick sweep with her eyes, leaning in to whisper in his ear, waiting for him to turn to her. 'This is a fucking nightmare.'

A genuine smile breaks through his scowl and he stretches to clink her glass with his own. 'Cheers to that.'

They sit and sip the foaming drinks, watching the place comes alive around them. A door opens back of house and staff begin their raucous rundown of the previous night as one lazily pushes a broom around brushing sand back and forth to no avail. Slowly regulars stream in one by one and take up their spots with a wave as the kitchen door swings open at the hips of workers, arms laden with dishes and tubs. Their presence garners the occasional glance their way, quickly forgotten.

‘Well, I like it here.’ She smiles, taking another sip of the green beverage. ‘It’s nice to be around regular people.’ She waves her hand at his incredulous look. ‘You know what I mean. These people aren’t thinking about the war, about the Resistance.’

‘I think you romanticize it a little.’

‘No, I like to earn my keep. And then to go home and forget about it.' She tugs off her boots and leans against him. 'That’s all I ever really wanted.’

‘Do you feel better to be working for them?’

‘With them,' she corrects thoughtlessly. 'Hard to say right now. Maybe I will when we actually get to go do the work. Right now I just feel like I’m a piece in a game being moved around but never being played. Do you feel better?’

He shrugs. ‘I’m not sure. It’s hard not to feel like I’m going to be found out at any second. But this is nice.’

‘What is?’

‘Sitting in a seedy cantina with you, like we’re just any other couple.’

She blushes and takes a drink as her heartbeat accelerates in her chest. He wraps an arm around her shoulder and jostles her. ‘Hey!’ She admonishes, mopping her spilled drink from her front with a dark look thrown his way over her shoulder. 

‘Finish your drink before your brain takes over.’

‘Yeah, what’s left of it.’

‘What’s the deal with these two?’ she whispers around another drink, slumped against his side, eyes shining alcohol, not caring that she’s practically poured into the vinyl seat and only tangentially aware of her feet under her.

He ducks his head to follow her eye line. ‘Those two?’ His bassy voice rumbles in her ear and goose-bumps prickle at her neck. She pulls her suddenly tugging hair down and smooths it as best she can. 

‘Colleagues by the uniform. The taller one is the junior. He’s had twice as many drinks as the shorter one. I think he’s nervous…’ She twirls a strand of hair unconsciously in her fingers. ‘If I’m right, he’s going to tell a joke and make light of it.’ They both watch shamelessly as the taller man shifts nervously on his feet at the bar, turning away as his high pitched speech is met with a stony blankness before staring into the depths of his drink.

‘Oh no.’ Her eyebrows sink as the older man walks away murmuring into his communicator. ‘Why are you laughing?’ She accuses around a smile as he shakes against her, hiding himself behind his glass. ‘That poor man.’ She presses her lips into a line that quickly crinkles into a full smile. ‘Do you have no empathy?’ 

‘What, for the imaginary situation you’ve created for these two strangers?’

‘You saw it happen the same as I did.’ She shuffles angrily back into an upright position, wincing at the ache in her back from slouching. 

‘I’m beginning to think this might be a good strategy.’ He looks at her out of the corner of his eye, face flushed and eyes still on the man at the bar. ‘Get our intel by sitting in the corner of a bar and letting it come to us.’

‘You might be on to something.’ She pushes her empty glass away from her and sits back, watching him as he smooths an errant curl of hair over her shoulder and avoids her eye. ‘Hungry? I’ll go get us something.’

She slips out of the booth, gratified to find her legs remember how to support her. For a first proper time drinking, she’s probably had a little too much, but silently thanks her metabolism as she composes herself to head up to the bar. She can feel his eyes on her the whole way. 

‘What can I get you, love?’

She presses her palms onto the sticking countertop and slowly drags her eyes up to the face wryly smiling at her overwrought attempt to appear sober. ‘I’m not really sure. Food. Something to soak up that green stuff.’

‘I’ll send something over. Is your boy eating as well?’

'He's not', she stammers, 'we haven't.'

'You're all good hun. Just messing with you. Food?'

‘Please?’ She winces, pushing off from the bar, ignoring the low laugh behind her as her head spins. The place is starting to fill out with people fresh from early shifts and the odd traveller, sticking out in their clothes not sand bitten and frayed. She sits and jostles him, laying her head on his shoulder. ‘No idea what we’re getting but she said it would sober us up.’

‘Who said we need sobering up?’

‘If we’re ever going to fly, it’s probably a good idea. Besides, I want to kiss you right now, and it’s annoying me that I can’t.’ 

‘Let’s get you sobered up then. I know what you’re like when you’re frustrated.’

She purses her lips and breaths out a huff through her nose. ‘You piece of bantha dung.’ She enunciates sweetly and he crushes her to his side with his arm, pressing a kiss to her temple lightly sheened with sweat. 

Fed and tired they head back to the dock watching their shadows lengthen in the brisk winter dusk. They’d not dressed for walking in the chill night air, but they’re warmed with the last dregs of alcohol and greasy food served with thick hunks of bread. She turns to look at the shabby cantina in the pink of sunset, trying to fix it in her memory. 

‘Are you nervous? About our assignment?’ She asks, fitting her fingers through his as they talk in hushed whispers. She supervises the careful placing of each foot, not entirely trusting them to go where she tells them to. 

‘Not really. It’ll be strange but I don’t think it’s particularly high risk. I’m less enthused about having to talk to my mother on a regular basis.’

‘You don’t have to. I don’t mind talking to her.’

‘I don’t want you to have to do that. I’ll get over it.’

‘Because you’re famously easy going…’

‘I don’t appreciate you mocking me, Jedi.’ He shoves her lightly as they catch sight of their ship. 

Safely floating towards their next destination on autopilot, she unbuckles and heads straight through to the bedroom to shuck on fresh clothes and flop heavily onto the bed. ‘I love this ship.’ He follows the sound of her voice where she lies sprawled on the covers.

‘You’re drunk.’ He hops trying to pull off his boots before he sits and loses any will do to so. 

‘I’m not, I’m just happy.’ She smiles, eyes closed. ‘Why are you over there?’ 

‘You’re taking up the entire bed.’

‘Move me then.’ He shrugs then scoops her into his arms, sitting on the edge of the bed with her arms loosely looped around his shoulders.

‘Better?’ She answers by kissing him, not breaking contact between them as he lays her on the bed and leans over her, thumb grazing her ribcage. 

A conspiratorial grin spreads over her face before she opens her eyes to lazily find his. ‘I liked sitting with you at that bar, pretending we’re just normal people. It suits you, to be some random sweaty person. I imagine if I’d met you there we’d still have ended up here.’ 

‘You’d have gone home with some random guy at a bar?’ He smirks. 

‘Maybe I would have if that random guy was you. Or maybe I’d have left you staring into your drink and hopefully thinking about me before you go to sleep. Wishing you’d have said something…’

‘You think I wouldn't have said something?’ He strokes her hair, leaving his hand resting at her neck. 

‘I’d have hoped you would have. And if you didn’t, maybe I’d have said something.’

‘What would you have said?’

She shrugs. ‘Maybe that I’d like to feel your hands on me. I like how you touch me, always a little too hard, just a little desperate.’ He hides his face against her chest as she strokes her fingers against his scalp to feel him shiver against her. ‘Like I said, we’d have still ended up here. Could have saved us an awful lot of time.’ She smiles up at the ceiling, feeling his hand bracket her slowly rising chest. ‘What shall we do with our last official night of freedom?’ He grumbles and moves to press her shirt upwards, kissing hungrily at her exposed skin. ‘It’s like you read my mind.’ She laughs, voice catching as her breathing stutters.

She closes her fluttering eyelids as he kisses every inch of her skin until she is completely exposed, clothes pushed off onto the floor. She hears his follow and kisses him, back arching as he curls a finger into her and she gasps into his mouth. She clings to him as he kisses down past her ear to bite at the skin of her neck and a groan rumbles out of her. She’s pinned beneath a delirious onslaught of feeling, lightly sweating skin sensitised to his touch, the roar of her blood pumping in her ears.

It's still shocking how different it feels from her own fumbling attempts. Hers were always perfunctory, a means to an end, ticking a checkbox of the various biological needs required to keep her moving. She’d never been slowly drawn higher and higher, his unhurried pace heating her skin in a flush. She crushes his mouth to hers, whining into his mouth and clinging desperately as he keeps up his mind melting pace. 

He kisses her as she comes with a shuddering moan, pressing his lips to her flushed skin and watching her open her eyes to meet his. She pulls his face to hers and pants against him with a needy desperation as he smooths his hands over her, wetness there cooling in the conditioned air where his hands flutter seemingly unable to decide where to rest. She pulls his hand to her face to suck them into her mouth, until he pulls them away to chase the taste on her tongue, hand pressing at her neck.

He mumbles his praise against her lips, her brain too lazy to catch onto the meaning, dipping to lightly catch her lip in his teeth. 

She nudges him onto his back and curls at his side, languid limbs not allowing for more than a lazy slump keeping them at eye level. He’s hard and hot in her hand as she slowly strokes him, mouthing along his jawline and feeling his pulse under her lips. One hand is threaded with hers, the other skimming over her arm as his muscles tense and twitch. She doesn’t need to ask for feedback as she swirls her thumb over the head, feeling him writhe underneath her and his fingers spasm against her skin. His breathing accelerates as his eyes search her face, begging her to kiss him. She complies.

His grip on her hand tightens and his breath hitches in his throat as she kisses around a twisted groan, feeling his chest finally expand for a hungry lungful of air as his come trickles down her hand. She kisses his heated forehead before licking at her fingers at the fluid rapidly cooling there. She looks at it properly for the first time, pooled on the still rippling muscles of this abdomen and wonders what it would feel like in her mouth, whether he's let her hold it there to feel it twitch. 

He rubs the heels of his palms into his eyes and shudders. ‘I heard that’, he says before devolving into silent laughter. ‘I think that’s an unfortunate side effect.’ He pulls her to his side to curl up there. ‘They don’t write about that in the Jedi manuals, funnily enough.’ He tangles his fingers in her hair and frowns. ‘Shower.’

They let the water do its job as he washes and untangles her hair and she hums at the feeling of his fingertips against her scalp. Any aches she’s been carrying have been dissolved by a blistering orgasm, hot water and strong hands kneading her muscles into a jelly. She pulls his arms around her to let him support her weight, breathing in hot damp air into her lungs. She feels the scrape of stubble against her sensitised neck as he ducks his head, setting off a wave of shivers. 

‘We should just keep running.’

He presses a kiss to her shoulder. ‘We could. But do you really want to?’ 

She sighs. ‘What if they try to separate us?’

‘They’d fail.’

‘Promise?’ She screws her eyes shut at the childish need echoing in the tiny shower cubicle.

‘There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to stop that from happening.’

She smiles. ‘Tell me.’

‘I would give them such pain they’d wish they were being burned alive.’ He presses along the shivering skin of her neck. ‘The only person who could make me leave would be you. You’d have to kill me to do it. If anyone kills me, I hope it’s you.’ She remembers snowflakes sticking to her lashes as he falls bleeding into the blackened snow, gasping around the sizzling wound of her blade. ‘Would you do it, if I asked you? If they were going to kill me, would you do it instead?’ 

She swallows, feeling a chill roll through her body, despite the steaming spray around her. ‘I won’t let that happen.’ She shakes her head against his chest, trying to shake the burrowing thought loose. 

‘But if it did, I’d want your face to be the last one I saw.’

Her heart thumps in her chest, the dizziness of the heat threatening to overcome her. ‘It would be like killing myself…’ Her stomach lurches at the realization of the truth of her words, that she would experience what it would be like to have a part of her ripped away and stay standing. ‘I would do it and it would be the last thing I’d ever do.’ Hot tears run down her face and neck and are lost to the wet skin of their arms twisted over her heart. 

He towels them both dry in heavy silence, as her eyes hold his in a weighted stare. Fear turns her blood to ice as he carefully dries her hair and her mind races. The suicidal tendency that had them pulled to each other like magnets, refusing to let drop the line between them even as they fought against each other, foils of each other. The same urge that made her go to him, flee with him even as the blood was still wet on their skin. At the end of it, would it always end up like this?  Connected, inseparably entwined until only death could pull them apart. And a part of her nagging at her, telling her that this is how it was always meant to be. 

They lay down in silence, and she curls at his side, hands tingling, feeling as if she’s continuously falling as his fingers lazily card through her hair. 

She awakes in the cold dark as terror rips painfully through her brain and she does a quick inventory to check her limbs are still attached. Her skin glows gray in the weak light of the ship, ears ringing in the eerie silence. His eyelids spasm underneath a brow drawn with pain, but he’s otherwise completely still as a wave of nausea settles in her stomach as she pulls herself upright to smooth his face with trembling fingers.

Her words are nonsense as she tries to tamp down her panic to wake him, pleading out in the dark. Finally, she sags with relief as his eyelids crack slowly open and the waves of pain start to dull, all the frantic energy leaving her like a yawn. She buries her face at his neck and sobs burble against his skin as his arms encircle her, crushing her to him. He gulps, and speaks with a voice hoarse from noiseless screaming.

‘I’m so sorry. For all of this. It’s not fair to you.’ She shakes her throbbing head against his skin. ‘Nothing about this is normal, you shouldn't have to be around it. I wish I could have met you some other way…’

‘Don’t say that’, her words are slurred with tears.

‘It’s the truth.’

‘Don’t.’ She warns. 

‘You deserve so much better than this.’

She pulls herself upwards to look at him squarely. ‘Are you going to tell me now that I shouldn’t be around you, for my own good? After you promised nobody would split us apart.’

‘Rey…’

‘Don’t patronize me. Say what you mean.’

‘Being around me hurts you. I hurt you, all the time.’

‘And I hurt you. But this isn’t about that. You’re scared.’ He squares his jaw, but doesn’t respond. ‘Guess what, I’m scared too. I don’t know how to be around people. Before you I’d never slept beside another person, let alone have them touch me or see my body. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve never known what it’s like to worry about someone else, think about what would happen if they died. What it would feel like to be alone again and know I can’t go back to who I was before. I’m more scared now than I was back at that cave. I would take that over this because the idea that you might leave me “for my own good” makes me want to fucking die.’ She grabs his jaw in a vice-like grip. ‘Stop talking. I’m not an idiot, I know this isn’t exactly healthy. People are going to look at us and think we’re insane, and they’re probably right. But unlike you, I’m not particularly interested in what people expect of me, what they think I should want. I want you. Is that not enough? Am I not enough? Am I some fragile thing you’ve created in your mind or am I the person who will claw what I want out of the earth with my fingers?’ She cranes over him to spit at him. ‘I came to you, I chose you, and I nearly died for it. Remember who you’re talking to.’ 

She burns him with her gaze, breathing out hot panting breath, her nails digging into his skin. She kisses him, hard, bruising her face against his as static flares behind her eyes. She struggles against his hands where they encircle her wrists, pushing forward into the kiss and pushing her writhing body under his as she bites him.

He pulls back to look at her angrily pressing up to meet him, pinned under his grip. She tries to twist them free and growls, pushing her pelvis up to his. He grinds down in answer, watching as her pupils dilate with arousal. He chuckles and she huffs through her nose with fury.

‘You want to be in control? You want to take what you want? Do it.’ He leans down, ‘or have you forgotten who I am?’ She gnashes her teeth at him and swears a string of curses picked up through traveling merchants, shared around furtive firelight. ‘Make me let you go.’ He challenges in a musing drawl. ‘Unless you don’t want to.’

She pushes into his mind, wrenching through his recent memory and pulling his dreamed pain to the forefront in a white-hot lick. He pushes her back with a minute flinch, head thumping with the echo of it.

‘Clever trick. Who did you learn that from?’ She swears at him, trying to throw him up off her body by curving off the mattress. He pushes a hand to her throat and squeezes, watching her eyes widen and her mouth fall open around nothing. ‘Try again.’ He grinds against the wet skin of her crotch with a painfully hard erection. ‘Make me remember who I’m talking to.’

He lets go of her hands which immediately claw at the hand around her throat, scraping the skin. He pushes his hand between them to push his fingers into her with another sharp bow of her spine. She’s impossibly wet around his fingers as he leans to whisper in her ear and her eyes slide shut.

‘I know you could stop me, but you don’t want to.’ He strokes her with firm, deep pressure, watching her abdomen flutter and tense. He squeezes, feeling her tighten around his barrage of sensations. He smiles, watching her come with a silent shout before removing his grip on her throat. She doubles over as her thighs shiver and she sucks in breaths, stroking her bruised skin and letting loose another string of profanities before devolving into laughter and then awed silence.

‘That was…’ She blinks, slumping onto her side eyes rapidly tracing thoughtless patterns above them. ‘How are we ever going to get anything done?’ She laughs as he pulls her into a hug.

‘We won’t.’ He beams as she bites at him through his shirt, an instinctual desire to transfer a little of how she feels to him, bypassing her brain. ‘But maybe we need to find a better way to say what we want that doesn’t involve arguing.’

‘What, something like, “hey, could you please strangle me a little? I’m overthinking things”? I don’t know how this works…’ She grimaces as he untangles a particularly pernicious tangle. ‘I just know I like your hands on me. I want to find all the ways we can affect each other. Can I touch you?’ He slumps his head on her shoulder as she grins, hand still tangled in her hair. ‘My hands aren’t as big as yours’, she murmurs in his ear, ‘but maybe I could use my teeth?’ 

He brackets her face in his hands. ‘I'm obsessed with you.’

She grins a toothy grin and takes him in her hand, stroking in a now somewhat familiar pattern but a little harder as his legs tense under her thighs. His hands wrap around the smooth skin of her hips as she drags her nails down his chest clamping her mouth at his pulse-point as he groans, speeding up her pace as his fingers digs into her flesh. 

She tries to keep steady as he tenses under her, drinking in the sound of his strangled breathing and the shivers that move over his skin at her touch. She feels dizzy with every little cut-off groan that escapes him, lathing at his skin with her mouth and brushing her lips over the imprint of her teeth there, knowing they will leave a mark. She sucks hard on the already sensitive skin and pulls him through a ragged orgasm, smothering his groans with her mouth and only slowing to a stop when overstimulated shocks run through his abdomen. 

After a perfunctory cleanup she turns his head in her hands to admire the purpling bruises on his neck with a satisfied hum before curling up against him to sleep. 

Chapter Text

The packet of information from Leia takes them a few moments to read over. A last known location, a holo of the now missing informant, a shopkeeper and mother. Trade was slowing to a trickle in the sector, say those in the area. Free movement of goods was getting harder to obtain, and what did get through was being heavily taxed and thoroughly inspected. Tourism in the old market town was struggling as honeymooners increasingly found the hospitality they found strained under the tense blanket thrown over the glittering town. 

‘So we just wander around and see what we can skim from people’s minds?’

‘Pretty much.’ He plugs the coordinates into the computer with a too hard jab. 

‘And if another Force user realises what we’re doing?’

‘We run. Or try to.’

‘That’s very comforting.’ She pouts as he shoots a dark questioning look her way. ‘What’s our cover?’

‘Just tourists passing through. Just act like normal and try to find out if anyone has seen anything. There’s no need to take any risks.’ She watches the ship shudder into lightspeed, stars blurring past them into a featureless smudge as he begins setting up the landing procedure. 

‘She's a presumed prisoner to the First Order and we might be able to help.’ She sits, sleep still hanging around her limbs as she stretches to prime the landing gear. 

‘If she is with the Order, there’s little hope of getting her back.’ He flashes a brief sad smile her way as she pushes to stand and dress in flowing linen clothes. She weaves the pin through her hair, turning the ship into the approach as he does the same, returning the image of a tourist, clothing relaxed even as he recedes into himself in front of her. She tries to ignore the static hum beside her of him shielding himself as the planet swims into view. 

They land on a riverside jetty the color of sun-bleached bone, exchanging a few credits with a slender Twi’lek and receiving instructions on which meandering path will take them to the shopping district. 

The Order have been here. Any sign you’ve been recognised, we go. We do what we have to to get back to the ship. Understood?  She feels his palm ghost at her lower back as their shadows shorten in the rising sun. Let’s get out of the sun. 

She surveys the tiny cafe for what seats to take, reaching out subtly to gauge the tone of the patrons thoughts as she spies an abundance of plush looking nooks. The walls are hung with pictures, paintings, tarnished spoons and embroidered fabrics studded with tiny sharp jewels. The closer she looks the more she sees, scanning over the crinkled and smiling faces of the past. 

She rejoins him at the counter as skilled hands pour their beverages into delicate mismatched cups the size of her cupped palm. 

Anything? He snakes his arm around her waist to pull her to him as his voice slides into her mind. 

Nothing beyond the ordinary. Tired and overheated brains coming back into focus. We’re trying not to attract attention, remember? Her heart flutters as he presses a kiss to her temple and grabs their drinks. She leads them back through plush curtains to a low corner beside a tiny diamond-shaped window outlined in tarnished metal. All the while she can feel his eyes on the back of her neck. 

She sinks back into the chair, cupping her beverage like a bird in her hands so as not to spill it. It’s caff, but thick, viscous and fruity. She takes a sip to find it almost but not entirely unlike what they’d been drinking for the last few weeks. She laughs as the flavour coats her mouth and tongue. ‘This is how it’s supposed to taste, isn’t it?’ He smiles as she shakes her head incredulously. 

‘Where do you want to go?’ His knee jostles hers, folded almost completely in on himself in the low seat. 

‘We have credits. And I hear this place is famed for its fabrics.’ The shopkeeper was the respected proprietor of one of the oldest and most revered fabric shops in the sector. ‘I would like to find out what all the fuss is about.’ She leans back, taking in the hushed babble around her, dialects and languages of all kinds, blending into a kind of tapestry of its own. With effort she can follow the odd thread before it dips out of view: Basic, Shyriiwook and Hutteese slang uttered with the clipped accent of the Core worlds, a trill of binary as a mouse droid slips past the draped doorway. Below it all another tapestry altogether, internal worlds not rounded into uniformity by the influence of the gathering of voices around them; loneliness, homesickness, the tentative hopefulness of an unrequited love held close and refusing to die. Her heart twinges in sympathy, letting the thread go. 

Anything? She asks, leaning her head on his shoulder to watch the sun climb a wobbling and distorted path through the amber glass. 

Nothing as yet. The owner doesn’t think too highly of the Order. They’ve been slowing down his deliveries and he worries his reputation will suffer. Her eyes dart around the busy interior as she feels the stimulating effect of the drink sharpen her vision into greater focus. 

‘Ready to go?’

She huffs, reluctantly hauling herself upright, watching him duck through the low doorway in her peripheral vision as she walks their cups back to the counter and they step back into the scorching sunlight. 

They duck quickly into another darkened interior where a young shopkeeper turns delicate metal bugs on their backs between her fingers to show them the iridescent rock mined from the planet's ancient volcanic crust, lost to conscious memory. She’s caring for her mother, whose joints age has stiffened and who's almost entirely confined to the small flat above them, universe narrowed down to everything her milky eyes can take in in one sweep. They enjoy the relative subtlety of the Order here, a planet for now escaping the push and pull of galactic politics. They leave with a small fabric folded trinket tucked into her pocket. 

The garment district spills out of the narrow alley that had at one point contained it. Bolts of rich fabrics lean against the mossy exteriors, flapping in the light breeze like the wings of giant birds. Inside a great frame of night-black wood is threaded with a crowd of fine bobbins like long dangling fruits, a design seemingly emerging unbidden from its growth. They wander around the cluttered shop, only soul inside save from themselves lost in the meditative task of her craft, breathing in and out slowly like the tide. Their gaze passes impassively over them, and they are forgotten.

They find their destination, tucked between two other small cave-like openings and step inside. A young girl stands to greet them with a slight shy bow, inquiring if there’s anything in particular they need.

‘I’m sorry,’ Rey smiles, ‘I’m not sure I’m in the right place. I’m sure I came here before and spoke with someone. Is there anyone else who works here with you?’ She keeps her gaze open as she drags her eyes over the stacks of rich fabrics forming what looks like the walls of the place.

‘It’s just me here today. I’ll try to help you as much as I can. You most likely spoke with T’easa but she isn’t here right now.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, she was very kind to me. We’re here for a few days, will she be back in that time?’ 

‘I believe she’s gone to stay with family. I’m minding the place until she returns. I’m sorry for the disappointment.’ 

‘It’s no disappointment at all. I’m sure you are very knowledgeable in your own right.’ She watches the young girl twist her hands and look down, before beginning to haltingly find what they’re looking for. The tremble in her voice smooths as she leads them through stacks of sumptuous woven fabrics and garments with obvious expertise. 

What are you doing?

She smiles as the girl appraises Rey’s body with a look and leads her towards a rack of crisply pressed tailored trousers. Finding out what she knows. 

What if she remembers you? She doesn’t reply, taking a delicately embroidered pair of trousers from the girls hands, waistband spanned with root like details picked out in shining thread.

‘They’re sewn with a rare ore, pulled to a thread by an indigenous moth species. They can only survive in our atmosphere. They're protected better than many people are.’ She presses lightly into her mind, finding the image of one such dusted creature, flapping its gossamer wings against her caged fingers.

They pay with thanks, and leave the hush of the store to re-join the procession of tanned tourists, breezing unhurried down the street. A window latches closed above them. 

‘I really don’t know what we’re looking for.’ She admits, pointing towards a child tottering into the sun as he throws his hands up in the joy of being caught. 

Maybe we see what people are thinking back at the dock? She nods, swinging her bag at arms length and trying to match his long strides with her own. 

They weave back against the flow of traffic, past families suffused with an unhurried glow of existing outside of their usual responsibilities and expectations. Their ship is nestled amongst many other similar ones, theirs slightly rustier and dirtier, but nonetheless unobtrusive. 

‘Leaving so soon?’ The Twi’lek questions, ‘I hope you’re not disappointed in your stay with us.’

‘Not at all’, she swings her bag, threading her free hand through his. ‘It’s like its own little world here.’ She beams at him, reaching out with her mind as her eyes catch the glow of the sun. His face doesn’t betray him, even as his thoughts turn with bitterness to the cost of their little idyll, and the bitter current that flows through it like poison. The man sat besuited in honey linen, playing tabac in the sun by day, who takes what he wants by night, with a hollow smile. She pushes the image to him, stepping away with one last nod to the keeper and heading for their ship.

They’re here all right. Her smile slides from her face in the unnatural glow of the craft. She watches through the windscreen as the man throws his hand to the table with a guffaw as a child peeks at him from the shadows and then ducks out of sight. She pulls on her trousers, feeling the lining slide against her skin and the pleats fall across her abdomen as if made for her. They watch the man stand with a stretch, place a wide hat on his head and head into town with a lazy wave of his hand as a droid trundles out to clear the evidence of his presence. 

They follow him, keeping him at the end of their vision as he pushes past the curtain of a saloon. She scans the place for a table, finding him nestled like a bug around a high table, tapping his foot to a rhythm of his own imagining. 

‘Shall we eat?’ A server appears at their elbows, pressing a tiny menu onto the scratched table-top between them. 

They nod wordless thanks and read the offerings, as Ben picks the man's foul thoughts out of the milieu.  Many systems away a family waits for him to return from his very special appointment at the orders of the General. They pray for his safety as he racks his eyes over the bodies of his servers and the families from whom he might press for a small ‘favor’. A night of companionship, limbs plaint with a distant resignation, the glassiness to the eyes he prizes like a jewel. Ben meets Rey’s eyes with a tight smile and a shake of his head.

He might be the one. By his thoughts, it doesn’t think much about taking from the people here. 

Should we talk to him? He shakes his head, flagging down a server to ask for drinks for them both. 

So we just wait here and see if he incriminates himself? She smiles her thanks as a frosted drink is deposited in front of her, clouded with muddled berries. Sweetness coats her tongue as she bristles at the brush of her mind against their target, immediately drawing back into herself as if his mind is statically charged. 

We have enough for now. He presses her clammy hand in his and she closes her eyes with a shiver. We can go….

No. I want to know for sure. Let’s wait. 

They almost abandon their resolve as an array of small dishes are brought out for them, fried crispy things and fresh tangy things, accompanied by thin bread as soft as skin. She busies herself observing the people around her, all in their own little bubbles, paying each other no mind as orphaned snippets of their conversations hang in the air.

You're good at this stuff. She drags her attention back to Ben, reluctantly backing her way out of a silent inward conversation between a young couple both separately struggling with their fears.

Excuse me?

You take to this easier than I thought you would.

She drinks the last of her drink, all melted ice and fruit as he takes in the tables around them. When it's just you, you get used to being the person people want you to be. 

You seem very relaxed...

Well it helps that I'm happy. I don't like why we're here, but I'm not uncomfortable to be here with you.  

At length, their mark leaves with a string of enthusiastic goodbyes to his companions, plodding lackadaisically towards the darkness outside.  She slips from her seat leaving Ben behind to hurriedly cover their bill, striding into the night, skin prickling in the cold. She follows him into the reverential hush of a riverside alleyway, sliding through the shadows calling out backwards in her mind as she’s obscured from view. 

He’s leaning his inebriated body against rough and cool stone when she pushes into his brain, looking for the face from the holo and finding it, pushed backwards onto an unmarked ship, tear-tracks picked out by bright moonlight before she’s swallowed by darkness. Furious nausea creeps up her throat as she turns back the way she came, counting each footsteps that takes her away from the man whose putrid brain burbles happily away, belly full, tanned skin flashing below his cuffs as he checks the time he has no real need to register. 

‘Let’s go.’ She all but pulls him back to the safety of their ship, tinkling laughter cut off by the ramp sliding shut. ‘I’m going to tell the General.’ She pulls her hair roughly down and shakes it out, murmuring out a bitter report, jaw tensed and eyes unseeing as she presses the point of her pin into the pad of her thumb. 

He returns, tipping her head back in his hands to swipe away the tears on her cheeks as her hands shake against his forearms. 

‘Come on.’ He leads her back, mute and imploring,to their bedroom, sliding her out of her new trousers and neatly folding them away before moving on to the next. Shirking out of his own, he cradles her stricken face in his palms and kisses each mottled inch of it, pressing forth his own fear and disgust, along with his pride and admiration of her. Her chin wobbles, and he kisses her until her tears stop falling. 

‘What do you need?’ He asks, desperately searching her eyes in turn. 

‘I want to forget.’ He lies next to her, closing his eyes as his stomach clenches painfully. ‘I know’, she sighs, ‘I won’t ask you to. Just be with me.’

‘I’m here, I’ll be here as long as you need me.’

‘Closer.’ She pulls him over her. ‘More’, she grits out with the last of her air. He cages her head between his arms and presses his forehead to hers, shuddering around watery breath. She presses against him in challenge, eye twitching as she feels him hard against her sensitive skin. She hooks her ankle behind his legs and rolls her hips against his as he huffs hot breath at her shoulder. 

‘Are you sure?’ He stares into her eyes, seeing nothing but desperate want. ‘I don’t want you to regret anything. You’re not okay right now.’ He brushes a hot tear from her cheek, kissing her as she cries and shakes against his mouth. He rocks her shaking body against his chest, staring terrified into the ceiling until she drops into a fitful sleep. 

She wakes in darkness with the familiar hum of the ship around her, covered in the gray blankets. A hand rests on the small of her back even as he breathes steadily under her and a fear rips through her. She gently unwinds herself to take his face in her hands and stroke his cheek as he wakes, eyes finding her in the dark.

‘I wouldn’t ever regret it,’ she whispers, swallowing as she claws for the courage to continue. ‘I want to be close to you. Please say you do too.’ His breath comes out frayed against her mouth. ‘But I need you to understand that once we do there will be a part of us that can never be separated again. I have to know it means the same to you as it does to me.’ Her lips shake as she stares at him, begging him to speak. ‘It would bind us, forever.’ She closes her eyes in shame at the neediness of it all, even as it’s the truth. She had never given any part of herself casually, to anyone, and doesn’t think she ever could. Now she stands on the precipice, waiting for him to hurl her into the darkness below.

He moves to sit and she claws the blanket around herself, swallowing down bitter rejection as she kneels crumpled and boneless. He kisses her down-turned face as tears overflow her lashes, pulling her chest to his and smoothing her thighs over his lap. He gasps breathlessly over her shoulder, combing absentmindedly through her loose hair. He gulps and cradles her skull in trembling fingers, ducking to kiss away a loose tear shuddering on her skin. 

‘I am yours, Rey. There’s is nothing I want more than to be bound to you.’ He kisses her, slowly, each unhurried movement setting her stomach swooping and her skin rippling with waves of goosebumps as she shivers in his arms. ‘Are you cold?’ 

She shakes her head, feeling like every nerve is a live wire. He presses his mouth down the column of her throat, feeling her pulse drone against his lips as her eyelids flutter. ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ He whispers, a low rumble into her ear and she gasps audibly, twisting to fit their mouths together in a kiss. 

She nods feverishly against him as he presses her backwards and follows her down. She cants her hips toward him, pushing their pelvises together before breaking off with a startled inhale. She lets go of her tension in a painful twinge as he lightly circles a finger against her. She spreads her legs just slightly and he watches her face as he curls his finger into her. Valiantly she tries  to maintain steady eye contact, clasping at his shoulder as he presses even deeper before adding another finger and feeling as if her heart is going to beat its way out of her chest. 

She pulls him down to her and closes her eyes, head swimming. She pleads out a wave of feeling, burying her face at his neck as colors swim behind her closed eyes, the colors of the ocean. Her hand finds his where he touches her, twisting with it for a moment before reaching for him to smother his strangled exhale with her mouth. 

The angle is awkward and her fingers shake around his, pressed close between their overheated skin. She feels as if they’ve both forgotten how to speak entirely; all she can do is feel him pressed against her thighs and his dry throat moving around a nervous swallow. Rey stares as the image of his face slowly resolves out of the darkness. She feels her heartbeat where they’re pressed together, like a sharp snare of a drum, until she can’t take it anymore. She nods a tiny fluttering thing at him, as her eyes blink around brewing tears. 

Not that different from anything they’ve done, at least in theory, clinging to his strong arms as she wiggles trying to work out how to bring them together. The instinctual draw of his body seems to fail her at the end. What had always been as easy as running her fingers along his skin and following the urge to bring them closer, now dredging up a sinking doubt that it was setting her up for humiliation. That this is simply not made for people like her. Then this thought is pushed into the darkness by his kiss at her temple, fitting his fingers through her shaking ones to guide them. 

He smooths his hand over her cheek, lightly, like a prayer, before gently pressing into her. Her eyes widen, a tiny panic of unfamiliarity dying at the back of her throat as his shaking hand skims her cheekbone. And then it’s gone, and she feels her temperature climb, like sliding into hot water as she pulls him to her and presses their thundering hearts together. 

Her voice cracks before she speaks. She clears her throat and tries again.

‘Why are you going so slow? Ben, please’ Please, I feel like I’m losing my mind . She doesn’t have the presence of mind to tell him, forgetting that it’s an option, entirely focused on the little half breaths it pushes out of her as her muscles twitch and tense against her will.

‘We only get one chance to do this for the first time.’ She opens her eyes to find he’s watching her, gently stroking the hair at her shoulder and laying it down on flushed and sensitive skin as a hot tear rolls into her hairline.

‘Please.’ She closes her eyes, her jaw wobbling as he kisses at her damp cheek.

‘Are you okay?’

She wraps her arms around his head to hold him against her neck, toes incessantly twitching, trying to process what she’s feeling. ‘I didn’t know it would be like this.’ She shakes her head against him. ‘I don’t know what I thought. I didn’t know.’

‘Do you want me to stop?’

Anger and astonishment are familiar ground she’s thankful to find. ‘Gods, you’re an idiot. No’, she shakes her head, mouth pulling into a grin. ‘Just give me a minute.’

‘I thought I was going too slow.’ He’s flushed, voice low as he squints at her. 

She cups his jaw and it shakes like hers does. ‘You’re shaking.’

‘The polite thing would be to not draw attention to it.’ 

‘Oh, I’m sorry. Do you want to start over?’ She laughs and is immediately reminded that he’s inside her, the sound breaking off into a nervous chuckle. ‘Is um…,’ she stammers. ‘Are you…’ she trails off, gesturing vaguely before giving up as his mind-reading skills fall below par. ‘Are you all the way inside me yet?’ He shakes his head, trying to suppress a smile. ‘Fucking hell.’ Her head flops back against the mattress and she lets out a ragged breath. ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’

‘Does it hurt?’

‘No. It feels like I’m going insane.’ She holds his eye, feeling a shiver run through her. ‘I thought I knew what it would feel like.’ A flash of a smile as his eyes fall out of focus, momentarily lost in the tangle of his thoughts before he pulls himself back to her. 

‘What does it feel like?’ He pulls out almost completely, pushing slowly back in as she whimpers and pulls his mouth to hers. He can hear half words pop at the back of her throat as he kisses her, slowly working to bring their hips flush. Her nails bite into the skin of his arms as he pulls back to look at her. Her smile comes first, then she slowly opens her eyes and they focus on his.  

With a smile and a sigh, she rolls her pelvis towards him and pleasure as sharp as a knife squeezes the air from her chest in a gasp. It’s terror she finds in his eyes, mirror to her own. She memorizes the little places at which his face twitches as he holds her gaze; under his eye, his jaw, his neck. She cradles his face against her neck and moves once again. 

Pleasure flows through her like a wave, resettling her into a shape similar but not quite what she was before, leaving a shiver in its wake. She opens her eyes lazily to find him looking at her, her mouth pulled into a lopsided and toothy grin as her stomach twists with fear and joy in equal measure. She juts out her chin in challenge, eyes fluttering closed and neck arching as he rolls his hips into hers. A low rumbling moan falls out of her as she draws her leg behind his to pull him closer. She laughs as tears roll from the corner of her eyes and down onto the bed, snaking her arms around his neck  and mashing their mouths together. 

She loses the sense of her own body as pleasure burns everything from her brain. She claws at him, writhing underneath his body and mouthing at every patch of skin she can reach with senseless susurrations pressed there. She draws his face back to hers and drags one trembling hand to her breast, slowly bringing their lips together with featherlight swipes against the reddened skin. He watches a sad smile tug at the corner of her mouth as she swallows. ‘You realize we’re doomed now, right?’ Her throat wobbles as she holds his gaze, eyes swimming with hot defiant tears that fall as his shaking lips find hers. 

She twists underneath him with every movement, hands not sure where to settle. Every sensation is overwhelming, threatening to pull her under and never let her go. 'Please,’ she gasps. ‘Go faster.'

'I don't know. I think I like you like this,' he teases, kissing her forehead. 'You're okay, I promise,' he assures her with a lazy smile.

She feels as if she's expanding as he keeps to his achingly slow pace. He drags inside her slowly, not letting her get any distance from the feeling and keeping her there; keeping it sharp and urgent.

'I don't know…I don’t know if I can take it.' She grinds her head against the pillow, pressure squeezing at the base of her throat. 

'It’s okay. We'll be okay.' He kisses her damp cheek, closing his eyes. 

She can feel her orgasm build dimly in the background, having already resigned herself to the idea that it wouldn't happen and just content to have him close. She had figured being relaxed was necessary; it always had been in the past. Whenever she needed to relieve her own tension, she needed quiet, isolation. The combination of swirling anxiety and sharp pleasure sets her stomach twisting, the two polar opposites pulling at her mind. But slowly pleasure crowds out anything else, dragging her closer than she'd thought possible, her brain tagging along behind her body. Once again her body takes over, her hips rolling to meet his, bringing their mouths together and holding him to her with a hand tangled in his hair. 

She feels her ears redden as they roll desperately against each other, close but somehow still not close enough. She digs her heel into his thigh, trying to press ever closer even through the twinge of pain around having him inside of her. She laughs, a crazed half sob, as heat creeps over her chest and over her cheeks. She presses her skull to his as finally she crosses over, sure she would lose her mind and happily resigned to it. It hits her, so hard she loses sense of her body in a formless gray nowhere, before sinking back into it, each thrust setting off a chain reaction of shivering pleasure from her crotch to her head. Her eyes won’t stay open, she catches glimpses of his racked face before he presses it to her neck to come with a gasp and a bruising grasp at her sweat slicked shoulder. 

They catch ragged breaths, skin cooling with a shudder as their hands reach out to each other leaving hot paths in their wake. Tears slide silently around her nose and down in a steady procession. They fringe her view in a shimmering silver as he presses a kiss to her hand and hides behind it, eyebrows raising as he blinks back his own. She can’t think of any words that wouldn’t sound stupid, so she crawls to burrow against his chest and lets out a racking wet sigh. 

They wash under the burning spray, his hands gently tickling over her soreness. She lets herself be held up in his arms as the heat soothes away her headache and turns her thoughts to mush. Curled clean next to him, wet hair fanned out behind her, they speak in little nonsense stories between them; snippets of tales heard long ago, beautiful things they dimly remember, fingers tangling between them. At a half remembered dirty joke, she barks a laugh at his shocked recoil and pins him underneath her laughing body, holding his jaw as he tries his best to look scandalized and skims his fingers against her ribs. Her look darkens and her vision swims in front of her. 

She pushes him back into her as a pleasure licks up her spine and into her hairline. She slumps against his hands, blood rushing in her ears like a roaring crowd. She presses one palm against his heartbeat as they roll their bodies together, the anesthetic calm of it warring and losing to a desperation that itches in their bloodstream, demanding more, to be closer, always closer. She digs her nails into his flesh as he presses even deeper, dragging deliciously against her. Her heart thumps and her fingers go numb, and she comes with a pained gasp. Her chest heaves as his hand fists in her hair and pulls her sleepy flushed face to him, muscles clamping around him in the pain-tinged pleasure she’s suddenly ravenous for. He arches under her, muscles pulled taut and then released, like a bow. 

She kisses a path down the flushed skin of his chest until his hands grasp to still her and she furrows her brows up at his still panting face.

‘I’ll die if you go any further.’ She twists from his grip to tower over him and stroke her fingers through the wetness cooling on his stomach, holding his face in her unblinking gaze as she feels his muscles ripple under her touch.

‘You’re stronger than that.’ She drinks in his squinting wince as she slowly touches his sensitized skin and he holds his dark eyes to hers. His hands lightly bracket her arm as she touches him and the hair there stands on its end. ‘What does it feel like?’ She murmurs.

He gulps. ‘Overwhelming. It hurts a little.’ She feels his heartbeat against her lips where she kisses his pulse-point. ‘But good. Because it’s you.’ She smiles against his skin and slumps to the side to face him. 

‘Are you okay?’ He twists a strand of her hair back into place.

She shrugs, ‘You keep asking me that. Do I not look it? I didn’t know my body could feel like that.’ She blushes around a crooked smirk. ‘Do I look any different?’ His brow furrows in question and she pushes his damp hair from his brow. ‘Can you tell?’ She turns her face for his inspection, shivering as his eyes rake heavily over her skin and she meets his look with a fragile smile, feeling like she’s looking at him for the first time. 

Chapter Text

He gently unwinds himself from her sleeping form and heads through to the cockpit. Sure enough, a reply is waiting, silently blinking away. He steels himself and opens it, eyes slowly coming into focus, leaning his chin in his palm as his mothers tinny voice fills the air. 

‘Thank you for your report and for your efforts. I will ensure that they were not in vain. I’m sure I do not need to tell you not to return there. We will ensure what needs to be done is done. I will try not to ask as much of you again, child, but I fear I may make myself a hypocrite. All the same, I hope it counts for something that I wish it. And Rey?' A familiar ache settles in his stomach and for a second he shrinks in his mind, back to a bed he hasn't seen for decades, pressing his ear to her voice to feel it vibrate through his cheek. 'May the Force be with you.’ Silence once again as they crawl through space. A hum in the air around him, viscous like a liquid. He checks the time and waits out the few minutes before Rey will wake, trying to breath through the chill in his blood brought on by his mothers voice. Clipped by its passage across the Universe, clouded in the familiar haze of regretful duty and formless performative comfort. 

He has to believe it was a sense of duty that had her previously speak to him with warmth and longing, that behind them was no real intention to fulfil the role. If she wasn’t playing the part, she had suffered, as he had done, with every hurried message of her delay, her being called away, needed somewhere away from him. The player behind words she was hired to say. Now when she speaks to him, behind the words is simply no-one. Somewhere in the last few years, she had simply slipped from the room with a rustle of fabric, grip reaching back for him, gone when his eyes forced him to blink.  

He moves as he notices the slight shift in the Force he was woven around himself. He presses a kiss to her cheek and feels her smile blooms across her features, sharing in her joy at waking up to him as she blinks the sleep from her eyes. He lets it soothe him like a balm. 

‘Did we get a reply?’ She peeks over her shoulder at him as he runs his fingers through the worst of her tangles, reading the answer in his apologetic smile. ‘So we’re on our own again? For the moment at least.’ She takes a sip of the last cooling dregs of their caff, all gritty sediment, closing her eyes as his nails lightly scratch the hair at the nape of her neck, gathering it into the neat braid. She tilts her face back for a kiss, sighing into it, blinking the cloudiness from her vision to peer around their little ship, cluttered with the little things they’d accumulated in their aimless travels. ‘How are we for credits?’ 

‘Good for a while. I negotiated a good price for our time…’ She chuckles, sinking back against him as a hand squeezes her shoulder and she presses it with her own. ‘Where would you like to go?’ 

She leans her head in his lap as he reads, warm salty air surrounding them, an ocean they didn't stop to learn the name of glittering in the distance. He doesn’t want to disturb the silence with his voice, stroking her hair as she breathes low and deep on the edge of sleep, pulling herself back to stay on its muddling precipice. But she has to know, even as guilt digs at him as she jolts at the sound of his voice, cutting through the layered tapestry of water, wind and distant calls, pushing them back into the distance as her focus shifts to him. It's a weight of attention he only feels from her, pressure like a crowd has benignly turned it's attention to him. She tugs out blades of grass as he speaks, laying a little pile in front of her. 

‘A wealthy expat is believed to have wandered into danger on his journey home alone. Efforts to find him have so far come up sadly short, but locals stress there is no reason to suspect foul play. Their town will always be a welcoming and tranquil place to visit. Wishing him a safe and speedy return home to his family.’ He slides the story closed and busies himself with sketching in finer detail an idea of the movements of the galaxy, moving along with paths and rules to him as inconsequential as the tumbling of birds in the sky above him. Beautiful and perplexing in turn. 

She rolls the ache from her hips as they walk into the near deserted town. They shop for soft things, blankets and sheets so smooth her skin feels rough in comparison. She runs her hands over them reverentially, but her mind still swims with his words. The man himself deserved no sympathy, she notes the lack of it in herself as clinically as a scientist would any reading within tolerance. It's the slipping on of a performance of earnest concern that her mind fixes on. Words chosen with a smile, part of some artificial structure between the author and their reader. A show of concern and a choreographed response to it. A conversation exactly inverse to their words, so practised as to become routine. This is the world she is fighting for.

It takes a few calls for her to pick his voice from the dirge in her head. She's dumped back into a body somewhere she has no knowledge of travelling to, accepting it as one would a dream, where the rules of the world are a joke to be laughed at. He holds her with her hand still pressed between a stack of folded blankets, waiting for her to sink onto her heels, sliding back into her body with a gasp.

They buy a few fresh pastries. He catches her staring as the shopkeeper wraps them with practiced movements, their fingers dancing lightly over the paper. He smiles at his feet as she hurriedly looks away, blush creeping into her cheeks. As they walk it slowly comes back to her, the thoughts that had woken her in the night to stare at him. Joy, beautiful and terrible, like the avalanche they'd watched at a distance together, sole witnesses to its silent dissolution. She can feel where he's been in her body, even the slightest casual thought of it bringing an echo of the sensation, of being pulled along in the dark with him, to a place where her senses gave way in turn. They must be able to see it on her, see it change the light before it hits her skin. Feel it humming there like a static charge, seeking ground. A drone in her blood shouting for him and only him. The thought is nothing new, but there's a fizz in her cells that keeps her always on edge. If they knew they would try to take him from her. They would fail.

She's silent as they make their way back to their ship and tug off their boots, looking around the interior to see if it too has been subtly changed while they slept. She's paused in the process of taking off her jacket by his shadow falling over her, one arm still tangled in her sleeve.

'You think too much', he whispers, pressing a kiss to her forehead, leaning over her as she half-heartedly tries to work her arm free without standing. 'If you want to know if it scares me, it does. But we'll get through it together, like we always do.'

'We get through it', she mutters, voice thin as her stomach turns, 'what's on the other side?'

'I don't know, Rey. But we'll find out. Its okay.' He blinks through his own thoughts, but he doesn't turn, letting her read the panic there in mirror to her own.

'It's like I'm drunk', she chuckles. 'It's like my thoughts just run in a loop until they don't even make sense anymore. Do you think it's going to get better?'

'I think you should eat something then see how you feel.'

They play cards with their purchases piled around them, taking bites from the shatteringly crisp pastries, impossibly finely woven and rich. She narrows her eyes at him over her hand, working the pastry from her teeth with her tongue.

‘I’m done with this.’ She juts out her chin and shifts where she sits in a cross-legged slump. 

‘Is it because you’re losing?’ He rearranges the cards in his hands, smiling as she glares at him, knowing that she would, still glad to see the sharpness return to her vision. 

‘I want to train.’ 

He nods in mock thought. ‘Admit you lose and we will.’ He shuffles his nonsense hand with exaggerated care. 

‘Show me your hand.’ 

He grins at her before cutting it back into the deck, shuffling it and placing it down between them. ‘If you want it, take it.’ He leans back on his hand, taking in her thunderous look, watching her slip into thoughts of self-indulgent malice, her lip twitching with a flash of teeth. 

‘Stand up.’ 

He watches the cards flex in her tightening grip. ‘You like ordering me around. That didn’t work a moment ago, why do you think it will now?’ He takes her cards from her and adds them to the deck, her fingers closing over nothing. 

‘You make me want to punch you’, she says sweetly.

‘I’m surprised you haven’t already.’ He shrugs as he watches her stomach, sucking in shallow angry breaths. 

‘Self restraint that is rapidly weakening.’ She pushes herself up to her feet with an exasperated sigh, sliding their food to the side with her foot and tilting her head at him.

‘Have you ever questioned that impulse within you that makes you unable to be beaten by me?’ He places the food and cards on the table, feeling the weight of her gaze at his throat, rolling the dice on turning his back on her, and feeling her bristle behind him. ‘You want to attack me, what’s stopping you?’ 

‘I want to beat you fairly.’ She breathes in deep through her nose, flexing her fingers at her sides. 

‘Are you sure about that?’ 

‘Fine. I want to see your face.’ 

‘Here I am’, he spreads his palms wide, watching anger pluck the corner of her mouth into a sneer. He catches her wrist with a sigh as she telegraphs her punch, her eyes never leaving his as she rolls her muscles trying to twist from his grip. ‘If you’d wanted to punch me, you’d have punched me.’ She rips her arm free, feeling her flesh throb with it.

‘Punch me, scavenger.’ She circles him loosely, pushing furniture aside to widen their tiny sparring area as much as she can. He chuckles at the screech of metal against metal, shaking out his limbs and purposefully ignoring her movement around him. ‘Unless you think you can’t…’ 

‘You’re trying to goad me into attacking you.’ Her eyes rake over his body, appraising him. 

‘Obviously. Don’t play dumb.’

She stops her pacing to glare at him. ‘I hate you', she spits. 

‘No you don’t. Just attack me, Rey. You’ll feel better.’ His eyes follow her as she resumes circling him, her eyes rolling with a sigh. 

‘That’s a fucked up thing to say.’

‘Yeah, but I’m right.’ He flexes his fingers and rolls his wrists, eyebrow raised in her direction. ‘Are we going to be stuck here all day?’

‘We will if you don’t stop talking.’ She steps into his space and looks through her brows at him, at the little smile that crinkles his lip before he smooths it away. ‘Are you-‘, she chokes on her words as he grabs her by the hair, her hands snapping to his wrist, the muscles of her neck straining to keep her eyes on his. She catches herself in her panic and hooks a leg behind his and pulls. 

His grip doesn’t loosen as he stumbles, but tugs painfully at her skull. He rights himself as her hands squeeze at his throat, her mouth pulling open with a growl as his fingers twist in her hair. She pushes her way into his mind, feeling his pulse thud against her fingers.

‘You had nothing.’ She growls, pushing him away with a crush of her hands, pulling his lax grip from her scalp.

‘You thought I did,’ she smiles at the rasp in his voice, ‘that’s all that matters.’ 

She attacks him until ever muscle feels tender with strain. Her ankle blooms with static where it collides with the bench in her single-minded desire to knock him to the ground and watch him sprawl. She drops heavily to her knees to join him, the sound and protest from her kneecaps brushed from her mind as she violently yanks his shirt over his head. She swallows his breathy laugh as she presses their hot bodies together, feeling the sweat on her neck begin to cool. 

A perfect day, food in her stomach and hot blood coursing through her veins. They'd woken with nothing but the desire to pit their bodies against each other, revel in the familiar pleasure of it as somewhere across space versions of them are being puppeted through potential plans, their input not even a consideration. Pieces presumed to be at rest until they are summoned. Save for the General, their cooperation brings with a kind of willed ignorance as to how they fill their time. It likely won't last, and in time they'll have to explain the bruises they deem not worth healing. But that is a problem for the future.

An alert chimes behind them and Rey takes the opportunity to twist out of his grasp, dancing away as he catches himself heavily against the wall. He follows flexing and shaking the sting from his palm. One of these days, they needed to find a better place to train…

‘Do you want to do the honors?’ She eyes the blinking status indicator, rolling the sprain from her wrist with a crackling twist, breathing slowing steadily back to normal. She shrugs at his non answer and hits play, sliding into the pilots seat and grasping back for his sweat cooled arm. 

‘I’m afraid I have to ask more of you, even though I have undoubtedly asked enough’ she snorts, scrubbing at the dot of blood that dribbles onto her lip, wondering idly when it had happened. ‘We have reason to believe the Order are preparing for something in the Senex sector. Despite our efforts, we haven’t been able to guess what that might be, but it’s safe to say whatever it is is undesirable to anyone who values freedom and peace in the Galaxy. Through observation we have come to learn when the base will be least defended. I ask you to find out what you can and slip out. We cannot afford to leave a trace. They must believe they have all the time in the world. If they are pressed, we lose any advantage we might have against whatever is coming. Is this something you would be willing to do?’

‘It’s not like we have a choice,’ she grumbles into her shirt, pressing it to her nose, bleeding already slowing.  

‘Please send me your answer at your nearest convenience. I hope you trust me when I say I value your help so far. And if you decide the risk is too great, it will not affect our agreement with each other, nor the protection I offer you.’ He rolls his eyes to the ceiling. ‘May the-‘ Rey cuts off the message as Leia’s parting words crackle around them. She thunks her head heavily against the chair back, headache blaring to the forefront of her mind.

‘Does she always talk like that?’ Her words are clipped as she rolls her ankle, swelling with deep bruises. 

‘When did that happen?’ He nods towards the foot and Rey shrugs. 

‘Yesterday. The table got me.’ She shoots a withering look back through the walls in the general direction of the offending piece of furniture. 'I'm more puzzled about my nose, personally.'

‘Let me heal it.’

‘You just want an excuse to put your hands on me.’ She arches her brow at him, with another wince of stabbing pain behind her eyes she knows he notices. 

‘Do I need one? Sit.’

She hauls herself up with an exaggerated sigh to follow him to the bench, table still folded away to the side from their sparring. He unfolds the ankle gently across his lap and breaths, slipping into a meditative calm. Her stomach churns as she watches the careful movement of his fingers over her skin, shivering as the muscles relax as warmth suffuses them and their tension dissolves to nothing. The bruises fade in front of her eyes like dissipating clouds. She leans her head against his shoulder, solid beneath her. 

Any other secret injuries you’re hiding from me?  Her hairs stand on end as his voice slides into her mind. Her jaw relaxes as her headache melts away into nothing. 

He hauls her upright to dab at the last of the blood on her skin, lips slightly parted as he concentrates on his work. ‘What shall we reply?’ 

She breathes for a few more quiet moments before speaking. ‘No matter what she says, we don’t have a choice. If we don’t agree we might regret it.’ She slumps to lie her head in his lap, turning to look up at him. ‘Tell them yes. But in a minute.’ She closes her eyes. 

He rattles off a request for details as she meditates, trying to smooth her annoyance into strength and calm, wrapping it around her muscles and sinew like armor. She senses him moving back towards her and reaches out to him, curling herself around him. He drops heavily to his knees in front of her and presses his ear to her stomach as her fingers twist in his hair. 

‘Is it done?’ He nods against her shirt, sliding a palm under the fabric to press against her heated skin.

They’re given their location, with instructions to pick up a parcel of supplies from a drop-off point on a neighboring planet. They haul the bag from the hay-strewn floor of a barn and onto the ship as lights flicker on in the dusk. 

‘I think there’s such a thing as conspicuously inconspicuous’ she laughs, pulling out a tangle of jet black clothing and laying it on the table. ‘How do they know my shoe size?’ She narrows her eyes at him, dropping the matt boots to the ground unceremoniously before sorting their garments from one another.

‘I like you in those.’ She eyes him from across the room as he clips on his communicator. All black but much more form fitting than his usual clothes, and capeless. She can peek at the pale column of his neck as he slides on his wrist guards. He laughs at her and shakes his head. 

‘Ogle away. It makes me feel less like I’m putting on a costume. Soldier for the Resistance.’ He spreads his arms so she can better take in his silhouette. New boots, thicker and more fitted trousers than the loose undergarments they’d brought with them. A jet black long sleeve shirt and a thick belt. They’d insisted on taking their sabres, of course, but everything else was designed to help them blend into the shadows. She’d insisted against gloves, wanting to feel his hands on her as he helps her clip on her vest, smoothing her braid out of the way.

‘This is getting long now.’ He pushes a stray hair behind her ear, before looping her arms around his neck to lift her to eye level, her legs squeezing around his waist. It never failed to get to her, the ease at which he can lift her and hold her without so much a tremor in his muscles. ‘You know, I think I prefer you in black.’ He murmurs. ‘Could have saved us a lot of trouble if you’d just joined me when I first asked you. You’d have made a formidable Darksider.’

‘And defer to you?’ She scoffs, before kissing him hard, and pulling a groan from his throat. ‘Besides’ she crushes her thighs around him, ‘I enjoy the trouble I cause you.’ She kisses him until she runs out of breath and pulls back to clamber down his body, the feel of his muscles thick under her hands sending a little thrill of arousal through her. ‘Let’s go do this so we can get back. I want to see you take those off for me.’ She smiles, holding his gaze with promise. ‘Ready to go?’ 

‘You’re an evil person.’ 

She snorts, and punches in their destination, ignoring his looming presence behind her. The ship kicks up to speed and their target slowly looms into view. 

An outpost, sparsely defended. Their job was to gain entrance at shift change, find out their plans for the base and get out without being noticed. There’s a rightness to it she feels as he walks beside her, her shadow as they duck past perfunctory patrols of troopers clearly missing their beds and going through the motions. They duck back as a sliver of light tumbles from an open doorway, the rustle and murmur of the life inside stifled as the door swings back closed. His breathing is quiet beside her, steps careful, and she notices a kind of blanketing hush around them as he lightly obscures their presence with the Force. But he hardly needed to bother, everyone they encounter is more than willing to believe there is nobody out there, that their bubble of safety is in fact a fortress, and that they can sleep soundly through the night in the soporific hush of darkness. One of the little delusions they were choosing to exploit.

She’s going in. She sends a little wave of doubt towards the uniformed officer, stifling a yawn behind her hand. She pauses at the doorway, ponderous for a second about something that recedes like a mist after they’ve stepped into the hum of artificial light, feeling the sinking feeling that she’s forgotten something.

Cameras. They’re a closed circuit, but we’ll need to wipe them.

They move through the base, keeping up a vague wall of nothing to see here as they step through open doorways to find the command post. Their intel was right, the last officer sits at his post, mechanically opening and scanning memorandums with the steadiness of a metronome until he’s relieved. It is as easy as a slight press on her part to get him to parrot all that he knows, half of him already given over to sleep. 

Leaving is just as easy. A wave of her hand and he returns to his reading, opening and closing the same file unseeing. 

They duck out to find the surveillance room and breach the paltry defenses, passwords left as default in bald-faced arrogance. They expunge the last few minutes, replacing them with a loop of precisely nothing except the odd dust mote hanging in the air. Her slight fear he’d gone too far in blanking his memory is relieved when they see him leave the base and trudge heavily through the streets back home. No alarm is raised, not so much as a hair is out of place. It was so terrifyingly easy. 

They leave atmosphere and relay all that they know to the General’s private channel before rounding on each other.

‘That was too easy.’ She says pulling her hair down and roughly shaking it out before pulling each boot off with a violent tug. ‘I’m annoyed, I wanted a challenge this time.’ The vest is next to go, dropped unceremoniously to the floor alongside her communicator as she steps over them to assist in peeling off his layers, tugging his belt free and ripping it from its loops.

‘Did you want it to be more difficult?’ He asks, steadying her arms as she wriggles out of her trousers.

‘I wanted to have to fight for it. That felt like they just rolled over and gave up.’ She yanks his shirt free to push it up his torso, her frustration carving itself across his skin in the reddening paths of her nails. ‘It’s frustrating.’ He cradles her face and kisses her as he steps out of his trousers before freeing her of her final layer of outerwear. 

‘You were magnificent. There will be other chances to fight together.’ He presses his thumb under her jaw and watches her mouth part and eyes half close before leaning forwards to sear her with a kiss and lift her to carry them to the sleeping quarters. 

He presses his weight on her to stare into her eyes, dark and locked on his as her thoughts melt away. 

‘I love to see you use your powers.’ He pushed a hand into her underwear to curl a finger into her and press as her spine arches underneath him and she pants out a shuddering breath. ‘I’ve never seen anyone do what you do with it. It makes my efforts look clumsy in comparison.’ Her stomach flutters as he strokes her, deep and firm and her hands grasp at the sheets. He adds another finger as her legs part beneath him, pressing his ear to her throat to hear the little breathy moans there. He swirls his thumb alongside them until her hands claw against his and pulls them up into her mouth. 

‘Take your pants off.’ Her chest heaves as he pushes them down with the help of her feet and thrusts into her with a slow, dizzying press that lights like a galaxy behind his closed eyelids. He opens them to hold her face and watch the tremors of pleasure work over the flutter of her eyelids, straining to keep unblinking eye contact with him. 

‘Never want to stop doing this.’ She stammers, lifting her legs to draw around him and pull him ever closer. ‘We were made to do this’, she clasps at his neck as a shiver rolls through her and a blush creeps up her chest. She rips at her breast-band and flings it away, drawing his hand to her chest as she feels waves of pleasure move through, heavy, like she’ll drown in it. She kisses him, swallowing his tremoring exhale and rolling her hips to meet him.

It’s gratifying, how easily they do this, how quickly they give each other pleasure. Every touch of his is echoed by her, driving each to higher points of pleasure, a feedback loop that feels as if it exists outside of time when they’re in it. She can’t remember anything before this moment, just the feel of them moving together, of being as close as it’s possible to get. Then the familiar desire for more, closer, so she bites down on his neck, feeling the little tendril of pain enfolding in their pleasure, feels him twitch inside her. She feels his thrusts grow more erratic and his breath catch in his throat as she bores her eyes into his. They come with a gasp into each other's mouths, hands desperately scrambling for more, more closeness, more everything. 

He rolls to the side in a boneless heap, one hand presses against her abdomen, as she breathes through tingling shivers. A laugh bubbles up through her and he quirks an eyebrow at her as he strokes her hair out of her face. 

‘I could get used to this as a celebration.’

Chapter Text

A few days later they’re asked to rendezvous with the General. They meet at a terrace cafe, heavy insects hanging in the heat, buzzing lowly. They could pluck them lazily from the air, should they want to. The General takes a sip of her drink, smiling over the rim at the owner. An old friend, she explains, knowing said explanation is neither needed nor wanted, their attention entirely diverted by a string of cattle crossing a nearby field at a slow march and Rey's resulting smile. But they do not have the luxury of giving in to the promise of a bright sun and a seaside breeze, so she does what she must and breaks their peace, turning her eyes to Rey and watching her shift.

‘We have reason to believe they’re developing a weapon.’

‘I thought they were concentrating their resources on the Core worlds.’ Rey drags her mind back to the task at hand with the slightest hesitation, a practised smile sliding over her features. She takes a sip of her drink, chosen at random, before swapping it with his wordlessly, her new drink honey sweet and slightly tingling against her tongue. 

‘It seems they’re doing both.' Leia can't stop the smile that rounds her words as she observes them, but shakes herself out of it with a quiet clearing of her throat. 'We want to find out what we can.’

‘What do you know so far?’ It's textbook, the slight subtle distance Rey maintains between them with her words. It's a sharpness she can't help but respect. 

‘Their R&D department seems to be unaffected by the reallocation of personnel. The sector is still heavily guarded, nothing goes in and nothing comes out, not even rumors.’

‘Then why do you believe they’re developing something new?’

‘One person did get out. He shared with us what he knew before his death.’

Cellular poison, a failsafe against desertion… Leia can't hear his words, but knows something has passed between them by Rey's slight turn in acknowledgement. Whatever it is, any lingering warmth is drained from Rey's words when she speaks. ‘What makes you think we’d have better luck?’ An insect inches its quivering body in the condensation, and she watches it as she sets her jaw. 

‘You have the ability to be functionally invisible. And you have better knowledge of their operations than most. I think out of everyone you two have the best chance of finding out what they’re developing before they test it.’ 

‘What did they say?’ He leans his chin against his hand in a show of impassive laziness, hiding the shake in his jaw as his mother’s eyes glide past him once again. 

‘It’s fission powered. Large amounts of radioactive isotopes have been dumped at the edge of uncharted space, it’s presumed the cause. The engineer in question was developing one small section of the power relay system for the device. As far as he knows, no single person knows the true design beyond its rough prototype, but we don’t believe that to be the case.’

‘You have recordings of the conversations with this engineer?’

The General nods a curt nod in his direction, waving a signal over their heads. ‘I will provide you with everything that we have. In terms of getting to the base, for now we don’t have a concrete plan. We have a number of restored First Order crafts, but clearance codes for a base of this kind are closely monitored. Any unannounced arrivals are liable to be shot out of the sky.’

‘Hmm’, Rey hums, levelling the General in a saccharine smile. That makes a change. A laugh bubbles up her throat as he clears his throat before she smooths her face back into a mask. ‘Anything else?’ 

‘That’s all I have for you for now. Think it over, we’ll be in conversation soon.’ What crafts do you think they have? ‘How have you been?’ Rey inhales her syrupy drink into her lungs, eyes wide. She coughs as his hand claps her back, smile on his lips. Leia’s eyes flit between the two of them, lingering on his point of contact between them, before it’s withdrawn.

Rey swallows the wobble out of her voice before speaking. ‘Is that everything for now, General?’ 

She takes her leave with a nod to them both, pressing a kiss to the cheek of the owner as two younger Resistance members dressed in civilian clothes fall into step with her.

‘This is suicide, isn’t it?’ She rolls the sweet sounding world around her tongue like a confection. 

He shrugs, sinking a little deeper into his wobbling chair without their audience. ‘Not necessarily. You did want more of a challenge.’

‘I guess I got what I asked for… Why does she ask about us like that?’

‘She’s worried about you. They’re asking a lot and she knows it.’

‘No more than they ask of anyone else working with the Resistance.’ She smiles at him, apologetically. ‘Do you think we have a chance, then?’ She drags her fingers through the moisture on the tacky tabletop. 

‘If we can get down to the planet undetected, the place is a closed circuit. All the surveillance and data is stored planet-side. As long as they don’t raise the alarm, we could have unrestricted access to all the plans stored there, for this project and others.’

‘Could we cloak the ship somehow? Make them see what they expect to see?’

‘Air control is run by droids’. 

‘Of course it is. Let’s get out of here.’

They head back to their ship as a light shiver of summer rain sighs around them. They’re pursued by a slight figure, ducking into a nearby restaurant as their gaze sweeps their way. I hope they’re not trying to be subtle. The figure turns back on themselves as they step onto the ramp. 

‘Why does she feel the need to spy on us?’ She towels her hair dry of the slight damp, kicking off her boots. 

‘Probably, because you’re not particularly forthcoming with the information she wants.’ She slumps into the chair and he combs his fingers through her hair as she begins prepping the ship. 

‘And what information would that be, my dear?’ He watches her throat bob around the word. Said in jest, he feels the little frisson of understanding move between them and his fingers fumble at her scalp. He leans down and kisses her, feeling her eyelashes flutter against his skin. ‘Remind me what we were talking about.’ Her eyes drift to his mouth.

‘No, I don’t think I will.’ 

She narrows her eyes at him as he folds into his seat and she rolls the shiver out of her skin to get them into the air. ‘Do you care where we go?’

‘Not in the slightest.’ 

She shrugs and picks a random habitable planet in the sector, reaching for a discarded water bottle as the engine shudders into life. 

They watch the blue sky wiped away and replaced by almost complete black of space. As soon as they’re coasting on their way she unbuckles herself, peeling off her outer layers to stretch her muscles into life, needing to move, feel her blood move through her. She barks out a loud laugh as she slips out of his grasp, hair flowing down her back and tickling the scorched skin there. He’s strong, but she’s quick, she leverages his body like a weapon, to spring out of his range. She crouches in challenge, pressing herself back against the tabletop, eyes shining. She scrambles over it to outreach his grasp. Foot sliding, he catches her, curving her spine off the cold surface, pressing against his arm as it holds her skull. Her eyes lidded with desire, she pushes him off of her to grapple some more. Throwing punches she knows he’ll catch, and feeling the ache in his bones as if it's her own. 

She pulls his orgasm out of him, her knees protesting at the hard floor, bruises flowering on his skin. She kisses him as the sweat dries on their bodies, and her skin prickles with goosebumps. Her arms looped around his neck, he trails his fingers down her back and feels her shudder against him, searching his face for something. She’s not sure what it is. She presses the corner of his mouth with her lips, light and gentle as a fear settles inside her.

‘Let’s make a plan’, she smiles. His brows furrow in question, before nodding and helping her to her feet. 

They watch the report from the engineer over dinner, the sallow tint around his mouth as he tells what he knows. He was ‘recruited’ by the Order to protect his family. He’d been given his task, but with no idea how it would fit in with the work of his colleagues he floundered, seeking the answer to a question he wasn’t entrusted to know. But he knew his family was gone. He’d felt it in his bones.

He’d hidden himself in with the waste, making contact with the Resistance on a parched and screaming planet, knowing the radiation had reduced his DNA to shreds. The peace he feels as he recounts his story is the merciful calm of a body that knows its end is coming. That there is simply no need to fight any longer. But he had known as soon as his absence was noticed that the biological switch in his blood had been flicked, and another poison was working its way through him, only to find the place already destroyed. 

His prompts come cracking in from a tiny speaker, the interviewee safely across from the base from him. They brought him there under the care of droids, had cleared a path through yards of concrete and lead to a chair, now destroyed and buried with him, far under the earth. If anyone had touched his skin, it would have felt like the quivering hide of an animal. 

‘There’s not much to go on.’ She closes the recording with a bitter tang on her tongue. ‘He died to bring us next to nothing.’

‘We know something’s being developed in secret. That’s not nothing.’

‘Do you know anything about this?’ He ignores the set of her jaw, grateful at least he hadn’t asked him in front of his mother. 

‘I know of the place, but I didn’t pay much attention to the weapons division. Snoke wanted me and the Knights to concentrate on what we could do with the Force.’

She nods, exhaling hard through her nose. ‘Of course he did. Was it not within your purview to be aware of the Order as a whole? Or did you just go where he told you to go?’

He bristles, but holds her gaze. ‘I’ll tell you everything I know. Are you annoyed that it’s not enough or that it’s too much?’ 

‘Fine. Tell me what you know.’ 

He explains as best as he can what he’d gathered about the base, from conversations conducted with him standing in the corner. A masked and emotionless drawn weapon amongst officers vying for petty victories. Huge investment that is yet to capitalize on its promise, the memory of Starkiller base and its destruction fresh in the collective memory. Their full cooperation is ensured by various means, chemical confinement, the supervision of a unit famed for its brutality and rigidness. They are the best at what they do, these nameless people, housed in their own bubble universe. I misunderstand, a General who had long since given up on trying to smooth the sarcasm from his voice, are we in the business of developing jailors or weapons? 

‘People are people. We can hide among them. You mentioned droids?’

‘Facilities of this kind, they monitor all air traffic in and out. We will need another technique for them…’

‘Suppose we destroy the droids?’

‘Their uplink is monitored, the base would go into lockdown.’ 

‘Can we acquire a clearance code? There must be at least some deliveries to the planet.’ 

‘Of raw materials, yes. Their schedule is likely very strict, but it's a possibility.’ 

‘What about inspections? There must be someone who verifies their work. And if it’s as closed down as you say it is, they’d have to go there to do it.’

He chews a chunk of dried leather-like meat. ‘You’re right.’ He clears away their dishes as she scribbles down a few hurried notes. ‘I hope you’re not suggesting impersonation of an officer?’ 

‘Of course I am, and they’ll be too busy tripping over themselves to seem in control of the situation to notice before we’re out again. I’ll send word to the General, see what they have that we can use.’ She’s gone before he can turn his head. He busies himself pouring two glasses of the wine he’d purchased while her back was turned, knowing she would enjoy the indulgence, if begrudgingly. 

‘We’re meeting with her tomorrow at noon at the base. She said to warn you that you will be monitored, for everyone’s peace of mind.’ 

‘How thoughtful.’

She scoops up her drink with a sideways glance before taking a sip. ‘Do you think we can do it?’ She asks, eyeing him over the rim as ruby legs crawl down the glass.

‘I honestly don’t know. I hope so.’

She crumples down next to him, careful not to spill anything, calculating the credits in her mind for each sip. Somewhere along the line she stopped truly caring, it being eclipsed by larger worries. Her hair fans over his shoulder in a glossy wave. ‘I haven’t been to the new base. What if my friends are there?’ 

‘Wouldn’t you be happy to see them?’

‘I don’t know if they’d be happy to see me, after I set off running.’ 

‘I’m sure they’ll just be happy that you’re alive.’

‘Somehow i doubt that.’ She curls her wine to her chest, wrapping her body around it.

‘You’re thinking too much. Drink your wine. We’ll deal with it tomorrow.’ She takes a dutiful sip and leans boneless against him. 

‘Can it work on each other, do you think? Can I make it so you look at me and see someone else?’

‘I don’t want to know the answer to that question.’ He scoffs. 

She lies languid with wine with her head in his lap, attacking him with strange and meandering questions with no through line. She threads their fingers together and turns their clasped hands in front of her until a tired cold begins to creep in and she tapers off. He scoops her in his arms, as she protests weakly but lets herself be carried to the fresher. 

They wash, she shaves him slowly, watching the press of her fingers against his jaw and the bruises she put there deepening against his fair freckled skin. Then she kisses him, like she’d wanted to the first time, when the thought had bloomed in her head for the first time. Her head spins with the steam.

They sleep late, the journey to the base a short one.

‘They went back to Hoth.’ He blinks at the readout expecting it to morph into something less likely. An old Rebellion base, a choice so recklessly brazen he can only assume the flag they wave is so blatant as to be discounted as bait. They exchange codes and are guided into the hangar bay as thick snow whirls around the ship, before the heavy storm doors are lowered into place and the air is suddenly static. 

Leia presses heavy jackets into their hands against the cold. ‘Apologies for the lack of a welcome party. There’s a mandatory strategy meeting being held at the other end of the base. You will have to settle for just my company this morning.’ And the eight other people surrounding us right now. She nods to the General, requesting a place they might speak in private. 

They sit around a low table as Rey explains their plan so far. If they can get down the base, they can get the information the Resistance wants. 

‘Are you confident you’ll be able to slip by an unknown number of people? There could be hundreds of people there.’ 

‘I haven’t tested it on that many people, but I believe so.’ 

‘Forgive me, but how can you be sure?’ 

‘I can’t be sure. I didn’t know what the Force was until a few months ago. I don’t know what the limit of all this is.’ She looks imploringly at the ceiling blinking back unwelcome tears of frustration and twisting her braid absentmindedly over her shoulder. He watches the path of Leia’s gaze on it, before speaking.

‘It can be done.’ He wants to reach out, but he maintains the distance between them, knowing Rey would not want it. 

‘You know this?’ 

‘I do. But it won’t make a difference if we can’t get down onto the planet.’ Leia lets the matter drop with a half second meeting of his gaze, turning back to Rey. 

‘What ship’s do you have? We need to look like Officers there for an inspection.’ 

‘You have a TIE fighter?’ Rey rounds on Leia, already walking up to the half covered craft, twin engines dull with dust. ‘Does it fly?’

‘A Special Forces TIE. How did you get this?’ 

‘What matters is it's untraceable. Its serial has been scrubbed. I think you’d call it natural attrition. I presume you can fly it?’ He watches Rey wrench open the door and slide into the pilot’s seat, tracking her eyes over the wealth of controls inside, all outfitted in black. ‘Would they be used for reconnaissance?’ 

‘For something classified, I’d imagine so. I hope that’s not fueled.’ 

Rey hangs her head out to them. ‘Teach me how to fly this.’ She fixes the General in her stare. ‘Do you have any First Order uniforms?’ 

‘I’ll set some aside for you.’

‘Will you fuel this for us? I take it the planet is otherwise uninhabited...’

‘You are correct. Is there anything else you would require of me? I need to check on the progress of that meeting. There are a lot of egos in that room that need someone to keep them in check.’

‘Blasters, and the space to test them.’ 

‘Sergeant Gant will give you whatever you need.’

Rey swings her legs from the ship to stand at his side once more. 

‘How long until it’s fueled?’ The Sergeant stammers under her gaze. He is one of the few, no doubt, who has been briefed of their status with the Resistance prior to their arrival. The hairs on the back of his neck stand on end as he walks ahead of them, leading them through a maze of winding corridors carved from icy rock. Their breath hangs in front of them like clouds, but the temperature climbs steadily as they journey farther into the burrowing heat of the base. They pass no-one, their hidden retinue shifting silently with them through corridors hidden in the rock. 

The armory is small, but outfitted with all that they may need.

‘Come for us when the ship is fueled. I’m sure the General would have told you to be hospitable to your guests. There’s nothing else we need, you can go back to your work. That includes those who have been watching us since we set foot off our ship.’ He stumbles over his excuse, she silences him, with a smile. ‘It’s okay. I know you know who we are, but you don’t have to worry about us. I’d rather we just be honest with each other.’

The Sergeant leaves with a blushing half-bow, and they’re swallowed in the unnatural quiet of the base and the thick soundproofing of the target range. Once again surrounded by thick walls of rock. ‘Our friends are still there.’ 

‘I know. Don’t take it personally, they’re not there for you.’ 

‘Then they won’t like this.’ She hands him a blaster from the bank. ‘Does it hurt, getting hit by one of these?’ She hefts the cold weapon between her hands, scoffing at his silence. ‘Okay, I change my question, how much does it hurt?’ 

‘I’ve survived worse.’ He sets the weapon down carefully. 

‘How did you survive, by the way? I left you in the snow with a gouge out of your face, bleeding out from your stomach. I know you didn’t heal it…’

‘One second I’m watching you run into the trees, the next they’re pulling me out of a bacta tank. I was in there long enough I wouldn’t die, but short enough I’d still get to feel it all. Does that answer your question?’ 

She aims the blaster at him, fixing him in her sights, one eye squeezed shut. ‘Not really.’

‘No one ever taught you how to shoot?’ He pulls her hand down to adjust her grip. ‘Open your eyes. Unless you want every shot to hit a few inches to the right. Try for the targets.’ He steps back to watch her take her first ringing shot, quickly shaking off the slight recoil to fire again, shots grouped roughly around the center. She turns to grin at him. ‘Try from back here.’ He turns her body to tweak her stance, watching the target as she fires off a volley of shots, impressively grouped, for a first time. She plucks the thought from his head effortlessly, dropping her arm to divert her attention to the more important task of glaring at him.

‘I reckon if I tried this time, I could hit you with this.’ She grins at him and then swaps her grip to pull his mouth to hers. 

‘Cameras’, he mumbles against her lips.

She loosens her grip, but doesn't let him pull away, her calves burning. ‘If there are, they saw me aim a blaster at you and did nothing.’ She shoves her blaster into his hand and curls his grip around it. ‘Point it at me, see if they do anything.’

‘I’m not doing that.’

‘Spoilsport.’

‘Rey, if I point a blaster at you and they are watching, they’ll shoot me on sight.’

‘I hate that you’re right.’

‘I know, you always do’, he fits her hand back around it. ‘Do you want to try on something moving?’

She swaps the weapon between her hands, trying to find which grip she favors as he pulls out an automatic target sling and slides in a handful of fluorescent discs. She takes aim as the first launches a high arc in the air and squeezes the trigger. It sails to the ground where it atomizes on the concrete.  

‘It’s harder, but you just need to aim for where it’s going to be, rather than where it is.’ She nods and he launches another. This one she clips, its tumbling arc falling short. 
‘Another’. A miss. He looks down her arm and pulls the shot slightly tighter in. The target disappears into dust at the very top of its arc, along with the rest in the machine. 

‘Good enough.’ She grabs a fresh blaster and holster from the locker, setting off to peruse the rest the room has to offer as he watches her in silence, picking out the tiny lenses trained on their direction, placing an unsettle-able bet with himself over how many are functional. 

Many of the items she’d seen rusted fragments of in the desert. Many more are entirely new to her. But they don’t really hold her attention, she prefers to rely on her muscles and her strength. The desert isn’t kind to machines, she holds a slight distrust for them close to her, even if she enjoys the challenge they bring. She is still uncomfortable entrusting her life and security to them, even their simple and small ship. She knows the tangle of interconnected systems running though it like veins, and how quickly they can go wrong. The Sergeant cracks open the door to tell them the TIE is fueled and quickly scurry away again. 

‘It’s months of drills and simulations before someone’s ready to fly a TIE.’ He rolls his eyes as she swings her legs into the cabin and slides into the pilot seat. The snow continues to fall in sheets past the open bay doors. He uncouples the ship as she peers around at her field of view. 

‘I’m already a good pilot, just tell me the basics.’ Her tan skin glows against the jet black interior. 

‘That is the basics.’ She grumbles over the control panel, purposely unlabeled and nondescript, to make it harder to hijack. She looks at him, brow deeply furrowed, eyes dark. 

‘Show me. Or better yet,’ she clambers out and he has to step out of her path or risk being pushed over. ‘Get in. I’ll sit on your lap.’ She waits for him to move, hands at her hips. ‘What? I can’t learn from back in the gunner position, and I’m not passing on the opportunity to fly one of these things.’ She steps forward. ‘Would you rather I just figure it out on my own? After all, you do it, so I must be able to.’ She bounces on her feet, waiting for him to move. 

‘You know, people are going to talk’, he says, folding into the familiar hug of the pilot’s seat. He feels smaller without the layers of leather armor he used to wear, vision unimpaired by his mask. Within seconds she’s snaking her limbs in over his. He positions her feet on the pedals and pulls the hatch closed with a click. 

‘Yoke, rudder’, he places her hands as he slowly runs them through the take-off procedure. ‘These things accelerate fast, so be ready.’

The engines kick into gear with a screaming and they disappear into the white sky in less than a blink. He feels the breath force out of her in a nervous reflex, knuckles white against the controls as he pulls them to a low cruise above a featureless land. They appear to hang there in space, both visuals and readouts betraying no sense of movement, the smoothness of craft setting of the familiar low warning at the back of his mind he routinely ignores.

‘This takes us up and down’, he moves them, tensing to compensate for the swoop in his stomach. ‘Left, right’, he takes them higher into the atmosphere, sky clearing above the clouds, laid out like a blanket underneath them. ‘Do you want to try?’ 

‘It doesn’t seem too hard.’

‘The tricky part is staying conscious. Turn us towards the mountain.’ She squints into the white, unable to distinguish the slight bump on the readout, before banking them towards it and feeling like her stomach is going to leap out of her mouth. She crumples, recovering and blinking the static out of her vision and lengthening her spine against his chest. She mumbles a string of curses, voice thick with nausea. He straightens them back up, as she sucks in a labored breath. ‘Try again. It’ll be better now you know what to expect.’ 

‘This thing has a hyperdrive, right?’ Her voice wobbles as she banks them once again, tensing her muscles. ‘What’s stopping us from just jumping to lightspeed?’ 

‘A misplaced sense of propriety. On your right.’ She narrows her eyes as the gray peak materializes shimmering on the horizon and turns them towards it. ‘Accelerate like this’, he pulls the yoke steadily towards them, and they’re pressed even further into the chair. She brings down their speed, dipping them through the cloud cover to coast over the unbroken stretch of snow before accelerating and punching them back through. 

‘What can’t I do in this, before I kill us both?’ He has enough time to blink, puzzled, before she pulls them into a sharp rolling turn, wrenching them out of it with a shout, muscles on her arms corded. Her laugh rings in his ears. 

‘You’re insane.’ He kisses the side of her smiling face and ducks them into a dive, sheer enough she yelps on top of him. They pull up low enough to see a flurry of snow pulled up in front of them. He waits until her fingers release their crushing grip on his skin, before pulling them into a spin, accelerating until he feels his brain buzz in warning, and then a little faster, until ground and sky smudge together and they feel as if they’re floating. He slows them, feeling as if his flesh is going to shear straight off his bones, until they’re cruising once more. He puts her shaking hands back on the controls and squeezes her with his body. They wobble in their course, but she corrects them, throwing a mumbled curse over her shoulder at him.

They stay until the fuel warning comes on, feeling out the edges of the craft, turning it until it judders and shakes around them, until it feels as if they’ll crash burning into the ground and smolder. It’s night by the time they catch sight of the base, glowing orange in the darkness.

She hops out of the craft onto legs turned to jelly underneath her, catching herself against the ship as gravity reasserting itself on her. Leia watches them smooth their sweaty clothes against themselves in the cold, nodding towards a pile of folded clothes and weapons. 

‘I’d prefer it if you were more careful with that in the future. We’re not likely to be able to replace it. I’ll see about getting you those codes.’ She walks away as Ray’s laugh forces its way out of her and echoes in the cavernous hall of the hangar. 

They leave as a few quizzical eyes watch their ship disappear into the night. She crawls onto his lap and sucks the breath and little yelp of alarm from his lungs, as soon as they’re out of atmosphere. 

‘I like watching you fly’, she pulls his shirt roughly over his head, attacking his skin with her mouth. ‘I’ve never seen anyone fly like you do. Show me how you do it.’ His hands bracket her back as she stretches to pull her top off over her head. ‘Actually don’t. Right now I don’t want to know.’ She presses his skull between her clawed fingers, watching his eyes squint in pain, staring unblinking into hers. She rakes her fingers through his hair and crushes her mouth to his, shuddering as she feels a low rumble in his throat. 

She leaps back to push her trousers down her thighs and stumble out of them, pulling his off and kicking them into the pile with her own. He laughs against her mouth as she pushes him back and climbs over him. She gasps as she sinks down onto him, chest fluttering over tiny strangled breaths as he swipes a thumb over her jaw. Her eyes roll shut as he rocks into her, laying kisses along her neck as she clings to him. She opens her eyes to smile at the ceiling of the cockpit, laughter setting off in her like a fever. 

‘What’s so funny?’ He pulls her face to his and watches her breath hitch and feels her clench around a particularly deep thrust. Her mouth falls open, jaw slack, he bites it. She laughs again and he can feel it around him and his stomach clenches. He watches tears squeeze out of her eyes as her mouth struggles to form words and his mouth pulls into a grin at the sight, swiping her tears across her cheek. 

‘I-’ She swallows, ‘I wanted to fuck you back in the TIE.’ His head falls heavily back against the chair before he kisses her through orgasm, pressing her down onto him, and feeling her nails dig into his skin. His vision floods white, all he feels is her heart beating under his fingers, and hears her murmuring senselessly into his ear. 

He leans against the fresher cubicle as she washes, hand trailing lazily over whatever skin he can reach. Her hands shake against his skin, like it’s the first time. His cock twitches valiantly and she smiles against his skin. 

‘Can I ask you something?’ She hums at him in answer, not stopping her silent survey of his body under her hands. ‘You don’t have any body hair.’

‘That’s not exactly a question…’

‘True.’

‘To answer your not question, you don’t tend to grow a lot in the desert. What I did have I lasered. One less thing to maintain. Supposedly it makes it easier to keep cool, but I can’t tell you if that’s true because it was still hell to live in.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘What’s it to you, anyway? Did you only just notice?’

‘No, I noticed. Just curious.’

‘Does it bother you?’

‘Why would it?’

She shrugs. ‘You cared enough to ask me.’

‘Just making sure you weren’t doing it for my benefit.’

She scoffs. ‘As if? I don’t even like you.’ 

‘Whatever you say.’

She dries them roughly and lays him out on the cot, eyes squared in warning as she takes him in her hand and the muscles at his neck tense. ‘I want to try something, can I?’ 

‘Depends, you pointed a blaster at my head earlier...’ His protest dies on his lips as she bites down his throat. 

‘It probably won’t kill you.’ She leans her ear to his thundering heartbeat. ‘I want to put my mouth on you.’ She strokes him gently, throat suddenly dry. ‘Tell me what you like.’

‘I have no idea. But I can’t imagine you giving me anything I wouldn’t enjoy because it’s you…’ He tucks a loose lock of hair behind her ear.

‘Damn, maybe I should have shot you then.’ His laugh trails off as her hand moves across his skin, tightening her grip. She presses a kiss against the smattering of moles across his abdomen, hoping she’ll never stop finding more. She feels the brush creep up her face in a hot wave as she licks an experimental stripe up his length, feeling him twitch slightly against her tongue in a way that makes her stomach twist. She watches his breath flutter as she strokes him, tensing and relaxing in front of her eyes. 

It’s harder than she expects, to open her mouth around him, her neck immediately heating with strain. She hopes she’s not too slow, working her mouth around him, trying to take as much as she can into the heat of her, his thigh tense under her steadying hand. There’s a slight saltiness, and warmth, so warm, her stomach tenses as she feels him against her soft palette, then it feels as if her insides drop through the floor with a guttural moan.

She pulls away to apologise, hand shaking as she strokes him, now wet from her mouth, and swears. She leans her chin against his burning skin to look at him, feeling her vision tunnel to encompass just him and the feel of his skin against hers. 

Her eyes screw shut as she tries to will herself past the clench of her throat, tamp down the flare of panic to feel her muscles relax and take him further into herself. Her heart rate climbs so high she thinks it’ll fail, as he bucks into her just slightly and a cold sweat showers her. Her eyes won’t focus as she looks at him as he apologizes, his fingers stroke her face and her brows furrow in confusion.

‘Why are you apologizing?’ Her voice, deeper than she’s ever heard it, it takes her a second to register as her own. 

‘I didn’t mean to do that.’

‘Did it feel bad?’ Anger licks up her, like she’s having one half of a conversation. He doesn’t answer, blinking with confusion at her sudden anger. ‘Do it again.’ Her jaw flares at her as slides her mouth over him again. A little easier this time, but her throat still tensing as she battles with it, feeling everything else fall away except the feeling of it. He’s still as a statue under her digging fingers.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Her anger is red hot as she takes his hand and places it against her skull, feeling relief in her neck. ‘Move.’ 

Her hand scrambles against him when he finally does, a tentative tilt of his hips, pressing just a little deeper, throat tensing around him. Her heartbeat whines in her ears, any thoughts melting away. Her thighs clench together as she chokes, pulling away to pant against him as she squirms. ‘Fuck, why do I like that?’ A tear leaks from her eye and tracks its way down to him. ‘Please fuck me.’ 

She laughs as he pulls her under him, cut off by a gasp as he presses roughly into her, her spine arching. Eyes closed she purrs at him through a satisfied smirk.

‘I want to do more of that.’ Her mouth falls open as he kisses at her neck, teeth scraping against her pulse. She pulls his fingers into her mouth, pressing them against her tongue and back, looking at him through the tiny crack of her hooded gaze. His blush creeps across his chest, she scrapes it with her fingernails watching it disappear and reappear once again. She rips his hand away to crush their mouths together, grunting as his palm closes around her throat. She comes with a full body spasm, struggling and failing to look at him, pressing his hand harder around her windpipe. Dazed and desperate as she comes through the other side, she pulls him hard against her as he stutters and comes apart inside her. 

‘I liked that. More of that please.’ Her skin feels sensitized, every drag of her fingers leaving tracks she can feel. It feels as if her muscles are teeming with energy, she grabs onto him, to ground herself. ‘What does it feel like?’ 

‘I don’t have the brain power to answer that right now.’ 

She sighs, good natured frustration at him and satisfaction all rolled into one long deflating movement. ‘We need to shower again.’ She flicks her eyes to his.

‘Uh uh, I know how that ends.’ He presses their interlocked fingers to his lips and her heart judders in her chest. ‘You go first.’ 

She rolls herself upright with a huff and a sharp bite to his shoulder. It’s true, them showering together seemed to result in them getting dirty again. They’d have to find ways to be together that required less water. It had felt good to have him in her mouth, she felt her blood thump in her crotch at the thought of it. Would she be able to handle it if she felt him come in her throat? 

Need I remind you, I can hear what you’re thinking.

She laughs, and once again feels like she’s floating in the hot steam, wondering how she had she gone with sonics for so long. Get out of my head. She sighs as she feels his laugh, sound lost to the water and walls between them. 

He’s asleep by the time she gets back and she leaves him to it. She pulls on his shirt from the floor of the cockpit. It’s soft against her skin and smells a little like sweat and like him, the same smell that had made her want to put her hands on him as soon as they were alone. She slumps onto the bench to plan, feeling a twinge of pain within her. Another little precious thing, she smiles to herself in the silence of the ship. 

Getting the codes is the real problem. She’s freshly energised as she looks over her notes. On the planet there’ll be no problem. Getting past the droids will be the issue. If she could only get access to an FO terminal…

It’s something she’s been questioning. How far computer systems resemble mechanical ones. If she can sense the web of the ship around them, all the ways power moves around and through it, will it work the same with information? She closes her eyes, feeling out the shape of the craft around her. She traces along the path of a wire, moving through it like a tunnel as it melds and splices through junction and terminus, tracing back and continuing. Around all this is the computer systems that govern them, buzzing and humming with its own kind of energy. But she hasn’t looked close enough to it yet, to sense its true shape. Like the rest, it has always been there, she only needs to train her eye to it, see that it’s not a hum, more the harmonisation of various nested systems resonating with each other. 

She comes back to herself, sinking back into herself, her damp skin sticking against the upholstery, his low breathing just audible above the hum of the ship. She turns the holopad in her palm, screen dimly illuminating at her touch, reacting to the resistance of her skin. She closes her eyes.

A simple circuit, power, light, resistors and modulators, all serving as an access point to information. A tree of it, she dips down one rung at a time. A branching directory tree, within each little request for information, sending out their promises, and getting back their own in turn. Within each, another path, another branch, information fizzing like a sea receding into the distance. And at the root, the binary yes no, the constant that is always there. Energy and lack of energy. She looks until she trips her way back up, and the buzz begins to resolve into words, rising unbidden in her mind. Tension in _, jubilation in _, a reward offered for information on _. Same as it always was. One celebrates, one commiserates. Energy and lack of energy. 

By the time he comes to find her, her muscles are shivering with tiredness, an annoyance she’d put to the back of her mind. Sat in the pilot’s chair, she knows the ship’s little secrets, the little ways in which it thinks and makes decisions. She’d known that most were imbued with a certain degree of intelligence, but she’d assumed it was human-like, that it had been taught the fears and considerations of a person and so could act as a human might. But its brain isn’t cyclical and inward-looking like a human’s. It doesn’t tread the same well worn paths, falling into its own historical steps to inevitably loop back on itself. It draws information from everywhere, its connections loose and webby. It knows how long they sleep, the temperatures they can tolerate, they are different from the one’s who’d come before, but they still cluster together like magnets. It passes by systems full of lifeforms, many like them. It checks its systems. It’s surprised to speak with her, it finds its own joy in her strange thoughts, even though their eyes see different universes. 

She blinks his face into focus in front of her. Larger lifeform. She wrinkles her nose. ‘I’ve been talking with the computer.’ He cocks his head at her. She huffs as he scoops her up into his arms. Her fingers tangle in his hair as she’s carried to bed, his skin still warm from sleep. ‘They think we’re strange and primitive. Like pets.’

‘Tell me when you wake up.’ He pulls the blanket over her and she’s asleep before he reaches the threshold. 

His mind races as he drinks his caff. There’s a not insignificant chance that she’s lost her mind. But hadn’t he felt the same before he was told about the Force, even as his words rubbed against some bit of himself that screamed about the truth of it. The energy that has always existed between things, the same energy they harness for space travel, weapons, and bridging their minds. It’s a bias that makes him believe there’s something organic to it, some spark of value that makes the living more important than the innate ones. It was one of the first things he’d been told to let go of, but it still colored his thoughts. Limited his view. But not hers. For a second he is gripped with fear. The things that she can already do, and what she might be capable of. So that’s what it feels like. He can’t fool himself with his laughter. He grasps out for balance, noting his fear and shame and letting it flow through him without comment. Star systems teem with life around them, he focuses on it until their twin loci are lost in the noise. 

‘Do you want to train?’ Her arms loop around his shoulders, her hair tickling his face. He nods against her. 

‘What do you think are the chances we’ll have to fight our way out?’ She shakes out of her jacket, staff leaned against her hip. They’d touched down on a particularly wet planet. Her hair is already curling around her ears, chest inflating to draw in damp breaths. It’s the peak of the rainy season, when the planet swells and bursts with it. Nobody will see them sliding in the mud, they know better than to come here. She’s still blessedly thrilled by the novelty of it, toeing off her shoes and rolling her pant legs to feel cold spots shiver against her skin. 

‘If all goes well, reasonably low.’ He crouches into position. 

‘And if it doesn’t go well. If we’re not as careful as we should be?’ She lunges at him in a feint, shaking the water from her neck. He smiles, and waits for her to attack. 
They pace muddy around the loose arena they’ve made for themselves, between trees fallen under their own wet weight and growing new fresh shoots out of their own splintered flesh. 

‘I hope we get to fight, just a little.’ She rolls her shoulders.

‘Not likely. It’s mostly scientists and engineers, remember.’ She dodges his attack, plucking it from his mind the second before he moves. He narrows his eyes at her.

‘Mostly? What about their Supervisors?’ He pushes her tentative probing from his mind, using her moment of confusion to launch an attack she parries with a grunt. 

He shrugs, ‘Troopers with special helmets. I don’t think they’ll be much of a challenge.’ He stumbles backwards to avoid her sharp stab.

‘Annoying. We should go back to trying to kill each other.’

He shifts his staff in his hands and shrugs before attacking. 

She holds her staff weakly against her hip as they head back. Underneath the mud she knows she’ll be covered in bruises, but her muscles buzz with the satisfaction of work. Her mind is calm, she picks up her boots and walks beside him, feet splatting in the mud. Every inch of her skin is streaked with it, she sucks weakly at a cut on her hand. 
They wash and heal the marks they put on each other’s skin.

The General answers Rey’s question with confusion coloring her words, she directs them to a nearby base that is being slowly downsized. She feeds the co-ordinates to the computer with a nose wrinkle, turning to him to pull her hair into place as the machine responds to her brain as if it were hands. 

‘If you’ve got little jokes between you and the ship, I’m going to feel very jealous.’

She presses her mouth into an impassive line and looks innocently up at him. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Let’s eat first. We’ll get to them for shift change.’ 

They watch the man snap into a lazy salute as his commanding Officer leaves for the night. He deflates a little at his post, scanning the skyline and shifting from foot to foot to ease their ache. Staving off boredom was a challenge he was by now well versed in. Nothing ever came out of the dark. The next movement he would see would be his colleagues leaving for home, creases in their uniforms crumpled from sitting at a desk for nine hours. They envied him for his fresh air, he envied them for their un-swollen feet. It was all pointless anyway. They were lucky enough to be posted somewhere low risk, but that meant functionally, nothing ever happens. 

He blinks away the blur of tiredness. They slip past, just a smudge, just an unfocused spot, smoothed away in a half second. A noise inside, he cracks the door to listen to find silence once more. He closes it again. 

The lights are dimmed to half brightness as they slip through the base. A jumble of voices in the distance, low and tired conversations about nothing. There are too few of them here to form any kind of meaningful presence, they’re simply guarding the Order's assets. A terminal, blinking with silenced bulletins. Biometric security, a discarded glove next to the panel, small and crumpled. Keep an eye on the door.

It’s harder here to find her calm, hovering over the display carefully to keep her body from making any contact. A tangle of biometric data, threads of information that translate the damp flesh of the workers into something clean and reducible to a short string. She plucks one at random from the most recent cached references, someone she can be reasonably sure is still on the base. 

The computer passes its eye towards her, and for a moment she is fixed under its gaze. Then it is gone again, and she has the same feeling she had looking into the rheumy eyes of a happabore, waiting for it to class her trembling body as non-threatening. She recovers herself, glancing at the shimmering surface of information, broken as information is moved, removed, circling back on itself only to dissolve its delicate whirlpools into nothing. The lacelike web of it drawn out across the base, to other computers, to routers, little silvery threads of it moving out into the universe. Her head thumps around the beginnings of a headache, and she slowly severs her connection to the Force, back into the room where her back screams at her and her shadow guards the door, watching her.

‘There’ll all connected. We can get whatever we want from wherever. It doesn’t matter.’ She snags a discarded holopad and gambles on its absence not being noticed for a few days.

‘Cameras.’ They head back through the icy cool of the base. This they’ve done before, she’s grateful it doesn’t require much mental effort to cover their tracks. Then they’re back again into the cool of night. She rubs the ache from her forehead as they trace their way back through the shadows. 

‘Does that hurt?’ His hand ghosts at her back as she blinks at the too bright street lamps.

‘Yeah, a little. About the same as when I first started working with the Force. Nothing I can’t get used to.’ She stops to take a deep clearing breath, holding his look with effort. ‘I’m okay, I promise.’ She ignores his worried look towards her as they sight the hulking grey of their ship.

‘You sleep, I’ll give the report.’ She smiles as he kisses her forehead, imagining he’d infused it with the slightest of healing, but too nervous to ask. She collapses clothed into the heaven that is her bed, feeling the room spin around her as she screws her face into the blankets. She sighs in relief as the lights flick off around her and she’s blanketed in darkness. 

‘I’m reasonably sure we weren’t detected. It seems we’ll be able to get the code we need from any connected terminal without much effort.’ He reaches out tentatively to Rey, finding her calmed by sleep. His hand hovers over the button to disconnect the call when he hears an intake of breath.

‘I’m surprised to hear from you.’ He freezes, hunched over the computer, warring with himself to sever the connection, save himself from hearing the careful response from Leia. He waits a beat, seeing if she’ll have the strength what he doesn’t. His throat wobbles, choking on nothing.

‘Rey’s sleeping.’ He leans heavily back in the chair, willing himself to believe it’s just his desperate imagination, imagining his mother curled in her private quarters, murmuring to him in the dark. 

‘I hope she’s well. I worry that we ask too much of her. She’s already given so much.’ He can hear his heartbeat in his ears, eyes dropping out of focus. ‘You’re worried about her.’ He closes his eyes as a chill pours its way down his neck. 

‘That’s everything, for now.’ He reaches for the call disconnect.

‘She’s a strong one. She had to be to survive. I’m ashamed to admit it still sometimes surprises me just how much she’s able to do. Life has not been kind to her, but she has a knack for salvaging the good. Sleep well.’ He nods a soundless reply as the connection drops to static, raking a hand across his face as his stomach crushes in on itself. 

Chapter Text

Leia doesn’t acknowledge their brief conversation, and for that he’s supremely grateful. It is easier by far to pretend that all is normal. He’d crawled shivering into bed beside Rey, eyes screwed shut as she’d pulled him to her body and curled around him. He’d awoken in her encircling warmth and watched awareness take over her, squinting up at him, every cell in his body telling him that everything would be okay if only they could only stay as they are.

They wash and eat reluctantly, firing off a message that they will come to meet with the General. Sheer coincidence, she assures them, that the bulk of the base is out on reconnaissance today, the rest are deep in strategy meetings and will be for a few hours. 

She’s incredulous at their plan, but had stopped reacting to what she believed couldn’t be done a long time ago. When it comes to survival, people routinely surprise you with the impossible, as if it’s any other day, like picking one fruit from another at breakfast. She doesn’t ask how they’re so confident they can pluck the codes they need from the First Order systems, nor does she comment more than a slight curve of her mouth at just how far that revelation could swing things for the Resistance. So they can disguise their appearance. That’s probably a good thing. She averts her eyes from his body curved like a shield towards Rey as she teases out the plan she’s still forming as she speaks it. He tries and fails to disguise the lift of his mouth as she talks. 

‘And when you find the device?’ Leia schools her face as Rey’s hand comes to rest beside her with the lightest accidental brush against his. She smiles at her flustered gaze, flitting around the room. ‘Do you think you’d have a chance at destroying it?’ Rey stammers, brow furrowing. 

‘We were tasked with reconnaissance.’ She looks to Ben, gratitude in her panicked breath, before turning back to Leia.

‘That’s true. But the situation has evolved somewhat. I hadn’t dared to hope that we might be able to get people down to the planet. But it’s safe to say that if you’re successful, it won’t be safe to attempt a repeat attack.’

‘We don’t know what kind of device we’re going to be looking at', he shifts, bringing them even closer together as he leans his hands on the table, loosely.

'If it’s not possible to do it safely, I don’t want you to compromise yourself for the sake of the attempt. Think it over for me? I don’t expect an answer from you now.’

The General excuses herself, meeting an engineer at the door who throws a questioning glance at the two of them. I wonder who he thinks we are, she muses, spreading her palms on the table to steady herself. ‘Can we go?’ 

They’re glad somewhat for their shadow as they head back to the ship. No need to tell her they’re leaving. 

‘Where have you taken us?’ A mountain rears into the sky through the scratched windscreen, dark and brooding. 

‘Somewhere you’ll like.’ She attempts to cross her arms in her thick jacket, put on for the icy base and never removed. She gives up and settles for glaring at him. ‘Wait for me a moment.’ He grabs a bag and stuffs inside some of their clothing, the soft and flowing items he knows she prefers, as well as a few towels and a blanket. She eyes the pack as he comes back through, legs crossed lazily at the ankle and slumped so far in the chair she’s practically horizontal.

‘I’m not climbing a mountain, I'll tell you that now.’

He helps her protesting body up from the chair. ‘We’re not climbing a mountain, it’s just through there.’

The air is crisp and cool, smelling of damp rock and leaves. He sees a little life seep back into her through the pink on her cheeks, steps steady as she keeps pace with him up the slight incline to take them into the tree cover. Then the temperature and humidity enters their lungs.

‘Thermal hot spring. Closest we can get to a bath right now.’ He shrugs off the pack and picks his way down to the water, ringed in damp moss covered rocks. She follows, unzipping her jacket against the warmth.

‘Is it safe?’

‘It filters up through the rock. The minerals are said to be particularly healing.’

‘I don’t need any healing. I’m fine.’ Her smile is unconvincing as he helps her out of her jacket. 

‘I know you are. Just try it.’ She follows him in toeing off her boots and socks on the soft moss carpeting the area.

‘Promise it’s not going to melt my skin off?’ She laughs at his grin as he rolls up the legs of his trousers to dangle them into the steaming water. She melts against his side as she slides her legs into the water, feeling her muscles shiver and release tension she'd been ignoring as a habit. Her toes fizzle with pins and needles as they sit, the chill of the air on their faces contrasted with the heat crawling up their legs. ‘Is anyone else here?’

‘Hmm?’ He hums his question into her hair, shocked back into a body he doesn’t realize he left.

‘I want to get in. How deep is it?’ 

‘Not very.’ He struggles to right himself as she staggers splashing to her feet and begins efficiently shirking off layers. He leans to watch her, taking in the flush of her tan skin and wiry muscles, throwing her clothes behind her in a forgotten pile.

‘Stop looking at me like that.’ He averts his eyes dutifully as she slides into the water to peer at him over the surface. ‘You make me feel naked sitting there like that.’ She bobs around the small pool, toeing carefully over the rock. ‘It’s not like you haven’t seen it all before.’ She raises her eyebrow at him, jutting out her chin. ‘Are you going to just stay there?’ 

She watches him, mouth below the steaming surface of the water, watching his wobbling figure undress. His pale skin is outlined against the dark of the rock, streaked with pink scars as he twists to throw his clothes behind him. Her heart thumps in her chest as she watches him, using the wavering cover of the steam to stare at him in the sunlight, waiting for him to fade away. 

‘Happy now?’ He wades slowly over to her, ducking his body under the water up to the neck. She smiles at him, chin quivering as it flits over her face.

‘I’m so tired.’ She admits, leaning into his touch as he cups her neck, closing her eyes. ‘Do you think we’ll ever be able to just stop?’ He holds her in the warm water, soothing over her skin, trying to put aside his bitter anger to concentrate on comforting her.

‘Do you want to go away for a while?’ 

‘After this is done.’ He wants to protest, but he doesn’t want to give shape to the treacherous part of him that questions if they’ll make it back. Doesn't want to give it form.  

They wash off the mineral rich water with their inferior recycled supply, distilled from their own sweat and tears.

‘Tomorrow.’ She says it with a smile, and he nods in agreement before stretching in bed to stroke her damp hair and tease out the tangles with his fingers. He lets it soothe him as she speaks to him, one hand curled around his calf like an anchor. ‘I want to sleep in a proper bed. Somewhere where we can feel the sun on our skin in the mornings. Eat breakfast in the cool air, wear my nicest clothes. I want to be somewhere nobody is looking at us, so we can cook and eat together. Drink some wine, maybe too much wine, sleep and wake up in the same place for once. Do you know anywhere like that?’ Her sigh rumbles in her chest. ‘There must be somewhere like that in the Galaxy.’ She rolls her face into his hand and breathes, luxuriant and slow. 

They wake in the night and crawl out of bed, brains snapped into awareness. He heads through to start a pot of something strong and caffeinated while she splashes some water on her face. It feels more fitting to look unrested and drawn, even if they won’t truly be able to see her. 

‘Shall we find our mark?’ She slides onto the bench and he deposits a steaming mug in front of her. ‘Sooner rather than later. Before they sever the connection on this thing.’ She balances the offending holopad on her palm, screen frosted with scratches. 

‘If you’re sure.’ She shrugs and places it down between then, wrapping her hand around her mug and closing her eyes. He pauses for a moment before joining her, sensing her gather the Force around her and become aware of the item in front of her, teasing at it until little tendrils of energy are loosed like flyaway hairs, twisting her Force with it. 

The connection is still up. His attention slides off of the swirling device, unable to get a grasp on it before it moves away from him. There’s a log of recent visits. She smiles as a procession of date-stamped records spills forward, as if eager to be let loose. Looks like they’re due another in a few months. Her request is met with a response in the affirmative. The tasks silently removes itself from the itinerary of a nameless recruit before they had had chance to acknowledge it. She absorbs the code and then works to translate it back into basic, scrawling it on a scrap of paper, blinking as they slowly return to figures in her eye.

‘General Wilde, ever heard of them?’ She falls out of her connection, rubbing the ache from her brows. 

‘Recently promoted, daughter of one of the founders of the Order. Like many she is of the belief that the Sith contigent is a waste of resources. She even went so far as to tell me so.’ He takes her mug from her and guides her to lie her head on his lap. ‘Close your eyes.’

‘Did you say anything to her?’ He smooths at the crease on her forehead, feeling her sigh against his wrist. 

‘What was there to say? She was right.’ He digs at the nape of her neck with his fingers, seeing her eyelids flutter as he presses at the corded muscle. 

‘Show me what she looks like. I’m too tired to do that again.’ She pulls in a shaky breath as he presses the image into her mind, the tiny woman staring through his mask at him across the room as if it weren’t there. ‘Is she Force sensitive?’ She looks at the tilt of the woman’s chin, how she seems to look down on everyone even as they sit a full head above her, slight sneer on her black painted lips. 

‘No, she just hates me and everything I stand for.’

‘Stood for', she corrects lightly. 'How old is she?’

‘Twenty-five maybe. Younger than me. She was raised in the Order from birth. Her name follows her everywhere she goes.’ She watches the lady in his mind as she speaks, eyes upturned as if she’s pulling the words from memory, sliding her eyes to her target as the last syllables hang in everyone’s ears. In words, a well-meaning question from a place of understanding, tone of ringing judgement. The memory of her smiling as a petty Officer falls into her trap, thanking her for her understanding as a sneer pulls at her lips. She shakes their hand and leaves the contaminated limb on the table-top, staying seated to watch them leave, before inclining her head at an underling to follow. ‘She’s employed in maintaining high operational standards.’

‘I don’t know if I can be her.’

‘Much of what she does is done out of sight. They just have to believe she’s there.’ She imprints the image of her face in her mind, knowing who to look for in the minds of others. ‘I don’t know how you do that.’

‘Hmm?’ She curls her face into his shirt, feeling tiredness settle over her. 

‘With the computer. That information is buried behind layers of encryption.’

‘They’re just distractions. The computer knows where it is so I just ask them.’

‘And they answer you?’

‘Why wouldn't they?’ She pulls herself upright, pressing at the cramp in her hip. ‘What’s our plan for tomorrow?’ 

There’s no need to pull up a plan for the base, they know the scientists will be nestled deep in the heart of it, as far from sunlight as they can get. They will talk to them if they can, try to get a sense of what is being designed by overlaying the loose puzzle pieces, pass between each room just as the engineers cannot. They will leave and take any trace of their presence with them. With any luck it’ll be a few days before they dare inquire about the result of the inspection, a few dozen hours of watching the doors as they sleep, checking for new messages with their breath held. If they’re very lucky, it’ll be forgotten entirely as multiple recruits whisper their thanks to numerous faceless Gods. They will relay their information and return the uniforms to be sonically cleaned, scrubbing their skin and sweat from the fabric as its vaporised away.  

They arrive before dawn, dressing silently in their uniforms and stepping out into the cold. 

‘Are you sure there’s nothing else you need?’ Leia folds her arms around herself, rocking in the chill of the morning at the base. The bay doors slide open, creaking with the temperature drop. She looks between the pair as they shake out of their jackets and smooth the wrinkles from their borrowed uniforms. Her stomach tenses as she looks at him, outfitted in the familiar silhouette she’d tracked through holovids, when she’d compulsively and masochistically sought out any trace of him since his reappearance within the Order. Han had always warned her against it, so it became a shameful furtive thing, carving at a little part of herself with each mention of him. She’s cursed at the time not being able to see his face, now she’s grateful. She can begin to overlay those images with the sight of him stooping slightly to help Rey with her collar, paste over them with the little smiling glance they share between them, until the shape burned into her brain begins to gray just a little.

‘The code will work?’ 

‘It’s current, we got it this morning. From the logs the officer in question went there just over four months ago. Safe to say they’re due an inspection.’ 

‘And it’ll work to get you out again?’ 

‘We’ll find out. General.’ Leia steps back to watch him fold himself into the pilot’s seat, pretends not to see when Rey squeezes his shoulder briefly before clambering into the gunner position. She watches them recede screaming into the sky just turning to morning. People will ask about the absent TIE. Friends of ours, is her default response. For their safety I will leave it at that.  

I guess we won’t have too long to question if this will work. She clenches her fists as he kicks the craft into lightspeed, letting her eyes un-focus on the by now familiar sight of stars smudging around them. How long until we’re there? 

Maybe ten minutes.

I really hoped I wouldn’t have to do this again. This is a little too familiar for my liking. 

It worked out fine for us last time. 

Yeah, eventually. He laughs to himself, trying to slip into meditation as the craft groans and scrapes around them. There was no space for their sabres in the slim fitting uniforms, just blasters. He prays to some nameless being that he won’t come to regret leaving them together on the ship. They would have rather hindered their efforts to be invisible.

What’s the likelihood of someone at this base having met you before?  In the gunner position there’s no chance of speaking over the scream of the ion engines. There’s a relief that he can’t see the tension pressing around her eyes, but he’s too far to touch even as his voice sounds in her head. 

Pretty low. I may have been in the same room with some of them, but we wouldn’t have spoken. She imagines him, standing in the corner, face hidden behind his mask as men debate the proper allocation of resources here, tension there, performance indicators and material losses as he watches on, the human hand of Snoke, coated in a thick skin of leather. He was never asked to speak, not permitted to comment on anything that wasn’t directly ordered by his Master. His presence simply ensuring to remind all those involved of the consequences of failure. 

It’s best if I do it. 

I’d say so. Can you do it and disguise yourself at the same time? 

She huffs bitterly. I have to, I don’t have a choice. Show me how these people talk, again. He busies himself with the task as they drift towards the web of droids guarding the planet, watching the silent exchange of codes on his screen and taking a shaky exhale.

They step out of the craft with the muffling blanket of the Force around them, subtly obscuring their presence. He keeps his arms at his sides as she walks ahead of him in her crisply ironed uniform, seemingly transformed by how she wears it, without the downtrodden slouch of those in the Order. Them seeming to be pulled out of their natural curled state by a wire tugging at their spine, as if every step hurts them. She walks beside him as she always had, self-assured and confident, something that seemed to reflect onto him in his most unguarded moments. Right now he’s mired in the familiarity of it all, once again silent observer to the flurry of figures assembling at the compound’s entrance, zigzagging like swarm insects suddenly without their leader. She smiles as the sun touches her hands, feeling her skin soak it in. It’s a beautiful place, despite everything. 

‘General. I wasn’t aware we had a visit scheduled. I’m afraid I’m not prepared for you to be here.’ The Officer’s skin is already pinking in the sun where he twists his hat in his fingers, his pale eyes passing back and forth between them, recognition dawning in his dry swallow. 

‘We’re here on a routine inspection. I find it’s more illuminating if we’re not expected. It’s natural to be nervous, but if everything is in order you have nothing to worry about.’ She tries and fails to leech the sincerity from her words, as she’s been shown. Still, the image is complete enough. They have passed the first and likely most significant point of failure. Beyond this point, it’s likely no-one would be suicidal enough to question them. 

‘Of - of course’, he stammers, turning to lead them into the looming shadow of the facility, a silvery square carved out of grass so bright it stings the eyes. ‘I can take you to our command centre. From there you can get an overview of the entire facility.’

‘Whilst also allowing you to send message to hide whatever you deem needs hiding. We’ll make our own way through. Ensure our presence is known and that we are to be complied with. Beyond that I’d like your men to return to command and stay there until I give the order you may leave. If you are needed, we will send word.’

‘Yes, General. Sir.’ The recruits eyes slide off of the face she projects at him, never meeting her eyes. It’s doubtful if she were the General if it would have made a difference. He slinks away, trying to collapse his limbs as small as possible, to appear so small he might disappear between the cracks of the durasteel panelling, or into the humming air vents piping cool air throughout the base. Anything to avoid the punishment that always followed these visits. His hand would still be warm from her palm and he’d be rehearsing his explanations in his head, for his own benefit rather than an earnest faith it would alter the result already pre-written. Their work, if exhaustive, was too slow. If creative; over-reaching. If dependable; unimaginative. Still for the most part, they were thankfully left alone. 

They’ll be watching on the cameras. She listens as footsteps recede into the distance, bracing her fingertips on a nearby command post, now vacant. We’ll need to wipe them before we go. She nods. Shall we? 

She heads to the elevator and waits for him to stand beside her. Now this is familiar. She wipes her smile away to look up at the cameras, waiting for the trill of the control panel being unlocked for her and selecting the basement. The doors slide silently shut and in the confines of the metal box smoothly pulling them downwards, she can feel the strain already beginning to pull at her. She closes her eyes as they plummet, far enough below ground the air takes on a flatter note around them and the air conditioning kicks up a gear. 

The doors open into a panopticon of curved monitors, chairs pushed quickly away and the condensation of cups still sketching rings into the table top. There’s another way out. She counts the dozens of cameras pointed at them, cameras on cameras. Somewhere there are monitors showing a wormhole of recursive views, each more jumbled with static.

There's a door behind that panel. She follows his gaze quickly, noting it and amending it to a map in her mind.

Let’s go. She makes a move to the first door, but stops when she realises he’s not following her.

We can see everything from here.

See, yes. But I want to talk to them. She gestures with a flap of her hand for him to follow her, stomping back over when he doesn't.

As far as they know we don’t have any need to talk to them. They’re expecting us to stay here.

That’s why we should get moving. She moves again but he taps at the monitors. 

We can make it look like we’re still here. Then you won’t have to shield yourself all the time. 

Good idea, I’m annoyed I didn’t think of that.

He smiles and pulls out a chair, sinking into it. You’re a little distracted. But this will help. Sit and look busy for a few moments.

She pulls her attention to the screen, to one of the scientists working silently on it, scrawling down with a quick hand something from the blown out rectangle of his computer readout. What do you think he’s doing?

We’ll find out. He pushes himself along to another readout, the screen blaring to life and fuzzing the silhouette of him as he runs a hand through his hair and holds it there.

What’s the point of having cameras on the screens if you can’t read them?

He turns to another, finding a similar tableau, a figure expanding some kind of schematic on his screen, it falling into focus for a second before blurring again. The cameras are closed-circuit but encrypted, can you feed this back to them?  He shakes down his communicator and speaks into it, stating the time and date and their plans to observe the inner workings of the base.

I don’t think they pick up sound.

Probably not, but they might be able to read our lips.

What if they realize what we've done?

My guess is they’ll think there’s been an issue with their systems and get in touch. But they’ll want to believe they know where we are, and that we’re not behind those doors.

He looks between the monitors, seeking any reaction to his speech from the scientists, finding nothing. They’re sound-proofed, probably so they can’t talk to each other. He watches a lady roll up her sleeve and extract something heavy from a box, carefully closing it before placing the object behind a clear door and setting off a rhythm of blinking lights with a succession of rapid button presses. I think we have enough.

Stand behind me so they can’t see. She feels the heat from his body where he stands stiffly behind her, as she strains to divert her effort from disguising herself to begin to breach the machines defences. Why do you think it works on cameras?

By the looks of it, the Officer is the only one who recognised Wilde. And he’d rather believe it’s her in here than that he let an intruder onto the base and gave them full access. The rest just believe him. She hears the blood rush in her ears as he speaks, simultaneously plucking the desired answer from the computers data banks and echoing it back to them, ignoring once again its curious look in her direction.

One day we might meet a computer that doesn’t want to work with me. She chains the coursing stream of data that is their video stream in with the concurrent one, feeling it snag there and be carried along in its flow. Then she moves on to the scientists, creating a dozen stuttering loops, blindly betting that those that are watching aren't doing so too carefully.

I didn’t know they had a choice in the matter. 

Of course they do. She breathes through the panicked sensation of her brain swelling against her skull, catching in the bumps and grooves there with an ache. How will we know it its worked? 

Ask them to open a door and see if they do. He moves towards one as she takes a deep breath, drawing her spine up and slowly cracking her eyes against the glare of the artificial lights. She moves towards another and waits for him to dutifully follow with a chuckle, standing and waiting for the keypad to admit them. It stares blankly out at nothing as they wait. She turns to the camera, pointing towards the door. Nothing. She turns to lean against his chest as the tension of keeping up the Force projection leaves her, groaning as his arm lightly braces her back against the wobble in her knees.

If they are still watching, we’ve just caused a minor scandal. Fraternization within the Order is strictly forbidden. 

Then they won’t like this. She reaches her arms around his neck and pulls his mouth to hers. She smiles as she feels his gloved hand frame her face, tugging at her skin. Do you think they can hear us?  She searches his eyes in turn. I’m so exhausted. 

I’ll learn for next time. He brushes a loose hair behind her ear, straightening her crooked collar. 

‘I can’t wait to get out of this ridiculous uniform. It’s like they designed them to be maximum levels of uncomfortable.’ She steps back to smooth the fabric over her hips, ripping off her gloves and shoving them in her pocket. She presses her palm to the lock and it trills in recognition. ‘I gave us both clearance.’

‘Dare I ask how?’ He pulls off his own with a chuckle.

‘Easy. Your brain knows your palm print, I took it and gave it to the machine in a language it understands.’ 

‘Naturally.’

‘I’ll remove them before we go. Shall we?’ She inclines her head towards the doorway. It opens with a click and a flurry of movement.

‘General. I-‘ the older man stumbles to his feet, trying to smooth the wrinkles from his lab coat in vain, them outlined in gray by the nervous swipes of his hands over the bunched fabric. ‘I didn’t know you were coming, I don’t have anything prepared to show you.’

‘It’s okay’, she sighs in relief at being able to speak without having to weight each word before she says them. ‘We’re here to check on how the base is being run. I’m visiting you out of my own curiosity. Can you show me what you’re working on?’ His eyes rove between the two of them, still reflexively smoothing at his coat. ‘Don’t worry about trying to make us understand, this isn’t a test, I promise.’

They’re not used to being talked to like this. Ben lifts a cup off of a stack of crumpled pages, covered in layers of scribbles. 

He’s not used to being talked to at all, least we can do is treat him like a human. She softens her burning gaze and turns back to the man clasping and unclasping his ink-stained hands in front of her.

‘What’s your name?’ She looks at the lines picked out in fading ink as she waits. 

‘Dr Price. Westley. Or at least I used to be. Here, not much call for it.’ She extends a hand to him, and he shakes it, his cheeks coloring at the cold sweat that has formed there. 

‘Will you show us what you’re working on, Dr Price?’ 

He turns to his work, posture lifting, as if someone else has stepped into his body like a costume, pulling it into a new shape. ‘Well my specialty is energy regulation. Have you ever visited Coruscant?’ He deflates a little at the shake of her head. ‘Well, massive cities have huge power needs and consumption. My job was helping to ensure the huge amounts of power needed to keep a place like that running would be used efficiently and had low risk of escaping the system. The kind of energy we’re talking about could cause widespread fatalities if not properly regulated and contained. That why they brought me here. I’m working on an energy regulating field on a level beyond Coruscant, beyond all the Core worlds combined. How they want me to test it, however…’ Her eyes drift to a wall of equations, looping back around on itself for space, partially erased by his own racing hand. ‘Please don’t think I’m criticising the Order. There’s a kind of flattery in being chosen for this project.’ He looks towards Ben, leaning casually against his desk, examining a model of fractal like supports around a dome of smooth metal. ‘Working in theoreticals has its charms. But it’s been years and I feel like I’m further from the end than when I started.’

‘You’ve been here years?’

‘By my best estimation.'

‘Do you know what it’s to be used for?’

‘I’m not permitted to know, and I won’t ask you to tell me.’

‘Do you have a best guess?’

‘I’m not so far gone yet as to hazard a guess, General. It is not my place to know.’

‘Quite right.’ Her gaze snaps to Ben, slowly placing a half drunk drink back in its place. ‘General, we’re running behind schedule.’

‘Thank you for drawing my attention to my own schedule, Officer.’ She turns back to the man bouncing his eyes between the two of them, seeing a tremble move through him at her look. ‘Dr Price, thank you for being so cooperative. Your work is greatly appreciated here. I will see you get the recognition you deserve for your contributions to this project. Be well.’ She quirks her head at Ben for him to leave, following him into the silent vacuum of the observation post. Then she rounds on him, walking him stumbling into the desks. ‘What was all that?’ she spits.

‘If you ask him questions like that, you’ll put him in danger if it gets out.’

‘More danger than he’s already in, you mean?’ She turns and forces her hands out of balled fists, kicking at a spot of nothing on the floor.

‘Yes, let him keep his theories. For all we know that room is bugged. You were leading him into a trap.’ Her blood boils as she hears him drum his fingers on the underside of the desk.

‘He must have an idea what they’re planning.’ She speaks at the vague black shadow of him over her shoulder.

‘I’m sure he does, but for all he knows he was talking to an Officer of the First Order. Speculating would get him killed.’ She hears him press off the desk, wrapping his arms across her chest and setting his chin on her crown. 

‘How are they supposed to make anything if they don’t even know what they’re working towards?’ She takes a breath and hooks her hands over his forearm, feeling her anger drain away with her exhale. 

‘You’re right to be angry.’ His voice rumbles through her skull. ‘But we have to be careful. For their sakes.’ She nods, a smile flashing over her face as she looks to the next door. ‘I’ll talk to the next one.’ He gently unfolds his arms and walks ahead, letting her shake her worry from her body like rain. ‘Ready?’ He waits for her nod before pressing his hand to the keypad.

This time she has the luxury of pacing slowly around the room as he speaks, running her fingers over neatly inked tables they had half-heartedly tried to obscure. Energy draw from the base, noted down to the minute with tiny questions inked into the margins. A dip in drawn power for their battery banks, deduced to correspond with a meal time they are excluded from. Days marked with a gouge of a fingernail at the edge of their desk, she runs hers through them, ears whining. He comes across the same wall in his questioning, the great honor that stops them from voicing the extent of their theories beyond their brief. They leave with a smile that quickly dissolves with the whoosh of the closing door, a hand twitching to reach out before they let it fall at their side.

'We're not getting anywhere like this.' She slumps into one of the chairs with a groan, watching the version of her on the monitors, trapped in a loop, gaze swinging between the monitors. Somehow, these versions of herself are united in how little they know. 

He sits carefully across from her, hands on his lap as she stares at him from her crooked palm. 'Well, they have a lot of reasons to fear us, and basically no reason to trust us.'

'Could we order them to talk?'

'If we did, it's doubtful they tell you anything other than what they think you want to hear.'

She speaks into her hand, mouth dry. 'At least we can be pretty sure they're still watching that feed. Otherwise we would have had company a while ago.' She unfolds her arms and tries to shake out some of the tension crawling there like bugs on her skin. 'I don't know how to convince them to talk.' Her eyes scan routinely over the crowd of cameras pointed their way, still an annoyance, even as it has become a feature of his life with him. Then a thought coldly expanding in her mind.

'I can practically hear the cogs turning in your mind right now. Are you trying to work out how to ask it?'

'Ask what?' She replies, disarmingly bright before she regrets the deception.

'What methods I might have used in the past to get people to talk. It's fine, you can ask.'

'I don't want you to hurt them.'

'But you want to know what they know.'

'I wouldn't ask that of you.'

'You aren't. But this is how it always goes. I won't hurt them, but I can get you that information.'

She sits, licking her parched lips and trying to roll the tension from her shoulder, holding his eye, unblinking. 'If I say no, we came here for nothing. If I say yes, what makes me any different from them?'

'Intent. You're trying to prevent the construction of a weapon. I'd say there's a difference.'

'I don't know if that's true.' She lets her gaze drop, cold tiredness crawling through her body, unable to look at him beyond the blurred shape in the corner of her eye. 'Do it.'

They're met with the usual stammered greeting, pretending to be supremely interested in the alien equations crowding the walls as their host flurries around. She's expected the usual back and forth, their answers gradually becoming more closed and guarded as they catch up to the reality of the situation. Ben steps into their path as they gather a hand full of crinkled papers in their hand, searching in vain for somewhere to store them. He does as he'd shown her in the past, pressing lightly into their mind and fixing on a face. One entangled with hope and pain in equal measure, the one face pushing them onwards, tethering them back to who they were. She can't see the process, only the result. He pulls it on and there's an immediate change in their posture, sagging into relief, sliding into a chair before their legs give out.

They search his face as he pulls a chair over for himself, mapping every inch of it as he waits, knowing it doesn't really touch him. But it's still uncomfortable, a jarring closeness, sudden and cloying. When they begin to babble he draws their attention back to him with a low instruction to focus on his voice. She freezes, breathing shallow and silent as she watches them, her presence melting into the background. 'Tell me what happened to you.'

They get their rambling recounting of events, sprinkled with fear and the reluctant resignation by which they'd come to view their prison. How they've tried as best they can to keep themselves whole inside of it, for the doomed idea they might return to their family, a fiction only sustained as long as they don't leave. They reach for his face but he gently diverts their hand before it can touch his skin. But at this slight contact any strength that was holding them together fails and they fall into their mother tongue. He answers, teasing out what they know, smoothly translating for Rey in his mind as he does. Toneless and faultlessly specific, he recounts it from a clinical distance even as his voice in her ear is warm. Concern in answer to their fear, leaning to keep in their eyeline as for the scientist, the whole world falls away around him. 

She only half focuses on his translation, Hapan, able to pick out the characteristics of their people now she knows. The over-bright lighting to mimic their home world, their answers slightly faltering as they slip into a disused tongue, it not having the words to describe their current life, circling on the concepts with a child-like questioning. She doesn't blink as the interaction plays out in front of her, with the feeling of having stumbled into the kind of conversations they have themselves in the dark with no witnesses. 

Is there anything else you want to know?  He tacks on his question, tone unchanged, and it takes her a moment to respond in the negative. He leaves the conversation with a promise he doesn't translate, but she knows it from the response. A half-believed agreement to their continual bravery, that if they can just hold on, everything will be alright. They nod, trying to shore up whatever strength they have left, jaw shaking as he squeezes their shoulder briefly. Then sleep takes over their features. 

'We should go.' He stands and smooths out the wrinkles in his clothes, eyes distant.

'Hapan. You speak Hapan.'

'Yes, we should move on.'

'You're really smart', she says carefully, not sure how to bridge the distance between them and bring him back to her.

'So they say.' He holds the door open for her, head pounding.

'They do, because they're right.'

'Can't say I've had much use for it lately.'

'Did you ever do that to me? He's not going to remember that, is he?'

'No', he huffs, slumping into a chair. 'I've never done that to you. You're right, he won't remember it.' She leans at his side and his eyes eventually swing in her direction with a quick smile. 'He won't remember what I said, but it won't matter. It's a hope that should have died being rekindled. I don't know if I can honestly say that I didn't hurt him.'

'They'll tell you anything, won't they?'

'They want to talk. I just gave them someone they could trust.'

'Who?'

'His wife.'

She doesn't press any further, just leaning at his side and wrapping an arm around him, squeezing him to her. It's clear his skill at this far exceeds her own, able to draw them into it with an almost hypnotic persuasiveness, but it hangs around him like a cloud slowly breaking apart. A light press into his mind finds it swarming with images not his own, having drawn a little of them into himself as he did it, echoing with borrowed pain, but shades of it familiar. A longing for a place only existing in the past, a face known to be changed by recollection. Even if it hurts him, she has to ask him to do it again. And she does.

They move through each door in sequence, sealing behind them each person and their tiny fragile links they’ve forged to the outside world. A replica of their home town picked out in gossamer thin strands of paper, shivering in the exhaust of the air conditioning. Time measured by the growth of nails, hair, the progress of the digestive system, Fleshy systems notated with obsessive accuracy. Dust collected in the grooves they gouge into the floor with their feet. A nuclear scientist, testing methods of containment against his own body. His water is red with iodine, his food rusty with it. A physicist working on particle collisions, viewing their experiments through a grainy feed, feeding instructions to droids in binary, who can only remember their home planet by the quality of the light there, and the echo they see in their eyes when their experiments are successful. Things that don’t fit together, the only similarity being the curving arch of their writing as they stretch at arms length, rewriting their equations like mantras. They seal each person back in, leaving them dreaming, in a peace that will only sharpen their world when they slip back into it. Soon they’re back where they started, looking at the smudges on the doors from their hands.

‘This doesn’t make sense to me, does it make sense to you?’ She feels the passage of time in the weight of her limbs, the shake in her fingers from lack of sugar as she strokes them through his hair. ‘I’m not smart enough to understand what they’re making.’

‘It’s not that. You don’t have the full picture.’ He slumps into his seat, supporting his head on his palm. 

‘I have more of the picture than they do. Do you have any idea?’

‘Something big. My guess would be an nuclear weapon of some kind.’

'I'm sorry I asked you to do that. I wish there was another way.'

'It's fine, at least it's for a good purpose this time.'

'I don't want to be like them.' She ducks, waiting for his eyes to follow hers, bloodshot and squinting, stumbling to keep up with hers.

'You're not like them.'

'That's kind', she whispers, brushing his hair back and feeling him flinch slightly under her fingertips. 'But I don't want you to lie to me. Close your eyes.' She leans her head against his, healing him a light brush of her lips against his, feeling him inhale sharply. She slides to the floor at his feet, wrapping her arm around his leg and leaning against his knee, trying to summon the energy to get them out of this room, then the base. ‘We don’t have anything to tell them. The only good thing is that it looks like it’s not ready yet. There has to be a record somewhere. Someone must know what this is all for.’

‘I don’t think it’s wise to ask anyone any more questions. We can leave and tell them what we know. Someone might be able to make sense of it.’

‘No, I’m finding out today. This can't have been for nothing.’ She forces herself to her feet and flops into a chair, slamming her eyes shut and forces herself into meditation, her signature boiling with it before she wrenches it smooth. If it’s anywhere, it’s on the base. I’m going to find it. 

He watches the output of the screen as she trawls through directories, human-readable UI fragmenting into monospace diagnostics, and beyond that into the stream of bare binary that fizzes like static on the screen. A bead of sweat works its way from her hairline and down her cheek, her fingertips white where she presses them into the table-top.

What do you see?  For the first time she can’t respond, even in her mind, and his stomach squeezes. Rey, I think you should stop. He brushes off a weak wave of pain she sends his way, clipped and perfunctory before his words have even finished. There are other ways to do this. He stands over her, trying to shift her iron grip, seeing his fingers dig into her flesh and bite against tendons.

‘Rey, please, we have to go.’ Her cheek burns against his. ‘I will stop you if I have to.’ He takes a breath and closes his eyes, hearing the roar of her Force signature in his ears. Then he pulls and forcefully severs her connection to the machine, as it thrashes and squeezes around him, burning against him until the last thread snaps. 

‘They're building a machine to make black holes.’ Her voice is toneless and she quirks her ear against him at the alien sound of it. ‘Give me your power or I’ll take it.’ She thuds her head back against his chest. ‘All the records are here, we can destroy them.’ She crushes his wrists in her hands, feeling the bones squeak.

She pulls him with her as she forces back into the computer, tracing the webs of connection out to the planet-side server, the threads of it spreading outwards like a brain, dividing and dividing like a spreading liquid. Then she pushes through them all and they evaporate away with a scream that rattles noiselessly in her ears. 

She comes back to herself with the thud of his heartbeat behind her, and a gray screen blinking impotently in confusion. She hears doorways slide open in the distance as she’s pulled to her feet and dragged up the stairwell, watching her legs mechanically take over to keep herself upright. They hear the scrape of shoes around them, squeaking rubber on concrete, and shouts pitched in panic as sensors bleep weakly around them. The air is crisp when they reach the top, doorway cracked open onto blinding sunlight, and at her side a handful of men slide silently to the floor, as if the light has erased their thoughts like shadows. In the future, some hours from now, maybe she'll ask him if they're dead. 

‘Where are we going?’ A voice she doesn’t recognize sounds around her as she’s clipped into her seat. They she feels the craft rock around her and the vacuum hush of the door closing, before it’s replaced by the scream of the ion engines pulling them into the air. For a second she can see ant-like figures swarming around the base, as if massing to carry it back to their queen. Then she loses consciousness.

He’s grateful for the years of practice that mean he can fly the TIE while his brain careens in panic. He counts each thumping heartbeat until they reach lightspeed. One. If they’re going to be shot down, it’ll be now. Two. He wishes he could touch her, if it’s to be now. Three. The planet recedes behind them, hanging calmly in space. Four. Their craft passes through the web of droids guarding the base. Five. He thinks to himself, just to prove he’s alive. Six. Would he have a second to realise, when his brain catches up to his body, burned up in an ironic cold? Don’t let it happen, he wants to take her to the place she imagined, let her have a precious normal day. The ship lurches up to speed, and they are swallowed in the static groan of it, safely in the nowhere of hyperspeed. 

He can enjoy the incongruous calm of blackness around them as she slips into unconsciousness behind him. He can sense her at least, there’s that. He plots a course for the nearest desolate planet and puts his faith in the autopilot, a part of him not caring if it fails.

They touch down on a murky planet shrouded in clouds as birds take off silently around them. He wrenches himself free, every muscle screaming in protest and scrambles to unclip her, her head lolling on her shoulders. She’s a dead weight in his arms as he pulls her free, sinking to the ground and brushing her hair from her face, scanning the skies for any incoming crafts. There is nothing but the wind hushing through the trees. He presses her to him, feeling his legs go numb against the damp ground. Then he waits as the cold slowly suffused his limbs and moves through his veins. 

By degrees, her breathing shortens until he feels her smile against his chest. ‘We made it out then?’ 

His laugh squeezes a tear down his cheek and he wipes at it with his frozen hand. ‘I guess you could say that.’ 

She sags back against his legs, arms hanging weakly in her lap. ‘Why can’t I move?’ She narrows her eyes at him.

‘You used all of your power and most of mine frying their computer systems.’

‘That’ll do it.’ Her eyes drift to a cloud in its slow dissolving track across the sky. ‘I am sorry about that.’

‘Don’t be. You’re welcome to it.’ He strokes a hand through her hair. ‘Although you could have been a bit more polite about it.’ She presses her lips into a line to try to suppress a laugh. 

‘How long until I can move again?’ Her fingers twitch at her stomach, turning pink with cold. He clasps them in his. 

‘Not too long. We’re safe here at least.’

‘Couldn’t you have taken us somewhere warm?’ 

‘I wasn’t thinking too clearly. I just needed to get us out of there.’ 

‘Then can we sit in the ship at least?’ Her heel skids on the wet grass where she scrabbles for purchase. 

‘I just need to look at you and know you’re okay.’

‘I’m okay, I promise.’ Her smile dissolves with worry. ‘I know I’m not jumping around right now, but I assure you I’m fine.’

‘How did you do that back there?’

‘It’s like what you showed me back at the base.’

‘No, the computer. It’s like you were talking with it.’

‘I was, you know that.’ Her brow furrows.

‘The speed of it, I mean.’

‘It has it’s energy, I just tagged along.’

‘Did you take it in? Did you understand what it was telling you?’

‘Some of it.’ She shrugs. ‘It knew there was something that they were hiding, it pretty much lead me right to it.’

‘Why would it do that?’

‘I think it wanted someone to understand.’

‘Do you believe it has wants like that?’

‘I do, and I’m sad I had to destroy it. But I knew if it remained then someone else would just carry on from where they left off.’ Her shoulders roll with a shiver, her teeth clattering together. ‘Can we go in the ship now I’ve convinced you I’m not insane?’ His knees creak as he gathers her up and slides her back into the seat. She weakly stamps the cold from her legs. 

‘You are insane, Scavenger.’ He reaches across her to buckle her in. ‘Sleep and I’ll take us back.’

He drops them into sub-light, where Rey can sleep and he can enjoy a few hours of silence before the barrage of questions that is to follow. They're expected back at no particular time, but a message blinks at him from the General. Her crackly voice fills the craft.

‘Let me know when you’re heading back and for the love of all things holy, do not put yourselves in any danger. I’d much rather you come back with nothing and in one piece than not at all. Look after yourselves and I expect a tastefully redacted report when you get back. That is an order from your General.’ He dismisses the message and floats once more. 

How were they going to relay their report without revealing what Rey had done. The knowledge of that kind of skill would make her the chief weapon in their arsenal, more so than she already was. If they found out that she had read the contents of the Order’s entire R&D department, they would pick her brain apart with questions, all under the guise of helping the cause. And to know she could grant herself clearance to seemingly limitless facilities, there is nowhere they wouldn’t send her, betting on her cunning to get her out again. 

A part of him fears for her safety, but another part questions the limit of it. She’s only begun to test the boundaries of what she can do with it. He knows her curiosity won’t stop itching in her skin until she finds the edge of its applications. He hears her sigh over the groan of the engines, her Force signature back to it’s normal tone. He could search for her blindly in a room full of people, and know it’s her. Translating it to the image he has of her in his mind, squinting with the sun on a remote planet and reaching for him. Turning that energy into something his mind can process, like just another sense. 

I have a question. His mouth pulls into a smirk a few hours later as the planet Hoth resolves into view ahead of them. A few hours of patchy sleep that had done its job in rounding the sharp edges from his thoughts, leaving theories he wants to have answered. Can you fly this?

She wakes with a moment of panic, before remembering where they are and sinking back into her seat. Of course I could, why?

He reaches out to soothe her as she brushes against his mind in worry. I’m not injured, I’m just curious. Could you fly this with your mind?

Maybe? If I had to. 

Do you want to try?

Not from back here, I can’t see where I’m going.

Yes you can. See what I can see.

I don’t know how to do that, I can’t control it.

That’s a shame. He steers them into a careening spin and drops the controls.

Pain rips at his mind as she screams at him, too angry to form proper words. He keeps his eyes on the view from the windscreen, earth and sky blurring into one colour. They’ve a few seconds, ten at most, to catch it, before they smash into the ground. 

Pull us up, you steaming pile of bantha shit. Laughter flares in his mind as she finds her words again, followed by another lash of pain as penance. Are you insane?  He watches the steering controls shudder as the console blares at him in warning. Then he’s pressed into his seat as the craft rears out of its freefall to coast above the pillowy snow beneath them. His neck burns with strain, head blaring in pain as he grabs the controls to drop their speed and guide them through the bay doors.

As soon as they’re stationary he’s ripped from his seat and thrown onto the frozen floor by a furious Rey towered over him. ‘What the fuck?’

He presses up to face her, face crimson above him. ‘Didn’t you wonder if you could’. He catches her eyes narrow in challenge before she punches him in the jaw. 

‘What is going on here?’ She stopped from pulling him off the floor by the General's ringing voice in the cavernous hangar. 

‘He’s insane and nearly killed us both.’ She lets go of his collar and shoves him to the floor, shooting an acid look at him as he rubs his jaw and pulls himself to his feet. Her chest sucks in huge drawing breaths as she thinks of all the myriad of ways she wants to hurt him and wipe the smug smirk from his face. 

‘Were you discovered?’ She blinks at the non-sequitur and stammers.

‘No. That went fine. It was just the journey back. Nobody knows we were there. The weapon’s destroyed like you asked.’

‘I don’t understand.’ 

‘I’ll give you a full report soon, I promise. Right now I just need to get away for a few days.’

‘I understand. Glad to see you both back safe.’ She nods to the General then jerks her head towards the ship. He scrambles along behind her. 

They leave atmosphere in strained silence. She mechanically checks their systems, safely floating in their shielded little bubble, the unnatural dark of space revolving around them. She leaps from her seat to go to him and plant a ringing slap across his face. He straightens his face to look at her. 

‘If you ever try anything like that again, I will fucking kill you.’ His gaze drops to her fingers, tensing in and out of a fist at her sides. 

‘Now you know.’ She rips him from his seat by his hair, crushing her mouth to his as he laughs against her. 

‘Take this ridiculous shit off’, she tugs at the uniform as he kisses down her neck, sheened in a slight sweat. She pushes him away, pulling off her own borrowed clothes and stepping out of her shoes to grab at him and pull his face down to hers. She shrugs at the metallic clatter of the blasters falling to the floor, happy to know they have a safety. He hikes her up into his arms, feeling her legs wrap around his waist. 

‘Better?’ He smiles, teeth tinged with blood. 

‘Did that hurt?’

‘Of course it did, but I deserved it.’ He presses her up against the cold wall of the ship’s interior, feeling her legs clench around him with a yelp. Her skin breaks out in goosebumps as she turns his jaw to the light. 

‘Do you want me to heal it?’ She cups her hand to the overheated flesh, squirming to feel him pressed against her. She presses her thumb at his swollen lip, darkly oozing, before darting to lick the crimson path with the tip of her tongue. 

‘Are you happy you got the challenge you wanted?’

She watches his throat bob and swallow thickly, eyes hooded and dark. Her smile is all teeth, curled like a predator watching its prey expend its futile energy, stringing out the last few seconds before the kill. ‘I wanted to fight. They were too busy chasing their tails to try to stop us leaving. I didn’t get to leave so much as a bruise on them.’

‘You want a fight?’ She nods hungrily, grinding herself against him. ‘Make me give you what you want.’

She digs her heels into his back. ‘I don’t have to make you, you’ll do it anyway.’

‘Oh will I?’ He pulls out of her reach until she thuds her head back against the durasteel. ‘I’m stronger than you, you’ll have to try a different tactic.’ He grips her wrists where she tried to snake them down his body, her nails digging into his skin. She presses a wave of her frustration into his mind, her stomach churning with it. That doesn’t work on me, I know you enjoy it. Try something else. He shifts her wrists into one hand and pinches her chin, lips hovering above hers close enough she can feel his breath against her. 

‘I don’t know what to do’, she slams her head back against the metal, feeling it ring in her teeth. ‘Tell me.’

‘Where’s the fun if I tell you?’ He holds her head back where she tries to surge forwards, a needy whine escaping through chattering teeth. 

‘Please.’ He watches a tear work its way slowly down her cheek. In its tiny movement it opens the floodgates and she’s pleading at him, her eyes sliding closed as it flows from her like a prayer. 

‘Rey’, her glassy eyes focus on his. ‘You can have anything you want.’ He kisses her as her breath catches in her throat, pulling him so tight the air is forced from his lungs. 

‘Please take me to bed.’

They bump their way through the tiny ship as she steals the breath from his lungs and coils her arms around his head like a snake. She clambers down as they cross the threshold, no longer willing to wait to feel his body pressed against hers. She rips off her remaining layers and throws them unthinkingly behind her as he pushed his away, roughly. They stumble heavily back onto the bed which squeaks in protest.

‘Let me use my mouth.’ She blinks at him, mind thoroughly muddled, but finds her way back to herself to nod. He chuckles against her furrowed brow before kissing down her chest, and across her pelvis, swirling his fingers through the wetness there, before lapping at it with his tongue. She throws her head back against the mattress. Her chest heaves around great pants as he lathes at her with his tongue, before adding a finger and hooking upwards. She swears, a jumbled mess of violent and colorful language, throwing an arm across her face.

‘Don’t do that.’ She grumbles and twists the offending arm against the crumpled sheets, lifting her head to meet his gaze, before dropping it again after a mind numbing swirl of his tongue.

He presses a strong arm across her stomach as she tries to vainly crawl away from the onslaught of pleasure, rolling her tense jaw and looking unseeing at the ceiling. Her stomach tenses as her orgasm is ripped from her and she pushes against his arm, heels digging and scrabbling into the thin mattress. She pulls his mouth to her and shivers as she tastes herself on his tongue, blended with the copper tongue of blood. He strokes her deeply as her stomach flutters, sobbing around another orgasm that flares red on her tear streaked face. She shakes with it as he kisses her, her fingers trembling against his cheek.

‘You’re okay, I promise.’ He brushes her sweaty hair from her face, watching strands drag through the salty tracks there. She shivers as he presses into her, her tremoring pants in his ear. He presses his cheek against her damp one. ‘I’m yours. Everything that I have is yours.’ He threads her fingers with his and kisses her hand. When she kisses him, he can hear the click of words in her throat, failing to making it to fruition.

He talks almost constantly to her now when they do this, out loud before his voice fails him, then inside her mind, a wave of assurances, praise and need that lap over the shore of her mind. Every time their bodies come together, they spill out of him. Where she can’t find words, he can’t not. She smiles. 

‘What is it?’ He searches her face for meaning before she pulls him back to her, rolling her hips against his. She buries her face in his neck when she comes, squeezing him with every muscle in her body, pulling him closer as if to fuse their bodies together. He shakes with his own orgasm as he kisses her cheek, tasting the salt on her skin.

‘I’m not sad, they just won’t stop.’ Her voice is wet with tears, fruitlessly brushing them away. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me’, she laughs against her wrist.

‘There’s nothing wrong with you.’ She smiles, healing his cut and rubbing the blood from his skin, her hand falling boneless to the mattress. She shudders as he kisses her cheek, her eyes sliding shut.

She stopped making a sound as she cries, just silently shaking, dragging her hands against her face. He pulls her upright and squeezes her to him, hands gently soothing over any skin he can reach. ‘Come on, let’s shower and I’ll feed you.’ She can’t speak, but she nods against him, gently. She gasps as he kisses her forehead and his stomach lurches.

Her heart thuds in her chest as she leans in the fresher, letting the water run over her aching muscles. She presses her ear to his chest and feels his fingers combing through her hair. Her mind feels like its expanding, pressing into the confines of her skull, her stomach in constant freefall. She’s afraid, in a way that hangs behind her closed lids, begging to be noticed. In a way that creeps up her neck and around her skull, until the water feels cold instead of hot. It’s as if words elude her just as she’s sure she’s got a grasp on them. Her jaw works against his skin as his fingers drag behind her ear. She kisses him and is feels as if the floor falls out from under her. He catches her where she stumbles.

He feeds her tiny bites of things as she leans in his lap, smiling around each bite. She falls asleep and wakes in their cot, his body curved towards her. She wakes in the dark and ghosts her fingers over his sleeping face, seeing how close she can get without touching, one eye closed in concentration. She settles in to watch him, warring against tiredness and her eyes which seem to slide shut against her bidding. And she knows that she loves him. 

Chapter Text

A message with no greeting, just a string of coordinates. He takes a second to scan his surroundings, the soothe himself in the knowledge that Rey is sleeping where he left her. Then he plugs in the coordinates and scoffs in the silence of the cockpit. Naboo, his mother’s own private escape, where she’d retreated to when things were bad with Han, when it was clear to her he would never enjoy setting down roots as she did. Now their paths are swapped, her making a home in those she surrounds herself with, him still. His last act passing a little warmth to the skin of his son, knowing it’ll dig itself there like a tick. 

Her hand would be on every carefully selected piece of furniture, every cup she’d take to sip in the sun, letting the heat purify her. He acknowledges the message, as close as he can get to a thanks. The craft rumbles around him as it climbs to lightspeed. Re-fueled in their absence, she’d have clicked her tongue in annoyance as the mechanics stowed it away, tilting her head at them to fill the tanks.

‘We’re going away’, he feels her smile against his cheek, warm from sleep. ‘Somewhere you’ll like, but we need a few supplies first.’

‘What kind of supplies?’

He slumps down next to her, closing his eyes. ‘Depends. What do you want to eat? We’ll have a kitchen, the sky is our limits when it comes to recipes to butcher.’

‘You can’t cook?’ She presses her hand to his shoulder, nuzzling in closer.

‘I know the theory', he drawls.

‘I have an excuse. How old are you that you don’t know how to cook?’

‘Thirty Galactic Standard years. For a few more weeks at least.’

‘Want to do anything for your birthday?’

‘There’s not much point. My mother, ever the politician, had me on the day the Galactic Civil War officially ended. She always knew how to send a message. On that day there are bigger things to celebrate.’

‘Hmm.’ The foam of the mattress shifts under him as she reaches blindly into the shelves under their bunk. ‘It’s strange, I never thought to ask you.’

‘What about you, Scavenger?’

‘Nineteen by my count. Does it bother you?’ He turns to intercept her look, more than willing to start his day with aimless bickering now they're on their own again. ‘That you’re so old and you don’t know how to cook…’ 

‘I want to learn one day. This can be practice.’

They coast into dock on a shimmering planet, turning like a marble in space. The salty air swirls its way in as they lower their ramps, dragging with it the rumbling sound of the ocean. It flicks itself at their ankles as they pay their dues, walking along the smooth dock, sand rasping under their feet. Their packs hang at their back, wedged with a few changes of clothes and sparse personal items, sticking their shirts to their back with sweat. The sea curves around in their vision, seeming to press at their toes, like they’ll pitch and tumble into it. She pauses in the doorway of a shop, drawn magnetically to the rainbow of fruits displayed in the thin band of shade. 

‘We’re staying up there.’ She battles with vertigo to follow his line of sight, squinting at the terracotta house perched on the cliffside. ‘We’re going to have to climb a little.’ She shrugs and turns into the cool shade of the shop. 

It takes a few seconds to blink the sun from their eyes, replaced by a sea of items resolving in front of them. He hangs back a few steps as she roves her eyes hungrily over the aisles in a doomed attempt to take it all in. She turns a packet in her palm, a medley of pastel grains that conforms to the shape of her fingers.

‘Can we try this?’ She folds it under her arm and resumes searching, turning a jar to examine a vibrant paste, a list of terms in basic, yet still devoid of meaning. ‘Have you had this before?’

He takes the jar, warm from her hand, the layer of blood red oil clinging to the glass inside. ‘Local spices. We should try it.’ He hooks a basket and sets it inside with the rest, freeing her hands to drag over every item in turn.

Display cases packed with varied selection, curated like museum exhibits. Food with a history; a heritage to the particular pattern of scoring, the crimp in the crust a protected characteristic, all explained in neat hand-written script her eyes slide over. The items are what hold her attention, pastries sticking to the paper with their syrup, airy confections like bubbles on the point of bursting. She places one gently on the pile in the basket, looking at him to acknowledge her artful balancing. She takes charge of it as they leave with bags teeming with strange colors and textures. The shopkeeper had folded and secured a box around it as she watched, blushing at his look. 

‘How far is it?’ She asks it as they begin to climb the winding staircase carved into the cliff, the rock bouncing her voice back at her robbed in the echo of everything except the searching neediness she'd tried to mask. She locks her gaze forwards, eyes averted from the creeping fear that walks behind her in her shortening shadows. No stranger to height, no stranger to the damage it can do, step by step this rational fear is turned into something viscous and heavy, until every breath is an effort.

‘Maybe five minutes.’

She nods to herself and he notices the distracted movement of it out of the corner of his eye, but she shakes off his look of concern. ‘Have you been here before?’ 

‘As a child. A long time ago.’ They’re silent again save for their synchronized footsteps, feeling perspiration coat the exposed skin at their necks. The ache in their thighs slowly growing quieter as they ignore it, until it’s just a dull hum. 

Their path widens into a courtyard of sorts, a bench cracking in the heat, scrubby grass growing up between the stones and bent under the wind. She’s struck by the image of him stepping down the path towards the building, shirt riding up as he stretches to grasp a key from above the porch, knowing who put it there and why. Her good humor escapes with her exhale, rooted to the spot where he turns to her, bouncing the key on his palm. She finds herself at his side with no memory of the steps it took to get there, staring at the rusted metal.

‘I wasn’t sure it would still be there.’ He places it back and rubs the dust from his skin. ‘We don’t need it.’ She watches him half shrug out of the corner of her eye as the lock clicks open. 

‘This is your mother’s, isn’t it?’ Relief stalls her at the threshold, the interior cool and scented like stone. She loosens her grip on the box at her chest, the cardboard snapping back into shape with only a few wrinkles muddying its crisp edges.

‘I haven’t been here in a very long time. Mostly she comes here to be alone.’ He dumps their packs and begins emptying items and roughly sorting them on the table. She starts on what needs chilling, forcing her attention to the task of turning and stacking them until they're all laid out in front of her eyes. Dozens of combinations, all new. She starts at his hand on her waist, pushing the door closed and turning to him.

‘Is it right that I’m here?’ She swallows, cold metal at her back. 

‘She told me to bring you here. This place brings her peace, I guess she hopes it will do the same for you.’

‘Maybe she just wants to know where we are.’

‘Potentially. She could just be trying to keep us off the base. If we were followed, better to split us from the group.’ He runs the tap and waits for it to stop sputtering, airy cloudiness turning clear. He pours a glass and hands it to her. 'She gave us clearance. The code we're registered under is clean.' She takes a grateful swig before holding it aloft to examine the design etched into the crystal. 

‘Can I ask you a question?’ She runs her thumb along the pattern, hearing it ring under her nail. ‘Your mother has more credits than I’ve ever even seen. Why does she care about leading the Resistance?’

‘Her people were destroyed by the Empire. We really shouldn't have climbed in that heat.’ It's true, she can see the pink of the sun on the base of his neck when he turns to re-fill his glass. 'Best to stay inside for a few hours.'

She gives him a shallow smile, recognizing his desire to bring an end to the conversation and ignoring it. ‘The Empire were defeated and she helped do it. She’s done enough for the Galaxy.’

He sighs briefly sharply but he doesn't argue, listing against the countertop. ‘I don’t think she’ll ever feel that she’s done enough.’

‘She funds the Resistance. There’s no need for her to live on that ice ball, not when she has this place.’

‘I think that ice ball is the closest thing she has to a home.’

‘Then why keep this place? Fill it with beautiful things she never sees?’ 

‘She always told me we’d have a proper home one day. I believed her for a very long time. The thing is I don’t think she’ll ever let herself stop.’

‘One day.’ She sinks into the seat, pressing her ear to the table and letting the distant roar of her breathing envelop her. Always "one day", a little further, a little longer. Easier than the truth and not quite a lie, by definition unable to be resolved one way or another. She laughs to herself, dangerously empty stomach twisting.

‘Are you alright?’ The hairs at the nape of her neck stand up at his question.

‘I am. I’m sorry.’ She lifts her face, leaning on her chin. ‘If I’m being honest, I’m jealous of you.’ She smiles at him general direction, not strong enough to do it and meet his eyes. ‘I know it’s not fair, but I feel it anyway.’ Her gaze falls to the table, at the patterns inlaid it its smooth surface in fragments the size of grains. ‘You have everything I’ve ever wanted but you don’t take it. Both of you. It makes me angry.’ 

‘I know, Rey.’

‘Do you?' She wrenches herself upright, the precariousness of their position at a cliff edge exerting its pull on her all at once. 'You brought me here, where you used to sit in the sun with your parents. Eat and drink out of glasses that could feed a family with their credits. It’s cruel to bring me here. I didn’t know you were capable of that kind of cruelty.’ She leans back, her head a lead weight, a bug skimming past her hand where it hangs at her side, the brush of its wings against her skin sharp like a shock. 

‘Do you want to leave?’  

She scoffs as he controls his tone, careful not to sway her either way. ‘We’re here now, what would it change if we left?’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘Sleep. Eat something before I throw up. I don't know why this of all things is too much for me. I can't even blame the heat...’

‘I’ll show you the rooms.’ She nods and follows him through the bright living room, outfitted with a stone fireplace and low soft-looking couches. Attached is the main bedroom, a sturdy dark wood frame piled high with pillows. She doubles back on herself, kicking off her shoes and pulling off her outer layers to crawl onto the cool of the sofa. ‘Shall I make some food while you get some sleep?’ His eyes hang on the one closed doorway, behind it a cliff of a different kind he'll likely never have the courage to face.

‘No, I want you to stay with me.’ She pulls a cushion under her head and a sigh rumbles out of her. He sits at her side and her hand comes to rest on his knee. ‘Don’t let me sleep too long.’ Her breathing deepens as he gently runs his fingers through her hair, pulling a book onto his lap. 

‘What are you reading?’

He chuckles, ‘I couldn’t even tell you, I’ve been pretending this whole time.’

‘That good, eh?’

‘It’s a real page turner.’ 

She presses herself upright, leaning heavily on one shaking arm. ‘I’m sorry about earlier. It wasn’t fair of me.’

‘You were more than fair.’

‘Okay, I modify my statement. I don’t believe you were trying to be cruel in bringing me here. You’re just stupid.’ 

‘Thank you, Rey.’ He works his arm around her and squeezes her in a hug. 'For what it's worth, I am sorry. I didn't think.'

'It's not your fault. It's just... You can't know what it feels like. I'm glad you don't know, but still. It's not even knowing what you have, or had. It's the fact there'll always be a little distance between us that can never be closed.'

'Well there'd always have been a distance between us, no matter what.' She turns to him, sitting back to give the movement the emphasis it deserves. 'Didn't you ever hear about how you don't ever really touch anything? If I do this', he takes her limp hand in his, her eyes falling to it, narrowed with suspicion, 'our skin never truly comes into contact. The energy in our atoms repel each other, it only seems like they touch.'

'Is that supposed to be comforting?'

'Depends. Do you feel comforted?'

'You're the dumbest smart person I've ever met.'

‘Can't argue with you there. Shall we attempt some food?’ 

‘Excellent idea.’ 

They browse their strange collection for a vegetable and some kind of protein, somewhat hampered by the fact they can't reliably identify anything beyond a broad category.

‘This looks promising, but I don’t know if it needs to be cooked.’ She takes a bite through shiny purple skin, rolling its fibrous flesh around on her tongue. ‘Yep. That needs cooking.’ She flings the partially chewed chunk into the sink.

He stills her wrist where she reaches for the chunk of marbled meat they’d watch the shopkeeper carve from the bone. ‘I can tell you now, that definitely needs cooking.’

‘Alright expert. We need a grain or something starchy, what are our options?’

‘Bread, or…’ he reaches into the cupboard and deposits a packet in her hand, ‘whatever this is.’

‘This. Bread as a backup. Shall we just boil the shit out of it?’ She flings the packet on the table, cracking the jar of spice paste and sniffing with a shrug. 

‘I think we should probably cook the meat first. Do you want to cut it or shall I?’ 

‘Find me a knife and I’ll do it.’

He rattles around in the drawer, removing a handful of implacable implements before finding the knife block and plucking one at random. ‘This alright?’ She takes the knife and tests the blade against the pad of her thumb, shrugging and sinking into the chair to begin slicing at the rose-coloured flesh. She looks up at the sound of the burner igniting, and the metal scrape of the pot being placed over it. He pours in some of the pastel grains, then a few more. ‘I don’t know if we should season this.’

‘Can’t hurt.’ She grabs the vegetable and begins carving off the skin in long strips. ‘Just put in whatever you think smells good.’ She chops until two neat piles of cubes sit in front of her and the pot burbles on in the background. She stretches to watch him for a few minutes, opening and closing cabinets, similarly unsure of what to do with his time while they wait. 'So, were you on vegetable cutting duty when you were here as a kid?'

'Hmm?' He squints at the same jar he's picked up and replaced a half-dozen times, stalling for time. 

'Did you ever imagine you'd be back here, doing this?'

'That's the thing', he turns to her over his shoulder and smiles, a squinting movement like he'd trying to dislodge something invisible, itching at his skin. 'We're so far beyond what I imagined for my future, every day is uncharted territory.'

‘How is it looking?’ she huffs out with a gasp, standing to peer into the steam. ‘They’ve puffed up, I think that’s a good sign.’ 

‘They seem cooked. I think we need to get rid of some of the water.’

‘Maybe fish them out with that thing.’ She points to a spoon with holes too small for the expanded grains to fit through. She leans against the table to watch him pull out spoonfuls the color of sand and tip them into a bowl, them shrivelling and drying, rolling down the side of the slowly growing mound. 

She stands behind the shield of his body as he lowers the first sliver of meat into the hot oil where it spits and bubbles. ‘Are you cowering? He accuses over his shoulder, her fingers digging into his bicep. 

‘I’m not!’ 

‘You are, you’re cowering. You’re hiding behind me like it’s going to explode.’ 

‘It’s spitting hot oil!’

‘It’s spitting hot oil at me, correct.’

‘Turn it down.’

‘You’re welcome to do it.’ 

She turns a few dials that do nothing before happening across the right one, bringing the furious spatter down to a sizzle. ‘I’m going to put the rest in.’ She shakes them off the paper and prods at them as he goes to run cold water over his skin, itching with tiny burns. ‘This is harder than I thought it would be.’ She works the first blackened chunk of meat up the side of the pan and blows at it, bouncing it on her palm. ‘Try this.’ She flicks her eyes to him as he chews. 

‘Good. But it needs more of that.’ He nods towards the jar of vibrant paste. She looks at him expectantly until he deposits it by her hand with a thump.

‘No idea how much, I’m going to just go with what seems right. Chuck that in as well.’ She nods towards the cut vegetable, its starchy flesh turning brown in the air in rings. The spices hit the back of their throats like a punch, them taking turns to step into cooler air in an attempt to force some air in through their closing throats. They add in the grains when the noxious cloud has stopped stinging their eyeballs, stirring in some water to let the flesh colored sludge simmer together. She pours two glasses of wine so sweet it tickles the back of their tongues.

As they roll the first bite of steaming food around their mouths, any categorization as to their success evades them. It’s smoky, spicy to the point of pain, floral and starchy in a way that clings to their taste-buds and won’t let go. She coughs and tears squeeze out of her eyes. ‘Well, that sure has a flavor.’

‘Several.’ He clears his throat and takes a gulp of his wine. 

‘It’s cooked at least, as far as I can tell.’ 

‘It’s edible. Now it’s burnt off my taste-buds, it’s getting easier to tolerate.’

She presses her mouth into a line, smothering her smile before taking another bite. It’s mushy and dry in one bite, but it’s nutritious and fairly balanced. Her brain screams at her in praise at feeding her body, content that they’d managed to make something resembling food, the complex flavors underwritten by sheer joy at having made it with him. ‘How much of this did we make?’ She skewers a cube of the meat and yanks it from her fork with her teeth.

‘A burdensome amount.’ He toasts his glass with hers and sits back to drink. ‘You don’t have to keep eating it.’

‘No, its fine. This mushy stuff is good.’

‘The unnamed vegetable.’

‘Yes, its good if you can just ignore the texture. The wine helps. If you take a bite and then drink it kind of numbs your tongue so you can swallow it.’ She mimes around a resolutely un-swallowed mouthful.

‘That’s a good strategy.’

‘Thank you.’ She smiles into her glass, setting it down gently as she feels the alcohol begin to dull her motor skills. ‘I can’t believe we made something this bad. It’s kind of impressive.’

‘Do you feel better now you’ve eaten?’

‘I do.’ She takes a breath and releases it in a long sigh. ‘It’s peaceful here. I just got too up in my own head.’

‘Do you want to have a bath?’ She groans and slumps back in her chair, nodding and pressing her cool glass to her forehead. ‘Come on, I’ll show you where it is.’

She trails her fingertips over every piece of furniture along their path, chair backs polished velvet smooth, the stone surround of the door-frame, cool against her skin. The bathroom, lit by an amber sunset. She stands to watch the sea move silently below them, the sun seeming to melt on the horizon and spread out over it. She drags her eyes from it reluctantly, the ghost of the sun moving with her vision.

‘Keep an eye on it. I’ll put the food away and get some clothes.’ She nods and sets her glass on the floor gently, kneeling to fold her arms along the smooth stone of the edge of the tub, staring out at the red of the sky turning silver as she trails her hand in the water. 

‘How are we doing?’ She smiles at his voice in her ear, pulled out of the trance-like process of watching the water inch its way up the side of the tub. She watches the fading orange glow blanket over his skin as he reaches to turn the taps, catching her eye and quickly looking away.

He turns to examine the contents of the cabinets as she undresses, jolting at the feel of her hands weaving around his waist and squeezing. He helps her lower herself slowly into the water, handing her her drink as she settles back to let the water lap up to her neck. 

‘One day I’m going to own a bath like this.’ She lifts her head as he sets a towel under it, picking her braid out of the water to start unravelling it. She hears the chair squeak under him as he leans to untangle the hair at her crown, taking her glass from her hands and taking a drink before placing it back against her chest. The cool spot of contrast seemingly the only thing keeping her from dissolving into the water. She closes her eyes as she feels him slowly work the brush through her hair in sections. Lights flick on automatically in the gloom, the moon silently climbing in the window. 

‘You know, you could fit in here with me if you wanted.’ A light rain is whipped against the window and a shiver passes through her. ‘I’ll make room for you.’

‘If I get in there with you, you’ll never get me out again.’ She turns to face him, feeling her head spin with heat and wine, hair tickling over the damp skin of her back.

‘We have nowhere to be, what does it matter?’ He places the glass at his feet, feeling her watch him and meet his eye with a question in hers. She pushes up to kiss him, her arms shaking under her, her exhale shivering as his fingers ghost along her jaw. ‘Come in here with me. I want you to.’

‘There’s not enough room.’ 

‘Yes there is.’ She scoots and splashes to the other end of the tub, startling as the taps dig into her spine, cold with condensation. ‘Okay maybe there isn’t.’ She twists back to how she was, tipping her face back to talk to him as he towels the water from her hair. ‘I feel like a lizard on a hot rock.’ She reaches her hand behind her to pull him to her, smiling with closed eyes as he kisses her. 

She dozes as he reads to her, the sound of rain hitting the glass in a pointless display as she stays warm and relaxed in the insulating stone. She sits when she feels goosebumps cover her arm where she traces thoughtless patterns in the granite. He works her arms around his neck and lifts her out of the water, wrapping her in a thick towel and then stooping to let the water run out.   

‘Your clothes are wet now.’ She eyes the patches along his front, the perfect wet hand-print she’d placed there without realizing. 

‘I was going to change them anyway.’ He hands her a robe which she slides her arms into, pressing the towel against her damp skin. 

‘This better not be your mother’s…’ She eyes him, pulling her hair from the neckline. 

‘It’s for guests.’

‘That’s okay then.’ She steps to begin pulling his shirt up his body. He chuckles and steps into some loose layers, skimming his hand over the bare skin of her waist to squeeze her butt. 

‘Hey’, she mouths her weak protest into his skin, her fingers at his chest shaking with her heartbeat. She turns as they’re bathed in a quick white flash, followed by a crack of thunder. 

They pull the cushions to the floor and sit around the coffee table, soft blankets thrown around their shoulders as the wind rattles in the fireplace. Their fire sputters and cracks as its buffeted by the air, but stays lit. Every time they turn their eyes to it, it blooms back from the dead. 

‘If you’re going for what I think you’re going for, I’m telling you now, it’s not going to happen.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure, there’s still two cards left to draw.’ She pours the last dribble of wine into their glasses, frowning at it. ‘If you’re so confident, raise.’ 

‘Fine’. He pushes a few more counters into the pile and she matches it with her own. She turns the card with a half shrug. ‘Looking a little light over there, Jedi. It might be better just to cut your losses.’ She glares at him over her neat pile of chips, downing the rest of her drink. She chokes slightly as the lights all flick off around them in unison, the ambient noise of the house suddenly replaced by near perfect silence. ‘Power cut. It’ll be back in a little while. The storm must have blown something down.’ 

‘You raising, or you checking?’

He pushes to his feet to light a candle and place it between the spilled chips. ‘Have much have you got?’ He peers over her arms where she shields her chips from his view. 

‘Enough. Worry about your own funds.’

‘Then I’ll call your bluff, all in. You have to go all in if you want to check me.’

‘Yes, I’m aware of that, thank you. Fine! All in.’ They push them all into a shifting pile and he finishes his drink, watching her stare at the final unturned card. 

‘Let’s see if it paid off for you.’ He turns the card and she squares her jaw in annoyance. ‘Come on then, what have you got?’

‘I nearly had a flush.’

‘So you have nothing, is what you’re saying.’ He drags the chips towards himself.  

‘Not nothing, almost something’, she bristles, ‘what do you have then?’

‘A pair.’

‘A pair of twos. You won with a pair of twos.’

‘You’re terrible at bluffing. You knew how bad your odds were but were too proud to fold.’

‘Look at you who knows so much.’

‘Do you want to play another?’

‘No, I don’t want to lose to you again.’ She pushes herself up onto the couch and waits for him to follow before slumping across his lap. ‘Do you ever think about the Force bond?’

‘What about it?’ She watches the flames reflect in his eyes. 

‘We know things about each other that others don’t. Would we have ever gotten close to each other without it?’

‘It’s hard to say. We were on the opposite sides of a war, I’m inclined to say no.’ He reaches over her to tug a blanket from the pile and drape it loosely over her. 

‘It connected us despite it, against our will. Do you ever wonder if that’s the reason we like each other?’

‘I think it had a hand in us meeting, but I don’t think it made a difference after that. Do you worry about it?’

‘Somewhat. I worry about what would happen if it was suddenly gone somehow.’ She closes her eyes, mouth dry. 

‘I don’t think it works like that.’

‘I know. I just… I don’t want to find out one day that this is just a side-effect of the bond.’

‘I believe the Force bonded us as counterpoints to each other. That doesn’t necessarily imply a romantic relationship.’ 

‘So we’re supposed to balance each other?’

‘I don’t think there’s anything we’re supposed to do, it just is.’

‘If it’s gone one day, if it breaks somehow, will you stay with me?’

‘Of course I will. Do you think I wouldn’t?’

‘Everyone leaves me. How could I not think that?’

‘I won’t leave you. You’re stuck with me until we die.’

‘Until we kill each other, you mean?’

‘Until we kill each other.’ 

She sits to straddle his lap, the blanket falling to the floor in a quiet whump. ‘Is it wrong I want to sleep with you in your mother’s house?’ She asks, her hands coming to rest lightly at his throat. 

‘I won’t tell her if you won’t’, he grumbles. She swallows as he kisses under her jaw, her heartbeat whining in her eardrums. Her fingers dig into his shoulders as he moves them, her stomach swooping with a second long fear of falling back onto the table in a scatter of cards and glass. She lifts her hips as he wriggles out of his pants, the ache in her thighs reasserting itself and fading again as she lowers herself back down to feel his skin under hers. She rolls her hips against his as his hand strokes up her spine to the base of her neck, pressing herself down onto him with a low rumble at the back of her throat, leaning her head against his in an attempt to catch her breath. 

‘This was a good idea’, she mumbles between them. Her head thumps against his shoulder as he lifts her hips and presses her down onto him, deep enough her toes clench. She wobbles carefully to her feet, a shock-wave of each movement running through her to her fingertips. She chases the movement, her rational thought siphoned off and replaced by need that crawls up her body and behind her eyes.

When she comes it's with a pained whimper swallowed by his mouth. Her feet slide and he lifts her gently from him, lying down and moving her pliant limbs to lie back against his chest. She clings to the arm across her chest, her body trembling. She swears where he pushes into her, every drag of him inside her ringing through her body like a tuning fork. 

She stares into the fire, her head pillowed on his arm, the toes of her lifted leg hooked behind his calf. She feels it coming with a certain amount of dread, whimpering thoughtlessly as his head rests on her neck to feel them vibrate in her throat. She kisses him while her neck burns with strain, pressing his hand over her thumping heart, her fingernails digging little half-moons into his wrist. 

‘Shower?’ she asks, laughing as she tries to catch her breath, head still spinning.

‘The power's still out.’

‘Bath is too dangerous. We’re going to have to make do with a cloth and hope our filth cancels each other out.’

‘You first.’

‘Why me?’ She sits up to stare at him.

‘Because sex energizes you. I feel like I’ve just run a marathon.’

‘It’s probably because you’re older than me.’

‘I wondered when you’d bring that up.’ He tucks her hair behind her ear before letting his arm flop heavily. ‘No. It’s because I’m a man. Our bodies release different hormones after.’

‘In that case, you should go first. I don’t want to come back and you’re asleep.’ He stretches his arms above his head and then sits, pushing her off the sofa and urging her towards the bathroom. ‘I thought you were tired.’

‘I am but you need to pee.’

‘I’m going to, why do you care? You’re not going to watch me are you?’

‘It’s important so you don’t get sick. Piss.’

‘What a sweetheart.’

She sits in defused moonlight, clouds dissolving and reforming silently. Dimly she registers him scrubbing water over his face, searching through the cabinets and pulling out a razor and changing out the blade. ‘Can I do it?’

‘What’s your fascination with shaving me?’ he asks, looking over his shoulder at her where she re-ties her robe, shifting on her feet.

‘What’s yours with braiding my hair?’

‘Fair point. Be my guest.’ She jerks her head towards the chair for him to sit in lieu of an answer. ‘Maybe I should do it, it’s pretty dark.’

‘It’s not that dark. You don’t know dark until you’ve seen the desert at night. I can see fine.’

‘Really?’

‘Uh huh.’ She tips his head back and begins working the thick lather on his skin. ‘I can see you start to get hard again because I’ve got my hands on you. You might want to consider different clothes if you care about keeping your modesty.’ He shifts under her glance and she pulls his hand to her crotch. ‘I really wouldn’t worry about it. It’s the same for me too.’

‘You make it very hard to be around you sometimes.’

‘Exceedingly poor choice of words.’ She wipes her hand on a towel and begins dragging the blade across his skin, tongue poking through her teeth in concentration. She pulls his hand from her where his fingers drag against her. ‘Stop that or you’ll end up having to mop up your own blood.’

‘You started it.’ 

She smiles as she rinses the blade for another pass. ‘If I could get away with it, we’d fuck until we died.’

‘Do you not think we’d get bored eventually?’ She can feel his pulse thundering under his skin where she tilts his head back to shave up his neck. 

‘Potentially. Wouldn’t you like to know for sure?’ His fingers brace her hips where she leans over him to the sink. 

‘It wouldn’t leave us much time to learn how to cook.’

‘We cook just fine. We’re alive, nothing caught fire.’

‘You have a very low standard for success.’

‘No, it’s just low priority. I enjoyed doing it because we made something together. But I’ll happily eat bread for the rest of my life and spend my energy on more important things.’

‘I can do the cooking for you.’

‘Only if you wear one of those cute little aprons.’

‘I’m not doing that.’

‘Well, it was nice while it lasted.’ She sighs airily, wiping the soap from his skin. ‘Did you pack our toothbrushes, house-husband?’

He smiles, ‘they’re in our bags, dear.’

She hums and kisses his nose. ‘I like pretending this is our house.’ She runs her thumb over his cheek, checking for any stubble she missed and finding none. ‘I hope one day we won’t have to pretend.’ She squeezes his shoulder and pads away to find their bags and his head falls into his hands. 

He pulls himself upright as he hears her return, scrubbing the worst of the grime from his skin with passes he doesn’t feel. They brush their teeth, watching distant lightning illuminate the sky, she counts on her fingers waiting for the thunder to follow. 

She falls asleep beside him on the cloud-like mattress, her hand on his chest. He gently works the tangles from her hair to soothe himself as he stares at the ceiling, listening to her slow even breathing, the slight whistle of her inhale. Appliances kick back into life and the house returns to its usual hum, the light from the fireplace slowly creeping out of the room as it dies. He whispers to the house, an introduction he should have made hours ago, dark heavy over him like a blanket. Her name and the prayer-like significance his mind gives it, the future that was waiting for the version of himself he left there. Undeserved and far exceeding his limited ability to dream, pulling herself closer, even in sleep. 

Chapter Text

‘You’d didn’t wake me.’ She stretches onto tiptoes to kiss his cheek, buoyant from a deep sleep, woken by the sun crawling up her body through the blinds.

An arm wraps around her to keep her close and something trills in the back of her mind like a warning. Same as it is always does, this growing awareness of how much she depends on him, the visceral reaction of her body at his touch, not matter how small. A little shift in her perspective, a sense that the world has stepped away a pace and she's sat somewhere with him observing it from this new distance.

Someday, not today, she will ask him if he feels the same way. Today she's content to let it warm her under a high sun, squinting into it to watch her vision swirl and drag her surroundings into a blended mess, closing her eyes as he kisses at her crown in passing because it's there and he can. She can feel the timbre of his voice rumble through her as he leans his chin against her skull to greet her and it joins the growing accumulation of sensations that serve as proof to what she already knows, had been testing with her own hypotheses and experiments. That without meaning to she had fallen in love with him, that some outside force had acted on her body, guided her down a path she didn't know she was following, and whatever part of her that should recoil at this had been left behind somewhere along the way. 

She drags herself away before he can sense her swirling thoughts, casting her eyes around the kitchen and taking in for the first time the utter destruction he's wrought. 'Have you been attempting to cook?'

‘I’m making good on my promise, or trying to.' He's saved from having to face her look by something coming to a sudden violent boil, moving through a sequence of frenzied dial turns to get it back under control. 'I’ve been reading and I think I’ve figured out how to combine what we bought into something half decent.’

‘Which is?’ She takes a cube of cheese and hops onto the table, kicking her feet.

‘You can fry the cheese and in theory it crisps up instead of melting.’

‘I see. What else have you found out?’ 

‘I peeled those things and there’s a fruit inside.’ He nods towards the pile of paper-like skins and the shiny fruits the color of a sunset. ‘If you cook them down they’re sweet but a little acidic, so it should be nice with the cheese.’ She nods and takes a fruit and takes a bite out of it, cupping her hand to catch the juice from inside. 

‘I can see how that could work. How long have you been up exactly?’ She sucks the juice as it tries to crawl up her wrist. 

‘A couple of hours. I thought you could use the sleep.’

‘What time is it?’ He stills from stirring the bubbling mixture to check the time on his holopad. 

‘A little after nine. There’s caff if you want it.’ 

She hops down to steal his cup and take a welcome swig. ‘How long until it’s done?’

‘Not long, the cheese should only take a couple of minutes. If you slice some bread we can toast it.’

‘Can do.’ She pulls a few knives from the block before she settles on one, dragging it through the crackling crust in thick slices as he pads around in front of her. It's unfairly distracting to watch him re-open the same cabinet with a low huff of annoyance as whatever he wants fails to materialize within it, so she drags her eyes back to her work. She's put in charge of a pan to toast the slices in as he moves around her, gathering what they need with a growing confidence, his recollection of the place creeping back in slowly.

Nothing is moved from where it was, the house preserved against the passage of time, keeping the memory of their time there masochistically sharp. A point of happiness only obvious in hindsight, persisting in the gaps between the times they had suffered, indestructible and irrepeatable. Strange that that would be the thing that convinces him of the resemblance between them, a mutual comfort in the harm they cause themselves. Only his mother would invite him here in earnest belief that the ache of nostalgia would help him, know that he colors his world through shades of pain, as she does. 

They eat outside on the bench which has dried in the morning sun. The breeze sets the reedy grass tickling at her toes where she reaches for it, taking a bite of the food and falling into silence as the taste, both fresh and rich, sets her synapses firing.

‘Do you like it?’ He asks, watching her jaw move as she stares out to sea.

‘It’s delicious. I could eat this every morning', she replies tonelessly, mind entirely elsewhere.

‘I’ll bear that in mind for the future.’ He jostles her when she doesn’t answer, taking a sip of his rapidly cooling drink and handing it off to her. ‘What do you want to do today?’

‘Are we going back tomorrow? She sets her empty plate on her lap, sunlight illuminating its pearl-like material.

‘We probably should. The General is waiting on our report.’

She nods, settling back a little deeper into the bench with a sigh. ‘Is there a beach down there?’

‘A little further round the cliff there is. Do you want to go?’

‘I do.’ She squints in the sunlight, smiling at him before turning back to watch the sea.

‘We should go before the sun gets too high.’

They push all their dishes into the sink for future them to deal with, shoving a few layers into a bag along with some water and one of the pastries. Rey frowns to discover the airy cake-like thing has deflated in the night into a sad, shrivelled puck. She takes a bite that sticks to her teeth, dense and chemical tasting. She dumps it into the bin, crushing the box down alongside it. 

‘Sorry, I should have said. We should have eaten that yesterday. We can get another one if you want.’

‘No, I think it probably looks better than it tastes. Shall we go?’

They turn back onto the stone steps, keeping their gaze resolutely forward as they climb into the unbroken blue sky. The wind whips at them as they crest the cliff, before dropping off swiftly as they begin their descent. Here the spindly flowers sprout sideways, hanging over a steep, tumbling descent, held on by the hair-thin roots which protrude from the thin crust of soil here and there. They sway lightly in the breeze, not caring that they have lost their grip. 

‘We’re going down there.’ They step down slowly, backs turned against the cliff, one hand trailing from fissure to sharp grass to delude themselves they’d be able to catch themselves if they fell. Slowly the beach comes into view, stretching impossibly in their vision, on the air the smell of wet sand and seaweed. Rey takes off her boots to take her first sinking step onto the gravel flecked beach, dry seaweed skirting over her feet. She hears him follow and they weave past rocks ringed with seawater to pick their way towards the water.

‘Any creatures I need to be careful of here?’ She hops around a tiny pool of trapped water, stretching to the end of her grip where she keeps his hand in hers. 

‘Nothing in particular. Just don’t try to eat anything.’ Her boots knock against her thigh where she’s tied them to her belt, coming to rest where she stands, toes gently lapped by the water. 

‘I'll try my best to resist. Can we go in the water?’

‘If you want to, the tide isn’t too strong at this time of the day.’

‘Good thing I put on underwear.’ She drops his hand to begin pulling off her layers, dragging her hair into a rough bun. ‘You coming?’ She sets her clothes on a rock outside of the tide line and hops back over to him. 

‘I’ll warn you, it will be cold.’ He twists at the hem of his shirt for a few seconds before he follows her, knowing they're alone, still needing to soothe himself with a quick sweep of his eyes.

'There's no one here.' She crossed her arms across her chest as he hops out of his clothes, tilting her head at his lack of answer as he walks the spilling bundle over to the rocks to stow with hers. 'You shy?'

'What if I am?' He laughs at her stilted shrug, arms still tightly crossed, shifting on her feet as shivers run through her.

She waves him off and begins wading out, the water surging around her ankles and erasing her steps. She has a second of regret as the water inches up her inner thighs, but it’s overwhelmed by the desire to feel her body float weightless. She stands up to her neck and paddles her hands through it, watching little bits of foliage being taken along by the movement, kicking her feet and working to keep her face above the water. 

‘I remembered from last time’, she shakes the water from her mouth where it immediately crawls in. She swims over to him, halting and splashing but finally reaching him, her smile aching in her cheeks. ‘Can we go out a little further?’

‘If you stay by me.’ He swims out a few more feet, feeling the ground drop out from under him and turning to wait for her. It's a beautiful place, the serrated edge of the coastline that's burned into his memory, him having swum to this same rock as child, the distance shrunk by his growing older. Fifty meters at most, the stretch he'd counted as a mile. They were better actors than he ever gave them credit for, their pride at his achievement beyond question. 

‘I don’t think I’m going to win any races doing this.’ She’s breathless, open eye closed against the flecks of salty spray from her own movements. 

‘It’s just practice. Swim around me.’ He extents one arm towards her as he treads water, pulling her up where her head dips under the water. She coughs and continues slowly arcing her way around him, taking open mouthed gulps of air when she reaches her starting point.

‘How was that?’ Her eyes go wide where she accidentally splashes him, laughing as he narrows his eyes in her direction. 

‘Hopefully you never have to fight in water.’

‘Fuck, I should hope not. I’m going to go again.’

They head back in when she’s too tired to respond beyond a nod, crawling her body to lie flat against the sand. She gasps there, feeling the sun high above them drying the water on her skin until all that’s left is the itch of salt. He brings her water and she drinks the lukewarm liquid like it’s life itself, handing it back to stretch with a sigh. 

‘What do people do at the beach besides swimming?’

‘Sweat and let the sun burn away all their thoughts.’

‘I think we could do with that.’

‘Agreed.’

She lies on the front and pushes the sand into little trenches with her fingers, trying to coax the damp grains into higher and sharper edges, watching them give way to subsidence. If she’s still, eventually tiny bugs emerge from their hiding spaces under the surface and zigzag across her skin, too light to register. They move as the sea begins to fling little cold flecks at their feet and ankles, sliding their layers back over sun-sensitive skin. They totter to put their boots back on, pouring out the stream of sand that had still found its way in, before she’s urged up the steps by his hand on her lower back. 

The assent is easier, the sound of the ocean at their backs like a guiding palm. Their clothes are whipped by the wind as they step into blinding sunlight before beginning the short descent on trembling legs. He walks ahead of her, her hands on his arm as they step down each jolting tread, resigned to the fact that they will never end before the house abruptly rears into view. 

They shower the sea from their skin and sprawl on the couch, watching brainless holoseries and grazing on any ingredients they were reasonably sure didn’t need preparation. He doesn’t realize he’s asleep until he feels her voice in his ear.

‘I’m going to get us something for dinner.’ She kisses his cheek and warmth spreads over his face like sunlight.

He sets to work cleaning their dishes from the morning and clearing the sprawling mess he had made, drifting from one idea to another. When she returns the dishes are drying by the sink and he’s wiped the worst of the crumbs and stickiness from the table. 

‘I asked them for something that doesn’t require preparation. More bread and cheese and some kind of dried meat that he sliced for me. I tried a piece and it’s nice.’ She sets the bag on the table and wraps her arms around his neck, smiling as he lifts her to sit on the table. ‘Mostly I went for more wine, which I got. We should take some with us when we go.’

‘Agreed.’ He pushes her down against the table-top and she weaves her fingers through his hair.

‘I hope you’re not intending to do unspeakable things on this table.’

‘Of course not.’ 

She leans back on her elbows when his weight it suddenly gone, her brow furrowing with an exasperated sigh. ‘I didn’t tell you not to.’ She blushes and hops down as he hands her a glass of wine, clinking her glass with his with a ringing tone. She takes a sip and feels astringent sweetness coat her tongue. 

‘Where shall we eat?’ He peers into the bag at the wrapped parcels within it.

‘Somewhere I don’t have to sit up straight.’

They take it through to the living room and unwrap the parcels in front of them. She begins assembling a towering bite of everything, chewing contemplatively before swallowing and starting work on another. They start a new series, trying to come to a conclusion on who’s who and what the point of it all is as they smudge the crystal of their glasses with greasy fingerprints. She picks at the food before finally pushing it out of her sight, her mouth gummy with saliva. She drinks until she doesn’t feel or no longer cares that she’s full, leaning her body against his for support. 

He sighs as she spills her glass in his lap. ‘Water for you.’ She grumbles but her head spins when she leans it back against the couch. The water seems to suck more moisture than it gives. ‘Drink that and eat some bread.’

‘I don’t want bread.’

‘Tough, you’re drunk, eat the bread.’ 

Her teeth set against each other in frustration. ‘What about you?’

‘I’m not drunk. You drank more than me and I’m bigger than you.’

‘Fine.’ She sighs and takes a sip of her water, trying to blink away the blur in her vision. She pouts before weaving her fingers through his where they rest on her hand. 

As she drinks her buzz is slowly replaced by a headache, the thoughts that had been grinding like stones at the back of her mind sneaking through the door cracked open by her pain. She writes them along the lines that swirl in the plastered ceiling, slowing them to the speed of her hand. He was a boy here, and at least briefly happy. While he'd slept she'd turned the handle to the one room he hadn't shown her for the fact that it was his. She'd been unable to cross the threshold, staring down at the bed surely too small to have ever held a version of him. He'd had everything she'd ever dreamed of, frozen in gilded frames, scattered through the rooms, documenting the progress of him growing into his father's resemblance, stretching in one, stooping in another. But it is gone now, the house evidence of what was and can never be again. Maybe she's the lucky one...   

What are you thinking about, scavenger? She turns to bury her face against his arm, hiding from the light stabbing at her eyeballs. 

'My head hurts too much for me to do that', she grumbles into his shirt. 'I still have to try.'

'You're just tired', he says gently, taking her headache from her. She presses her mouth to his palm where it lingers on her skin.

‘We have to leave tomorrow.’ She holds his gaze, sadness pulling at her eyes. 

‘We do.’

‘Do you think we’ll come back here one day?’

‘Probably not.’ 

She shivers as his fingernails scrape the skin at the base of her neck. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

She sombre as she pushes him to the bed, pulling her hair down and grabbing his jaw to bring his mouth to hers. She crawls out of her layers, shoving them off the side of the mattress and setting to work on his, wordlessly. She pulls him on top of her, her breath shaking against his lips. 

‘Are you alright?’ She doesn’t answer, pulling his mouth back to hers. ‘Rey’, he pins her hands above her head, ‘are you okay?’ She looks between each eye in turn, the seconds stretching and stretching. ‘Are you okay?’ He whispers in her ear and feels her jaw tremble against his cheek. She shakes her head in a move that seems to gain its own momentum. Her sob catches in her throat and he releases her hands, rolling and pulling her onto his chest. ‘What’s wrong?’ His stomach bubbles with nausea as he mouths his question into her hair. 

‘I want to stay here with you. I want to have this life.’ Her voice is distant with pain, her breath wet against his chest. ‘I didn’t know how badly I wanted it. Now I know, how am I supposed to make it stop?’

‘I want it too.’ 

She presses up to sit, looking to the ceiling and letting the tears snake down her neck and onto her goose-bumped skin. She drops her gaze to his. ‘Make me believe it.’

He sits, stroking her arm lightly. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Make me believe that you want a boring life with me.’ Her cheek is hot and damp against his palm. She winces at the contact and his stomach drops. She pulls her knees to her chest.

‘Rey, I’m sorry, I don’t know what you need.’ He can see her arms shake as she hides her face from him. ‘Please talk to me.’

‘I can’t stand it anymore. Dreaming of things and never getting to have them.’ He wraps his arms around her and she doesn’t pull away, sinking into his chest. 

‘You can have this. I will do everything I can to make it happen.’

‘Stay here with me.’ 

He feels as if something sharp drags at his throat as he swallows. ‘We can’t stay here, but we will have our own home when this is all done.’

‘When they decide they’re done with us.’

‘Yes’, he gently unfolds her arms and brushes her hair from her face, watching her struggle to meet his eye. ‘When this is done you can have a home and know that it’s safe. I’m sorry you have to keep waiting, but it’s not forever.’

‘Please kiss me.’ He hears her breath rattle with moisture as he kisses her, her hand wrapped around his wrist like a manacle. Her chest heaves under him with half sobs, her body shaking against his. She breaks away with a gasp that crushes her chest. She crawls up the bed to lie her thumping head on the pillow, grasping for him. He follows and draws the covers over them and her hands find his chest, feeling his breath move through it. ‘I’m sorry.’ She lifts her eyes to him with a half smile.

‘You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.’ 

‘I do. I can’t just be happy with being happy.’ He clasps her hand in his between their chests. ‘I’m so happy here with you it feels like I could die from it.’

‘Trust me, I know how you feel.’ 

She smiles, shaking her head. ‘I don’t think you do. There’s always one of us that makes things overdramatic…’ He scoffs, tucking her head under his chin. ‘I’m ashamed to say, it’s usually me.’

‘Are you coming for my melodramatic crown?’ 

‘What if I am? Are you going to fight me for it?’ She tries to lift her eyes to see him, giving up and sitting to loom over him. ‘You’ll lose.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure.’ He flips her under him and kisses the surprised squeak from her lips. She recovers with a smile against his lips, wrapping her legs around him to pull their bodies flush against each other. She sighs as he kisses down her chest, her breathing fluttering as he bites lightly at her neck, grasping her jaw. 

‘You okay?’ She nods, rubbing herself against him. ‘That’s not, strictly speaking, an answer. But lucky for you can I read your mind.’ She spreads her legs as he strokes her, her fingers digging into his arm. She inhales sharply as he curls his fingers in her, closing her eyes as her head spins. Her mind races as he kisses down her chest and along her hipbone, her eyes flying open as he pressing his tongue firmly against her. 

‘Fuck.’ Her fingers tangle in his hair as he mouths at her, his fingers curling with firm pressure inside her. ‘I feel like I need to pee.’

‘You won’t pee.’ His voice vibrates against her sensitive flesh and he hooks his arm under her hips to trap her against his mouth. ‘How many times can you come?’

Her brain struggles to get into gear as he continues his mind-melting strokes in her. She gasps as he gently sucks at her. ‘I don’t know, I haven’t exactly counted.’

‘Do you want to find out?’ 

She slaps her hand against the mattress and pulls him up her body, her tongue diving into his mouth, wiping the wet from his chin and squeezing his throat. ‘Put your cock in me right now.’ She releases her hold on his neck and fumbles to help him, her fingers tangling with his. Her spine bows as he presses in, stroking her hair from her face. 

‘Like this, sweetheart?’ She nods, closing her eyes. ‘I still intend to find out what your limit is.’ There’s a gravely edge to his voice as he traces the shape of her parted lips. She sucks his fingers into her mouth and he drags them wet down her throat to press here for a moment, feeling her legs tighten around him. She kisses the satisfied smirk from his face, digging her nails into the column of muscle at his neck and he shivers. 

‘You drive me insane’, he breathes, pulling a cushion under her hips to press even deeper, trapping her wrists in one hand above her head as the other swirls at the wetness between her legs. He watches her as she tries to keep her eyes on his as she comes, her voice a quavering whimper. ‘I want to see how long until you go again.’ He traps the tear that squeezes from her eye with his tongue. ‘Keep your eyes on me.’ She nods as he releases his hold on her hands, his hand cupping her butt and feeling each thrust shake through her. He hears her breathing begin to accelerate and turn shallow, her body twitching in his grasp. He presses his forehead to hers and she struggles to keep her eyes focused, he fits his fingers through hers. He can feel her abdomen clench under him as she gets close, her fingers squeezing the blood from his until they tingle. She comes with a sob and he presses her face to his shoulder, his eyes wide.

‘Please.’ Her eyes shine where she looks at him, mouthing it again, soundlessly. He kisses him as his orgasm moves through his body like a wave, leaving nothing but peaceful blankness. 

They wash up and lie watching the shadows of clouds passing in front of the moon. Smiling in relief at each other each time it emerges from its cover.

They leave it as they found it, careful not to look back as they pick their way slowly down to the jetty. They walk back onto the ship and dump their bags, starting the process of take-off before they’re pulled back up to the cottage. They lose sight of it, then the cliff, until all they can pick out is the ocean swirling in a sea of black. There are footprints of theirs, somewhere along the fragmented coastline, of them leaning heavily on each other as they shook the sand from their clothes and pressed hand-prints along the stone in their assent, setting flowers gently swaying in the corner of their eyes. 

They guard the smell of the ocean on their skin like a precious thing as they crawl back through space towards the base, knowing they weaken it with each careful inhale. It’s gone by the time they reach the icy marble of a planet, sending word of their arrival to the General. She’ll expect them in the usual place. They shrug on some layers as they land, sand scraping in their boots as they walk.

Rey slides into the seat, launching into her report with no preamble. She feels her anger catch and flair at the sight of Leia, bundled in warm layers as her house lays abandoned once more, sucking in the heat of the sun, each carefully dried glass returned to its spot to gather dust.

‘Here’s what we know. The facility was planning to build a machine capable of creating black holes at will. From the looks of it, they’d been working on the project for a few years and were about to move into the prototyping phase. Creation, containment and the assumed effects on the surroundings populations were reasonably certain. The plans for how it would all fit together were housed on the base and as far as we know only on the base. Any records held there are now destroyed and irrecoverable.’

He watches the General struggle to bring herself up to speed, shuffling through questions and discarding them before speaking. ‘How did you discover his? Did you speak to who was in charge of the project?’

‘As far as I can work out, no sentient being was overseeing the project. It was theorised and managed by the computing systems on the base. If we’re correct, they won’t know where to start on getting them back to where they were as no one person knows. Even the scientists working on it only had theories as to what they were doing.’

‘How did you convince them to let you meet the scientists?’ She looks between the two of them and he squares his jaw. 

‘We didn’t. As far as they knew we were simply watching them through their own observation systems.’

‘Can you explain to me then how you managed to gain access to them.’

‘In brief, we overrode their surveillance and went in undetected.’

‘Where they not secured?’

‘They were, but we gained access. They were being held prisoner in inhumane conditions. I don’t know if anything can be done to help them, but if it’s within the Resistance’s power, we owe them for this victory.’

‘Would it be safe for you to give me any more detail as to what happened there, if I assured you it wouldn’t leave this room?’

Rey traces the outline of the room before meeting the General’s gaze with a tight smile. ‘It would not.’

‘Very well, thank you for your report.’ She meets Rey’s humorless smile with one of her own, her gaze gliding off of his stony expression like wet rock. ‘As to your cover, the General you impersonated is scheduled for public execution. I’d rather you heard it from me than from anyone else. How do you feel about this?’

‘From what I know of the woman, she spread fear everywhere she went. I’d say we’ve done the Universe a favor.’

‘I’m surprised to hear you say that, Rey. I don’t want you to blame yourself for what happened.’

‘I don’t blame myself. We are at war, are we not? May we go?’ She pushes up to leave but it stayed by Leia’s hand lightly resting on hers, her skin vibrating at the contact. 

‘Rey, please wait.’ She waits for her to slowly sit back down. ‘It’s clear that this work weighs heavily on you. I want you to know that it’s not my intention to hurt you.’ She removes her hand and places it in her lap, out of view. Rey glances at her skin that seems to burn with it, smooth and unmarked despite itself. ‘I know you don’t believe it right now, but I hope one day you might.’

‘What about your son? Is he not there with me? Is that all in my head?’ She waits for her to look at him, willing her gaze to lift, her throat tensing as it doesn’t. ‘Good day, General.’ 

They ready their ship in silence, eyes narrowing at the figures idly smoothing the covers on a dusty fighter, trying not to look like they’re looking at the unfamiliar craft warming its engines.

‘Finn, and someone else. Come to try to scope out who keeps coming and going in secret.’ Shielded, the craft seems to rumble there of its own accord, their passage through the base obscured through habit. It is regretful that she can't allow herself to talk to Finn, but the General through her own efforts had made it clear it is best for all if they stay hidden. 

He knows Finn, watching him kick lightly at a rusted retaining bolt as if trying its hold, his hands deep in his pockets. He doesn't have enough confidence to judge how he would react to seeing them both together, how far the knowledge of his friends safety would go to dull the image of their last meeting. ‘That’s the Pilot we’ve heard so much about’, he supplies, checking their fuel reserves, her eyes on his neck.

‘What’s the betting they try to come over?’ she asks, swiveling her head to check the door seals she knows she closed. 

‘They’ll have been told not to, for our protection and theirs. But if they’re curious, or particularly stupid, they just might…’

‘Finn isn’t that stupid. What about the Pilot?’

‘He’s arrogant and impulsive. Odds are even.’ They hear a spanner clang to the floor with a dull pop, flattened and dulled by transparisteel. The Pilot extends his free hand from deep in his jacket, waving a hand in greeting at the sole mechanic, deeply entrenched in his post in the converted transport. They back into the corridor with a few more furtive glances their way. ‘Maybe next time.’

‘My money’s on the Pilot.’ She flicks on their shielding as they begin to slowly inch into the scramble of snow. 

‘You’re on, scavenger.’

Chapter Text

‘There is a gala to be held on Coruscant between many high ranking First Order officials and the local political representatives at the capital. A charity event said to raise funds to benefit those who have been "destabilised" by the current situation.’ Leia's sarcasm drips through the crackle of the speaker. ‘I want you to find out if anything is being said about the Order and their sudden lack of a weapons division. Both sides have agreed to meet and celebrate a new era of peace without the insidious influence of the Sith. They will not openly carry any weapons with them, but I’m sure I don’t need to tell you to be careful. Observe, find out what you can, but otherwise live in their shadows for an evening. Please ensure you’re both aware of the realities of the planet before the night. We will arrange transport for you. I do not intend for you to have to stay there any longer than is necessary.’  

‘What was that about?’ Leia’s reluctance is nothing new, something hard crystallises inside of her every time the General expresses regret at petitioning for their help. But this was deeper. She could hear the distance in her voice, as if the General were leaning away from her transponder, appealing to the air in front of her. ‘It doesn’t sound any more dangerous than anything else she’s had us doing…’

‘It’s Coruscant. The place is as full of history as it is complacency. Much of the Universe’s most wealthy call it their home, they're particularly hostile to anything that threatens their place at the top.’ She blinks as she feels her eyes glaze over. Politics. A slow, insidious disease she'd done her best to avoid for most of her life. How it weakens words, dulling them to a toneless, meaningless dirge. ‘It doesn’t surprise me that they’d try to strengthen an alliance with the Order right now.’

She slides to the floor to lie back against it, enjoying the cool on her skin and the pleasant vibration of the ship beneath her, moving through aching muscles, forcibly aligning her spine. They'd spent their morning walking for the sake of it, picking a point in the distance, both too proud to admit their estimations to its distance were woefully inadequate. They'd listening to their assignment slumped in the cockpit, too tired to lift their heads, their calm gradually washed away like loose dye. ‘Dare I ask why?’ She closes her eyes and tries to find her peace in the humming quiet, feel her heart beat under her palm. 

‘They’re famously hostile to Force users.’

‘Wonderful.’ She feels her lips slide against her teeth as her mouth forms around an ironic grin. 

‘Have you ever been to Coruscant?’ He watches her on the floor where she scoffs bitterly, her hair fanned out behind her as her huff ripples through her body stretched against the scuffed durasteel. ‘The General specifically hates the place. Alderaanians, those who rebelled against the destruction of their home world, they were brutally suppressed by the capital. The heart of the Galaxy and they made it clear there was no home there for her people.’

‘Your people.’ She catches his gaze through lidded eyes. ‘They’re your people as well.’

Something heavy settles in his oesophagus as he watches her, still and observing him. ‘My people. I am heir to the throne of a destroyed planet. How could I forget.’ He rubs at the headache now forming behind his eyes, blinking away the spots swimming there before staring out into the nothing of deep space.

Of all the places to send them, it had to be Coruscant. Couldn’t she have sent them to the edge of known space, let them try their chances in the asteroid fields, crossing paths with pirates and thieves?  It had to be Coruscant, a place seemingly designed to be the place Rey would hate the most. Even if he followed the General’s admittedly sound advice and warned her about the place, the machined air of the planet would suck the life out of her like a fish dumped into the middle of a desert. If she would even listen to him right now, her breathing schooled to a calm whistle. He chances a look at her from the corner of his eye. If he touched her, she would shock him like a live wire. 

‘Tell me about Coruscant. I want to get it over with.’

He tells her all that he knows of the place. Its turbulent history as centre of the Galaxy, its invasion by the Sith, the ultimate failure of the Jedi to keep the balance for the sake of the Universe and the death that resulted from it. These tales are old to him, he’s heard versions of him at the knee of his parents, in the reveries of old friends speaking of their part in moving past this dark time in Galactic history and starting afresh. They’d become a kind of fire he’s stoke his anger around, the endless push and pull of it, so clear from those outside of it, but life defining to those in the centre. That perspective shift that always set him apart from them, and seemingly always will. Coruscant is no doubt happy to be at the centre of things again. A number of its inhabitants are wealthy, living above the churning underbelly of the planet, enjoying the clean air above the clouds and happy pretending that that cloud is the surface. They will be moving amongst people with the kind of wealth that will shield them from the human cost of warfare. 

‘Naturally they’re to discuss peace there. It has no impact on their lives.’ 

‘We don’t have to go. There are other ways to get this information.’

‘We might not have the opportunity again. I’m surprised they’re taking such a risk in the first place.’

‘I imagine their position conveys a sense of their own invincibility.’ 

‘Someone with the will could do the universe a favor in that room.’

‘That’s not why we’re going.’

‘Isn’t it?’ Her nostrils flare as she stares at him, fixing him to his slouch in the chair. ‘It would have occurred to the General when she asked us. Do you really think she intends us to just come back with information? Or is she more concerned with keeping her hands clean for whatever comes next?’ 

‘That’s not our brief.’ She turns away, muscles standing out in tension as she hides her face from him. Her fingers twitch at her side, before she smooths them back to rest. ‘We’re just going to gather information. I can go alone if you prefer.’

‘We go together.’ He smiles slightly at her reflexive reply, even as she keeps her face turned from him and her breathing accelerates, catching shallowly in her chest. His muscles vibrate with anxiety as he sits to pull her head onto his lap, smoothing her hair in what he hopes is a soothing pattern. He watches and waits for her breathing to return back to normal, watching her jaw work in fury and eventual capitulation. He smiles down at her searching eyes and strokes her clammy face lightly under his fingertips. 

‘Don’t leave me alone there’, her hand flies to his skin to wrap his wrist like a cuff. 

‘I promise.’ 

She keeps her hand in his as they’re taken down to the surface via air-speeder to walk the glittering bridge towards the gala. Her eyes slide dispassionately past the razor shine of buildings piercing the clouds, the layers of air traffic below them as multitudinous as insects around a still steaming corpse. He’d slid the tiny recording device into his pocket, grateful that they will not have to relay what they find, consume and digest it to spit back out. The pilot of the speeder makes obvious pains to avert their gaze, as if they hold between their clasped palms something incendiary. If he reports it back it will become a part of the whirl of rumors beginning to suffocate the two of them, so he takes it from his mind silently. The sky is suffused with the light of Coruscant Prime and the planet's several moons, all blanketing the approach with a timeless haze. It is night time, but nothing so natural as darkness passes over the face of the planet. For most, they are denied even this false sky. 

The pilot takes off with instructions to return in six hours. As the craft lifts into the air once more, he loses his charges in the crowd. He chalks it up to the scattering phosphorescence of numerous exotic plants, uprooted to serve as sign posts and guide the guests into the humid biome that is to house such an auspicious occasion. The invitees hardly need coaxing, they’re too busy finding their own honed reflections in the transparisteel of the dome to notice them slip through. Their eyes are locked on their own figures as they stretch and curve, laughter shaking the jewels that hang on them like raindrops. 

They’re supremely grateful to be invisible as they move through the crowd, dressed as they usually would amongst bodies of all species poured into garments threaded with precious metals. They guide each other through the swelling throngs, careful not to touch anyone or anything lest they become contaminated. They hang around the outskirts, listening to long greetings, full of feigned sadness at how long it has been since they last spoke, regrettably this business with such and such has kept me up all hours of the night. We were successful, but it really leaves no time to relax! This couldn’t have come at a better time, truly. Titles and new appointments are traded as drinks are passed from hand to hand and toasted lightly together before each band dissolves to begin again with fresh faces and more exchanged vanity. On a discarded napkin, trampled under a shimmering foot they find first mention of the gala’s beneficiaries, to bring stability to those at most need. They find it again, carved in the ice a bartender chips skillfully into tiny glasses. He holds them in his fingers as if they’re as solid as smoke. Her eyes are downcast and unfocused as they step into the shadows.

‘Are you okay?’ Her eyes slide to his, unseeing. 

They’re listening. He blinks in confusion. They don’t get to have every part of me. 

People are still arriving, but slowly a hierarchy forms in front of their eyes. A central core which people may approach, but drift away again after a few polite exchanges, repelled by a ring of surface-level smiles. They turn back to each other, their voices pitched below the crowd. They slide closer to the throng in an attempt to creep into their hushed bubble.

‘Naturally it was with great reluctance that we had to withdraw our support from the distant colonies. We had some idea of the unrest that would follow, but couldn’t have predicted the level of disruption that would occur…’ The First Order officer is outfitted in a crisp black suit, a flush creeping up his pale neck where his satin shirt is unbuttoned. 

‘Yes, great disruption. We feel it even here. A number of our household were forced to abandon their duty in order to return to their families. Their absence has been keenly felt. Good men are next to impossible to replace…’ 

‘That they are. It’s a shame they felt the need to abandon their posts. In times like these people tend to show you their real character. True resilience is hard to find outside of certain families.’ 

‘Truly.' He raises his voice, just high enough for it to carry and catch at any ears that may be listening in. 'Still people tend to flourish best under times of stability and order. That is precisely what we intend to spread throughout the Galaxy one more, peace, and above all, order. People can flourish when they’re provided fulfilling employment, at all skill levels. We intend to be the guiding hand that steers them away from this propensity to fall into entropy and ruin. Recent events have gone to show just how vital that is.’

‘Are we to believe then that the Order has shed its allegiance with the Sith? With the Supreme Leader…’

‘It's true, the Supreme Leader is no more and with him the foul air of the Sith. Now the Order can finally be what it was meant to be.’

‘I'm glad to hear that. But we hear rumors about your offensive strength. An incident on a research base, and now you assure us the Sith among you are gone. How are you planning to instil and maintain this peace?’

‘Rumors, nothing more. I’m sure we all have an idea as to their source.’ 

‘Dissidents. Always very vocal until the time comes to take charge, and then suddenly they can’t find their voice. But they’re a part of nature. Where there are prize cattle, there must also be shit.’ They dissolve into tinkling laughter, splintering off into smaller groups, content that for them the hard work is done. The Officer accepts another swirling drink, content he can rest a little easier now his point has been made and he has bent the right ears. They step back into sluggish periphery, between the discretely dressed security personnel standing beside their untouched drinks sweating on the ledge at their elbows. Their eyes slide past and through them, giving the unsettling impression of walking into a scene in which you have no role and no lines. 

The Knights are gone. His jaw is set as he watches the Officer tug at his collar before waving down a server for another drink he doesn’t need, surprised to find his hailing hand already clasping a sloshing glass. 

They are.

Did you know?  He’s a statue at her side, eyes downcast as the crowd swells in front of them with an impulsive smiling toast. 

I suspected. Something cut them off from the Force completely, they wouldn't have done so voluntarily. His eyes catch on someone, beyond their passive observation, recognition catching and holding his gaze. I made a choice. You and me. She closes her eyes, concentrating on the feel of his pulse against her palm as she’s overcome by a paradoxical chill despite the humidity. Her feet feel leaden underneath her, the idea of moving back through the sweating masses utterly repulsive. She takes a deep breath and urges them onwards in their rounds. 

They can spot the Order personnel from the politicians by the sallow tinge to their skin in contrast to the deep bronze of those who count their hours of unbroken sunlight among their riches. They’re crisply suited down to a person, the few female officers' hair beginning to escape their smooth low buns in the draining humidity. They press at their sweating skin with handkerchiefs the color and shine of gasoline, catching the eyes of their superiors in a frantic pattern of reflex, a fragile net thrown through the loose crowd. They’re artfully dotted amongst the low tables, beneath the fountains bubbling with iridescent liquid, clustered around the outtake of the air circulation system, silently suffusing the labyrinthine rooms with a purified imported air, scented for their pleasure. 

They step out of the spilling path of a lady, her sharply pointed heel scratching the floor as an octopus of arms extend to help her to her feet as she pushes her slender strap back across her shoulder. They devolve into an animal screech of laughter, treading the line between alarm and amusement.

This could have been your life, if Alderaan hadn’t been destroyed. They track the passage of the lady as she stoops to perch atop a linen clad knee, a hand smearing the glittery pattern hand inked across her exposed back. 

If it hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been born. They circle in hopes of picking up the thread of conversations beyond the sweltering heat and noise they exclaim between them has made them positively inhuman. They dart their nervous eyes towards the scattered non-human guests, devolving into clasping giggles as the shining eyes of a Twi’lek happens upon their searching look. 

How do people live like this? Pink and swollen fingers dig into the tan skin of the woman, pulled tight across the ravine of her spine. She folds her slender figure over the man as he reaches lazily behind him to catch a server by the elbow and bend his ear towards his flushed face. 

For many it’s all that they know. They don’t know it can be any different. He can’t help but picture his mother in places such as this, toeing off her shoes and picking over spilled napkins to fold herself into the space between men duelling for who has the most burdensome fortune, the most fervent wish for peace from those constantly needing their wisdom and guidance. Would she have painted the vague half smile across her face and counted the seconds before she could leave?

It makes me miss home. Any good natured humor Rey once had at the alien lavishness of her surroundings is gone, replaced with an ageing weariness that drags at her features as if the gravity had been turned up under her feet. Her eyes clouded, her flush feverish, her breathing too even, her hand limp in his. 

I’m sorry. Sorry you have to be here and sorry you can’t go home. He squeezes her fingers, a jolt running through him to feel them twitch against his.

I know there’s nothing left for me there for me. But I still miss it. 

They head towards the tantalising reprieve of the terrace, only to find the air hasn’t got the message that they are now outside. It’s as close and stifling as it is inside. She looks up at the starless night, heavy with orange hued pollution. Despite the biomass of people living underneath them now, maybe looking up as she is, there is silence. It shouldn’t be possible for that many people to be silent. It grates at something within her with its wrongness. She reaches out with the Force, ignoring the cloud around her companion as he masks them from the outside world. People, a writhing mass of them, as thick as the plush carpet slowly soaking up the finite exports of squeezed planets, their heritage mopped up by thick fibres. They scream and toss impotently below her, with an anguish too futile and universal to voice.  Let’s go back in.

In the darkened corners they find those bitter with their drink, First Order personnel done with mingling and keen to indulge their spite, throwing barbed looks into the crowd indiscriminately. 

‘Years of work and I’m expected not to say anything when it’s all gone up in smoke.’ She stands at their elbow, holding them in her seething gaze, rolling her jaw, blinking slow as a panther. ‘Not even allowed to know what happened. They say it doesn’t concern me. As if I hadn’t been expected to explain every absence, every loss of person that didn’t exceed their ridiculous quota. Protect our investment, they always said. Now it’s gone and they say nothing.’ General Shaw, he supplies. Head of the program. I’m surprised he’s here. Loose ends…

She blinks as a hand gesticulates wildly within a hair's breadth of touching her, staying rigidly still. She knows with a cold clarity that if he touches her, she will kill him, use his blood to wash the stain of his contact from her skin. 

‘Redeployed, they say. We all know what that means. Decades of painstakingly sourced talent, thrown away. How long will it be, do you think, before I’m tasked with rebuilding? Or will my blood still be hot when it happens?’ 

We should go.

Her heartbeat trembles at the base of her throat, she closes her eyes as she feels herself lose a sense of her scale, as if she’s growing to push the air from the room. Don’t you want to see what his friend has got pressed against his hip? The adhesive must be coming loose with sweat. 

I don’t need to see it, and you don’t want to see it.

Don’t I? She stares at his glass, sloshing as he takes a frenzied deep draw from it, sucking it like oxygen. He pulls her back into the shadows, her eyes never leaving the pair until they’re obscured by a stumbling gaggle of young dignitaries, pawing at each other's skin. Her eyes take a few seconds to focus on his where he steps in front of her faraway gaze, laying an anchoring hand on her shoulder. She presses her hot cheeks to his skin, eyelids twitching. 

We should listen to the speeches, then we can go. She nods, a tiny jerk of her wobbling chin before looking to the crystal diaz at the far end of the hall. They are the only people spared the burden of maintaining their smiles. 

‘We thank our esteemed guests for sparing some time for us this evening, and for their generous donations towards the cause for which we are gathered.’ He pauses to acknowledge a polite smattering of applause, like a sudden hailstorm now spent.

‘We are, none of us, ignorant of the turmoil within the Galaxy. But we are proud to witness tonight the first tentative steps towards lasting peace on our humble planet. We, as a people, have always given ourselves over as diplomatic centre, weathering all manner of storms in an attempt to temper the moods of the Universe. Faith has its place in our hearts, but we stand with our allies that it has no part in government. Those of you with keen eyes and with more restraint than me when it comes to relaxation’, he pauses for a too-loud laugh, torn up like a scream, ‘may be able to spot from our gorgeous venue the Imperial palace, built upon the grounds of the old Jedi temple. We hope to emulate that auspicious example as we move towards a new era of prosperity for all, forging a path between the poles of radical faith. The Universe should never have been reduced to a pawn in their game, and will not be again, if the fine people of this room have any integrity beneath their sumptuous attires. May this be an alliance long-lasting and prodigious. But I’m sure you’re tired of my voice by now. Enjoy the perennial twilight of our home, Galactic City, but do not mistake it for an ill portent. Our friendliness will not evaporate in the morning light, you will take it home with you, wherever that home may be. With our alliance we will ensure the jewel of the Galaxy is preserved for all who will follow us.’ 

He steps down in his wave of applause to hang heavily upon the arm of an officer, his shirt pulling out of his trousers to hang limply. Within an instant, the faces all turned towards his elevated figure have swivelled back to their compatriots, continuing their conversations with a renewed urgency at the intrusion of temporality on their evening. Funny that of all places, the centre for Galactic standard time, its people seem most practised at throwing off its influence as easily as they slide off their jackets to snag them upon the gnarled crowded branches of uprooted plants. 

Conversations have turned on themselves to begin to auto-cannibalize as they slip into the open. Three of the planet’s four moons beat their weak light against the blanket of pollution around them. Even here, far above the cloud line, the temperature is kept at a temperate level, sky littered with the sparkling evidence of the place’s extensive terraforming and climate regulation. The biome glows in the slowly dimming light, ringed by a cacophonous medley of imported flora and fauna, fed through a massive system of irrigation covered over by artfully arranged blankets of flowers, crisping in the false air. 

What’s below here?

The bulk of the planet’s population. Nobody knows how many for sure. As the planet started to choke they simply built over the top of them.

Can we go down there? 

One day. Not today. 

They materialise at the door of the speeder and the driver fumbles to admit them. People are beginning to spill out of the dome like ants, meandering aimlessly on aching feet, grasping for the ground threatening to rush to meet them. She curls in on herself on the back seat, blocking out the slide of the russet sky past the windows behind her arm, cooling in the conditioned interior. She’s not asleep when they get back to the base, but is deep into a meditative state he’s reluctant to destroy, even if he must. He wants to touch her, but he won’t, simply making her aware of him brushing against her Force signature. She unfurls herself to sit upwards, muscles of her back quaking with the effort. But she steps from the craft and walks beside him towards the General, looking to anyone else like someone simply relieved by a job well done but thankfully over. Her eyes are humorless as she smiles at the General as he deposits the listening device in her waiting palm. They take their leave with a short nod, drawn towards the safety of their ship, hulking in the corner like an until-now unnoticed fixture of the place.  

Too tired to take off, they trust in Leia’s efforts to keep them and their ship undisturbed. They wash the sweat off their skin before drinking as if they’d slithered out of the desert.

‘Do you want to be away from people for a while?’ He strokes her hair as she curls in his lap. 

‘Those weren’t people’, she mumbles into his shirt. ‘I want to hear your voice. Say something to me, it doesn’t matter what it is. I want to drown out their voices in my mind.’

‘Have I ever told you about where I’d like to go when this is all done?’ She shakes her head, digging against his thigh, nose crinkling at him. ‘It’s liable to be very long and boring, might send you to sleep.’ She smiles and sighs against him, his fingers resume teasing their way through her hair, dragging mesmerising touches against her scalp as her fingers grasp against his leg. ‘There’s a place I’ve heard about, but for all I know it’s a rumor...’

She falls asleep as his voice meanders and muses around her, wrapping her in its rumbling tone in the hush of their ship. She wakes for a moment as she’s carried to bed, listening to him move around in the next room brushing his teeth and placing a glass of water on the shelf next to her for the morning. He’d spoken long after she’d fallen into the deep rumble of sleep on top of him, blinking fear out of his eyes as he dared to give voice to wishes he’d forbidden himself from keeping. He can pretend they were just the shapeshifting hum of the ship, clouded by sleep.  

He leaves her sleeping to slip through the base just starting to smell like caff. No need to announce his presence to his mother, she excuses herself and ducks into the corridor to meet him. ‘Don’t tell Rey about the scientists. She already suspects but it’ll only hurt her if you confirm it.’

‘They’re all gone, aren’t they?’

‘They would have been pressed on their part in the incident, and if they didn’t comply, executed.’ He dodges his mother's look for the easier task of counting the pairs of eyes that pass over him, questions dimly sketched before he shields himself.

‘They had no part in it, they couldn’t have complied.’

‘All the same. She knows in her heart, but let her keep her doubt.’

‘I will.’ Satisfied, he turns to leave her to her meetings, stilled by her question. ‘Does she know how much you care for her?’

‘She does.’

‘Have you ever told her?’

‘There is no need, she knows.’

‘She might like to hear it all the same.’

The base slowly comes alive around him as he beelines for the ship. Eyes glance curiously at him as he passes, the puzzle of his civilian clothing and the rumors around a recent clandestine mission begin to form a tentative conclusion in their mind, before being lost to the fog of their sluggish morning minds. They shake their head and try to grasp for the thread of the whispered conversation. Tales of a recent success, arms wrapped around their torsos they allow themselves to hope that the fight might soon come to an end. 

He leaves her sleeping as he begins to prep the ship for take-off, plugging in distant co-ordinates, peeling off his gloves and craning to initialize the shields and dampeners without a co-pilot. He takes off without an audience, ship code casually logged by the base air-control before being dropped from the records. The glow of the ice-planet shrinks in front of his eyes as she finds him. 

‘Where are we going?’ She snakes her sleep warm arms around his shoulders, hair tickling his neck. 

‘Somewhere you’ll like. An ancient temple. Lots of people.’ He feels her hum against his skull. ‘We’ll be there in a few hours. We should eat.’

They pull a selection of ingredients from their stores, regularly bolstered by a stipend from the Resistance. At first she had been reluctant to take them, but relented to the comfort she found in seeing their kitchen well stocked. She’d irregularly peek inside to find she can’t see to the back of the cupboards, and blink as if they’ll disappear in front of her eyes to be replaced by dust. But they don’t. They’re mostly tasteless but they take little time to prepare and soon they’re sat surrounded by a selection of dishes, peacefully waking up.

‘Did you go speak to your mother?’ He can’t see her mouth as she speaks, slumped against his side. 

‘Why do you say that?’ 

She shrugs awkwardly. ‘I don’t know. Something on your face.’

‘I just thought I should tell her where we were going. I know she knows already…’ They lapse into silence as the ship drones lightly around them. 

They lay out their clothes for when they will land before retreating back to bed. She sits cross legged on the covers as he slowly brushes out her hair in sections, laying each piece in front of her shoulders carefully. ‘So there’ll be people where we’re going?’ 

‘There will, pilgrim’s mostly. People travel there to pay respects to their Gods.’

‘And they won’t mind that we’re there?’

‘Not as long as we’re respectful’. He gathers her hair to smooth down between her shoulder blades. ‘You’ll have to be on your best behaviour.’ She swears under her breath. ‘Exactly my point.’ He takes a section of hair at the crown of her head and begins to slowly twist it into a smooth braid. ‘Who taught you to swear?’

‘I taught myself. I’m very good at it. Tell me about the temple.’ He shares what little he knows of the place as she luxuriates under his light touches against her scalp. The people who travel there are private, their faith something they do not often advertise for fear of persecution. The history of the place is written nowhere, shared in stories and legends only, for fear of reducing the place and its people to something calculable, something quantifiable. It is the culmination of a lengthy pilgrimage, they know, the rest of the journey known only to those who take it. For all anyone knows there is no set route, just the endpoint. To the rest of the universe the temple is the final note of a melody they’ll never hear, hanging there haunting and serene, perched in the mountainside mist. 

They land in the static swirl of light rain, buffeting against them in fragile waves by them disturbing the air. They join onto the mossy stone steps receding into sunlight and fall into step as their clothes press against their skin with damp. It’s joyful to feel the warmth seep through the muscles of their legs as they pick their way up the sloping mountain face, feel their lungs work as they move past their initial discomfort to slide into the mechanical routine of it. Beside them whorled and blasted trees sway in the light breeze with a shivery song. 

They pass a lady descending out of the grey shelf above them, moving past on sure feet, she passes her gaze over theirs with a peaceful smile, catching their eyes before they move out of each other’s view to disappear into the mist. Something flutters in Rey’s chest, so used now to being perceived in the fuzzy shielded way that had become their protection. She had been close enough to see the blood at Rey’s cheeks from the exertion. Rey has been close enough to pick out the stripe of grey through her gathered hair, the crinkle at her eyes as she’s smiled at her. Her heart thumps in her chest as she fixes her eyes on the stony horizon, at the ramshackle steps arcing into the sky at an increasingly steep angle. It’s sheer enough she can reach out her hand to touch the worn steps at the apex, before they crest into a clearing. The temple reaches high into the sky, craning over them standing there dazed and panting on wobbling legs.

The building is colossal, giving the impression of a handful of jagged rocks being dropped in a grating pile by an unseen and gargantuan hand. Water flows through fissures between the unfathomably large boulders in rusty rivulets of mineral deposit, eating at the point of contact with the slow erosion of water and time. It looks as if it has stood as such for thousands of years, on the point of catastrophic dissolution. She laughs at the contradiction of the place, a sudden worn sound swallowed up by drizzle. At the centre they spy an opening, a crack between thick sedimentary layers through which people pass in silence. Around it towering statues, hands worn smooth and fingerless. She smooths her hand against one, fingers tracing the lines carved into the palms, wondering if they were traced by the eyes of the artist from their own.

‘How long has it been here?’ 

‘We don’t know. It’s likely it predates recorded history.’ She squints up the dizzying face of it, blinking against the rain. ‘Do you want to go inside?’

He takes her wet hand in his as step through the stone opening, inhaling its deep mineral smell before blinking in the dark of the interior, spots of candle-light swimming before resolving in front of their eyes. The inside is curved and flowing, every wall smoothed by hands and tools to a satin undulating form, like hiding in the guts of an animal. Around them small groups of people speak in low voices sat on richly patterned carpets, their voices echoing and overlaying each other in the stone. Some sit in silence, hands clasped, they smile as they pass through, their clothes steaming. A lady catches Rey’s hand in hers and withdraws it, leaving a copper stone in her palm, warm from clasping. They’re drawn down to sit with the lady, tracing the carvings that blanket the ceilings with their eyes as she speaks in an unknown tongue interwoven with guttering candles. Her voice weaves back on itself in little rivers of sounds as they feel her eyes on their faces, their throats as they swallow. 

‘I hope this place has brought you peace’, their eyes snap down to her at her halting basic. Rough fingers tilt their faces up to hers, a shadow ringed by orange candlelight. ‘You feel as if you’ve been here before. Maybe you have. There have always been souls here. In the end, it’s the same thing.’ She leaves them with the ghost of her tiny fingers against their skin. Rey leans back to fill her view with the carved ceiling, losing her eyes in the patterns there as she tries to force air back into her lungs.

She catches movement in the corner of her eye, tiny figures sharing a wrapped parcel between them and looking at her, not bothering to disguise their staring. Crumbs fall between their fingers as they smile at her. As she looks around her, feeling her clothes beginning to unstick themselves from her skin, every lined and smooth face meets her openly, fixing her eyes with theirs. They don’t shift underneath it, staying where they are, sat or sprawled, hand curled or pressed against the rock, precious items ringed around them. She takes in every detail of them she can find in the hazy light and files it away somewhere. The candlelight reflects in their eyes, mouths pulled into a serene rapture they can’t help but wanting to see reflected back at them in the faces of others. One face in a mirror. 

They stand, reluctantly, silently to follow the woolly susurrations of voices further inside. A loose ring of people passing off words between them like a song as others mouth along in silence around them. They sit on a low shelf of rock that seems to fold around them and listen to the unparseable words in a reverential hush. Words bubble and die at the back of their throats, streaming out in hot air. They don’t realise they’re trembling until a thick rug is passed their way and spread on their laps before the givers disappear back into the circle. She swipes her thumb through the thick pile, feeling a breathless dizziness crush at her chest. 

They leave, clothes dried in a charged rainless pause, joining a small trickle picking its way back down the steps. They step slowly down, wrapped in a deep calm, counting their slow heartbeats. 

‘It feels wrong to leave’, she hesitates in front of their ship, glistening with recent rain amongst the trees. 

‘Then we won’t. We can stay here a while.’

They sit under the shelter of the ship, eyes trained on the stony approach reaching up into haziness. ‘Does it make you feel sad?’ she asks the steps.

‘Somewhat, but not necessarily in a bad way.’

‘I wish I had what these people have.’

‘Faith, you mean. Do you not feel like you have faith?’

‘There were those who said Jakku used to be a paradise, that one day it would become one again. I saw that complacency and hope get people killed. The Universe didn’t care about their faith in it. But I wonder now if it was a fair trade. If maybe they had the right idea all along.’ She digs her foot into the loose gravel they sit on. ‘I used to think I understood how it all worked. I don’t know what I believe in anymore.’ She closes her eyes in pain as he kisses at her temple. He cradles her face in his hands and waits for her to crack open her eyes to catch his around a ring of tears.

‘You believe in people, in the goodness of people.’ 

‘But they’re not good.’ 

‘No, not all of them. But you still believe in them. If you didn’t it wouldn’t cause you such pain.’

‘I don’t want to have to run anymore.’ She presses her face into his chest, arms squeezing his ribcage, trembling with effort.

‘You don’t have to. The Resistance can help you, give you a normal life somewhere.’ She shakes her head, grinding her forehead into his sternum. ‘I don’t expect you to give up your life for mine.’ He untangles her arms from their bruising grip around him to look at her face, red and hot with tears. ‘You don’t have to do this anymore, it’s okay.’ 

‘Don’t you want me anymore?’ Her face crumples in on itself as he watches, clouds rolling over to bathe them in grey.

His throat crushes with a spike of anxiety, he blinks until her swimming form resolves in front of his eyes. ‘Rey, I would take any life at all to be with you.’

‘Then we go away.’

‘It’s not my decision to make. But I wish more than anything that it was.’ She blinks around an unbroken stream of tears. ‘I wish I could give you everything that you need. I wish I could give you a normal life.’ She smiles, her jaw trembling with it. ‘Anything you want from me, you can have. I mean it.’

‘Don’t leave me.’ He blinks hot tears out of his eyes as he folds her against his chest, feeling her back ripple with sobs, her fingers twisting in his shirt. His vision tunnels into complete blackness as he holds her shivering body against his. 

He helps her back onto the warmth of the ship, stripping off her wet layers to help her step into dry ones. He tries to calm his panic as she’s pliant in his arms as he gently untangles her braid and towels the worst of the moisture from her hair before passing a hot towel over her tear-stung face.

‘What do you need?’ He threads his fingers through her limp hand, squeezing softly. 

‘Tell me about our life, after.’ He lies her gently down, tucking blankets around her shivering body before sliding in beside her.

‘After all this is done, we’ll buy some land on a far-flung planet’, he murmurs. ‘We’ll build a house for ourselves by a lake, and you can laugh at me when I drop the timber on my toes. We’ll make it exactly how we want it, and fill it with whatever we want. You’ll fall asleep to the sound of the rain on the rooftop, and wake up to the sun behind your eyelids.’ He takes her hand and fits his fingers through hers. ‘We’ll have breakfast on the porch, then head to the market to buy whatever looks good. We’ll walk back in the sunshine and hang trinkets on the walls until every inch is covered. Then we’ll add on another room and fill that one too. You’ll chase me through each decorated room when I imply that maybe you have enough now.’ He twists his legs with hers, drawing her closer. ‘After dinner we’ll head into town to the bar you like the best, where they roll their eyes when we come in because they know how insufferable we will be. There’ll be people there who know us, and they’ll rope us into little games we pretend not to enjoy but secretly do. You’ll wear your hair down because you like the feeling after you’ve had a drink, and they’ll pretend not to see us hold hands under the table. We’ll fleece them for every credit they have at each successive ridiculous bet, but leave it uncollected for next time. We’ll walk home in the dark, along the path we could walk in our sleep and you’ll push me into the lake. You’ll laugh so loud that birds will take off from the trees around you in annoyance. But you’ll dive in after me and kiss me as I pretend to be annoyed. Then we’ll soak ourselves in a bath big enough you could dive in it. Then to our bed, so soft it feels like you’re falling. There you’ll go to sleep knowing that we’ll do it all again the next day, and every day after that.’ 

She slowly closes the space between them to press her lips lightly to his. His heart thuds in his chest as he pulls her against his chest, shuddering into her mouth as he kisses her. Her hands push under his shirt to press against his skin as she rolls and shivers on top of him, her hair falling down in a curtain around them. She kisses his forehead before feverishly attacking his mouth, feeling his hands grasping at her back as she pushes her tongue to stroke with his. She rolls her pelvis against his to feel the little grunt that escapes into her mouth. She steadies her head against his neck at the lick of arousal that runs through her at the sound like a knife. Too warm, suddenly too warm, she kicks the covers away and scrambles out of her shirt before slanting her mouth with his once more. With fumbling hands they managed to wriggle out of their pants and kick them roughly away. She pushes his shirt over his head before laying her heated skin against his and bracketing his flushed face in her hands.

‘Do you mean it?’ His brow furrows in confusion, hand stroking her goose-pimpled arms. ‘Do you want that life with me?’ She shakes her head to try to bring focus back to her addled mind, ‘Would you be happy? With me?’ She searches his face for any tell, any indication of hesitation or fear, knowing she’d be able to tell. In the tension around his eyes, in the muscle spasming at his jaw. Nothing. She smiles, pulling him over her, keeping her eyes locked with his. ‘Please touch me.’

He kisses her as he rolls her and his fingers drag between the wetness between her legs. She breaks away with a breathy exhale as he curls his finger inside her, rolling her hips to meet him, feeling him grin against her neck as she smiles in return. ‘Let me fuck you.’ She laughs as he mumbles into her skin, fitting his mouth and teeth against any patch of skin he can reach.

‘Since you asked so nicely…’ Her words trail off around a shaking exhale as he pushes inside of her, eyes sliding shut. She holds him wordlessly against her neck as her legs wrap around his waist, feeling each slow and deliberate thrust move through her body like warm waves. Any words in her mind dissolve at the feel of his skin against hers, replaced with just the desire to do this forever. It’s strange to think of the time they spent together when she couldn’t touch him, was convinced he wouldn’t want her to. She’s not sure if she’d have wanted to either. Now it seems unthinkable that they’d have denied for themselves the pleasure that they bring each other, the feeling of coming back to herself wrapped in warm arms, the feel of his blood pumping under her fingertips. How could she ever go without it again?

She pants into the space between them, trying to force her eyes open against the feeling of her limbs seeming to liquidate into nothing. She kisses him as her breath hitches in her chest, fingers spasming in his hair as she comes violently, gasping as he draws her through every disorienting second of it, only to feel it begin to build once more. She kisses him until she feels herself clench around him once more around a second, softer orgasm as her feet slide on the slick skin of his thighs. His motion stutters and he holds her even closer as she feels him twitch inside her. 

‘I want to do that for the rest of my life,’ she whispers to him, slumped at her side. She stares into his eyes, seeing them slowly return to proper focus, brushing the hair from his face. ‘I know what that means and I know we haven’t known each other for that long. But it's the truth.’ Her mouth twitches with a self-deprecating smile he tracks with his eyes. ‘You don’t have to say anything to me. I just needed to say it, for my own sake.’ She shivers as his fingers graze her waist before resting at her ribcage. 

‘I don’t know how to tell you how I feel about you. I hope you know, but you deserve for me to try, at least. The truth is I have no precedent for this. I don’t know what’s normal or what’s too much. The only example I have to go off is my parents, and they were laughably bad at saying what they felt, to each other at least.’

‘I’m not scared of anything you could say.’

‘I am. I’m very good at putting my foot in it.’

‘If you do, you can just wipe my memory and try again’ she offers, her own surprised laugh rippling through her body. She pulls the blanket over her rapidly cooling skin, bunching it around her fidgeting hands in a doomed attempt at levity. He pulls her to him, voice deep and low in her ear. 

‘You have me, for the rest of my life. You marked me as yours, and if you want other people to know, we’ll show them. Whatever you want.’

‘But there’s nothing on me. How would people know?’

‘We could exchange something, beyond our customary blood that is…’

‘Such as…’

‘Jewelery is traditional.’

‘Like rings? Are you suggesting we get married?’

‘One day. If you’d like to.’

‘Ask me properly. One day when we’re not both naked. But so you don’t have a brain aneurysm, when you ask me I’ll say yes.’ She kisses him, unfurling her hands to graze along his cool skin before bustling him out into the fresher. She stumbles over the thought like it's a murky step in the dark, pausing to laugh in blind fear before she joins him. 

Chapter Text

Words ringing out in the cold of the ship, having left the warmth of their bed to let them play out. I thought it might benefit you to hear of the immense relief you have brought to us here with your actions. I hope a little of its lightness reaches you, wherever you are. She digs her head against the back of the seat, frigid air dragging its way through her lungs, like a liquid she has to push past pain to manipulate, blinking through discomfort. You may not feel it in this instant, but we live in a universe now having narrowly avoided a harsh future. Worlds that would have ceased to exist were it not for your bravery.  Lives that will continue because of what you did. She closes her eyes, lips numbly tingling, eyelid twitching, refusing to stay at rest. They’ll likely never know, but I know.

There is nothing more to be said, the message clicks off with no fanfare. Any farewell, no matter how small would only serve as a dull note souring the end of melody. Effortlessly and officiously callous, the subtly de-humanising effect of being deemed a leader of people. An instinctual weighing of theoretical lives against real ones, the former clean and sinless. No sequence of actions or years able to hold its weight against the imagined innocence of people, numerous enough to collapse back down into one body. A body they saved. The necessary sacrifices to bring in a better future, stacking around her feet like leaves fallen around a tree. 

There is no bravery in her action of pulling them out of light-speed to hang in a quadrant devoid of life, devoid of anything save the crushing weight of nothingness. Somewhere families are getting the news they’ve anticipated for years, desperate for an ending, finally given. The mercy never granted to her, a definitive answer. Footsteps that will never come, clothes that will always hang, slowly succumbing to gravity. What a relief, a rare honor to be the guiding hand in this process...  

He finds her in the cockpit, swaying lightly on her feet as she stares into space, not truly seeing the galaxies that swirl around her, nonetheless pulled silently by their mass. She’s snapped back to awareness by the squeak of his careful footsteps behind her, swinging at him with her whole bodyweight, knowing with barbed kind of pride that if it connected he’d be on the floor. 

‘Restless, huh?’ She nods, eyes on the fingers that wrap around her forearm easily. ‘What are you thinking about?’

He watches her be taken surprise by her laugh, a heavy huff as her chest squeezes on itself. ‘Look for yourself’, she says, a humorless smile losing its footing as soon as it finds it.

‘No, I want you to tell me.’ 

‘Of course’, she shrugs around the arm still loosely held in his. ‘Didn't you hear? We’re heroes’, she enunciates carefully, eyes meeting his with a squint of pain before they drift away again.

‘You, maybe.’ She shakes her head slowly as he speaks, weakly protesting the words before they’re even spoken. ‘Me, not so much.’ 

‘You heard what we did. A great victory for peace and freedom in the Galaxy. Only cost a few lives.’ 

‘What can I do?’

‘I don’t want to think about it’, she grumbles, a reflex he’s not going to try to quash, noting it with a quick quirk of his lip. ‘I don’t want to think about anything.’

He tightens his grip and her eyes slowly drift back to his and hold. ‘Shall we do something about it?’ 

‘What do you have in mind?’ 

He walks her backwards, keeping her pulled close, close enough to hear her hiss as her back connects with the cold metal of the wall. She straightens her neck against it, a glint of sharpness returning to her gaze. ‘Fight me.’

‘We don’t have the space.’

‘Yet you took a swing at me. Not for the first time. Were you expecting someone else?’ Some imagined fury of the galaxy, given form, stepping out of the blackness to wrap long cold fingers around her throat. 'Or just feeling nostalgic?'

‘What can I say?’, she says through a leer, head tipped back to look at him. ‘You deserved it.’ 

‘I know I did. But more importantly, you enjoyed it.’ Her eyes search his as he speaks, trying to gauge the rules of whatever game he’s pulling her into. ‘Want another shot at it?’

‘Depends.’

‘On?’ He fishes her braid out from down her back and lays it over her shoulder carefully. 

‘Don’t hold back.’ She stares at him, unblinking, waiting for the words to land heavy in his mind. ‘I want everything.’

‘For you’, he presses her against the wall, freezing her inhale before she can make it. ‘Anything.’ 

She immediately tries to twist out of his grip and he forces down the knee she shoves between his legs before it can make contact, rewarded for his efforts by her nails raking down his cheek before he shakes her off. It's not gone, the pain she doesn't quite know how to voice, simply pushed below the surface by something she does know how to process. Their bodies moulded into weapons able to exert an immediate and bloody effect on the world. Wounds to be healed, sweat to be washed away, bringing them back to themselves. He scrubs at his face as they circle each other in the too small ship, cockpit only large enough to get a few clear feet between them. Twenty minutes ago he was sleeping, now he’s watching her scan their surroundings with the brief quantifying sweep of someone used to the threat inherent in every space, compiling a short list of avenues of escape. He’s more than happy to let her indulge in her instincts as he pushes up his sleeves and runs his hand over the scant furniture crowding their space, steadily carving slices out of her territory. Soon all they are left with is a shared smile and the mutual understanding that her only chance is to try to slip past him. 

She takes her chance, knowing it’s doomed from the start, still needing to go through the motions. He hooks her by her neck as she tries to duck behind him, pinning her to his front, her yelp abruptly cut off but not before it sounds through his mind. A sound like the sweep of the sun, erasing everything it its path. He claws his way back to the present with his eyes closed, leaning his chin on her head as she tries to writhe her way from his grip.

‘Wishing for your staff right about now, I take it.’ He pins the arms digging gouges into his arms to her stomach, the image of it reflected back at him in their sleeping ship searing itself into some dark corner of his mind. 

She recovers, as he knew she would, tensing her core to kick her legs off the back of the pilot’s seat they still habitually share to slam them to the floor. She scrambles off him, hands and feet slapping against the floor, ringing in the silence. She makes it a few steps before he grabs her by her ankle and she crumples to the ground with him. 

Her shirt rolls up under her as she’s pulled to him, her skin dragging against cold metal as he pins her beneath his body. Her hands throb weakly, pressed hard into the metal, fizzing weakly as their blood supply is constricted.

She pushes up on straining muscles to press into his space, lips shaking. ‘That all you got, Knight?’ His mouth pulls into a leer at the word, eyes falling out of focus. ‘All that training, all that power. If this is everything, I have to admit I’m disappointed.’ Until now they have been locked in a bilateral effort to pull back at the last moment, arena and choice of weapon rarely truly suiting either of them. They had routinely watched each other soften their attacks just slightly, their care for each other hobbling in a way he's willing to throw aside for her. Because she needs to feel it, needs to know their potential, pin it up against the image they have of them, re-draw the divide that grows fuzzy. 

He drops his hold on her to wrap his fingers around her throat and she digs her nails into his wrist to drag his hand down to his cock, hard in his pants. ‘What now? You gonna fuck me?’

Easier than he imagined, to move past the feeling of her squeezing him hard to tighten his grip and feel her legs kick under his. Sweeter than he imagined to watch her screw her eyes shut as he leans over her. ‘No sweetheart, I’m going to hurt you.’ 

He shakes her off easily, if only to highlight the difference in strength between them, something she’d always been dimly aware of, newly appreciative in a way she would have never predicted. Still she gives everything she can to resist him as he takes her hands and presses them by her head, her muscles straining, still failing. He lets her sit with the feeling for a moment, watching her chin jerk as she tries to reason with herself, rattling through and discounting option after option to land on a conclusion leveling and inevitable. He’s stronger than her. Hand to hand, he will always win. She meets his eye, jaw shaking as she takes deep sucking breaths. 

‘There you are. That’s what I wanted.’

She struggles against his grip, muscles burning. She squeals in frustration as they give out, leaning her head against his chest and letting it flop back heavily, eyes darting about, deep in her mind. ‘Let me go', she says evenly, trying to roll her shoulders, hands balling weakly as she looks around them, surveying the ship that is their universe from her new vantage point. Pressed against the scuffed and no-doubt filthy flooring, decades old lighting too weak to carve strong shadows, mind slowly turning over the answer to the question she's been asking herself for months. What she would do with the knowledge that he was always capable of subduing her, but chose not to.  

‘You know that typically doesn’t work on me. Try a different tactic.’ She's dragged back to the present by his reply, calculatingly casual, his response to the conversation they're both having separately in their minds. You're stronger than me. You'd beat me. She can hear it, clear and warm, said with a smile. Of course I am. 

‘I yield. I yield, alright?’

He blinks, trying to read her expression, head titled. He's the one to bridge the distance between them, his voicing cutting through her thoughts. Do you mean it?

She turns to him and holds his gaze, breathing deep and slow. No. I just wanted to say it. 

He leans in close, licking at the sheen of sweat on her straining neck where she turns her face from him. ‘Get the fuck out of my mind, Jedi.’

‘Make me killer.’ 

He pulls back and lunges at her and she jolts, growling into his neck with suffocating pleasure at the knowledge he can still make her flinch if he wants to. ‘Still a little afraid of me. You have no idea how happy that makes me.’

‘I’m not afraid of you’, she spits.

‘Brave too. Just means I’m going to have to work a little harder.’ He sits across her hips, one hand on her chest to keep her pressed down as he leans to check how far out they are from their destination. Still a way out from Hoth he notes as she tries her best to push them both off the floor with her feet. ‘You are aware I’ve got a good thirty kilos on you?’ He ignores her fists as they make contact with his chest, well aware they’ll leave bruises and not caring. ‘I’m confused as to what you think this is going to accomplish, other than wriggling around under me. Feel free to continue though, it feels great.’

‘You’re a pig’, she coughs.

He leans down over her, heat radiating from her skin. ‘So they say’, he smiles, eyes roving over her flushed face, her muscles picked out with sweat, anywhere but her eyes. ‘Now, what to do with you’, he muses.

‘Let me go.’

‘It wasn’t a question. If I need your input I’ll ask for it.’ He waits for a protest that doesn’t come, ignoring the heavy throb in his pants. ‘Obedient little thing, aren’t you? I bet you didn’t even know.’ He peers around the room, strewn with their possessions, her caff still lightly steaming on the side over the controls. Where he’d repeatedly asked her not to place it and she’d routinely ignored him, her eyes boring into his skin. ‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of’, he says offhandedly, ‘a lot of people like being told what to do.’

‘No-one tells me what to do’, she seethes. 

‘What did I tell you?’ She tries to curl away from the hand that slowly pushes up her chest to wrap around her throat. ‘Silence, or I’ll make you. I don’t mind either way. The choice is yours.’ Her mouth twitches into a sneer but she says nothing, squeaking when he tightens his grip to whisper in her ear. ‘A wise choice.’ 

She slowly drifts back to her body, not realizing when she left it as his weight is abruptly gone. He checks their status as she creeps herself upright on shaking arms, inching her way towards the wall to press her back against it. He keeps his eyes on his work, resetting their course to set them back on their way when they’re ready to leave whatever this is behind them. She opens her mouth failing to settle on what it is she wants to say against the larger desire to stay silent. Without warning he pushes from the controls and strides over to her in a few long steps and pulls her onto her feet by the arms that try to bat him away. 

Her muscles squeak as he stretches the arms she tries to pull close to her to the back of the pilots seat and holds them there, his chest warm against her back. ‘Do you know where we are?’ She shakes her head, eyes locked on a galaxy curling in on itself in the distance. ‘Nowhere. We’re in dead space. There’s nothing out there but rocks and dust. Do you know what that means?’ He smooths her hair down her back and her eye catches on his reflection, his eyes at the pulse at her neck. ‘No-one is coming to help you.’  He leans his chin on her shoulder, words as wistful as a fairytale they both no the ending of before he voices it. ‘I could do anything to you, and there’s nothing you could do about it.’ He presses his cheek against hers, tacky with drying blood and she slams her eyes shut. 

‘Don’t.’

‘Don’t what, darling? You’ll have to be more specific.’

‘Don’t touch me.’

She feels him smile against her before he drags his nails down her bare arms, the skin twitching under the movement. ‘Then stop me. Kick and scream if you want, it won’t make a difference. I’ll still take you.’ Is this what you wanted?

At his question in her mind a tangle of images swell and blend. Them transplanted back to the Supremacy , blood forging meandering paths over scuffed flooring. Bodies, too few bodies to drain the itch from her skin, seeking an outlet in him, their blood still hot, blending on her skin under his hands. He’s dragged into it alongside her, gasping against her neck and recovering with an airy chuckle against her skin that sets her shivering. ‘You flatter me darling. To think you were having such lovely thoughts about a virgin. He would have disappointed you.’ He digs his head against her throbbing temple to breath in her ear. ‘But I won’t.’

She leans her head against the back of the chair and counts in her mind as he cups her over her pants before pushing them down, lifting her pliant feet to rip them off and kick them away. She’s aware of him moving slightly out of her space to remove his own, any desire to take advantage of the opportunity quietly melting away. It’s reflex that has her seize when he rubs himself against her, his voice warm in her ear. 

‘You know we might struggle like this. The angle is a little awkward…’ He pushes into her with one hard thrust and she yelps, stamping her foot before it drifts off the floor to hang there. ‘Actually’, he wraps his arm around her front, holding her to him, ‘I think we’ll manage.’

She’s held up entirely by his chest behind her and her digging grip into the seat, his hand pressing over hers. She doesn’t know what she says, doesn’t even realize that she’s speaking until he clamps a hand over her mouth, her hands balled and lightly shaking against the seat. 

She can’t move, all she can do is just take what he gives her as images resolve slowly behind her eyelids. Disconnected fragments, shades of feeling blurring like a dream. The image of them that had followed them throughout the Galaxy. His smile as she’d pushed him down in the forest before she twisted back onto his feet. Half seconds of memories growing less distinct as she grows more aware of the drone in her ears, drowning out everything as she crawls her hand up his arm to his wrist and holds. When she opens her eyes they land and hold on the blinking icon of their ship paused in its crawl along a featureless shallow arc, the image blurring with the thump of her heart, air faintly whistling through her nose.

He pulls out as she comes, her groan smothered behind his palm. She slides to her knees with a crack, clenching around nothing as he slumps into the pilot’s seat and pointlessly flicks through screens. She places each palm in deliberate sequence as she crawls herself slowly away.

‘Where do you think you’re going, sweetheart? Did anyone say we were done?’ She shakes her head as his shadow falls over her, flipped her onto her back as she drags her hands over her face, flushed and damp with tears. He kisses her as he nudges her knees apart, her hands shaking against his shirt as he enters her. He pulls it off and she clings to him, wrapping her arms around him, pulling her back off the floor, locking them together hard enough he has to work to breath. 

‘Please come’, she begs against his skin, ‘please come in me. I’m done with this. I want to feel you.’ 

He comes with her squeezing him between her knees, her fingers twisting in his hair, sucking the breath from him. She holds him there, muscles quivering, her head pressed against his, jaw shaking as she cries.

‘You okay?’

She nods before being overcome with violent smothered sobs that lurch in her stomach. He twists to pull her onto his lap, looping her limp arms around his shoulders as he presses his cheek to her skull. ‘I’m okay’, she gasps out. ‘I’m okay, I promise. Just a little overwhelmed. It’s nothing.’

‘You’re crying.’

‘Yeah, well. It’s not like its the first time.’ She drags her palm over her face with a sigh. ‘See? All good. Brave, like you said.’ 

‘You are brave.’

Her eyes flit between his, not sure how to put into words how she feels, exactly. Something she didn’t know she needed, knowing she wouldn’t give up what they have for it. How she likes him soft, holding her in his arms, gently rubbing the tears from her cheeks as much as she likes him hard. The two people she told herself she wouldn’t compare like everyone else does, trying to fit each action into columns that curve and blur into each other. For the first time in months she compares his face to the one she met, taking off his mask to talk to her. If there’s a change, she can’t see it. She swallows, burrowing in closer to the hear of his neck, warm and smelling of his skin. 

‘Come on, let’s shower. I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry.’ She smiles against his skin, pulling back to kiss him and work herself awkwardly to her feet. She hangs at his arm as he stoops to gather up their clothes and set them back on course before walking them through to the fresher.

He loops back to kiss her after having set the water going, feeling her hands slowly settle on his chest. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ he whispers between them. ‘You seem… Kind of out of it.’

‘That sounds pretty accurate.’ She looks at his mouth as he speaks, the words reaching her after a slight delay, her brain sluggish to decode them. 

‘I know that’s not exactly what you’re used to…’

‘Did I do something wrong?’ she asks, distantly aware something is being asked of her, not entirely sure what.

‘No, you did nothing wrong. I’m just worried I did. We didn’t exactly discuss it.’

‘You didn’t do anything I didn’t want you to.’ She smiles, a slow broad smile that makes her vision blur. ‘You didn’t do anything I didn’t like.’ She snakes her arms around his neck, stretching to press herself against him. ‘I like you like that.’ She takes a deep shuddering breath, tracing the scar that carves down his chest with her fingers. ‘You made me feel powerless. No-one makes me feel powerless.’ She looks at him, eyes half closed, falling back into the memory of it as the cold leeches from her limbs and her bruises begin to assert themselves.

‘I wouldn’t have hurt you. I hope you know that.’

‘I do. But you could have done. That’s a new feeling for me. I like it.’

He groans, head pressed against hers, palm spread over her still thumping heart before he gently removes her arms to pull her shirt over her head and lift her laughing into the shower. 

There’s a pressure that creeps into the air with the steam, squeezing them, demanding words. 

‘Is there something wrong with me?’ He stills in the process of working conditioner through her hair. ‘That I like that.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘I don’t want you to think that’s how I see you. You’re not him. Not to me.’

‘I know.’ He works soap over her shoulders carefully, her eyes heavy at his neck. ‘But I’ll play the part for you, if you want.’

‘I liked it. I don’t want it all the time. But maybe some of the time. Did you like it?’

‘Couldn’t you tell?’ he squints at her.

‘You growled at me. I’ve never heard you growl before. I thought the sound would kill me.’ He sets to work washing himself as she watches. ‘Do it again.’

‘It doesn’t really work like that I’m afraid. Besides, we’re expected at the base in just under an hour. We have to eat, get dressed. We don’t have the time to do the kind of things I want to do to you right now.’

‘You’re evil.’

‘I’m practical.’

‘Practical would have been us not doing this when we’re going to have to sit through a meeting with the General. How do you expect me to concentrate?’

‘I’m sure you’ll think of something.’

‘Thinking of something is not my issue here. I have a question for you.’

‘Oh?’

‘Can I do that to you sometime?’ She stares up at him where he freezes, smoothing her hand up his chest to run her thumb along his collarbone. ‘Would you obey me?’

‘Is that a real question?’

‘I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking. Can I expect obedience from you? Answer me.’

‘Yes.’

‘But would you enjoy it?’

‘I think so. Guess we’ll find out.’ 

He’s shifting as they eat, a discomfort that bleeds into her. She allows it for a few moments, narrowing him in her gaze as he moves his food around, checking the time as if it’ll change anything. They’re already late. She takes the holopad from him and wordlessly sets it on the shelf behind her. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘I’m not doing this with you. Talk to me.’ 

He pushes himself back against his seat, exhaling past something dragging in his chest. ‘I think we need rules.’

‘We have rules.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘What do I have to say to you to convince you I’m fine?’

‘I shouldn’t have done that. It’s the kind of thing you should discuss beforehand.’

‘Why? I have no complaints.’ 

‘We were lucky. We might not always be.’ 

‘Okay?’ 

‘A proposal. We have a word you can say. You say it and it stops immediately. But if you don’t want it to, you just want to berate me, you can say whatever you want to me.’

‘I’ve always enjoyed telling you how stupid you are. That does have a certain appeal.’

‘You need to choose a word you wouldn’t ordinarily say but that you won’t forget.’

'What are you talking about? What is this?'

'I've been reading...'

She watches him pour a little more into his already full cup before she takes it from him and his hand flops to the table. 'Are you trying to tell me I'm doing something wrong?'

'No, nothing like that. But we like to hurt each other. I feel like it would be good to know we have a failsafe of sorts.'

'So I just choose something to say like a magic word?'

'Pretty much.'

‘How about “I surrender”?’

‘Clever, but no, it has to be something you couldn’t accidentally say.’

‘Steelpecker. It’s a carrion bird from back home.’

‘Good, you say steelpecker and I’ll stop whatever I’m doing.’

‘I take it that only works for sex.’

‘It does. It’s supposed to keep you safe. You can’t just say it if you’re annoyed at me.’

‘Kriff, you read my mind. What’s yours?’

‘Ossus. It’s a Jedi library world I read about once. I don’t think I’m likely to say it in general conversation.’

‘Fair enough, glad we got that sorted’, she takes his hand in hers and shakes it. ‘Anything else you want to iron out since our negotiations are going so smoothly?’

‘You’re a piece of shit, you know that?’

‘I’ve been made aware of that fact, yes.’ She stacks their plates and leans her elbow on the table, tilting her head at him, trying to read his expression. ‘What brought all this on?’

‘Seeing people, I guess. People who know who we are and are going to question what’s going on between us. If they know who I am, they’re going to wonder how this happened. I want to feel sure that I didn’t trap you. That I’m not hurting you.’

‘You’re not.’

‘I need to make sure you know that you’re safe with me.’

‘Of course I do. Do you think I’d be with you if I didn’t?’ He doesn’t answer. ‘Do you really care what they think?’

‘I know who I am. I’ve done a lot of bad things, but I hope this isn’t one of them.’

‘It’s not. Is that what you think?’

‘I don’t want to think that…’ He leans his chin on his palm. ‘We were in a bubble before, now we’re not. We can’t pretend we’re invisible. You saw them, they’re gearing up to say something.’

‘And you think us negotiating our sex life is going to help that?’

‘It’s important you know that you can walk away at any time.’

‘I don’t want to.’ She feels her jaw tense as she speaks. ‘This isn’t about sex. Do you still think I’m with you because I have to be?’

‘No. But this is going to get worse and I want you to know that I’ll understand if it becomes too much for you. You don’t owe me your life.’

‘I’m not having this conversation again. Listen, we’ll deal with it. It’s fine. I always knew we wouldn’t be able to keep running forever. I made a decision and I stick by that decision. I’m with you, alright? Deal with it. You want me to talk to the General?’

He deflates. ‘No, I should probably do it. Out of the two of us, shockingly, I seem to get on better with her than you do.’ He flashes her a tight smile. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘Steal us some supplies, I guess. We’re down to the bad stuff and we’re running out of that even.’

She turns the corner with as many rations as she can hold in the ring of her arms, having raided the Resistance stores. They’d give them if they ask, but it feels more like salvage if she picks them herself. She rounds the corner outside the General’s quarters only to find him not alone.

He’s ringed by three recruits, their voices raised. Whatever they’re saying to him, by the tremble in his hand at his side, it’s not good. He turns his attention between them lazily as each seems to pick up the thread of the others emphatic conversation, weaving their own accusations into a rough harmony. It’s annoying how quickly he was proved right. She’ll have to scrub the smugness from his skin like dirt later. 

Her annoyance quickly recedes into the background as she watches him roll his neck and take a quick step back as one of them shoves him by the chest. It’s not hard to enough to move him, but he shakes off the contact and fixes the man in a stare. She knows she has half a second to do something before he reacts.

Before she really processes it, she sends him a wave of calm, and watches his shoulders round, watches him sink a little where he stands, rubbing at the base of his neck and the itch of tension suddenly relieved. Then her stomach sinks and she turns away, just in time to see his head turn in her direction. Then she’s running, mylar wrapped parcels falling forgotten at her feet. 

He catches up to her before the parcels have fulling settled to the ground, trapping her back to his chest, one arm slung across her torso, the other squeezing her jaw, cheek biting against her molars. ‘Don’t you ever do that again…’ His breath burns at her neck, his chest heaving against her. She freezes. ‘You don’t get to do that to me. Nobody does.’

‘Please, you’re scaring me.’ She tries to twist away and he tightens his grip. Her brain screams at her to get away, get to higher ground, put some distance between them before she does something to escalate the situation even further. 

‘Good, you should be. It’s a natural reaction.’ She tries to turn her head to look at him and he squeezes her jaw even harder. She’ll have bruises in the morning.

‘Look, I’m sorry.’

He scoffs and the hair at the nape of her neck stands on end. ‘No you’re not. You still think you’re in the right.’

‘You were gonna…’

‘I was gonna what? Lose control? Like I am now?’

‘I don’t know..’

‘You thought I couldn’t handle some random Resistance grunts telling me that I’m a bad person? Did you listen to a word I said or do you still think that it’s some fucking revelation to me that people hate me?’ 

She grits her teeth, bracing herself to talk. ‘I don’t want them to hate you.’ He shoves her away and she stumbles to catch herself, spinning back to face him. A reflex of her upbringing, if it can be called that, to never turn her back on a threat. He’s a threat.

‘Sorry but you don’t exactly get a choice in the matter.’ She chances a quick look around them, half worried they’re being observed, a smaller traitorous part of her looking for help. ‘Don’t worry. They can’t hear us. No-one’s coming to help you. Is that what you were trying to save them from?’

‘I just didn’t want you to make it any worse, alright?’ Like I just did. She steps forward and watches him draw up to his full height, her palms up, placating. His eyes flick to her hands and narrow, walking her backwards into a wall.

‘Do you know where that comes from? That gesture. You’re playing the part of honesty and openness. You’re showing you’re unarmed.’ Her back hits cold stone. 

‘It’s just a…’ she looks anywhere but his face as he glares down at her. ‘I don’t even know why I did it. It’s just a thing people do.’

‘When they’re trying to influence people with their body language. Get them to do what you want them to do without them realizing what you’re doing.’

‘I wasn’t trying to.’ She presses her palms to her thighs. 

He tilts his head. ‘Having second thoughts, are you? I thought you made your decision.’

‘Yeah, I kinda am’, she breathes airily. ‘Because you’re acting like a psycho right now.’

‘How exactly would you prefer I react after what you did? I’m genuinely curious.’

‘I didn’t mean anything by it.’

‘We had an agreement. We’ve had that agreement for a very long time. It is the only line I haven’t been willing to cross with you and you crossed it anyway, despite knowing why that is the case. You’re the only person alive who knows that. Was I not clear enough with you?’

‘Why are you talking to me like this?’

‘Because I haven’t been truly angry at you until this moment. It’s a rather new experience for me.’

‘Well that makes two of us.’ She screws her unfocused eyes shut, taking a breath before forcing his eyes up to his, waiting for a reaction and getting none. Bastard. ‘Where do we go from here?’ 

‘Excuse me?’ 

‘You’re angry at me…’

‘For doing something I explicitly asked you not to do.’ 

‘I know.’

‘Oh so you do know. You intentionally took control of my emotions from me. Do you have any idea what that feels like?’

‘No.’

‘Because I’ve never done that to you. But you have to me. Twice.’

‘I didn’t mean to. I was just scared, alright? I don’t want them to lock you in a cell.’

‘Then why are we here?’ He bellows, turning away and then rounding on her again. She presses her spine into the stone hard enough she feels her nerves fizzle down her limbs. ‘If you don’t trust them and you don’t trust me, why did you bring me here if you’re so convinced that I’m going to lose it at the slightest provocation? Do you want me to, is that it? Finally get it over with?’ 

‘Tell me what to do to make this better.’

‘I don’t know what you can do.’

‘There must be something.’

‘I trusted you.’

‘Trusted?’ She looks him up and down, as much as she can with him pressed around her vision. ‘So you don’t anymore?’

‘I do trust you. Which is the problem.’

‘Look, we should just go. There are cameras...’

‘That would be a shame. You do all of that and I still end up making a scene.’ All she can see is him, but he’s careful to make sure they don’t touch, knowing it would ground her and purposely robbing her of it. 

‘Look, I don’t care if you’re angry with me. Well I do, but I’d rather you be angry at me than anyone else because I can take it. You’re angry with me right now. You want to snap my neck.’

‘Correct.’

‘But you won’t. I’m the only one who knows that you won’t, okay. So if you’re going to be angry, fine, be angry. We leave and you can be as angry with me as you want to. I just don’t want them to see.’

‘Why?’

She clenches her fists in front of his face. ‘BECAUSE THEY DON’T GET TO FUCKING KNOW. Only I get to know. You’re mine.’

‘What?’

‘Are you planning at any point to say more than one word to me?’

‘What do you want me to say to you, my dear?’

‘Just tell me what to do! I don’t understand what to do! I’ve never done any of this before. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. All I know if I don’t want them to see you like that. I don’t care if you hurt them, but they’d separate us.’ She swallows and tucks her hands behind her back, squeezing them against the fissured rock. ‘But mostly I just don’t want them to see you like that. I told you before, they don’t get to have every part of me.’

‘And that extends to me?’

‘Yes.’ She struggles to hold his gaze as his eyes burn into hers. ‘It does.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Yeah, neither do I. But it’s the truth, so I hope that counts for something. Ben?’

‘Yes?’

‘Don’t say it like that. Like it’s a joke.’

He clicks his tongue. ‘What, did I hurt your feelings?’

‘Yeah, you did. Does that make us even?’

‘Not particularly', he chuckles, pressing his knuckles into the rough stone. 

‘What do I do?’

‘You keep asking me that.’ He drags his eyes over her with suspicion. 

‘That’s because you always help me. We help each other. I thought we always would.’

‘Rey.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m angry right now. But I won’t always be. Just… don’t ever do that again.’

She shakes her head. ‘I won’t.’

‘I’m not going to lose control. They can say whatever they want to me, I’ve heard it all before. It’s fine. I could have stood there all day if I had to. They don’t know me well enough to truly hurt me.’ Her guilt drags itself painfully down her esophagus as she swallows. ‘I didn’t reach for my powers, you did.’ She looks at him, eyes narrowing slightly. ‘Are you going to be okay?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Try again.’ He smiles at her, just a quick quirk of his lips. 

‘You’re talking in riddles.’

‘Would you prefer I shout at you?’

‘Please. I understand what to do with that.’

‘Which is?’

‘Look chastised and scared.’

‘So you’re telling me you were acting?’

‘Maybe I was.’

‘Well you were very convincing. But you can drop it now, show’s over.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You’re shaking.’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Yes sweetness, you are.’ He reaches for her face and she flinches slightly, breathing through her nose in a panicked staccato.

‘What are you going to do?’ She winces at the neediness in her own mumbled question.

‘Do you want me to play my part?’ He drags his thumb along her shaking jaw.

‘I want you to talk to me like you usually do. Like I’m your equal. Like you’d kill them for me if I asked you to.’ Her mouth pulls into a lopsided smile which he mirrors.

‘You need to work out what you want.’

‘Do I really?’ She drawls.

‘If I were just a lowly bystander, I might question if I disappointed you in some way…’ She juts her chin and he squeezes her throat, just hard enough she feels her pulse redouble. ‘But why would you, calm me’ he looks to the ceiling, looking to pluck the word from the air like an insect, ‘if what you really wanted was for me to be a monster?’

‘Like I said, I don’t want them to see it. Only I should get to see it.’ She wraps her hand around his wrist.

‘Again. A casual observer would point out that that’s a rather strange thing to say.’

‘Good job there’s no-one here then. Can we go back to our ship?’

‘Why?’

‘Because you have your hands on me.’ She glances down at the hand that has crept towards her lower back without her noticing. She swallows. ‘And I don’t know how I’m standing anymore.’

‘Do you want me to kiss you?’ He whispers his question against her lips. 

‘No. I want you to hurt me.’

‘Anything you have in mind?’

‘Punish me. Like you want to. You do, don’t you?’

‘I don’t even know what that would look like.’

‘Then let’s go find out.’

They pick up the dropped parcels as they go, blanketed in a bubble of Force energy, so they don’t have to deal with passers by inquiring about the shouting or the armfuls of stolen resources. They quickly pack them away and she sets a course for nowhere in particular, a few hours at sub-light speed, long enough to get the frigid air of the base out of their lungs and deal with what had happened outside of the view of others. 

She waits until they’re locked in on their course, her hands falling from the controls to fold in her lap. ‘I am sorry, Ben. I really don’t know why I did it. It seems so ridiculous now.’

‘I know Rey, it’s okay.’

‘It’s not.’ She stands and kneels at his feet, taking his hands in hers. He eyes them with suspicion. ‘I had an excuse before, not this time. I should have just come over and told them all to go to hell.’

‘I would have liked to have seen that.’

‘Did you talk to the General?’

‘No, she was in a meeting. I was waiting when they found me. Then you found me.’

She feels her face flush with guilt once again. ‘If you’d have done that to me I’d have never have forgiven you.’

‘Well lucky for you I’m famously easy going.’

‘Why are you making this into a joke? I’ve never seen you like that. Not ever.’

‘Now you know why they say what they say about me.’

‘You’re not a bad person for getting angry.’

‘Really? Because I feel like I immediately proved their point. I scared you. You trust me and I scared you.’

‘I’m a big girl, I’ll get over it. I pushed you, you pushed back. I’m sorry I made you feel that way.’

‘Please don’t make apologies for me. I can’t handle that.’

‘Please come back. I don’t want us to take like this anymore. I want us to talk like we usually do. Why are you so distant from me?’

‘Because I’m guilty and hurt and I don’t want to think about it anymore.’

‘I want to make it better.’

‘I know you do. Honestly I just want to forget it ever happened. Can we do that?’

‘We can do that.’ She sits gently on his lap, taking his head in her hands and kissing every inch of his face except his lips. ‘Can I say one thing though?’

‘Depends.’ His thumbs drags against her thigh, lazily.

‘I find you very attractive when you’re angry.’

‘Well I’m glad you enjoyed it at least.’

‘What, you didn’t? Not even a little bit. Are you going to try and tell me I didn’t feel you hard against me?’ She raises her brow at him as he squints his eyes at her and then looks away. ‘You said you’d punish me, remember?’

‘If I did, it wouldn’t be what you wanted it to be.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You want me screaming at you, grabbing you. If I were to truly punish you I wouldn’t touch you at all, I would leave you alone with your thoughts.’

‘You’re right, I don’t want that.’

‘Good thing I’m not angry anymore then.’ He smiles at her, dragging his hand up her side to her neck, feeling her pulse quicken under his palm. ‘Means I can do this.’ He twists his fingers in her hair and pulls, her hands jumping to his wrist to try to take off some of the tension, eyes struggling to say open around a wince. He stands and pulls her with him, spinning her around to brace her hands on the control panel before nudging her legs open with his thigh. She watches him reflected in transparisteel as he yanks her trousers and underwear down to her ankles, locking her elbows as he drags his fingers against her wet skin with a chuckle.

‘Now I could fuck you like this.’ He presses his fingers into her and her head drops, forehead pressing against cold metal. ‘But if I did you might feel used, and I don’t know if you want that. What do you think, sweetness?’ He twists his fingers in her and her knees wobble, her hand slapping against the controls, setting off a warning he quickly silences. ‘Do you want that?’

‘If you think I deserve it.’

‘Oh, you do. But you shouldn’t feel like that for my benefit. Like I said, I’m not truly angry with you. I’ll give it to you if its what you want.’ He leans to thread his free hand through hers and let her squeeze the knuckles against cold steel, his cheek hearing her shallow breath through her back. He crooks his fingers and her hips drop for a moment before she locks her knees. 

‘Please.’

He smiles against her skin, stroking her deeply and firmly as her thighs begin to quake. ‘You know if you lift your head you can watch. Usually only I get to see what your face looks like when I enter you. I promise you it’s worth seeing.’ He moves up to bite at the juncture between her neck and shoulder and she gasps. ‘You will have to keep your eyes open. But I know you can do it.’ 

She squirms slightly on her feet as he removes his hand to undo his belt and push his trousers down to his ankles, stepping out of them and kicking them aside. She’s making good on her promise, watching him with dark eyes as she stays where he put her, bent over with a perfect view down her top where it hangs loosely around her neck. The flowing layers she’d preferred as a layover of their time spent wandering between warm planets, pointing out little trinkets and walking hand in hand through busy markets. She’d worn them under her jacket to Hoth in a grasp at comfort. Now she can see her nipples grazing the fabric as she breathes. 

Her spine arches under his hand, pushing the fabric up to her armpits until she wriggles out of it, wrapping it around her arms for comfort as the rest of her is bare in the conditioned air. ‘We’ve never done it like this before, are you ready?’

She nods, spreading her thighs just slightly as he presses himself against her, rubbing himself along her wetness, feeling hot muscles tense and relax under him. Then he presses in and watches her watch herself as her mouth falls open, eyes widening as her breathing turns shallow. He presses in a little deeper and her head sags onto her arms before she lifts it again, cracking open the eyes that had fallen shut. He pulls out of her and she gasps, before pressing back in, deeper than before, her elbows locking again as her spine arches.

‘How does it feel?’ he asks, gently rolling his hips against hers.

‘It’s a lot.’

‘Open your eyes.’ She punches the console, but she does, lifting her head to meet his eyes in the reflection. He snakes one hand around to hold his fingers against her, feeling where their bodies meet. She can feel her heartbeat under his fingertips as he pushes himself fully inside her, her thighs shaking against his, eyes twitching where she stares at him. When he pulls almost all the way out and back in again, her head drops against with a little whimper.

‘It feels different, doesn’t it?’ She nods her head, not able to answer. He begins a slow, steady pace, pulling almost entirely out to feel her muscles clench around him with each thrust. She paddles her feet, trying to change the angle, lessen the intensity in some way, but he holds her hips in an iron grip and continues with his mind melting pace, until she feels as if her brain will dribble out her skull and run down through the switches and dials of the controls. 

‘Does it hurt you?’ He knows the answer, her shoulder-blades tense a little at the end of each thrust. She nods against her arms. ‘Do you want me to stop?’ She shakes her head, a little wet hiccup escaping her mouth as he picks up the pace just slightly. He pushes her spine down into an arch and runs his hands over her thighs where they’re spread against his, then he snaps his hips against hers. 

He had thought it felt good before, to watch the succession of twitches move through her body, but its nothing compared to the low rumbling moan that falls out of her, half way to a sob as he sees is thrusts ripple through her flesh. She clenches around him so hard he stills for a moment when he shoves his hand between her spread thighs to rub at her, her hand coming back to dig into his thighs and pull him closer. He grinds his hips against hers and the hand falls to the panel with an audible thump. He bends to kiss down her spine, her legs twisting against him, overstimulated and needing movement. He pulls back and stills, before pulling her hips back onto his, fingertips pressing little dents into her skin. 

‘Your turn.’ She meets his eyes in the reflection. ‘Push yourself back onto me.’ She presses her hands back under herself and puts her weight over them, pressing her hips back against him until their skin is flush once more. ‘Good, do it again.’ His voice trembles as he speaks, jaw shaking as he watches her shoulderblades move as she pushes herself back, hair falling over her face. She soon finds her rhythm, snapping herself back against him, hard enough he has to steady himself with a grip on her thigh. She sinks back onto folded arms and he realizes from her muffled groan that she’s biting at her skin as she moves. He pulls her up by the throat to press against his chest, her hands holding onto his arm for balance, inching her legs around, trying to find relief. He licks the salt from her cheek as she stares at him, her expression begging. He squeezes her throat and feels her cunt throb, before pressing her gently back down. 

He could come in her like this, her head screwed into the metal as one hand covers his at her hip, the other squeezing at her chest. It would be as easy as giving himself permission, and fulfilling a fantasy he had held since acquiring the ship. Still he wants to see if wash over her as her pleasure induced delirium takes her over an edge she didn’t even know existed. The shock and fear of it, searching his eyes for comfort. He’s dragged from his thought by her hand searching up through the panel for something to hold on to, her muscles clenching down around him as she’s pulled through her orgasm, knuckles whitening with her grip on the thankfully non-operational rudder control. He fucks her through it as she squeezes him, hard enough his thrusts falter. Just like that he’s thrown over the edge of his own orgasm, his fingers tingling against her skin.

He makes it down to the floor on limbs he can’t exactly feel and she follows, straddling his lap and kissing awareness back into his brain. ‘What the fucking hell was that?’ She laughs against his face, cooling with sweat.

‘Did you like it?’

‘Like it? I felt it in my toes. I thought I was going to have a heart attack.’ 

He pulls her back against his chest as he tries to catch his breath, cold metal heavenly against his skin. She gives in for a few moments, winding her arms around his and sighing as her skin tingles all over with aftershocks. Then she sighs and pushes herself off of him.

‘Come on. Let’s shower so we can do that again.’

Leia’s quarters are within a minute of the hangar bay, their ship garnering it’s usual puzzled glance in their direction before they shield themselves for the short walk through the morning air, still hanging onto the chill of night. Not that the time has much meaning to them, they’d spent the last few hours in the void of light-speed, tangled in a sweaty heap.

She ushers them to sit on the fading couch, a table set with a few fresh fruits and empty cups. Rey winces just slightly, a tiny sharp intake of breath as she sits, throwing him a dark look before sliding into impassivity and turning to the General. He smiles to himself, she still manages to look intimidating and uncompromising with the barest flush on her skin. Well fucked, yet still terrifying.

‘Thank you for joining me at breakfast. I had it in my mind that you would be here yesterday. I’m sure I saw your ship…’

‘Something came up.’ Rey’s response is clipped and cold, shoving her hands under her thighs and crushing them there.

‘Well, once again. Apologies for the setting. I know it’s a little informal, but I thought we could drop the pretense of this being a discussion in this case. We have a device we’d like you to place at a given target. Because of the nature of the place, you’re the only people who I believe could have a chance at succeeding.’ She weathers their look as she offers the teapot before pouring herself a cup, tenting her fingers lightly over the steam, a slender floral design embedded in the translucent porcelain. ‘The aim is to install it in the building and detonate it after operating hours, when they’ll only be a skeleton crew guarding the facility. The aim is material damage. I want you to as far as possible place and detonate the device outside of the range of any personnel. Do you think this will possible?’

‘Are you asking me if you think there’s a chance I’ll be able to resist murdering a few faceless First Order staff members?’ She digs her fingers into the upholstery leaving little tracks in the plush pile.

‘No, I’m asking you if you’ll be able to place the device and remain undetected.’

‘How many people will be in the building?’

‘After hours, as far as we can ascertain it’s monitored by a team of individuals each taking one zone. There could be as few as ten and as many as a few dozen people there. You would need to find a way to trace their movements, either with their own surveillance or by your own means.’

‘The Force you mean. Planting a bomb seems somewhat out of character for the Resistance. It is a bomb we’re talking about, isn’t it?’

‘We prefer to think of it as tactical destruction of property.’

‘What’s the place?’

‘I’ll send you the details. Will you come to me when you have your plan ironed out?’

‘If that’s what you want.’ Anger wraps around her throat as she catches the brief look Leia exchanges with Ben. ‘Something else I should know?’

‘Rey, may I speak with you?’

‘You are speaking with me.’

‘Privately, I mean.’

‘Whatever you have to say to me, you can say to us both. I’ll only tell him anyway.’ She taps her foot under the table and count its metronomic movement, lifting her chin. ‘What is it you want to say?’

‘I wanted to ask you why you’re so angry with me?’ Her stomach contorts around a scoff that seems to catch at her ribs. She pulls in a breath, letting her gaze drop to the cup steaming in front of her, untouched. The handle as slender as a twig, catching the light, an impractical delicacy that screams its enormous value, but only to those close enough to see the ghost of the contents within glowing with the light. She looks away, crossing her arms across her chest, suppressing the temptation to smash it into glimmering powder.

‘Am I supposed to enjoy being a mercenary for the Resistance?’ She has the decency at least not to reach out to her across the table. ‘The same Resistance, I should point out have no issues confronting Ben in the corridors and voicing their indignant concerns. You promised to prevent that, did you not?’

‘We need your help, Rey.’

She rolls her eyes at the obvious deflection. ‘This wasn’t the kind of "help" I pictured when I agreed to work with you.’

‘I know we ask a lot of you…’

‘You do, repeatedly. I have to wonder if there’s a limit to what you’ll ask of us.’

‘I don’t intent to put you in danger, Rey. If I could think of another way to have this done, I would use it.’

‘Observe the place, find the routes they use to patrol the place and plot a path through. Patience and a few cameras, surely you have access to those kinds of resources.’

‘You’re right, we do. What we have much less of is time. That kind of approach could take weeks…’

‘If it’s as crucial as you seem to think it is, surely it would be worth the time invested.’

‘You’re not obligated to take the assignment, Rey. There are others we could-‘

‘Send them in to be captured by the Order and killed. You know I couldn’t live with myself if that happened, which is exactly why you asked me. We’ll do it. Send over what you know.’ She stands to leave and feels her skin twitch with rage as the General places a hand on her arm. ‘Don’t touch me.’ She stares at the hand as it’s reluctantly removed. 

‘Rey, please. I’m worried about you.’

‘I honestly don’t care how you feel, General. It doesn’t change what you’ll do, nor will it for me. Enjoy your breakfast.’

She tries not to notice his little glances her way as they make their way back to their ship. She rubs heat back into her arms as if she’s trying to rub the skin away with her bare hands, pressing her tongue to the roof of the mouth as her jaw cramps with tension, moving through the take-off sequence , sinking back to stare at the ceiling as they climb through atmosphere. 

‘Rey.’

‘Don’t do it, I don’t want to have this conversation. The one where you tell me they don’t mean anything by it. I’m not stupid, this isn’t about being offended or scared.’

‘Then what is it Rey?’

‘Have you noticed she just talks to me. How she’s sorry to send me, put me in danger, make me upset. As if we don’t go together.’

‘She can’t forgive me for what I’ve done, I know that.’

‘It’s not that. She can forget about that if she just concentrates on what you can do. We’re just a resource: one she’s realised how to motivate and manipulate. A miracle, two Force users falling into her lap that she has such effective leverage over. She just talks to me because it’s easier than asking her son to do it.’

‘Shall we tell her it can’t be done.’

‘She’ll send someone else. It’s not about the mission.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Is this all it is? We’re Force users and that’s it. It’s the only use we have?’

‘Honestly?’ She lifts her gaze to him, tension crowding around her eyes.  ‘As long as the war goes on and we choose to fight, yes. We’re Force users above anything else. I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. You told me the truth. It’s more than your mother would do.’ She stretches the stiffness from her shoulders, waiting as he reads the file in their ship’s inbox. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Central logistics. An old factory requisitioned and converted into the shipping hub for the Order’s resources. I can see why they’d want to disrupt it.’ She blinks at him, shaking the itch from her arms. ‘Whenever troops need new amour or weapons, or projects need raw materials, it’s all processed and shipped from there. They use their own distribution networks, to avoid taxation and coercion. Through it, in theory, anything they may need can be allocated and dispatched before they even know they need it. It’s computer supervised, but there’s a large organic team as well.’

‘So if we destroy it, the Order won’t be able to react to attacks as quickly?’

‘That’s the theory. Their resources are vastly superior, but if they can’t get them to where they need to be…’

‘They basically don’t exist. Won’t they just find alternative methods of distribution?’

‘Undoubtedly, but in the meantime they’d be vulnerable.’

‘Does it tell you anything about the device?’

‘No, but they’re only giving us one. We can assume the effect will be pretty large.’

‘So we plant it and give word on when it’s to be detonated?’

‘Seems to be about it. How do you want to do it?’

‘I can’t see getting in as particularly challenging, It’s only really the droids we have to worry about on that side of things.’

‘I guess we blend in with the workforce and try not to draw attention to ourselves.’ 

‘How will we know when to give word?’

‘They’ll have cameras. Depending on where they are we might be able to wait for an opening that way.’

‘And blow ourselves up in the process. Do you think we’d be able to sense them all?’

‘Depends on how many there are. We could test it before going. The base is smaller, but it’s got no lack of people wandering about.’

‘I’m not interested in going back there until we have to.’

‘Then we find somewhere else to practice. Anywhere in mind you’d like to go?’ 

She climbs over to him and sucks the air from his lungs, grip pressing into his skull with a press he can feel thumping with his blood. ‘How many staff will be there?’ She pulls away, feeling his hands settle on her hips, steadying her. 

‘A place like that, a lot.’

‘And they’re just regular workers. Will there be any troopers?’

‘I doubt it, it’s largely automated.’

‘Then we just walk in.’

‘We could do.’

‘Think about it. Are they likely to notice a couple of new faces. They’ll just think we’re recent hires. Then when we’re in we can figure it out from there. Computers I can deal with.’

‘That could work.’

‘I don’t see why it wouldn’t.’ He shrugs and she fits her mouth to his neck, biting and feeling his fingers twitch against her. ‘We go in the morning.’

Chapter Text

They walk in with the dayshift, device heavy in his pocket, watching workers yawning silently behinds their hands as they shake off their gloves and begin peeling away outer layers in the damp heat of dozens of bodies. They hang at the frayed edge of the crowd as its gradually eroded, the clamor of the expansive hall gradually lowering. In the shadowy rafters, beyond the sterile glare of LED strip lights, a few birds swoop and settle like wind-borne paper. 

They eye their steadily shrinking pool of options as the wind whips the exterior doors shut to bounce in their frames. A number of supervising droids peel off to secure them, leaving their colleagues the task of scanning through the rest. It's still instinctually rattling to feel eyes peer through through them to the doors, now bolted home with a heavy clang. A man shakes the cold from his hand as a droid moves closer to monitor his attempt as he presses his palm back against the reader. They slip through, behind their heads the man mumbles his annoyance as he’s buzzed through with a tone. A routine so long-standing and monotonous, any diversion in protocol would strike the bodies in the room as more invasive than anything. Nothing is presumed to be ever caught in their net, it is simply cast as it always is done. Were they found they would no doubt have been gawped at with an exasperated confusion, as if they'd walked into an enforcement office and neatly folding their hands to take a seat. 

Past the hall a clanging of lockers as standard issued jackets are shoved roughly onto hangers, gloves poking from their pockets. One by one they’re sealed away, arms shoved into high-viz vests, colleagues lengthening their steps to reach the bank of holopads before their teammates. Swiftly they scan the wall and select the least temperamental device from the bank before all that’s left are the battered rejects, their screens flicking on and off in syncopating rhythms. 

There’s no need to press into their minds, they grumble their annoyance into the air, met with a chorus of grunts and scoffs. It’s a waste of everyone’s time, they say to no-one in particular, faces tilted to their feet to keep their mouths out of clear view of the cameras before they lift their chins to clip on their hard hats. They pull on vests of their own from the few vacant lockers, counting the cameras as they tip their heads back to smooth the collars around their necks. Everyone knows nothing moves when there’s a storm warning. Rey shares a commiserating smile with a man whose eyes happen to fall on hers as he waits for his screen to populate with manifests.

‘What did I say?’ He flicks his screen towards her, a long list of tasks crawling off screen. ‘Inventory management. Gods forbid we have a single day not strengthening the facility.’ He slides the thing into his pocket and pushes his way through the doors, outlined in black and yellow stripes of warning. They linger by the bank of screens, head-wear under their arms as they give the appearance of settling on their own, their eyes moving over each in turn. They pick two at random and wiggle the ill-fitting hats onto their heads. Above the exit a screen slowly crawls with information, listing each zone with the same status; "Limited Operations - See Your Supervisor For Details".

The cavernous staff area opens into a warehouse so large its edges blur and tumble in their vision, cold wrapping around their legs like water. The air is filled with the whoosh of buggies, shuttling people down and through the aisles, wide enough to comfortably fly a fighter. Ahead of them someone is mechanically scanning pallets before stepping back and drumming their fingers against their holopad, waiting for the tone that signals they can move on. They sidestep and begin the process again on a new stack. To their left a worker carefully fork-lifts pallets onto bare racking, forming a neat line. They step over deep trenches in the concrete floor that hum weakly. Behind them tucked in the dark are towering cages, their scraped and dented platforms threaded into the tracks, the wall around their controls shiny from palms slapping against them and leaving their marks. 

They skirt their way around the perimeter, holding their hats on their heads as they crane their necks in attempt to see the ceiling. Above them, droids toe their way along the metal stuctures like spiders, silently moving and replacing items with a logic only they can follow. They’re joined for half-seconds by the purr of buggies, working their way towards weak sunlight. 

Vehicles cluster around the entrance to the hangar bay, their riders hopping down to thumb the switches of huge conveyor belts, which weave around in arcing sweeps like the scaled body of a snake. Someone pushes a broom for the sake of it around the huge dashed border marked "Loading" as the sunlight dims as corrugated shutters creep towards the ground before making contact. The movement shivers up the folded metal, shaking the ground under them. Levers are pulled on huge metal goods lifts, wide enough to lift their ship like it’s a toy. 

There’s a floor below this. He nods his head towards the door marked for the lower levels and they slowly drift their way over, balling up a few hand-fulls of loose wrappings and tossing them in with the trash. A short decent, echoing their footsteps until they buzz in their ears, then they’re down below the delivery area hearing metal clang above their heads. 

It’s just bright enough for them to feel the press of more racking surrounding them, laden with shadowed crates and sagging boxes. They carefully make their way to the corner, breathing in the silence and hearing their ears whine with the vacuum. They duck to crawl their way into the space between crates, pulling their legs onto the freezing shelf and wrapping their arms around their legs. A strangely unsatisfying conclusion to a debate they'd had over breakfast, how to work around any snags in their plan, too simple to be trusted. If anyone was alerted to the presence of two intruders, it happened silently.  

‘Do we just wait here until end of shift?’ She perches her chin on her knees, seeing shapes slowly resolve from the gloom.

‘Guess so. Sounds like they’re shutting down until the storm passes. When they’re gone we can give the signal.’ She gives him a tiny thoughtless smile as he works off his vest, voice somewhat distant as much of his mind is given over to recalculating their chances accounting for the particularly pernicious dark. It's a worry worn and old to her, fresh enough to him she watches him swallow, voyeuristically observing in him a flicker of fear before he moves past it with a breath.  

‘As good a time as they're gonna get. Where should we place it?’

‘Somewhere down here, I don’t think it matters where.’ He takes in their surrounding habitually, tracking as far along the framing around them as far as his eyes can make it before they adjust, around them and behind them, sketching a universe in his mind of which they are the center. He shifts against rigid metal, shoving his discomfort into his jacket with a huff. 

‘Is it weird to be walking around with that in your pocket?’

‘Not especially. If it went off I wouldn’t have the time to register it.’

‘Can I see it?’ He fishes it out with effort and places it in her palm, setting his reader on a crate by his head. ‘It’s so small’, she says, bouncing it on her palm, ‘and light. Where did the Resistance get hold of a bomb anyway?’

‘Best not to ask that question.’ He gently takes it from her and places it on the opposite shelf before folding himself back into their hole. 

‘Thank you, I feel much safer now it’s twelve feet farther from me.’

‘I’m putting it out of your reach. I don’t trust you not to start fiddling with it.’

‘I’m not burdened with the desire to play with an explosive device… But I appreciate you trying to save me from myself. So we just wait then?’

‘Pretty much.’  

She carefully straightens her legs, her hips cramping from the cold, trying to work some heat into her muscles via friction where they tremble under her palms. The more she tries to convince them it’s not that bad, the more they shake in protest. She hops down, pulling him with her to place a few softening boxes under them, grateful to whoever emptied them that they had been too tired or lazy to clear away the wrappings. Sat on a few insulating layers stamped with the First Order insignia, she can finally sit without her spine curving over her core. It's a wonder they get anything done, the biting frigidity gradually turning a spring within her, drawing her further and further into herself, taking over her thoughts. Maybe by design, this intentional cognitive murkiness. Creating a crowd of people that can be diverted and directed like water, an organic substance to be poured over the problem. She shoves her hands between her thighs and turns to him.

‘We didn’t bring any food. Do you think there’s any in these boxes?’

‘Expired rations potentially. Nothing I’d recommend we eat.’ They can hear the wind moving through the hollow exoskeleton of the building, rattling its huge bolted joints. There's a change in the air that filters down to them as the pressure starts to drop. She closes her eyes, reaching out to the Force to sense the lifeforms swarming above her, amassing in the warehouse to crawl up and down. Insect-like zigzagging paths being drawn above them, furiously fortifying their home, crawling over each other’s body as they scramble to re-enforce the aisles.

How many people do you think are up there?  Her attention falls on one spot of consciousness as they trace a path along the entrance to the hangar, turning back on themselves in an unbroken loop.  

A couple hundred. 

They’re sealing it up. Seems like it’s going to be bad. She feels him wordlessly agree, opening her eyes to realize her hand had sought his body in the dark. She removes it from his knee and places it in her lap, but he pulls her to his chest, wrapping his body around hers, feeling her limbs slowly relax from the cold.

‘I’d like to see the storm if we can.’

He settles his chin on her shoulder. ‘We can watch it if you like. It probably won’t be wise to take off. They don’t shut this place down unless its absolutely unavoidable.’ He squeezes her in his arms, feeling her hands settle lightly on the skin of his wrists, tracing unconscious patterns there. ‘They’re happening more and more now. It won’t be long before they give up on this facility altogether.’

‘What’s causing it?’

‘The terraforming. A lot of planets were terraformed too quickly for the ecosystem to adapt. They require more and more managing every year but the weather systems grow more extreme and unpredictable. Then all that energy finds its outlet and it’s good for a while until it gears up for the next one.’

‘What happens to the planets when they become unmanageable?’

‘They’re abandoned, typically. Eventually they might settle back into somewhere liveable. There’s always a few people who won’t leave their home. They always find a way to survive it, even when on paper its not viable.’

‘People will surprise you that way. What time is it?’

He huffs and she can feel it in against her neck. ‘Trust me, you don’t want to know.’

‘What do you think is in all of these?’ She squints to read the codes printed on the boxes around them. ‘OSF-NCRSU-i33s32, what does that mean?’

‘Organised Static Forces, Non Combat-Ready Standard Uniform, item 33, size 32. Couldn’t tell you what item 33 is though.’

‘But you can rattle that off like it’s your name?’

‘Hear it enough times and your brain starts to translate them automatically.’

‘Shall we find out what we’ve won?’ She presses onto her knees to pick at the sealed edge, feeling the cardboard rip away with the adhesive. She works her arm in to the elbow and gropes around, face falling into a frown. ‘Belts. A lot of belts.’ She leans back to blink into the shelves looming up in the dark. ‘This can’t all be belts.’

‘You’d be surprised.’

‘There’s something different up there.’

‘What does it say?’

‘I don’t know, I can’t read it.’ She brushes the dust from her hands and stands to get a good foothold, stretching as far as she can to try to jump and get a handhold on the shelf above. Her hand closes on empty air. She catches his eye as he looks up through the racking as it creaks around them and slowly settles. ‘Do you reckon those still work?’

He hangs off the shelf to follow to her line of sight to the half-wrapped machines piled in a jagged tumble in the corner. ‘I think they’d probably take your arm off it you tried.’

‘Help me up then.’

‘I’d rather you didn’t go climbing around in the dark.’

‘Yeah well I’d rather be eating a grilled womprat right now, we don’t always get what we want.’ She jerks her head towards the shelf above them and keeps it in her sight as he boosts her up to pull her body onto the racking. Dust rains down onto their cardboard in audible taps as she moves in the dark. ‘CEP-LM-402-SU’

‘Combat Emergency Provisions, Life Maintenence, single-use, something weather related.’ She throws one down to him and it hits his chest. ‘Ponchos.’ He hears her stamp her feet savagely into the grating. ‘Not what you’re looking for?’

‘What are the chances there’ll be a toilet in one of these? I didn’t pee before we came down here and now I’m regretting it.’

‘Look for SC codes, sanitation and comfort.’

‘If I find one, I’m pissing in it, whatever it is.’

He follows beneath her as she calls down codes and designations, guessing the contents from their ambiguous product codes and passing down anything that might be of use. Before long their cardboard platform is piled with plastic wrapped items and her hands are coated in grime where she clambers back down his body. Wrapped in a thick insulating shroud designed for a cannon, they rifle through the rest of the items, passing them back and forth from their laps.

‘Still need to pee?’ He cracks a handful of expired glow tubes and they emit a sickly light, just enough to irritate their eyes as the chemical reaction creeps along them. 

‘Yes, but I’m warm now so I don’t want to.’ It had become part of the background hum of vague annoyances; the tag-team of cramps through her muscle groups, the pressure building in her ears, his comparable warmth. All things she can't do anything about except wrap her mind around the kernel of annoyance like a camp-fire.

‘I don’t think you have much of a choice.’

‘I’m more than capable of controlling my bladder for a few hours.’

‘Good, because. We’re going to be here for at least seven.’

She scoffs, wrapping herself a little tighter until all he can see is a face glaring at him with an impressive display of ire. ‘Why would you say that to me?’

‘Because you’ll feel better once you’ve gone.’

‘Fine.’ She dumps the radio battery she’s been toying with in his lap and he feels the chill of her sudden absence. ‘If this doesn’t work, someone is going to have a surprise when they open their box of standard-issue weather-repellant extra fine pencils.’ She turns a corner and is swallowed by the dark.

He reaches to set their disparate objects aside, waiting for her footsteps to reach him and curling the stiff fabric around her shivering body. ‘Sleep for a while, I’ll keep watch.’

She tucks her feet into the warmth and curls into his lap without comment as he snaps another glowstick and cracks a palm sized field manual to read by its anaemic gloom. He reads it cover to cover, holding his breath and wrapping an arm around her as he hears the door open and footsteps shuffling in the dark. Then they’re gone and the silence is once again absolute, save for the moan of the building as its buffeted by wind. He drags his thumb over the skin at her wrist as she grips his jacket in her fingers and reads through successively more specific subsets and amendments, laying out in clinical detail approaches to dealing with ever more catastrophic and unlikely scenarios. He traces back through the pages at their urging, playing out situations increasingly more hostile to life. "In the event of total cabin failure and loss of all life-support systems, follow protocal 16-a detailed on pg.204." He flips to a blank page and scoffs inwardly, trying to blink his eyes back into focus. 

‘How long now?’ He smiles as she seems to voice his own question, pulling down the dented holopad that sluggishly wakes.

‘About five and a half hours. Do you have somewhere to be?’ He feels her smile against him before she sits to stretch.

‘Anywhere but here. We could be back on the ship in the warm.’

‘Are you still cold?’

‘Yes, but I’m used to it.’ She folds her legs over his and leans her head on his shoulder. ‘Do you ever think that there’s maybe better uses for our time. I don’t think hiding in the dark requires a huge amount of skill.’

‘True, but I think it’s the safest option.’

‘Anyone could have done this. I don’t think it was necessary to send a couple of Force users in to do it.’ She spreads her palm against his and he threads their fingers together.

‘To be fair, I don’t think they were expecting us to take this approach.’

‘Shall we tell them we did something much more impressive when we get back? Keep up our mysterious image… Maybe a story that doesn't involve me pissing on a bunch of bootlaces, although they were very absorbent.'

'And you didn't wash your hands', he says with a sigh.

'Still it’s nice to do something that makes me feel more like a regular person.’ 

If he closes his eyes he can pretend they're on their ship, filling the silence with their voices after they're pulled from sleep by nightmares so ubiquitous they've no need to name them. ‘Do you ever wish you were? Just a regular person, I mean.’

‘Not Force sensitive, you mean? Sometimes. I’m a little envious of the workers, they can just leave this behind at the end of the day and go on with their lives. Do you ever wish you were?’

‘Somewhat. I know that it made it difficult for my parents. They never said it, not outright, but I know they wished I could have been normal. My mother tried to leave it all behind, couldn't. I know it made Han feel inferior because he didn’t share what we have.’

He squeezes her in his arm and feels her sigh. ‘What were you doing when I was asleep?’

‘Reading this.’ He watches her turn the thing in her hands, flipping through the pages with a sneer. 

‘Any good?’

‘It’s a real page turner.’ 

‘Well in that case.’ She settles in to read, leaning against a box which gives slightly under her weight, but holds. She pulls him to lean on her lap, bunching the covers into a makeshift pillow. ‘Sleep and I’ll wake you up if we get killed.’

‘How reassuring.’

He dozes in an out with her fingers gently combing through his hair, hearing her mutter and grumble to herself occasionally as she reads. He hears her check the time and toss the holopad back onto the shelf as if it’s burned her. ‘You’re terrible at waiting.’

‘And you’re terrible at sleeping. Neither of us have an excuse.’ He smiles and closes his eyes. 

When he wakes her face is cast upwards, listening to the building creak around them. ‘It’s getting really bad out there, do you think they’ll send them home early?’ She swallows, her eyes flitting down to his. The blood rushes back into his leg in a flurry of pins and needles as he sits. ‘They’re still all moving around up there. Will it say on the holopad do you think?’

He reaches for it where it had slid deep into the racking where she carelessly tossed it aside. ‘They’re being dismissed in just over an hour.’ He turns it to her so she can watch the announcement crawling its way across the screen in a stilted slither.

‘Have you ever seen one of these storms?’ 

‘Not from the ground, but I saw a few from the ship.’

‘Some of the storms on Jakku, they said if you were caught in them the sand would strip the flesh from your bones before you took another step. Sometimes I wondered if that’s what had happened to people when I found them in the sand.’

‘These are electrical. If you’re on a ship and you’re caught in it, it will shut down all the electronics on board.’

‘How are we going to get off planet?’

‘We’re not. We’ll wait it out.’

‘Good, I want to get back to the ship.’

‘What do you want to do for the evening?’

‘Eat, shower potentially. Take these stupid clothes off and roll around naked with you. The usual. I want to get out of here and go home.’  

He’s glad she’s peering out into the darkness and doesn’t see him blink in shock as she says the word. So lightly, like she says it every day. He clears his throat and she looks at him in question. ‘Not too long now. Anything in particular you have in mind?’

‘I’m not playing this game. I’m too cold and hungry to add being frustrated on top of that.’ She narrows her eyes at him as he slowly closes the gap between them to bring their lips together. ‘Fuck you’, she whispers as they part, her gaze at his mouth. 

‘Sorry, I couldn’t resist.’ Her jaw clenches in annoyance which dies as quickly as it flared. He sits back to watch her eyes quickly scan him before she forces her gaze at their surroundings, her exhale wavering. ‘Are you nervous about getting out of here?’

‘I am. We walked in here so easily I worry we won’t be able to repeat it.’

‘They’re going to be too busy thinking about going home to notice us.’

‘You’re probably right. I hope you are.’

‘Do you want to play a game?’

‘Such as?’

‘We’ve both read that stupid book. If I give you a scenario, you can tell me what’s the advised method to combat it.’

‘Go on then. Let’s see how I would do as an Order recruit. You can tell me if I’d pass basic training.’

They play until the wind makes it hard to hear each other, deciding its time to work their way back in with the others and get carried with them as they prepare to file out. They’re grouped in little clusters as they adjust to the comparative brightness of the warehouse, straightening boxes on shelves as they continue murmured conversations under their breath. The shutters rattle in their frames as the tone signals the end of the work day and people begin filing back through the doors, already shrugging out of their vests.

They follow and hang theirs back where they found them, leaving their helmets with the other backups and a little nest of items on the shelves deep below them, still slightly warm from their bodies.

Her eyes are unfocused in the middle distance, hands hanging limply at her sides. He takes one lightly and rubs a soothing hand up her arm in an attempt to bring her back to the present. They have to leave, fast. The plan was to get back to their ship and wait a few hours before giving word to detonate the device, when all the workers were safe back in their homes. The intent was material losses, as Leia had pointed out, more about sending a message more than truly winning an advantage. An exercise in showing that the Resistance could get anywhere, nothing short of foot thick durasteel would be enough. 

They were just sliding through the lobby area when it went off, an explosion of falling bodies and debris only a Force shield thrown up at the last second as a reflex saved them from. 

‘We have to go. There’s nothing you can do for them.’ He pulls at her hand where she stays rooted to the spot, a drop of blood working from her ear. ‘Please, people are coming. I’ll carry you if I need to.’ His voice muffled like he’s underwater, smoldering flakes of cardboard and fabric drifting in the air like seaweed.

‘No, I’m okay.’ Her eyes won’t meet his, but she gazes down at their linked hands, before sucking in a panicked breath and coming back to him. ‘Let’s go.’ They head out into the twilight as bits of masonry fall around them and they’re accompanied by the drone of the dying, moaning out wordlessly.

It was never supposed to go like this. Her boots slip on blood as she steps out into misted air and sets off in a run towards their ship, trusting that their shielding will keep eyes away from the only two people walking out of the gutted building alive. Her legs crumble underneath her at the sight of their craft. As she's caught all she can hear is the thump of blood in her ears and the patter of rain on the ship's exterior as the storm finds its voice. It was supposed to go off after the building had been cleared for the storm. When the two hundred workers would be at home with their families. She stares upwards at the sky shimmering with rain and doesn’t feel it hit her skin. 

‘You’re okay, we’re leaving. It was an accident.' Were he kinder, he would get her drift in whatever distant place she's retreated to. But they do not have the luxury of falling apart, so he voices what burbles in the background of her thoughts. 'It’s not your fault.’ He curls his body over her before lifting her into the shuttle, placing her gently on the cot before leaving with a kiss to her bloodied forehead to set the ship on its course. 

It was blood-chilling terror that meant he didn’t remember ducking into the bruised sky and pushing them through angry clouds forking with lightning. He watched the electrical systems wink off one by one from a curious distance, pulling the lever to take manual control. A skill that had laid dormant in his mind for years, imparted in a conspiratorial whisper by eyes winking with good-natured mischievousness. You never know when you might need it, kid. Better to know and not need it, than the alternative. Right again. He's too choked by his thoughts to register when the lights come back on to banish the darkness. Then he's back in his body, safely floating in space and forcing himself upright to go to her.

She’s as he left her, curled into a tight ball, breathing a hoarse reflex, fingers slipping on the blood slick skin of her forearms wrapped around her. He ignores the flair of pain in his knees to stroke her head, watching the tracks of tears washing a stripe of clean skin through the rusty brown of old blood and dirt. 

‘You have to get cleaned up, you’re covered in blood.’ She shakes uncontrollably in his arms, grasping weakly at his shirt as he takes her to the fresher. He sets her on the counter to work off her shoes, then trousers, she lifts her arms at his asking without comment, and he peels the shirt off of her where it sticks in patches. At least with the layers gone he can tell she is unharmed. And with the lightest brush into her mind, he knows there’s no internal injuries he needs to know about, snarled tangles of hurt muscle and bone that throb in the Force. They are miraculously unharmed, the same cannot be said for hundreds. 

Her underwear is filthy, much of the blood and grime seeping through to turn what was once grey into a dark brown. But it would be too far to remove it. ‘I’m going to take you to the shower now.’ He lifts her by her waist and deposits her on her feet, knees lightly trembling, but nevertheless holding her weight. He leads her to the cubicle and moves to shut the door but her hands shoot out to cling to him, bunching his shirt in her fingers.

‘Don’t leave me.’ She pleads.

‘You need to wash the blood off.’ He places his hands over hers and tries to loosen the seized joints.

‘I don’t care, don’t leave me.’ 

‘I’m not going anywhere, I'm just out here.’

‘No, no please’, her tears no doubt sting her raw flesh as she begs and burrows into his chest, her spine arching as aching sobs work from her. He cradles her head, feeling nausea bubbles in his stomach and his head swim at her fear, bleeding into his mind.

He kneels to crowd her to him. ‘I’ll stay with you, just let me get undressed, okay?’

‘I hear you demanded to speak with me.' She'd left her meeting, skin crawling with a shiver at the knowledge he was carving a path through the base, confirmation reaching her before he did in whispers falling into silence under her look. She meets him in the hallway, closing the door on the circular conversation about what response they're to give to the attack, whether whatever they could say will be better than silence. 'You’re very lucky the officer you spoke to is trustworthy, you could have compromised both of your safety. We both know it's not safe for you to be seen right now.’

‘You’re going to lecture me on safety when your mission almost got Rey killed!’ He towers over Leia, but she is unmoved, spine straight as she waits. 

‘I was wondering when we’d speak.’

His eye twitches as he tries to tamp down his rage. ‘We’ve spoken.’ He spits. 

‘You’ve taken orders from me, begrudgingly, but he haven’t truly spoken. Not since you agreed to work with us.’

‘And what is it exactly that you want to say to me?’

‘I want to have a conversation with my son.’

‘I’m not your son.’

‘Aren’t you? Are you coming to me now to abuse your General or are you coming to me because you’re worried about Rey.’ He swallows. She waves him through into an unused office and motions him to sit before lowering herself down. He follows without comment and with a squeak of a chair and a hand scraped over his face hard enough to leave a flushed mark, she knows she came closer than she ever has done to losing him. ‘Tell me what happened.’

‘You know what happened.’ He mumbles his response at the table, head in his hand, a buzz of rubbing fabric filling the ear as he bounces his knee before he stops himself.  

‘I want to hear it from you.’

‘Of course you do.' He straightens his spine with a disarmingly bright smile, falling back on his training to recount the effects of their mission. The glimpse she has of her son, yanked away in an instant. 'The explosive we were to plant went off when we were still in the building, along with hundreds of First Order personnel.’

‘Do you believe I intended it to happen?’

‘How could it have happened? It was remotely activated. One of your people didn’t wait until the building was clear before detonating. Someone has to be held responsible.’

'The uplink went down a few minutes before the device detonated. Likely a cause of the storm.'

'How convenient' he scoffs, eyes widening.

'What are you implying?'

'You know exactly what I'm implying. Your trusted advisors aren't worth shit. So I'm sure you know what I'm going to say. We're leaving.'

'You can't. They'll be an inquiry in progress as we speak. Once they figure out two Force users walked out of that, they'll come for you.'

'Then maybe we should stay. Let them pay us all a visit. I don't know what you think is stopping the Order from destroying this base. Certainly not superior defences or a distinct tactical advantage. You're simply too small to bother with. Not now. Not because of you.'

'I wasn't the one who went into that building.'

He crushes his head in his hands, a cold chuckle working its way through his body, pushing aside tiredness and the throb of pulled muscles to drown him in the inescapable knowledge that he has been soundly outmanoeuvred. Impossible not to be impressed by the work, even as it's turned against him. He leans back, any remaining warmth draining from his limbs in a slow trickle.

'Nice work.' She acknowledges him with a minute nod of her head, to anyone else instantly dismissed as a thoughtless movement. 'You know the funny thing is, you might have gotten away with it, if only someone could have resisted the temptation. If they weren't quite so aware of whose pocket it would be going into. Destruction of property is one thing, it's one hub on a crumbling planet, they'd divert around it. Now the Resistance has a slaughter on their hands. And we're still alive. How does that fit into your plans?'

‘I didn't plan for this. The wiring was faulty. There was no detonation from our end. It is unfortunate, but it happens.’

‘You don't have to lie to me. We're family, remember.'

'The plan was to send a message, nothing more.'

'We could have been killed to send your message.’

‘But you weren’t. Which is one of the reasons you were assigned this job, because you two can survive things that others can’t.’

'Yeah, we're good at that.' She watches him shove his hands in his pockets, breathing through the cold squeezing at his chest, seeing him sink into a body screaming with pointless warnings. 

'How is she?'

'How do you think? She's alive, she's breathing.' 

'Make sure she see's a medic.'

'Thanks for the advice. May I go?' He waits a beat and moves to stand when she doesn't correct him.

'I'll ensure you're not put in this kind of danger again. Rey was right, we should have been patient.'

'Well I'll tell her, I'm sure that'll be a real comfort.'

She stands, wise enough not to try to close the distance between them. 'I don't want to think that either of you believe I wanted this to happen. I didn't. I guess I didn't understand the limits before, I do now.' 

‘So this is some experiment to you?' He steps towards her and she keeps her eyes locked on his. 'See how tight a spot you can put us in before we can't get out of it. Is that why you contacted us?’

‘I contacted you because I need your help.’

‘Then we leave.’

‘I will always find you.’

‘Why are you doing this to us? Tell me. What did she do to you?’

‘She hasn't done anything wrong. You two are our last chance. I cannot compromise that because of my feelings for you both.’

‘I don’t know how to help Rey. She thinks it’s her fault and I can’t convince her otherwise.’

‘It’s true, they would be alive had you two not gone. Whether or not we’d have sent someone else in your place isn’t going to be of much comfort to her right now. Just, lay low for a few days. Try to make her understand it was an accident.’

‘If one of your accidents gets her hurt, I will kill you myself.’

‘You’ve said that before, but somehow I don’t believe it.’ 

‘And what makes you think I wouldn’t?’

‘She would never forgive you.’ She smiles, as his eyes dart away. ‘I don’t know what bond exists between you two, but I know how you look at each other. It is a singular pleasure to witness as a mother, what you two mean to each other. I wouldn’t willingly or intentionally do anything to jeopardise that. But we are at war, son. The last of the Resistance to a force much bigger than our own. I can’t promise that work won’t put you in danger. But I think I know Rey well enough to say that if she can help, she will. Go look after her now.’

He finds their ship as they left it, docked in the hangar bay. It passes through enough that most had stopped seeing it, and the few that notice it are met with rumors of the two allies within, a unit into themselves with shadowy and outlandish powers. Some say they can hypnotise you with a look, that the latest in a string of clones that simply get replaced regularly. Most know them as simply the shadow that haunts the First Order. He cloaks himself routinely when walking through the base. It is simply easier than answering question, and those on the base know better than to knock at their door. 

He finds her where he left her, curled up in a ball on the bed. He smooths her hair, forehead hot and sweaty with a fever brought on by pure nerves. He kneels to wake her gently, watching the panic recede as her eyes come into focus to find his, rimmed and bloodshot. He crawls up to curl her to his chest, folding his limbs around her in a tight cocoon of safety. She’s washed and in fresh clothes, but he knows she feels dirty, and can still feel the blood of the dead on her skin. All he can do is whisper to her and himself in the dark. 

‘It’s okay. It wasn’t your fault. I promise you, it was an accident. You’re not to blame.’

‘We put it there.’ She sobs out against his chest, voice muffled with tears and fabric.

‘I know we did, but it wasn’t supposed to go off when anyone was there. We wouldn’t have done it otherwise. The General said it was faulty wiring, you didn’t do anything wrong.’

‘You spoke with the General?’ She pulls back to look at him and he pulls his eyes to hers. 

‘I did. I was worried about you.’

‘What did she say?’

‘That it wasn’t detonated. The bomb went off on its own.’

‘Does it ever get any easier?’ He can’t answer her, just press a kiss to her temple and hold her as she sobs until she’s an empty shell. Some endless time later he tucks her in at his side and watches her, heartbeat so hard and insistent he can feel it at the back of his tongue. 

He walks her bodily through a bustling market, her mind elsewhere. He buys her sweet things, watching her mechanically chew as people flow in front of them in a ceaseless torrent. He sees her eyes resolve a little clearer on the odd person, a foot stumbling and catching themselves in the dust, voices rising in playful argument, a man stopping in the throng, remembering himself and turning back against the current. He brushes gently against her mind, cold and featureless. 

He takes her hand and they walk through the city. Where once there were troopers, skirting the fringes of the crowds, keeping the peace, now there are uniformed officers, craning their heads over the throng, passing comments between them. People step around their orbit, ignoring their existence but modifying their step to look innocent, to not draw attention. The First Order symbol hangs above their heads and they feel no need to remove it. No human upheaval has happened here, it wasn’t their flesh and bodies that ousted their oppressors and set that vital energy to rip their symbols from the face of their world. They simply stepped away and were swiftly replaced with those of their own. If they had celebrated, became the kind of writhing reptile back slithering through the streets, their image spread on the holonews, they had forgotten it. Or had overlaid it with a succession of ordinary days.

They shelter in the shade of an alleyway, as the sun climbs high in the sky above them and they pull their legs into the shortening shadow. Doors close in the buildings around them, shutters pulled in against the midday heat. She leans her head against his shoulder, breathing in slow hot lungfuls that curl around in a sigh. When the sun moves over them, they set off walking again, the length of the city.

They pass houses of all kinds, some crouched behind stone stoops, worn into a sagging curve by uncountable feet. Some are so new they stand there an affront, disturbed dirt still tensed around them. They pass through shabby industrial corridors, buildings with no need to entice or seduce with what they do, people passing in and out with materials and products. They can’t always tell the difference between the two. The shadows lengthen, they walk down to the river by smell, walking along it as an orange glow brightens on the horizon, lower and longer than the sun. They sit in the dark corner of a bar, not caring to disguise their faces, muscles aching and loose. He eats with one hand on her knee, he feels her jaw move where she leans her head against him. 

The General had offered periodically, as they’d recounted their information, fed back on each mission, their narrow view on an effort moving and shifting the universe around them. Things are progressing well, she says, we can offer you protection with us. You are becoming known to them. For your safety it might be wise to stay with us. Nobody will harm you here. Her words ring hollow, but they have no real choice. When they return they will have to give over their ship and walk amongst the members of the Resistance. She had done it once, when she was a different person. He had done it as a child, hovering in the periphery, moving through throngs of people eager to make Leia’s son feel welcome, slowly abandoning their efforts with the dark and sad child. Finding other ways to make a good impression. 

They pack most of their few belongings into their bags, the embarrassingly few items they count as the sum of their wealth. Jackets stolen from the Order, the ink black costumes of their covert tasks, Rey’s few treasures from their travels, hand made on planets they can never visit again. They leave their packed bags on the table, and set the ship to slowly crawl its way to Hoth. 

‘I don’t know how to deal with this. I don’t know how to forget about what we’ve done.’ She meets his eyes, pupils pulling in and out of focus. His stomach drops like a stone. ‘How do you deal with it? How can you keep moving?’ He’d laid down next to her, keeping a few inches of distance between them, in case she had wanted it. He stares into her eyes as a slow smile curves his mouth and then dies again. 

‘There’s nothing I can tell you that would make it easier right now. I am sorry.’ He chokes around the words as her face crumples when the hope she’d allowed herself to keep dissolves. She bats weakly against chest, and he catches her wrists, hands curled in front of them. 

‘Do you ever forget?’ She stares at her fingers, curved like the exoskeleton of a dead arachnid. He shakes his head. ‘Show me.’ She tenses her wrists and twists them away to lie limp between them. ‘Let me see it.’ She fixes him in the cage of her eyes. He agrees, as he always will. 

Her eyes flutter closed as she steps into his mind. He is cold, cowering in the dark, imploring to some higher power to bring back the sun, bring back the light, get him through to the dawn. There is a voice in the back of his mind. No matter how much he pleads, it doesn’t bring warmth to his limbs. It mocks his desperate supplication, stretching out the hours into an endless expanse. He doesn't feel like the same person when he washes up on the shore of the morning. I can make it go away, it promises, wrapping around his thoughts as he sits with the other pupils. You can free yourself from this pain. They move away from him, eyeing the shadows under his eyes, the shake in his muscles, the emotions that war over his features. His life becomes interior. He comes back to himself in the brief flares of pain in training, rubbing the wounds with dirt. 

One night he wakes to see the green glow of a saber raised over him, blotting out everything but the stricken face of his mentor and uncle. He had looked into his mind, he knew it had happened, but the intrusion was small enough he’d had no reaction. And it served no purpose that hadn’t already been achieved. They feared him, they wanted him gone, they would do it themselves if necessary and feel good about it. He pulled the building down around over them and stepped into the night. There were others, panting in the rain, blood flowing away like shadows under the silver of the moon. They were to exorcise the rot, the pain, they are told, is instructive. Like touching a live wire, it tells them they’re at the heart of it. He sees the events play out in front of his eyes, as a spectator to it. They had always looked at him with fear, and in this, a kind of resignation. They curled in on themselves as they died, pleading for their families. 

Their panting is lost to the rain, the shiver disguised by the cold, tears and blood trod into the mud. A ship picks them up and they leave in silence. In the darkness of the hold, he tries to find a kind of peace in the Force, but it shrinks from him. He is truly alone. 

Their allegiance is to be tested. They are split into cells in the cold dark, blood sticking their clothes to their skin, dirt of another world under their fingernails. He waits so long his mind wraps itself up in the familiarity of it. He forgets to be hungry, he forgets his thirst. Sickly praise worms into his mind, with a regretful tone coloring his thoughts to red. I will help you, I will make you into the person you were born to be. But you need to cleanse yourself of what has come before. You are mired in it. You will not be free until you are clean. 

There was a kind of thanks in her eyes when he killed her, her face smoothing into the youthful calm he remembered in the firelight. Her sabre skittered away, taken up by a cloaked figure and taken apart. The pain spread up his arm like a fire, as if the unbroken bones had begun to radiate a deadly energy within him. Fingers rifle through his mind with shuddering intimacy, and he is thrown back in the dark. 

Then he is a man who has learned to stoke himself on pain, the only constant and unclouded thing he possesses. His mind approaches but never falls over the point at which he will lose himself, but it is always one action away. It is the fire that will forge him into the machine Snoke wants of him, burn away any last scrap of what he used to be, in the cowering hidden corners of his mind. They’re dragged into the light, he laughs in mockery. Always so close, just when I think you’ve finally become what you should be, you find a way to fail me once again. He remembers their faces, sliding through his mask to the person underneath, tugging at the thread between them, taking a little piece of him as they grasp up at his armored body and fall back with it clasped in their hands. Almost, he is told, it is your weakness that is holding you back. Your pain is your own. I try to help you, but you’re not as strong as I hoped you were. Such a pity. Such a waste. 

There is a change in her face, he knew there would be. She stares at him, at the muscles tensed under his eyes, deep and warm and clouded. He had never been able to kill it, that desperate light within him. It had thrown his actions into relief, never allowing him to forget as he piled his wrongs higher and higher until at the depths was just crushed bands of pain and hatred, the color of alien sands, the same pleas in various tangling dialects. That he recognise in himself their shared mortal fear and come back to safety. A plea unanswered, seeping into his bloodstream and spreading. It wouldn’t leave him, no matter how badly he destroyed his body, no matter how much pain Snoke gave him, or he gave himself. It writes itself upon his cells. 

‘How can you live with it?’ She mumbles, face flaring in blush at the sound of her unfamiliar voice.

‘One hour at a time.’ His fingers twitch to reach out, and he folds them under his chin. ‘It doesn’t go away but it becomes a kind of normal.’ He blinks, struggling to keep is eyes on hers. ‘For me, it’s better he’s not there anymore. But it won’t ever go.’ She closes her eyes as tears fall in an unending stream down her sun-prickled skin. She opens her eyes and the words die on her tongue, reaching out to him, he pulls her to him and wraps her up in his body as wordless promises lap against his mind. 

'Is Rey in the infirmary?'

'Why else would I be here?' He gestures around Leia's quarters, cruelly familiar as he expected. Crowded with objects hinting at a happier time, since passed, anachronistic and sharp. A museum exhibit purporting to preserve the idea of a home of which he was once part. Him the only other person to know the extent to which she has wrapped herself up in a lie. 'She wouldn't have gotten checked out if I hadn't insisted.'

'That doesn't surprise me. You should consider taking your own advice, you know.'

'I'm aware.' By his head, just within his eyeline is a vase near seamlessly repaired from when he broke it as a child. He'd kept a tiny shard of it wrapped in his room for years, intent on it staying incomplete as a kind of monument. Easier from then on to hide things, the skill having been developed and honed. Almost instinctual, to poke little holes in her world that'll never close.

'I have a med droid here if you consent to it scanning you?'

'If you can assure me that it won't store a record on me.' 

'He's part of my personal team. But if it would help you, you can delete the record yourself.'

'Are you planning to stay here while it happens?'

'We have things to discuss, child.'

He perches stiffly on the couch, taking the offered holopad so he can watch the process of the scan as it happens. With a beep the droid wheels into view, beginning the familiar process of scanning and probing him for injuries, calmly appending them to a list that quickly stretches down the screen. His eyes are drawn to movement behind him as Leia comes to take a seat next to him, leaving a few inches of space between them. She reaches for him, despite the deliberate distance and he flinches away from it, all the while little notes are added to his file. She lets her hand fall into her lap.

'Now I know you didn't get this height from me. But hiding your pain from others, that I do have something to do with.'

'I'm not in pain, we were shielded from the blast.'

'That's not what I'm talking about.' She flicks her eyes to the screen still crawling with a list of past injuries extrapolated from the fused and scarred tissues of his body. He waves the droid away and deletes its findings, pleased he can be truthful at least in the statement that there is nothing needing treatment. 

'Thank the Gods you got out of there before the storm hit.'

'We didn't.' He shuts off the device and tosses it aside lightly. 

'You flew in an electrical storm. Are you insane?'

'So people like to tell me. I am, or was, the best pilot they had. Guess it's nice to have a reminder.' He pauses in the process of rolling down his sleeve, a tiny smile flicking over his face. One day, not today, she will broach the subject of them having silent conversations with each other, often in the midst of voiced ones. But it softens him in a way Leia's sure he's not even aware of and she values those moments too much to disturb them. ' I don't even remember doing it, I just know that I did.'

'What happened to you?'

'I just had to get Rey out of there. Whatever part of my brain that deals with fear about those kinds of things didn't exist at that moment.'

'I meant before.'

'I know what you meant', he snaps. 'Look, it's a little late for parental concern. I am here to keep Rey safe. If you want her to stay you will want to make her as comfortable as you can.'

'Of course, what will help?' She folds her hands in her lap and squeezes them. She'd been notified of their arrival, had watched their ship find a permanent home in their hold through a grainy security feed and counted the minutes it took them to emerge. She can guess at the contents of their conversation, the news having filtered through the base like a cancer, how between them they had found the means to weather it. 

'Allowing her her privacy, and by extension, me. Please do not attempt to be a mother to me. If you care, keep your distance.'

'I understand.'

'Do you? The only way I can keep myself standing is if you are my General and nothing more. I will take orders from you if they align with hers, but Rey is my master.'

'You'd swap one master for another?' 

'She's quite a bit kinder than I'm used to', he says with a hollow smile.

'Is that wise?'

'I don't know any other way. Am I dismissed?' She nods, watching him leave, waiting for him to turn only for the door to softly close. 

‘I don’t have a file on you. How long have you been working with the Resistance?’ The bench squeaks under her as she perches in the med bay, tracking with her eyes the approximate position of the General and her son a few rooms over. 

‘We’re not based here. We travel around.’ They’ll be moving into one of the more private rooms, no windows. People have connected them with some of the recent missions, but the General intends to keep their level of involvement concealed for now as some of the more outlandish rumours around them skew closer and closer to the truth. 

‘You must have a centralised record at least. Name and family name.’ She stammers to fix her attention on the older gentleman routinely flicking through his readouts and glazing his eyes over to her, mechanically going through his steps and waiting for his partner to step to him.

‘I don’t have one, I’m an unregistered birth.’ As she’d found out through several humiliating conversations with well meaning missionaries passing through. Legally, she simply does not exist and is such, beyond the kind of help that can be recorded and quantified. She watches him run her prints and DNA, eyebrows quirking as they bring up nothing.

‘Well you’ll have one now with us. Name and family name.’

‘I don’t have one. Like I said, unregistered birth, I don’t know my family name. I’m just Rey.’ To his credit, he doesn’t respond how other’s usually do, infantilising pity. He doesn’t react at all, simply tapping a few words into her record.

‘Date of birth? By my reading you’re just over twenty.’

‘I’m nineteen.’

‘Not according to my scanners. What’s your date of birth?’ How much time had passed, outside the rigid day/night cycle of any one planet? Could she have lost count amidst the countless timeless mornings waking up in the dark, touching down at twilight on one planet, only to watch the sunrise on another. She’s snapped from her questioning by the unconscious tap of his stylus against the screen as he reaches to power on a number of blinking devices. ‘How do you usually count your age?’

‘New years on my home planet. Jakku.’

‘Shall I put that or would you like to choose a different one?’

‘Put that, I suppose.’

‘Family name. Again, you can choose one if you’d prefer to. Or not.’

‘No, just Rey.’

‘Okay Miss Rey. Is there anything I need to know about your medical history? Any long term illnesses or recent injuries.’

‘Nothing recent, no.’

‘Any bad breaks or fractures.’

‘Just the normal amount.’

‘I should hope the normal amount would be none.’ She squeezes the edge of the bench. Is there no question she can answer that will fit into what he deems normal? ‘You grew up as a desert scavenger, I’m told. Do you consent to me scanning you for injuries?’

‘If it would help.’ She looks over the machines with a weary sigh. I hope whatever conversation you’re having, it’s going better than mine. 

‘It may.’ Sorry to disappoint. She can feel his amusement softening the tension in her just a little. It’s just her body, after all. Just a temperamental machine.  ‘Do you feel in good health? Any concerns at the moment?’ She keeps her body still as the sensors grope blindly around her, building their model of her broken and fused bones. No need for her to see it, how could she forget...

‘I was near an explosive when it detonated. That’s why they sent me to you.’ She smiles at him, a quick humorless quirk of her lips.

‘How recent was this?’

‘A couple of days ago. I feel fine though.’ She feels the muscle under her eye betray her with a tired twitch, seeing him notice and say nothing.

‘Which explosion?’

‘The one at the First Order base. My unit was the one to plant it.’

‘Many lives were lost on that mission. I didn’t know anyone was injured beyond Order personnel. How close were you? Outside the building?’ He shines a light in her ear. 

‘Inside.’ She keeps her eyes on the door they'd disappeared through, willing them to re-appear after she opens her eyes, only to find the door lightly shimmer and slide back into position with each tired blink. 

‘That building was leveled. Are you sure you’re not mistaken?’

‘I’m sure. We’re Force users. It’s how we survived. My, umm, he did something. A Force shield. It protected us from the blast.’ He clicks off his light and returns to behind the safety of his screen, running through a checklist, eyes on her skeletal form instead of the messier and fleshier human one. 

‘Any changes in vision? Any dark spots or sensitivity? 

‘Nope.’ I hope you’re nearly done in there. As a surprise to no-one, I’m fine.

‘Problems with hearing, balance or coordination?’

‘Not that I’ve noticed, and not that I’ve been told. I haven’t spent more than a few minutes alone since it happened.’ 

‘It’s a wise precaution, given the circumstances. Still, you seem to have walked away entirely unscathed. Your teammates?’

‘Fine. No issues I know about.’

‘Well thank the stars for those powers. You’d not have survived without them.’ She watches him tick through his procedure, foot tapping restlessly behind his slim desk. 

‘Do you treat many people who are Force sensitive?’

‘Me personally? Very few. Why do you ask?’

‘Is there anything I should be worried about? Any particular side effects?’

‘As far as I know, which is not a whole lot, it is simply another kind of awareness. The only potential I could foresee would be coming to believe you are invincible. You were lucky this time, but luck runs out for everyone, trust me. Are there any other questions you’d like to ask me?’

‘Not that I can think of.’ He smiles, for the first time the warmth reaching up to his steely eyes. 

‘Well you’re at a healthy weight, if a little on the lighter side. Your past injuries seem to have healed well, you have youth to thank for that. I’ll warn you that resilience wears off, you can’t always trust in your body to heal well and without pain, but that’s what we’re here for. Your blood looks good, no concerns for your heart or blood pressure. You could do with keeping an eye on your diet, there’s evidence of long term nutrient deficiencies, we want to keep an eye on those before they worsen. Your body fat is on the lower side, that could complicate things should you ever want to have children.’

‘I don’t.’ Her response is automatic, the speed surprising her. She’s never truly thought about it as an option until now, only to find the answer already formed and solid in her mind. 

‘If you ever change your mind we could help you lay a good foundation for pregnancy. I see you have a contraceptive implant, I’m happy to see you being cautious. Come to me if you have any concerns. Any at all. I know you aren’t in the habit of visiting a professional for your health, but I promise we’re just here to help you. Would you like me to send you away with some general information?’

‘That would be useful, thank you.’

‘I’ll have it sent to your reader. Speak with you soon, Miss Rey.’ 

She hesitates to hop down, unsure if there’s anything she needs to do, some exchange of credits or something to acknowledge with her prints. She hops down with a glance his way, his focus already lost to the reader and translating her words to the record, conjuring up a transmissible version of her as the real one slips into the hallway to find him.

Teammate. I hope you’re done, I’m coming to find you. She zips up her jacket, shouldering through the successive heavy doors trying in vain to keep the vital heat in. 

Teammate?  She traces the walls, zeroing in on his location through his Force presence, the dimmer field of his mother, vibrating alongside it. She curses the warren-like curving of the walls, laminated like rings in a tree, forcing her to trace her way away and back again. 

That’s what they called us. We are a team, are we not? Or a unit. What do you call members of a unit? 

Are you done with the medic?

I am. Why do they live in a maze?

Stay where you are. I’m coming to find you. She huffs in place, hopping from one foot to another as her breath billows in front of her. This hallway is just like the others, gray, featureless, and so cold it aches deep inside her chest, as if her organs are clenching with it. So cold it makes her angry at being alive and in so-called good health, that her body can and will fight the cold, doing everything in her power to make her leave it. She’s furious by the time he rounds the corner, her teeth chattering violently in her skull.

‘Let’s go.’ She turns to immediately lead them back the way she came at a trot, each step feeling as if it clangs against the bones of her legs like cold metal. 

‘Any issues?’ He asks, keeping pace with her effortlessly, mockingly. 

‘I’m fine. Which I could have told you without freezing half to death.’

Chapter Text

Their ship is docked with the others, the mechanics trying to hide the quizzical tilt to their heads at the beaten pedestrian craft they’re to take into their care. Rey tries not to imbue the clunk of the restraining bolt sliding home with a note of ringing finality. They are stuck here, for a while at least, no longer free to move under their own devices. She presses hands already stinging with cold to her abdomen to quash the sinking feeling in her stomach. It doesn’t mean anything, she promises herself hollowly. They can still leave. They'll be provided ships of all kinds. Better ships, even. It’s not forever. Besides, she weighs the passing recruits with her eyes as they carve around them, there’s not a person here who could stop them should they wish to go. 

They're handed off to a fresh-faced adviser who is instructed to give them a thorough tour of the base and show them their choice of rooms. Corridors of bunked accommodations, sparsely dotted with the odd fallen over pair of boots in the hallway, a door propped open to an unmade bed. Someone throws them a look as they slip a jacket over their base layers, air unfurling from their mouth in a gray stream. She folds her arms around her torso. 

‘Most people are staying here. We’re slowly filling out the corridors, but we’ve got a lot of space to work with currently. You can take any empty spaces…’ They’re shown the mess hall, the clang of utensils light in the background, tables blank and endless. An orange jacket appears in their periphery, filling a mug with steaming liquid and shooting them a questioning look.

‘You’ve already seen the hangar bay, attached is engineering. We’re lucky enough to have a great team of talented mechanics. They keep us and the place running.’ He drags them through their guided tour at a pace hovering below a sprint, catching a brief glimpse of each area before they're ferried to the next. The med bay, scrubbed and shining dully with the exception of one corner of life. A command center of sorts, at the end of a winding corridor. Faces she knows and those she doesn’t, they glance up at the open door, before drifting away. She’s not clouding their presence. If he is, she won’t ask him to confirm, she can’t blame him. The General meets her gaze and smiles, before shifting her attention to the young engineer folding his tall frame down to speak with her. 

The rest of the base is storage, being slowly explored when they have the time. Not a whole lot to find, they're told, just scattered personal items. Signs of the Rebellion having evacuated at speed, their comparatively numerous numbers spread through the space like a web. They get the same tired warning everyone else does. You're free to explore, just don’t go so far you can’t find your way back. And tell someone if you find anything useful. 

‘Do you know where you’ll stay? The General wishes to know when you’re settled in.’ 

‘We’ll find somewhere.’ She moves towards a dark hallway, lights flickering on at her movement. 

He shifts on his feet. ‘You should know we don’t usually house couples together…’ She looks at him as a blush crawls up his face, flicking her eyes towards the smile she knows she’ll find on her partner's face. The young man stumbles over an apology, until she stills him with a wave. 

‘We'll find somewhere and make it known where we are. I’m really not interested in what you normally do. If there’s a problem you can take it up with the General.’ He ducks away with another mumbled excuse, hurried footsteps swallowed by the thick floors and walls. 

They traipse through the dust strewn base, bags of their few personal items slung over their shoulders. Most of their lighter clothing hangs in the dark of their ship, a few softer pieces chosen to come with them for the way they press against their skin and make them feel most themselves. At length they find a large-ish storage room and crack the door, letting the light in past the thick metal door. They pull out a few crates rattling with loose ephemera, skidding on a blanket of dust, the worst of which they kick out into the corridor, breath puffing out in front of their faces. A space cleared, just large enough to stand and close the door behind them and can finally be assumed to be unobserved, a weight lifted like they'd waded into water. 

'This fine with you?' She thumbs open the environmental controls panel and brings the section juddering to life with a few sparks. Stale air tinged with the smell of burning dust slides around them, slowly beginning to leech the cold from the room as the lights flick on and hold. A fairly large room emerges from the dark, the stacks of crates they'd spotted at the threshold stretching wall to wall at various heights. Shorter towards the back, taller at their feet as whoever had had the task of storing the contents had begun to feel the urgency of their shrinking space and built upwards. 

'It's missing a few amenities... A bed, for example.'

'It's got walls, lights and a door that locks. We could do a lot worse. Do you remember how to get to where everyone else is staying?'

'I think so.'

She pushes him away gently but firmly as he blocks the insipid light from reaching her as she divides out the wiring inside, happy to count in a muted rainbow all the systems supporting a generally agreed to be liveable environment. 'Go get us a bed.' 

'Fair enough.'

'Ben.' He turns back at the doorway to face her, her fingers still tangled in the mess. 'Please?' He leaves with a chuckle and she turns her attention fully to the task at hand.

The place is filthy, stuffed with all manner of discarded items, stored out of sight as they came to be replaced or unused. They lean against her ankles where she'd wedged her feet towards the floor, as if by opening the door and disturbing the air, they'd awoken a dormant process of decomposition. She begins the process of digging herself out, all the while hearing items resettle around her. The first layer is mostly crumbling radio equipment, blanketed in a layer of musty webbing, dead insect carcasses rolling around the bottom of the boxes as she moves them. Below that, wrinkled boxes of rust spotted tools and dented oil cans, crusted and seized shut. She works at opening one with the end of a blunt screwdriver, scoring through the gummy ring of dried runoff to get to the contents sloshing heavily inside. Before she realizes it, she's lowered herself to the floor to hunch over them, towering piles looming over her, silently and efficiently falling back on the trade that had sustained her for years, salvaging old junk and giving it another chance at usefulness. Rust whacked off with a practiced set of impacts, oil bringing dulled metal back to a shine with the help of a rag peeled from the wrinkled ball it had been crushed into. All having been tossed into the box mindlessly before they were sealed away, the last hands to touch them, reasonably assumed to stay that way. Had it not been for her. 

By the time the humming sprung frame of a cot is worked through the doorway, she'd slipped back into a previous version of herself, pleasantly surprised to see him eventually follow, leaning against the thing, clearly at a loss on where to put it. She has a partner in her salvage, her joy turning to amusement as he gestures at the thing he'd hauled across the base to her with a wave of his hand. 

'Bed.'

'I can see that.' She brushes off her hands to stand, dumping a pile of now serviceable tools on a shelf to pick her way to him through the channels she'd carved through the room. 

'Not sure how we're both going to fit on it', he grumbles, resting his chin against the frame to illustrate his point. 

'I have a plan for that.' She stoops to remove a few more crates and dump them in the corridor so they can lay the thing down, flicking out the alarmingly spindly legs that form its only structural support. She lowers herself gingerly onto the wire strung frame, eyes widening as it shifts and settles under her with a ringing clang. 

'Does your plan involve us sleeping separately?' He fishes his pack out from where it had slid between some pallets, finding his water and taking a drink.

'Do you have a problem with that?' She grasps at him and he hands her the water, poking his head into boxes and squeezing his way tentatively around the room that is to become their home. 

'Yes, I do.' She snags him by the arm as he passes and laces their cold fingers together. 'What is it?'

'I didn't want the water. I was trying to hold your hand.'

'Well I didn't realize, apologies.' He crouches to kiss her and she hums, feeling it resonate through the frame alarmingly. Sitting to eyeball the measurements a couple of things are obvious. There's no way they would both fit on one cot, and there's a negative chance he would fit on one alone. But the solution may be simpler than either of them had come to anticipate, therefore it will almost certainly go catastrophically wrong and they'll be visiting the shiny new med-bay looking like they've ran head-on into a thorny bush. 

'Will you get me two more?'

'Two?' He glances down at his hand, still clasped in hers. 'Are we expecting a guest?'

'They're twice as long as they are wide. Do you want me to draw you a diagram?'

'Actually, I think I got it. Anything else while I'm gone?'

'Mattresses, sheets, pillows and blankets.'

'Might take a while. What are you going to be doing?'

'Me? Nothing. I'm doing all the planning. Might take a nap.'

'Well don't let me disturb you.' He keeps his hand in hers as far as his reach with allow, dropping it to support a tower of crates as he slips past them for the door. 

She works somewhat sporadically, inventorying the contents she finds and setting aside what might be useful, ferrying each full box of junk to a neighbouring room only to have her eye caught by something poking from the depths. When she returns with a length of thick banding wrapped around her forearm, another bed frame is deposited next to the first as if by magic, a bundle of felted blankets perched on top. 

The next time he returns he finds her weaving a spool of cracking electrical wire between the frames, pinning them tightly together. She drags herself out from under them to help him position the third across the feet of the frames, vision criss-crossed from staring. When her eyes re-adjust she's treated to the sight of the cots lining up squarely, the shape of a decently large bed coming together. 

'So I checked out the mattress situation...'

'Uh huh.' She crawls back under the frames, squeezing her hands between the lattice of wire to feed the spool through.

'We're going to need to double up.'

'Okay?' She pinches her wrist on a protruding length of metal and twists it back into place with a frown.

'Six mattresses at least.'

'Someone went to school.'

'Just wanted to acknowledge the fact I'm probably going to be ferrying dusty old mattresses across the base for the best part of an hour.'

'If you were expecting a glamorous life, you really shouldn't have fallen in with me.'

'I'll be back with your mattresses.'

The frame is secured and pushed into the corner when he comes back with the first load, and Rey is disassembling the bank of now cleared racking and unfixing it from the wall. A growing stack of piping leans in the corner, and he directs his annoyance towards it before he departs. They're gone by the time he returns, having spent the journey praying to nameless deities that the rooms he chose were in face unoccupied and that there isn't a growing group of recruits waiting to hunt him down the next time he crosses the base unshielded. Still, it's good to have a tentative answer to his question; the effect extends to items he's holding, even large ones, or else those he passed watched mattresses float themselves down the hall and had no reaction. Both eventualities are illuminating in their own way.

There are a few crates forming a table as such for their possessions. He moves his pack from one of them to sit, watching her turn on her feet, broom at her side, mapping out a floor plan he will see sketched out in greater detail every time he returns. 'What's next after the bed?'

'What do you need?' She begins trying to brush away the layers of ancient grime that rasp under their feet. 

'Is there power in here beyond the lights?'

'Power, heat, ventilation. There are outlets back there and they seem to work.'

'Then I can't think of much else.'

'If you go get the last couple I've got an idea of what to do with them.'

'Does it involve burning them as they're disgusting?'

'Yes, of course. That's why I wanted you to bring them here. Just go, I want to get this finished. I'd rather not sleep on the floor if it can be avoided.'

'You're a bad boss, you know that?'

'Get moving.'

'I'm going', he moves for the door, palms spread before zipping up his jacket and bracing for the cold.

She leaves the low shelving on the wall by the door, wiping off the worst of the dust and removing the last of the items piled and balanced as a challenge for the next person. In a latched crate under a folded tarp a selection of camping equipment clunks against itself. Well worn enamelled cookware, ropes and bent tent pegs, a lamp, cracked but the bulb seemingly intact. There's no whisper of shattered glass when she shakes it. It clicks on with a quiet pop when powered and she leaves it to charge, bathing the corner in a warm orange glow.

The room has come to a pleasant temperature, hot enough to potter around in her base layers sorting through the last few items, setting her accumulations in roughly sorted categories on the shelves. A workable selection of tools, oils and paints, an assortments of canvas coverings and tarps, shaken out for any bugs and re-folded, a few cups and bowls next to their pitiful store of rations. They’d packed a few in with their clothes, out of a habit that continually asserts itself as vital. Still, it's gratifying to know how much they'd been able to claim as their own from this one room and a handful of its neighbours. Combing the rest of the corridor could keep her occupied for weeks, presenting a string of small but solvable puzzles, infinitely more preferable than the large one looming above her. 

She's scanning over what she's found when the door cracks open, stepping away from the wave of cold that immediately pushes in. She's already shoved a few items under her arm when he flops them down, coming over to help stack them in a tessellating patterns that's in theory less likely to slide apart as they sleep. She shakes a thick canvas tarp over the pile and stretches it taut, instructing him wordlessly to hold the tension at the opposing corner as she bores holes through the fabric, securing it to the frame. He goes where she tells him to, eyeing the room that has once again transformed in the time it took him to close the door and reopen it. 

'I'll do the rest if you find us something to go on it.'

'Take it you didn't come across anything in your travels.' He removes his hands where she bats him away.

'Not unless you want to sleep on bloated batteries and old boots.'

'I'd rather not.'

'Laundry is by the canteen.' She gives him a bright smile before turning back to her work, wrapped around the frame and pulling herself along it to sew a perimeter around their creation, her world narrowing to a few inches, the process endless until it abruptly isn't. She hauls herself up onto the decently soft platform, any creaks and groans pressed out by the weight evenly spread over top of it, legs butting up against each other for much needed support. She's pleased to discover the edges of the frames don't poke through the pitifully thin foam, and any dents from their previous inhabitants are evened out. Stretched with canvas, even knowing the seams are there she can't feel them, giving herself a few minutes to stretch on it and feel her spine ache as the pressure is alleviated before twisting to finish sweeping what she can. 

Slowly the flooring is exposed in swipes and she relents to the obvious conclusion it'll need to be mopped if she's ever going to take off her boots again and stave off the thought of her legs rotting to stumps below the ankles. Luckily, the next room turned up a clutch of threadbare mops, tangled together like a strange sprouted tree. The last of their water goes to the task, but she's left with a rubberised floor clean enough by her own dubious standards to pull off her socks. 

A human sized bundle of fabric pushes through the door and she relieves him of what she can, setting to work stretching the sheet over as best she can, tucking in the slack to be grabbed by the snug frame. From the abundance of blankets its easy to roll a few to wedge against the wall, chucking the pillows down to form a soft surface far enough away from the roughly plastered walls to not feel the worst of the cold.

She's admiring her work with the brush of her palm when he deposits a bag onto her lap and climbs on beside her, kicking off his boots with a thud. He stretches with a groan, rubbing at his eyes and she thumbs the switch for the lights, having snaked an extension across the room. He chuckles, slowly opening his eyes in warm lamplight.

'I took a slight unsanctioned detour. I figured you might be hungry.'

She hooks the strap of the bad with her fingers. 'Did you steal this?' 

'I did. It was probably set aside for someone going off base. Now they'll starve.'

'What did we get?'

'Not sure, have a look', he says around a huff, sitting up to shrug out of his jacket and flinging it in the direction of the crates that remain as close as they have to chairs or a table. She cracks the container on some kind of baked dough dusted with sugar, shaking and sniffing a flask of caff that smells like battery acid and peeling the foil from a heavy pastry wrapped something and taking a bite. 'Any good?' he asks, spotting the cups and making a beeline for them.

'Don't know what it is, so it's hard to judge.' He takes a sip and fails to disguise his wince of disgust, handing it off to her when she stares at him. 'I stand corrected', she says lightly as the bitter taste of the already cheap, now scorched and acidic caff permeates her mouth. 'What am I eating?'

He takes a bite and hands it back. 'A pie of some sort.'

'I knew that. What's in it?'

They pear into the mushy contents, spying a corner of something that could be a vegetable skin or could be something worryingly organic. 'Something that was at one point alive, and also some vegetables. There's salt, I can tell you that.'

'Very illuminating.' She keeps it clasped between her hands on her lap as she chews. 'Now what?'

'I don't know about you, but I need to pee.'

'Can't help you there I'm afraid.'

'The nearest fresher I know of is a few corridors over.'

'There'll be one closer. I found the water heater while I was tidying.'

'That's good to know but it doesn't help me right now.'

'Need me to come with you?'

'I don't want to go out again, It's warm in here, there's a bed. I like our ship, everything we needed was about eight steps away.'

'When we come back we can stay here', she offers. 'Test out my handiwork.'

'How do you mean "test out"?' She blinks at him slowly. 'Okay, fine.' They finish off the food, sealing the last of the noxious caff away and setting it with their rations.

The water crawls up to temperature, pipes sputtering before any water makes it through, clearly far enough in the fringes of the base even the plumbing is surprised to be getting any use. Still, it's blissful to wash the worst of the grime from their skin, taking turns at a half-hearted shower, one ear at the door, half expecting the entire contents of the base to pour through at any moment. They return to a room almost entirely transformed from the storage area they'd selected at random into a place almost cosy. 

‘When do you think they’ll find us?’ She asks, frowning up at the uneven blanket of blown bulbs above them. 

‘When they need something.’ She scoffs at him, the noise low and humorless. ‘We’re safer here, for now. People are going to be looking for us.’ 

‘I know.’ Her eyes are unfocused as she's dragged back in her memory to the event that had forced them here. The sliding of blood, the deafening silence, hundreds of clamoring lives dulled into sudden hush. A fan whirrs and finds its bearings, sound petering off into a hum. 

They stay there as the air changes around them and they know that it is now night. Something shifts as the bulk of their neighbors slow down and turn in, nestled in next to each other, close enough to hear each other’s breathing in the dark. 

They talk about the things they’ll find for their room. A table, more food, more blankets, things that speak to them of comfort, of security. It’s warm enough with them huddled close together, it's dry enough under a pile of dusty blankets, and all their possessions save the ship are within an arm's reach, close enough they can check on them with a sweep of their eyes. They can pretend that the hush is absolute for a few hours. Before they have to venture out for more food and water, and start to slowly blur the line they’d drawn around themselves separating them from the rest of the world. 

They speak in the hot damp space between their faces under the blankets and feel their hearts thump against each other. She presses her body against his, muscles shaking as she attempts to push her way past his skin into the warm and safe space behind his ribcage. He rocks into her, their breath comes in cut-off pants, her eyes screwed shut, her head swimming. She presses their sweat together, stomach clenching around her desperate pleasure, she feels as if she’s toeing towards a cliff, dark gray sketched barely against ink black sky. Cold drips its way over her shoulders and she worms her staticky skin close enough they can’t take a breath. Her orgasm burns up through her, her mind whites and she is nowhere.

Rey is attempting to softly close the door to the stores behind her around an armful of disparate foods when someone steps into her path. A foil-wrapped block of something drops unacknowledged to the floor. 

‘The General wants both of you to attend the meeting at command this morning.’ She clutches the food closer to her chest, pretending not to notice his glance at them. 

‘How do you know she wants me?’

‘Not a lot of new faces around here. Sorry, but you stick out. Nine a.m. Pass on the message for me.’ She nods as the man steps past her to head towards the canteen, task completed, she can almost feel herself being dropped from his thoughts as he single-mindedly hones in on his next target.

She works her way through the labyrinthine base, hanging back to stay out of sight when she hears the scuff of feet intercepting her path. Before long the air begins to hang with cold and she knows she’s beyond the point most tread, and therefore close to their quarters. 

‘I got us some breakfast.’ She dumps her spoils in an unceremonious pile on the bed, them not having yet acquired a better place for them. ‘And I’ve figured out where their stores are. I'm hoping we can find some stuff to make food here. I don’t fancy having to go there every day. What have you been up to?’

‘Found us a fresher, complete with a sonic cleaner.’

‘Thank the Gods.’ She begins sorting some of their food onto a shelf, tossing the flask of no-doubt cold and extra rancid caff between her hands, weighing up whether or not it'll be necessary. ‘Do you know what time it is?’ He checks the time on the reader, mentally noting another thing they need to add to their living space. ‘We’re wanted at command at nine.’ 

‘That didn’t take long.’ 

She unwraps a bar and rips off a bite, frowning down at the label. ‘Do we have the option to not go?’ She sets the bar aside and takes a bite of a mealy fruit, sighing. 

‘Not really.’ He rolls a fruit between his palms until she quirks her head at him to eat. She slumps back, continuing to take violent bites and staring at the ceiling. 

‘I want to see more of the base, but I don’t want to see any people. They’re just going to have questions for us.’

‘We can check out the rest of this corridor. See what we can salvage.’ They finish a few items, stowing the rest away for later and shrug on as many layers as they have, happy to spend the next few hours seeing what they can find to furnish their room.

She unscrews spotted bulbs from fixtures to replace the blown ones, shoving them in her pocked to scrape alarmingly together. They drag a heavy locker over the threshold to use as a kind of wardrobe, digging it into the corner, sweeping away the damp dust they'd rolled into slender snakes under their boots. She kicks them over the threshold, setting her sights on the corner of a table, poking out of the gloom across the corridor. By the time they leave the room has all the grimy trappings of living quarters, clinging with a soft dust that predates their births.

For the first time they are invited to witness the process as the latest attack is sketched out and refined. They’ve been issued their communicators that blink at their wrists, highlighting the falsity of the concept they might be able to conceal their living quarters from the General.

‘We have located an individual with information valuable to our cause.’ His lips curls into a subtle sneer at the clinical distance at which Leia discusses her messy network of spies cultivated with blood and credits. ‘We have reason to believe they will be in the quadrant for a period of time, and in this time we may be able to gain significant access to them.’ A look passes between them. This is how it always goes, a closing window of opportunity, so slight only a phantom could exploit the scant vulnerability. ‘If we are to get that information, it could help turn the tide on the First Order.’

‘When do we leave?’ Rey asks, shifting in her stiff seat. 

‘We are here to discuss our potential options.’ He scoffs. Every time it’s the same conversation. She smiles, and smooths her face into an impassive mask at Leia’s eyebrow quirked in her direction. ‘I know we ask a lot of you two. Our intent today is to find other options.’

‘Then why are we here?’ A room full of officers, strategists and pilots find anywhere to look but at him. This is a joke. They can’t even look into our eyes. It's not strictly true, but it would help either of them for her to argue. They have no issue looking at her, she'd felt eyes on her every second since she'd entered the room. His presence had been consciously ignored, like grasping for ignorance of something unspeakably obscene occurring beside them. 

‘Because your input is valued. And you deserve to be involved in decisions that affect you.’ Didn’t stop them before.

She meets his eyes with a small shake of her head. I know. Let’s just get it over with… I saw some chairs on the way over here I need you to help me liberate.

I hate this. To look at him, if they bring themselves to do it, he would appear bored, picking at the peeling edge of the desk, only half listening to the conversation. It's not surprising to have her gaze catch on the General's, but its an unexpected heaviness she has to push past to comfort him.

I know. Her fingers twitch to reach across the wide table that separates them. Why did they seat us apart from each other?

To maintain the illusion that we are still people to them. He squares his jaw.

One of the General’s advisers clears his throat with a dry rattling sound. He reddens as their eyes land on him. ‘Apologies, General. I know you have a lot of faith in their… abilities.’

‘They have proven their capability, have they not?’ They track the volley between the two of them with renewed interest. 

‘Their work has certainly had an effect. Not all of it good.’ The adviser meets Rey’s gaze briefly, and she shakes it off with a nervous blink. 

‘That is to be expected with work like this. The simple fact is they’re the only ones capable of doing what we need right now. Unless you have any other suggestions?’

‘Surely there are methods we can use that are more… natural?’ He spreads his fingers on the table-top.

‘We do not have the people or the time spare to soothe your sense of what is “natural”.’ She turns to Rey as the adviser sits back in his chair, working his jaw. ‘Rey. Are you willing to take on this mission?’

‘Yes.’

‘If you would like a moment to discuss, we can reconvene in a few-’

‘There’s no need.’

‘Do you speak for the both of you?’ 

Rey scoffs, then shakes her head incredulous, folding her hands across her lap. ‘When do we leave?’

They ignoring Leia’s eyes flitting their way as they stand, catching a glimpse of her sagging slightly in her seat as they close the door, her advisers gathering their possessions to file out to their posts within the base. 

‘Do they ever address you?’ She zips her jacket with a violent yank, bitter that she has to walk this place swaddled in several bulky layers just for it to be liveable. She’s still violently insulting their choice of home as the head through the corridors.

‘Sir. They call me sir.’

‘Ridiculous. Let’s go.’ She’s a ball of anger as she strides beside him, almost breaking into a jog as they round each successive corner. She smirks as a young recruit flattens themselves against the concrete wall to let them past, watching them pass with unguarded curiosity. The General was at least true to her word in that she’d prepare the base as to who they are. Rey feels as if she’s playing for a well rehearsed role as she hears the murmur of voices behind her, pitched with fear. 

She rips off her jacket as soon as they’re back in the comparative warmth of their room, sitting down heavily on the bed and flinging off her communicator like it’s a bug on her skin. 

‘This was a bad idea. I don't know what possessed me to think this was anything other than a colossally bad idea.’ She kicks off her boots violently, pulling her legs crossed into a parody of calm and huffing out huge breaths. He leans and slowly removes his outer garments, hanging both their jackets off the shelf and waiting for her to continue.

‘I feel like such an idiot. All the time I spent trying to get you to join us and this is what I talking about. The noble Resistance, clearly frightened of us and too cowardly to even say it.’ She tries to roll the stiffness from her neck brought on by the meeting, feeling the muscles catch on seized knots and moving through the crunch of them giving in. She feels the sharp flare of pain bring her back a little clearer, feeling the rough blanket under her feet, the weak aspiration of the rattling heater behind her and him standing across the room, watching her.

‘I don't know why they sit us apart from each other. I don’t see why we need to be there in the first place. The decision was already made before we even set foot in there.’ She rolls back her shoulders and her hair tickles at the name of her neck, mocking her attempt at calm. ‘Will you say something?’ Her chin is lifted in defiance, her voice quavering with a desperate fury. ‘Are you trying to prove how much more calm you are than me? Is that what it is?’ She feels heavy guilt press down on her instantly. ‘I’m sorry, I just…’ Her hands fall from her knees and into her lap as her muscles go lax. ‘It’s so much worse being sat in a room with them. They won’t even look at you.’ She holds her gaze on him, willing him to come to her, and pressing her cheek to his hand where it rests on her shoulder when he does. ‘I’m sorry’, she smiles sadly at him as he sits next to her, one hand brushing her knee where he braces himself. 

‘These were my people once. Those that followed my mother from the Senate of the New Republic and then formed the Resistance. I spent more time with those people than I did my own father.’ She holds her breath at the mention of Han, keeping still and silent beside him, looking at his growing hair where it’s beginning to curl at the ends. ‘You didn’t make me come here. I thought it was the right thing to do, and I still do. But I promise you I hate it as much as you do.’

‘I don’t understand why we can’t just go on our own. We’ve been fine so far.’

He takes her limp hand and folds his fingers through hers. ‘They weren’t really looking for us before. They are now.’ 

‘Because of what we did.’ He doesn’t argue, just lets the statement hang there between them in its truth. She leans her boneless body against his side and takes in the room by the weak sunlight filtered through the ice outside their window, and how it flattens everything into a tableau. Their boots lined up together where he’s put them, their stolen food next to their sabres, their bags packed with the few personal things they hadn’t wanted to see shrunken by the place but prefer to imagine them purchased under beating sunlight and carried back through the crowds of planets they can’t name but for the feel and smell of it on their skin. 

‘Your hair is getting long, do you want me to cut it?’ She watches him smile out of the corner of her eye. 

‘Do you know how?’ She feels his voice rumble through his chest against her side. 

‘No. I can’t imagine it’s too difficult.’ She sits back, feeling her spine creak. ‘Don’t you trust me?’ 

‘Not in the slightest.’ 

She borrows some shears from the med bay that seem sharp enough, tucking them into her waistband as she beelines back across the base. Back in their room and shaken from her cold outerwear, she frowns at the logistical puzzle presenting itself. ‘I guess you’ll have to sit’, she drags in a chair from an adjoining room and swipes the dust from it with a cough. 

‘Can I ask what your plan is, exactly?’ He eyes her over his shoulder as he sits. She straightens his head and he feels the cold metal of the blades press against his cheek. 

‘Simple’, she leans onto her toes, steadying against his shoulder to begin dragging the hair back from his forehead. ‘Take little pieces and cut some off. Why do you have to be so tall?’

‘Have you only just noticed?’ 

‘We spend most of our time either sat or in bed, I guess I don’t notice. Stop moving.’ He tries to smooth the smirk from his face and fails. ‘How much do you want me to cut off?’

‘Whatever you think. You can probably see better than me.’ 

‘I maybe should have wet your hair’, she says, taking a chunk and trimming off the ends to shower down on him. ‘Do you want me to put something down?’

‘We’ll sweep, it’s fine.’ She carries on, taking small sections and measuring them against the previous, mumbling to herself. He hears her shift on her feet behind him, combing through his hair with her fingertips. 

‘Who used to cut your hair before?’ 

He brushes the cut hair from his cheeks. ‘Droids. They did everything like that. They even did the ironing.’

‘How undignified. Why couldn’t you do it yourself?’ 

‘It just wasn’t how things were done. I think they worried things like that were too humanizing. Better they were just done out of sight.’

‘I guess it would have changed how I saw you if I caught you one day ironing that ridiculous cloak.’

‘That ridiculous cloak stopped you from freezing to death, remember.’ She hushes him and returns to her work, crouching to work behind his ear. ‘Do you want me to cut yours?’ She stands to wipe the blades on her shirt and he hears her breath huff around a shrug. 

‘It’s fine like this, it’s easy to manage.’

‘Easy for me to manage, you mean.’

‘I don’t hear you complaining.’ She rakes her fingers through his hair, feeling the length, and finding another section to trim. He settles into a pleasant silence, occasionally disturbed by the bite of the blades working through each piece. It's pleasantly surprising how much light makes it through, softly highlighting the creases in their crumpled sheets, lending a weak glow to the room that he realizes with an expanding bubble of joy in his chest is as close as they've come to truly making a home for themselves. A bed than can be generously classed as theirs and only theirs, a space made to their lax specifications. Her voice, low and thoughtful sounds in his ears. ‘I could cut it though. I kept it this way for years, just in case. Even when it got in the way and was impractical.’

‘I don’t think you should cut it just because it would be practical.’

‘I probably won’t. I like you doing my hair too much.’ She tilts his head forwards to cut at his nape. ‘I always did.’ She brushes the loose hair from his shoulders, raking through his hair one last time to check its length. ‘I think you’re done.’ She tosses the shears onto the bed and runs her fingers through her work with a satisfied hum. ‘Let’s get rid of this mess.’ 

Hair swept into the hallway with the rest of the dust and debris the droids don’t reach, she sighs at him as he stands shaking the hair from his shirt. ‘Come on’, she pushes a bundle of clothes into his arms and steers him towards the fresher. 

She leans to watch him as he washes his hair and the last of the loose hair slowly tracks down the drain. ‘Something bothering you, Jedi?’ He pauses when she doesn’t answer, peeking at her where she blushes and looks away. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s nothing really...’ She toes her feet through the water, watching the soap swirl lazily away from her. ‘I really enjoyed wandering around the universe with you. Being able to hold your hand and have people look at us just like we’re any other couple. We can’t do that here.’

‘You’re right, it’s probably not advised. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s ridiculous. It shouldn’t matter, I know how I feel about you. And it doesn’t concern them in the slightest.’ She averts her eyes, sighing at the cool air chills her skin. 

‘It does matter’, she closes her eyes as he cradles her neck. ‘You shouldn’t have to hide from your friends. But it won’t change how I feel about you.’ She smiles and it slides away with the water.  

They'd returned from the fresher with little in the way of a plan for the day beyond lazing about. She'd napped on and off, nowhere to go but curled at his side, no desire to be anywhere else but in a bubble of their own making. But he'd come to realize her brain never really stopped, watching her snap back to awareness with a blink and work herself onto her arms. ‘The General knows where we sleep.’ She eyes their communicators, tangled in a pile next to half eaten rations and empty cups. 

‘She has eyes everywhere. We could destroy them...’ He tears his eyes from his reading, to the slender bands that are holding Rey’s gaze as if by magnetism. 

‘You’re right, it wouldn’t make a difference anyway. I just miss being able to delude myself that we’re hidden somehow.’ She breaks her gaze away with a frown. ‘Do you think if she knows where we are she knows where everyone else is too?’

‘If they’re wearing them she probably does.’

‘But if they’re not they could be anywhere.’

‘What are you worried about?’

‘You mean other than being murdered in our beds?’ She glares at him before returning her focus to the electronics, blinking silently away. 

‘Nobody here would have any reason to harm you…’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure. I helped bring you here.’

‘Has someone said something to you?’

‘No, but they will.’ He takes in her tense jawline and downward gaze, her fingers toying with the loose threads on the blanket, trying to decide whether his touch would burn her or not. Finally she swallows and tracks her eyes slowly up to meet his, nervously roaming around his face, not able to focus on anything beyond isolated features. ‘I don’t regret any of the ways I’ve helped you. But there are going to be people who condemn me for not leaving you behind on that moon to die. I don’t know how far loyalty to the General will go against that.’

‘The door is locked. Only someone with Force powers could get through it, and if they existed on the base we’d have sensed them.’

‘What if they disguised themselves?’

‘Even as they slept?’ Her brow furrows with hurt, looking at her knees as she pulls them closer to her, curling over them. ‘I understand why you’re worried, I’m not trying to be cruel. I just want to reassure you that you’re safe. We both are when we’re in here.’

‘And when we leave this room.’ 

‘Honestly, less so. But we can’t help that if we’re going to be of any use.’

She nods and he gets to watch the progression of affected nonchalance over her body, the part of her that’s scared sinking down behind its armor. ‘Speaking of, shall we see what the General has in store for us?’

She cranes to grab her reader and open the message sitting predictably in her inbox. ‘Bets on where we’re going?’ She flicks her gaze to his where he lies back heavily. 

‘Core worlds.’

The inflection-less artificial voice starts on their message, reading through the automatic ‘hoping this finds you in good health’ with the clerical chill they deserve. ‘Further to our recent communication, you have been assigned the task of meeting with one of our advisers in the Uscru Disctrict on Coruscant-’ she covers his mouth with her hand where he inhales to gloat at her. ‘We are lead to believe they have some important information on the status of the talks between The First Order and the Core worlds. You will find our informant at the Outlander Club. They are meeting there with a high-ranking member of the Order before they leave the planet to put their plans into action. The informant in question has reason to believe they themselves will be redeployed very shortly, and wish to share what they can before that happens. It should go without saying that there will be Order personnel and sympathizers everywhere. Do not put yourselves in-’

‘Wonderful, Coruscant, my favourite. How did you guess?’ She removes the hand still over his mouth with a snort. 

‘Lucky guess. What do I win?’

‘What do you want?’ She skims through the remainder of the memo, they’re to meet them there tomorrow evening. They’re to dock their ship outside the entertainment district and dress and act like tourists, they’re good at that. ‘We’re taking our own ship.’ She smiles down at him. ‘Shall we go now?’

He rolls off the bed and begins pulling on his boots and jacket. 

They meet the General as she’s coming out of another meeting, taking in them standing in the corridor with a confused tilt of her head.

‘Is our ship ready? We’d like to go ahead of time.’

Leia closes the door behind her before turning back to Rey’s questioning look. ‘There’s no need for you to go before the morning…’

‘I know. We won’t do anything risky. I just prefer doing things over sitting around.’

‘Rey, I really don’t think that’s a good idea. I don’t think you should be out there any longer than is necessary.’

‘She won’t be alone, General. I promised Rey I’d show her Coruscant. I don’t know if we’ll get another chance anytime soon.’ 

Leia’s eyes snap to Ben and hold there. ‘I feel like you should be here, I'm reticent as it stands to sending you back out there so soon. But I will say there have been some developments on that front.’

'Oh?' Rey asks, tone light even as she stops dead at his side.

'The inquiry into the explosion. Have you been following the news?'

'I tend not to. I hate how I look in their footage.'

Leia spares her a quick tight smile. 'It was ruled an accident. An explosion caused by an electrical fault, likely triggered by the storm. A vulnerability of an aging facility, unpredictable weather patterns causing unforeseen degradation of the supporting infrastructure.'

'They're covering it up.'

'For now, it appears so.'

'Why?'

'If I knew that my dear I wouldn't have a full day of meetings ahead of me. Still, I thought you might like to know.' A tiny smile flicks over her mouth before she pulls her jacket closer around herself, focus already back on the voices burbling along behind them. The questions she will have to half answer. ‘Your ship is still in storage. I’ll have someone bring it out and fuel it for you. I apologize that there isn’t another ship you can take, you’ll have to wait for it to be prepared.’

‘Thank you General.’ 

‘You’re welcome. Now excuse me.’ It’s too light for a true dismissal, simply her struggling to shift gears in her head, lingering a few moments outside the door as they leave, taking a deep breath before re-entering.

Chapter Text

They reach the hangar bay as mechanics are grumbling to open the storm doors, throwing a dark look over their shoulders at who is impatient enough that they had to cut into their free time to coax the frigid metal begrudgingly into place. 

‘Does it ever stop snowing?’ She forces her hands deep into her pockets, jogging in place to try to keep the heat in. ‘Is it wise for us to be taking our own ship?’

‘People come and go in the Core so often I doubt anyone will notice us.’ They move around them, pace decidedly unhurried, uncoupling their ship and connect the fuel line.

She nods thoughtlessly and begins examining the other ships. Most are partially covered, the fabric flapping in the biting wind and exposing the thick restrains around them, clouded with dust. A few speeders sit atop tracks of grease, hand prints smudged onto the bodywork. In the shadowed corners where the lights have begun to dim and buzz they spot a few more civilian crafts, spotted with rust. The bulk of the space is occupied by the transports which have been transformed into an office of sorts for the hangar crew, strewn with cups, discarded jackets and orphaned gloves. Gray snow is gathered underneath the ramps, pushing through the metal grillwork and stamped with bootprints. 

‘When do you think was the last time any of these flew?’ She steps under the wing of an X-wing, feeling the metal catch against the skin on her fingertips. The TIE has been hoisted up into the gloom of an unlit corner, far from the prying eyes of anyone foolish enough to try to fly it. She squints up at it, hanging in the shadow and battles with herself over what justification she can give to request access again. Whatever it is, it won’t be enough. If they’re smart they’d have gutted it of its computer and smashed any link between it and the R&D base into the snow. Is this all there is?  She waits for him to do the same tally she’s been doing, weighing up just how palty this defense would be against an attack from the Order, no matter how small. 

We don’t know what ships are out on missions at the moment, he offers. 

By the look and speed of these guys, she nods towards the mechanics slowly replacing the cap to their fuel intake port, I don’t think they see a lot of ships coming and going. 

We disturbed them at dinner. The General says engineering are working on expanding the fleet. We don't know how many people were on those transports...

Are we really safe here?

The mechanics nod stiffly at them and quickly retreat back into the warmth of their little rec room, sliding into their seats and resuming the game of cards set aside. They clamber onto the ship the second the ramp hits the ground with a squeal, running through a quick check of the systems and peering through its collection of tiny rooms, checking for any disturbance, any footprints they don’t recognize as their own. Satisfied they steer the ship into the snow as the orange of the base diminishes behind them like an amber eye lazily closing. 

‘At least this time we can leave when we want.’ She sighs as she sinks down further into the pilot’s seat, toeing off her heavy boots. ‘Couple of hours until we get there. I can't tell you how happy I am to be back on this ship.’ She flings off her heavy jacket and folds her arms over her face to breathe in the familiar air of the place, heated to a point she can feel her limbs begin to slowly release their tension. 

Then his frozen hands stroke her arms and she curls in on herself, throwing him a scowl. ‘I was so relaxed and now I’m tense again.’ He skilfully dodges her heavy look, unfolding her stiff limbs, tipping her head back to kiss her. She swallows as her heart-rate climbs. 

‘Still tense?’

‘I’ve been less tense.’ She turns the chair to face him, smiling as he braces his arm against it to lean and kiss her, chasing the contact as he pulls away. ‘What’s your idea? You look like you’re planning something. I don’t trust it.’

‘Stay still.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I said so.’ She feels goosebumps cover her neck as he brushes her hair behind her ear. She swallows up at him, eyes imploring him to move. She tracks him with her eyes as he bends to kiss below her ear, her pulse thundering as she closes her eyes. ‘What do you need?’ His breath cools the sweat at her neck, drawing out a shiver. 

‘I don’t want to think anymore. Tell me what to do.’ She watches the smile flick over his features, hearing the leather squeak behind her under his grip. 

‘Are you sure?’

‘Don’t make me beg.’ She closes her eyes as pressure begins to build behind them, squeezing at her skull. 

‘You can have whatever you want.’ Relief washes through her at the feel of his kiss on her forehead. ‘Get on your knees.’

She moves before she’s aware of it, as if his instruction has bypassed the conscious part of her brain. The floor is sharp and unyeilding under her knees, still thawing from the cold. She takes a breath before opening her eyes to look up at him, staring until the burning there forces her to blink. Her breath catches in her throat as his thumb drags across her lip.

‘I want to see what you can do with that mouth. That alright with you?’ She tilts her chin up and watches through half-closed eyes as undoes his pants and steps out of them, meeting his eye and nodding minutely where he pauses in his underwear. He cups her jaw and stoops to kiss her on her crown.

‘Put your hands behind your back.’ She laces them together, feeling her shirt pinch at her shoulders, rolling them back to look as his face as he pushes his underwear down his thighs. She keeps her burning gaze on his, like an anchor. ‘Open your mouth, sweetheart.’ Her stomach flips as his fingers graze her jaw, sucking in a gulping, shaking breath before she complies.

She shifts on her knees to adjust the angle, eyes fluttering shut as she takes him into her mouth. She reminds herself to breath through her nose and feeling her awareness begin to narrow down to just the feel on him on her tongue. At the back of her mind, the sound of his sweetheart like a litany, warm like sunlight behind her eyelids. Then his shaking fingertips work gently through her hair and she loosens her jaw, wanting to feel more of him. Wanting to feel his light grip on her skull falter as she feels him touch her throat, then her thoughts are wiped clean. 

Her nails dig into the backs of her hands as she feels her throat constrict, feels the flare of warning in her mind. Like so many other warnings, after a second she turns her attention to it, her stomach sucking in desperately, and notes it for what it is. A warning, that like many others, can be ignored. She presses a little deeper and feels the tears squeeze from her eyes and rolls down her cheeks, cooled by the air conditioning. She can just about see them in the corner of her vision when she opens her eyes, shimmering like jewels with her heartbeat, then she looks into his eyes. 

‘Do you want to find out how far you can go?’ She nods and feels the teardrops release their shaky hold on her cheeks, tracking down her neck. ‘Tell me to stop and I’ll stop. But I think you don’t want to, and who am I to say no?’

Her hands fall limp and forgotten behind her back as he takes her head in his hands. All she can feel is her throat constricting and the whine in the back of her head as her airway is obstructed. Her back bows as he moves in her mouth, pushing deeper, fast enough she gags on him, rubbing her thighs together, slick with sweat. He pulls away and she works her jaw, a deep grunt tumbling out of her. Then she’s laughing, and feeling it rumble through skin she’s newly aware of, hearing it trail off as she fixes her eyes on him and parts her lips. 

She presses off her knees as he pushes in with one long thrust, a hand gripping his calf as she chokes around him, one, twice. When he pulls out she watches the slender strand of saliva stretch and snap between them. She swipes her tongue along his wet length and presses herself past aching resistance to take him back into her throat, staring up at him. He takes her head in his hands once more and she leans into his grip, feeling the wetness in her crotch sticking the fabric to her skin. 

She can taste it on her tongue that he’s getting close when he pulls away, and can feel it in the shake of his muscles where she holds his calf, not being aware of when she reached out. She narrows her eyes at him, anger flushing her face in a blush she can feel.

‘Don’t you dare.’ She digs her nails into his muscle.

‘I don’t think I come in your throat and stay standing…’ His voice is ragged as she strokes her overheated cheek.

‘You can and you will.’ She jerks her chin at him, wiping roughly at her saliva and pulling him closer. She can feel his stokes lose their rhythm and consistency, hear her ears whine and thud with her heartbeat, the taste of him on the back of her tongue. The ache in her jaw reiterates its protest and she works it free, choking on a particularly hard thrust. Then his breathing turns ragged and he stills, and she feels his knees wobble as she presses herself onto him. Her only thought to rip his orgasm from him and feel it twitch against her tongue. Satisfaction flows through her veins like honey as she hears his strangled groan, stroking the quivering skin of his calf and swallowing around him. 

She watches him as if from a distance as he sinks heavily to his knees and pants hot into her neck. She runs her hand through his damp hair and down his neck where his shirt is stuck to his skin. She smiles as he swears and sinks onto his hand.

‘You okay?’, he asks. She sits back and stretches her arms over her head, luxuriating in the feeling before tilting her head in confusion. 

She clears her throat and smiles at her ragged voice as she speaks. ‘What would make you think I didn’t enjoy that?’ She leans back on her hands to watch him collect himself, peeking in her direction. ‘Come here.’ She pulls him over her and presses their mouths together, guiding his hand to her crotch.

‘That felt incredible.’ Her head thunks back hard against the durasteel floor as he works his hand into her pants and strokes at her. She plucks at her trousers, ‘I’m pretty sure if I wasn’t wearing these you’d have been able to hear how much I enjoyed that.’ She groans as he bites at her neck. ‘How long does it take you to get hard again?’

He laughs into her skin and her chest squeezes. ‘I haven’t exactly timed it.’ He works his hand under her shirt to lay on her stomach, feeling it move with her breathing. ‘What do you have in mind?’

‘I want you to fuck me.’

He sits and pulls her with him, pushing the shirt up her chest, removing her breast-band, then her trousers and underwear and throwing it in a ball with his. ‘Do you trust me?’ 

‘Of course I do’, her answer is automatic, but she still narrows her eyes at him.

‘Lie on your front and put this under your hips.’

‘But I won’t be able to see your face.’ She folds her arms and rests her head on them, watching as he moves her legs and kisses down her spine. She relaxes as she feels his warm weight press against her back. ‘I don’t understand what the p-‘, she gasps as he presses into her. He kisses her cheek as she digs her fingertips into the floor, spots firing behind her eyelids. ‘Holy fuck!’ He kisses her jaw before wrapping his hand lightly around her throat and snapping his hips forward. He feels her clamp down around him as her legs kick weakly. He presses their temples together and mumbles encouragement and praise into her ear, feeling a hand grip his wrist and squeeze.

Her palm slaps against the scraped metal when she comes and he releases her throat, listening as she sucks in huge lungfulls of air, screwing her forehead into the ground. She twists onto her back, kicking their clothes away and wrenching him to her, pushing his cock in her with a trembling hand. She gasps and begs into his mouth, digging her heel into his thigh to press him deeper. She kisses him through it, as his eyes screw shut with pain tinged pleasure, licking little whimpers from his mouth and along his shaking jaw. 

‘I like this ship’, she brushes sweaty hair from his face and kisses at the moles that peppers his skin. 

They land as the blush of early evening hangs in the corona of thick air pollution. Like everything else about the place, even this effect is managed by a team of sensors and synchronised LED arrays, simulating the false sickly peach tone of a bustling metropolis that no longer sees true nightfall. Those unlucky enough to be born on the jewel of the Galaxy will never experience evening suddenly surrendering into night as Rey had on Jakku, where the planet seems to release it’s light and heat in an exhausted yawn.  

Their credit chip is scanned by a droid at the dock, a jetty hanging in the air above the tangling current of ships below them. It flicks its attention their way in a move borne of pure habit, before buzzing them through as silently behind them their ship is filed into storage. 

‘We’re going down a few levels.’ She begins shielding them both as they work their way across the sky bridge vibrating with footfall, before dropping it with a laugh as she’s nearly swept into the current leading back the way they came. ‘Guess not.’ She fits her hand in his as they push their way towards a towering doorway picked out in neon green, wavering in the heat.

They don't fight the flow of people, it would be pointless to try. They're guided through a tunnel, pressing in on them with tattered layers of posters, torn by passing hands to reveal glimpses of the designs underneath. Bands of colors chosen for maximum contrast against each other, utilizing the irritated pause of eyes attempting to resolve the image into sense to press their image of decadent vice onto the unconscious brain. Then they’re ejected onto a street screaming with discordant noise; a tuning orchestra that will never quiet. 

Food and drink of every venomous shade competing for attention, shriveling fruits held into a listing pile by the fragile tension in their mottled skin. Glistening flesh turning on juddering spits, fringed with violet light, a loose cloud of insects occupying the periphery, buffeted by heat currents. People brush past their backs as they slow to examine them, smiling tightly at the vendors who mop grease from their forearms and fan the shirts at their necks.

‘I hate the air in this place,’ she murmurs, voice pitched low enough she hopes no-one around her will hear her insult their home. They weave past the smaller stalls, tired faces lit only by the smoldering burners throwing orange under their shadowed eyes. They can feel the burn at the back of their knees as the street worms its way downwards, a boiling ribbon of people stretching into the distance. ‘How many people live here?’ She squints her eyes as she feels her shout in her throat, the sounds seemingly swallowed by the air. 

‘About a third of the known Universe.’ She feels his answer buzz in her eardrum, picking the tone of his voice from the mass by familiarity. I’m going to have no voice by the time we leave here.

My throat hurts already, whose fault is that? A laugh cuts its way through the crowd, lilting on the edge of panic. They watch a young lady streaked with shimmer pull her friends through the curtains of a bar, thrown into silhouette under a neon eye batting lashes that move like a wave and squeeze into a wink.

‘Let’s find somewhere a little quieter!’ She shouts over the crowd, smiling at the phrase that was the closest the street came to an official motto, hearing another voice from the crowd underline hers in chorus. Appraising eyes drag over their bodies as they slowly weave through, catching their eyes with a questioning tilt of their head as others speak inaudibly into their ears, wrenching their attention away. They’ve already moved past, replaced by other bodies, flushed throats and shining skin to be puppeted into writhing scenes in their minds, trying them on for size. She feels these looks press at her skin, making her aware of the slide of her clothes against her nerves, and the shock-wave of her silent footsteps moving through the muscles of her legs. 

They step into a piped cool of a dark restaurant and feel exhaustion drag at them like gravity. A staff member inclines his head their way as they pull a couple of chairs off the gritty table and sink into them. 

‘What are you two wanting?’ He brushes a few crumbs into the floor before leaning over the counter. ‘Not got much on at the moment, bit early for us.’

‘Whatever’s cheap and easy. And something cold to drink if you have it.’

‘We got beer and meat fritters.’ He leans into his shoulders as wall-mounted lights buzz into life around them in lazy sequence. 

‘What’s the meat?’ She leans her elbow onto the table to watch their interaction, feeling the stickiness grab at her skin. 

‘Non-synthetic if that’s what you’re asking. Twenty credits, I’ll bring it when its ready.’ He disappears out back, leaving them to pass a look between them. She hangs her head as he kneads at the tension in her shoulder, pulled back into taut attention as two bottles are deposited in front of her with a thud. Condensation streaks its way to the table as the man’s back disappears once more. 

‘Ebla beer.’

‘Hmm?’ She drags her eyes from the shadows moving back of house. 

‘A Wookie favourite. Sagrona.’ He clinks his bottle with hers, feeling water drip onto his fingers. It’s cold and hoppy, leaving a film in his mouth from the bitter grain used to brew it. ‘What do you make of it so far?’

She slumps in her chair, cradling the cool bottle against her chest. ‘I like it better down here. I’m not used to being looked at this much.’

‘We’re probably safer here than most places, is the strange thing. Do you want to stay on the ship?’ She takes a swig, puzzling over the taste with a shrug and feeling it settle in her stomach.

‘What are our options?’

‘Numerous sleazy hotels.’ He smiles at her over the rim of his bottle, and she watches neon arms reflected in his eyes. 

‘Is that safe?’

He shrugs and settles a hand above her knee. ‘This place runs on turning a blind eye. I don’t see the harm.’

‘Hence why you think it’s appropriate to put your hands on me.’ She raises her eyebrows at him, meeting his look with a serious look only somewhat undermined by the crinkle at the corner of her eyes and lips. 

She has a second of stomach plummeting regret at her words before his arms is wrapped around her shoulder, heavy and warm. ‘I want to and I can. Are you going to tell me to stop?’ His breath is hot against her neck as she shakes her head, staring into her drink. She crumbles in on herself at his tickling kiss to her neck, sensitized by alcohol. ‘You’re a cheap drunk.’

‘I haven’t had much practice. What’s your excuse?’ She beams at him before straightening from her slump as their waiter approaches with paper baskets of steaming food. 
They’re bitter with scorched oil, and flecked with whatever carbonized deposits have survived the heat. Still as they feel the fried crust shatter under their teeth any reluctance at the price is forgotten as their brains scream at them in relief at the food not extracted, preserved and press into shelf-stable uniformity. They eat in silence as they watch people move in the street, some weaving thoughtlessly, and others cutting through the throng with their arms, their eyes set on a destination the two of them can’t see. Credits exchanged they step back into the heat as their bottles are smashed behind them with a sound like a muffled firework. 

What about here? Rey exchanges a smile with a young Twi’lek pressing a jewel-toned handkerchief to the sweat at her neck.

Not here. It’s a pleasure house. He feels the muscles at the small of her back twist under his palm as she turns back to the woman, the shine of her outfit blending seamlessly with her shimmering skin. 

She’s beautiful. 

She is. What about there? He points towards a building seeming to sag under its weight, rows of windows reaching into the smog and curling down over them. 

Can we get one with a window?

We can try. They step out of the path of a stumbling mass of limbs, their feet slapping against the ground rushing up to them. Let’s get off the street.

‘We charge by the night or by the hour. Prices are up there.’ The lady fans herself as their eyes acclimatise to the gloom. ‘Payment is up front, if that’s a problem for you there’s plenty other places to try, loves.’

‘One night, with a window if possible.’ She shifts as the lady’s eyes pass over her body top to toe. ‘One room.’ 

She scoffs, ‘honey, it’s always one room. Check in with the droid, he’ll give you your key.’ The droid scans their chip, the First Order insignia on it’s body scratched and peeling. She eyes it with her breath held before it turns from them, wheels squeaking.

They don’t chance the elevator, creaking in its frame. Do they monitor places like these?

They’re registered with the Order, that’s about it. They make too much money from Officer’s "relaxation" to do much more than that.

Did you ever come here?  She feels her heart-rate begin to climb, the food settling heavily in her stomach as they start on the stairs. 

No, but I can understand why they did it. They round the corner on another flight of stairs, one of the many dizzying turns they'll have to make to reach their room. They'd picked it out from the key, climbing twelve floors into the eerily static sky, tracing their fingers up the spine of the building, printing dulled by others' passing. People need intimacy, even if it’s paid for. They turn another corner, a door slamming somewhere below them, vibrating through the handrail.

I couldn’t imagine sleeping with a stranger.

They fall into silence, floor numbers steadily climbing as they trudge their way upwards in an endless sequence of tightening loops. Gradually they pass above the street level, blinking neon and windows flushed red replaced by a near organic tangle of ducting and vents, the life support for the illusion of cheap decadence, growing less persuasive with each glimpse. Turning onto the corridor that is to be their home for the night, any sense of space evaporates to be replaced by a long curving carpeted tunnel.

They're admitted with a beep into a room sound-dampened and oppressively quiet. It's small and dark, but fairly well appointed with a tiny fresher and a window hung with curtains as more of an afterthought that anything. The whole place is suffused in the amber glow of the street. They kick off their shoes and lean elbow to elbow on the window ledge, cracking it a sliver in the hopes of a breeze that doesn’t come. She perches her chin on her arms and watches clusters of people collect and disperse like leave in running water.

‘I’m not sure if I like it here. But I’m happy we came.’ She closes her eyes as he kneads at the knot of tension in her shoulder, body held in a constant state of alert since they'd stepped back onto the street. There's little familiar enough to latch onto, the only thing it shares with the few places she knows is what it lacks. Little in the way of youth, save for when it is sold. 

‘Do you want to head back out in a minute?’

‘No, I think I’m done for the night. I want to see it in the morning. Is that alright?’

‘Of course. We’ve got all day tomorrow.’

‘We didn’t bring any clothes.’ 

‘There’s some on the ship…’

‘It doesn’t matter. Just made me realize how I’ve never done this before. That lady on the desk things we’re going to have sex in here, don’t you think that’s strange?’ She watches him try to suppress a smirk in the reflection of the glass. ‘I’m not saying that we won’t, still just weird that she knows.’ He hides his face against his arm as she stares at him out the corner of her eye. 

‘You think too much, you know that?’

‘I’ve been made aware of that, yes.’ She stands to stretch and flop dramatically onto the bed, tiredness sweeping over like a warm blanket. The bed moves under her as he lies at her side, hand on the slow movement of his breath in his stomach. She takes his free hand in hers and holds it to the light. 

‘Are you my boyfriend?’ She feels the mattress shift with his aborted laugh.

‘I suggested we get married, remember.’

‘Of course I remember.’ Her inward reply is more for herself than him. ‘I just realize I never asked you. I just kissed you and hoped that you understood.’

‘Yeah, I got the message.’

‘I probably should have said something. What if you thought it was a casual thing?’

‘Was it?’ 

He hears her shake her head into the covers. ‘Was it casual for you?’

‘I already knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you before you kissed me.’

Her eyes rove over the rings of damp and smoke patterning the ceiling. ‘I was so worried you’d sense it in my skin when I touched you, or you’d see it in my mind and be disgusted with me. But I couldn’t stop myself. It was like I was watching myself walk towards a cliff and waiting to see if I’d throw myself off.’ He kisses their clasped hands and she closes her eyes, feeling him shift onto his side and following. 

‘Go into my mind.’

‘What, right now?’

‘I want to try something.’ She can feel his eyes on her as she closes hers, reaching out to sense the Force and feel the calm of their signatures humming alongside each other.

Can I kiss you?  Her energy swirls with confused annoyance. I want you to feel what it’s like for me. She swallows, pressing into his mind to find anxiety so potent she can taste it bitter on her tongue. His signature waves with each thumping heartbeat, a whine gaining in pitch and volume as she feels him slowly bring their lips together. 

She feels as if she’s been upended, buffeted by his reaction as well as her own as his stomach lurches into his throat at the contact between their skin. He tempers his fear to steady himself, as he has always done, pressing down his desire so violent it feels as if it’ll burn him, that he can only think about obliquely to avoid being pulled under by it. She feels as he does every nerve ending in his body seeming to fire to attention, fizzing at the contact between them and demanding more of it. She sucks in a desperate breath through her nose, grasping at him, body so steady, his brain is a tumbling mass of desire and terror. 

Fuck. He smiles against her lips before twitching under her scrutiny as she looks at him. ‘You’re scared of me', she speaks with a mouth suddenly parched.

‘I am.’

‘Not casual then.’

‘I’d say not casual.’

She kisses him and slowly her racing brain begins to calm somewhat, letting her connection waver and break, pressing her body towards him instead. She sighs into his mouth as the sound of the street becomes a kind of formless hum, in the back of her mind the knowledge that the woman was right wittering away. She’ll shake her head and laugh as they leave and try to keep their hands off of each other, having pulled on the same clothes they came in in. She crushes him with her limbs in an attempt to force their bodies into one writhing mass, feel his heart beating alongside hers, feel his blood rush alongside hers. She presses her face to his neck so there’s no space for any words to creep out as they try to slide down her tongue. She kisses him as she comes with a yelp, her breath hot against his cheek. She tries not to come apart as his breathing begins to rattle in her ear as she presses her lips to his face, twisting her fingers with his and feeling them close around hers automatically.

She was right, she'll have no doubt welcomed several more parties as they made their way slowly through the building. She might even have a figure for them, if they were ever foolhardy enough to ask her, of just how many people had turned their nose up at the patchy carpet and peeling walls but still found a reason to stay. Something about having a room with a bed and a door that locks. Something about how people stand together; she can pick out the first timers, those who had met and spoken solely in the stale air of the place, the couples travelling through and wanting a little variety, grubby as a novelty. She'll know where they fit into her demographics likely better than they do, any efforts to disguise it pointless, rendered down to just people. Stay here with me, the chant in her mind, desperate and impossible. Every time they step out somewhere with the knowledge of what they have to do pushed back in their mind. The promise of these four walls, a tiny separate universe butting up against dozens more, somehow stronger for it. She reaches for him silently, drone in her ears quieting to a hum as he pulls her to his body. Later they'll wash in the tiny fresher and fall asleep tangled on top of musty sheets, strobes of neon creeping across the carpet in the dark. They'll realize they passed the evening without any words, him giving her a weak smile instead, opening his mouth and then closing it again. Because he will always be stronger than her. 

When they awake, the day is already in full swing. The night that never darkened beyond a tarnished-looking brown has become a day where the light seems to lay like a sheet over them. They check out in the same clothes they came in in, suffering a quantifying look head to toe; she doesn’t see anything that surprises her, jerking her head at them to leave. 

‘Anywhere in particular you wanted to go?’ The seats outside the pleasure houses are vacant in the daylight, a little sheen of water clinging to the surface, having shivered down in the night like a sigh. 

‘We could visit the Imperial Palace. I’m told there’s not much to see; its been stripped of its Jedi and Sith past, but I’ve never been. We could take a speeder?’

‘We’ve got a few hours...’ They pick their way off the main thoroughfare to the cluster of speeders hanging in the unnaturally still air.

‘Where to, lovebirds?’ She blinks in alarm at the modulated voice of the driver as they tilt their head to sweep them head to toe. ‘Relax, I pick up people from outside the pleasure houses everyday. How you spend your credits is none of my business. Hop in.’

She leans forward in her seat. ‘We weren’t…’

‘What ever you say, sweetheart. Where do you wanna go?’

‘Imperial Palace please?’

‘Scan away and we’ll get going.’ She sits back as the credits are transferred with a beep, staring out of the window to convince herself they’re moving as they slide smoothly through the air. A crisscross of speeders weave silently above and below them, the feel of being at the center of a swarm of insects moving towards their own purposes.

They’re deposited on a bright plaza, blinded by the comparative glare of the increased elevation. 

‘Can we go inside?’

‘Parts of it, I think. The rest was closed off at the end of its Imperial occupation.’

‘What happened here?’ She stills, the dark shape of it hanging in the distance, the air tensed like hot skin around a wound.

‘A Jedi massacre. Many Force users died here. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I brought you here.’ She grabs his arm and turns to him.

‘I can feel it, in the air. I can tell. Can you feel it?’

‘I can. Do you want to leave?’

‘No, I want to see it.’

‘Are you sure?’ He squints at her.

‘They died here, the least we can do is acknowledge them.’ He nods and they walk slowly towards the building, through a miasma that clings at their limbs, like wading through freezing water. Ahead children clamber over the remains of stone parapets, the chunks smoothed over time by other feet like theirs. ‘They don’t feel it.’ She smiles as one points their way and jumps back into the clump of tiny bodies, scattering like ants. 

‘It’s a Force memory. They can imprint on places where great upheavals have taken place. Happiness, fear, any strong emotion felt by many Force users, the place remembers it. You have to be Force sensitive to truly pick up on it. It’s probably part of the reason it remains mostly unused.’ She nods, watching the shadow of her footsteps shorten as they step into the shade of the building. ‘Space is at a premium here. There’s a reason they haven’t built over it. We don’t have to go inside.’

‘I doubt we’ll come back here again. I need to see it.’ 

She nods at the elderly Calamarian sat at the doorway. He pushes himself up slightly in acknowledgment before sinking back down to watch the skies. They turn the corner into a museum of sorts, saber hilts and model temples encased behind glass. She presses her hand to the casing.

‘It’s dead', she frowns, cupping her hands to her face to stare at the gilded hilt on its velvet stand.

‘It’s a replica. They’re making an effort to remember the history of the place, but any sabers here were ritualistically destroyed.’ Next to a few they spot cards detailing their owners, some sit unlabelled, their individual details recreated or reimagined, painstakingly burnished. ‘If you destroy a saber, you destroy what was left of the user. They rarely change hands willingly.’

‘Luke gave me his.’

‘He did, and it was his father’s before that.’

‘Vader.’

‘He wasn’t Vader yet, but yes.’

‘No wonder you wanted it so badly.’

They walk through the few publicly accessible hallways that loop around the edge of the Palace. Each connected room is hung with tapestries attempting to tell through imperfect collage the storied history of the place. Jedi, picked out in tasteful silhouette against a backdrop of trees which once lined the plaza.

‘What did they do here?’

‘Jedi used to hold a lot of political power. They helped to advise Coruscant and the rest of the Galaxy in times of trouble. This place housed a Jedi temple and an academy, at one point the largest repository of Jedi knowledge in the Galaxy.’

‘What happened to it all?’

‘Burned mostly. Some Jedi tried to salvage and rebuild what they could.’

‘Luke showed me what he had. A half dozen dusty volumes houses in a tree.’

‘That tree used to grow here. Along with many others like it.’

‘Is this all there is?’ Their way is blocked by a tastefully carved decoration pointing them back into the light. She stands, nose to the wall that cuts across their path. ‘There’s something dark back there, underneath us.’

‘Sith Holocrons were kept here, when Palpatine ruled Coruscant.’ She presses her ear to the stone and looks at him. ‘They were used to store Sith knowledge and wisdom.’

‘Who keeps it now?’

‘Snoke had a home planet. I don’t know where it is, but there’s a chance they’re still there. It takes a Force user to activate them. I don’t know if there are any Sith left to try. Some of the Sith texts are known, but they’re about as dry as the Jedi ones.’

‘You’ve read them?’

‘The ones Snoke thought me worthy enough to read. Not that many.’ He takes her shoulder and guides them into the light and only the stone balcony that leads them back to their starting point. 

‘I never really asked what your life was like, before.’ Shadows of stone pillars cut across her vision, she closes her eyes to keep her balance. 

‘A lot of training, lessons that seemed to make less and less sense the more I tried to understand them. It felt like I was expending all my energy and being slowly pushed back upstream.’

‘Did you ever believe it all?’

‘I tried to. I believed in what he promised me and that it was my weakness that was keeping me from it.’

‘What changed your mind?’

‘Time. I started to realise he was just as lost as I was. He told me killing my past would finally set me free. When it didn’t there were just more excuses, I’d still failed him somehow and I always would. Then you offered me a different path, the first person to do that and mean it. What was your life like before?’

She puffs out heavily as they descend the stone steps back onto the plaza with a wave to the still seated manager of the place. ‘I was either burning up trying to haul junk out of the sand or freezing half to death. It’s incredibly boring nearly dying every day. If I didn’t count the days they’d have merged into one long string of grainy rations and slowly diminishing salvage. I had a few years left before I wouldn’t be able to scrape together enough for a days food, then that would have been it.’

‘Would you have left?’ He steers them to a bench, shaded yet no less hot for it. 

‘Would you, when it became impossible to endure any more?’

‘Whenever you think you can’t take it anymore, your body always has a little bit more.’

‘Yeah, I know that one.’ A breeze they can’t feel works on the trees around them, noise like a quiet sigh. ‘What now?’ 

‘Are you ready to leave?’

‘I can feel it on my skin. It’s like I can taste it on the air now.’

‘We could go back to the ship and change? We don’t have to stay planetside until the meeting if you don’t want to.’

‘You’re going to have to drag me back, but yes, I want to get off Coruscant for a few hours.’

‘We can do that.’

They pick their way to another of the enumerable speeders and exchange a few more of their credits to take them to the port. They wait as their ship is plucked from a huge vertical array and placed down for them to alight. They relax into their seats as the silvery atmosphere of the planet is replaced by dark space. Her arms coil around his shoulders.

‘I’m going to change and try to scrub that feeling from my skin. Shall we just drift for a few hours?’ He nods against her arms, bending to set them on a meandering path around the planet as her footsteps recede behind him. He watches the slow progress of their ship marker inch along its trajectory, the slow turn of the planet filling the viewscreen. 

She’d felt it, stronger than he had. She walked as if she was laden with a fully-stocked pack, like she was buckling under the weight of it. He can sense her discomfort now, as she stands under the spray of reclaimed water and wills the feeling away, eyes closed, counting each moment to drag herself forward to a future where she feels herself again. He can sense her count, and fall back to one, like feet giving way under shifting sand. He finds his calm and draws it around himself, so he can give it to her when she’s too exhausted to protest.

She falls asleep on top of the covers, new clothes damp from her skin, her hair drying beside her as if she’s frozen in freefall. Her skin is feverishly hot under his palm. He folds himself to sit by her, reader on his knee, one hand on her ankle like an anchor.

The entertainment district will be easy to spot at night, sparkling like the broken surface of water. They’ll dock and find their mark on one of the low tables near the backrooms, far enough even the perfunctory droid security won’t bother to pass them.  He’ll wake her in a few hours so they can watch the spiderweb of the planet spread out underneath them. She stands at his side as he brings them down, eying the beetle-like ships that scurry across the surface with the itching desire to crush them and hear the crunch of their bodies give way.

They step back into the saccharine heat of the place, billions of bodies expending their heat to be trapped in the thick false atmosphere. They walk in the current of lifeforms streaming into the place, a helmeted police officer cranes their chin over the throng, checking the time on their wrist with a lazy flick and a tiny stomp of annoyance.

They find her easily, turning something in her hand and casting unseeing eyes around the bar. They slide into the seats opposite her and bristle as she turns to them with a scoff. 

‘Hmm. I wondered if it was going to be you to show up. I’d recognize that silhouette anywhere. So this is who'd been haunting us, a Knight and his sand rat girlfriend.’ She leans back to snag a passing server by the elbow and press them for another drink, laughing at Rey where she instantly freezes, stilling her breathing. Her face swings heavily towards his direction, eyebrow quirking. 'Working on your anger management I see. Keep it up.' She laughs, the sounds rumbling at the back of her throat wetly. ‘Don’t look so shocked, do you really think no one would put two and two together. I wouldn’t be in the position I am today if I was that stupid.’ 

They stare at each other for the few seconds it takes the server to return with a drink, clearly already having anticipating her want and having prepped it for her to shorten the window of time they’re required to stay in her presence. She leans back in her chair, nudging her drink around with her fingertips, condensation trickling down in rushes at each halting lurch against the sticky steel surface. She scoops it up in one hand, stretching the other behind her back and taking a deep swig, the deep color dying her lips a deathly gray in the dim light.

‘You don’t have to worry about me telling anyone.’ She fans her open jacket with her hand, collar unbuttoned to her collarbones. ‘Tomorrow morning I’m to be put on a ship for redeployment. A craft a few months away from being officially decommissioned, we all know how that goes…’

They sit, Rey leaning and then instantly removing her arms from the tacky tabletop. ‘You could come with us.’ Rey’s brow furrows at her laugh, loud enough faces flash in her peripheral vision, tilted in curiosity before turning back to their parties with a shake of their head at the noise intruding on their fragile sense of anonymity.

‘That wasn’t the offer extended to me, and you’re in no position to make those kinds of promises. Your esteemed General gave me the opportunity to tell what I know and get some answers to the questions I’ve been harboring for years. She did this with the knowledge that there will be no loose ends to worry about after tonight. It’s best for us all to follow in her example.’

‘Why do you even care about talking to us if you’re sure you’re going to die?’

She proffers the deposited drink in Rey’s direction, shrugging off her refusal with a spasm of muscles tensing and relaxing. ‘Academic curiosity, I suppose. The desire for closure. Good old fashioned vindictiveness. You choose.’

‘I don’t understand, don’t you believe in their cause?’

She snorts into her drink. ‘What cause? This was my career. I was lead into this work fresh out of the academy. To be put in charge of such a pivotal sector of the Order, what door would that not open for me? Of course it never crossed my mind that two people could walk in and destroy everything I’d built over the last decade. Call that my narrow mindedness. How did you do it anyway? I saw a clip of you two arriving. Your clearance checked out so it was pure chance I was even looking. Something told me I should pay attention to you. I had a hunch then, glad to see if confirmed, even under these circumstances. Smoke?’ Grey tendrils crawl from her lazily curled fingers, disappearing into the haze that hangs over the place. ‘Course not. You two are straightedge, other than the fucking.’ She straightens the pack on the table, a sneer crawling across her mouth as they stiffen in embarrassment. ‘What are you embarrassed about, who would I tell?’ She takes a drag that rumbles in her throat. ‘Or do you think people don’t know? I thought you two were smart.’ She jabs the smoldering end in their direction.

Rey watches little flakes of ash swing their way to the tabletop before meeting her eye, watching her as she turns to laugh over her shoulder. 

‘What did you want to tell us?’ She smiles at Rey as Ben speaks, ashing her cigarette before turning her eyes to him.

‘Only what you already know, Knight. They have no leader. The Supreme Leader is gone, thanks to you?’ She points the burning point at him in question, swinging it around to her mouth as his silence answers her. ‘Nobody has been able to take up the mantel, or I should say, nobody wants to.’ The smoke curls between her teeth as she speaks in curled fingers. ‘Hux is nothing but a genocidal tyrant, he’s spent long enough shitting on every other General in the force that he has no allies, and nobody else is stupid enough to put that kind of target on their back. And now they’ve put a distance between themselves and the Sith contingent that made up their chief disciplinary force, people are starting to question what the point of if all was beyond wanton destruction.’

‘Surely someone must want that kind of power.’

She leans on the table, close enough they can see the sheen of sweat across the pale skin not covered by the usual high collar. ‘We’re not talking power, sweetness. We’re talking about going down with the ship. Our arsenal is shrinking, we no longer have the technology to threaten planets en-masse. The bulk of the credits that remain after costly manned occupation were being funneled into weapons projects, now destroyed. It comes down to people, people who are increasingly unwilling to join us without coercion. We’re being pushed out of every stronghold. We can’t replenish out losses. Who would want to the person to ratify a bill of forced conscription? Unless a leader is found, that’s the only way the Order could keep any influence. How about it, Supreme Leader?’ Her eyes flit between then, shining with drink. ‘You speak their language, you could return and lead them into a new era.’ 

‘I think a few people would have something to say about that', he says, scanning through the crowd as a reflex. 

‘So you’ve thought about it then, interesting. Does your girl here know that?’

‘Would it save you if you brought him back?’

She smiles indulgently at Rey, a flash of white teeth peeking through the smoke. ‘Potentially. But it won’t happen.’ She turns to him once more. ‘If you wanted to lead, you’d have taken control back on the Supremacy, or hell, before that. But if you had, she’d have never forgiven you. It’s sweet in a way, you destroyed it all for her. Do you think that’s a comfort to all those that died because of it, that it was all for love?’

‘What did you want to know from us?’ he asks, tone icy. 

‘Most of it you’ve answered already. I wanted to know what it was that turned you. I didn’t think it could be something so simple and puerile as sex. We were under the impression you’d burned that out of you long ago.’

‘Are you quite done?’

‘Not even close. You see we were of the opinion that your Knight here was something of a monk. Nobody turned his eye, although many tried. Hard to tell under the mask though. The going consensus was that he got what he needed taking the blood of others, that there must have been some kind of bodily satisfaction it it. Were we right?’

‘I’m not willing to have this conversation.’

‘Willing!’ She slaps her hand down on the tabletop, glasses rattle in a sudden shower and a moat of cloudy purple alcohol finds the skin of her forearm and spreads itself along it hungrily. Her fingernails whiten as she drags her hand back towards her, flexing the sting from her palm. ‘I die tomorrow. Your boss promised me that in return for what I know, you would tell me what I want to know. Do I need to tell her that we don’t have a deal and I’ll return with what I know just to spite you both? Are we not here to have a polite, open conversation?’

‘I don’t know if I would describe this conversation as polite, Amatha.’

‘So you do know my name. And I thought you barely knew I existed', she drawls, eyes boring into his, refusing to be the first one to think.

‘What do you want to know?’ 

She watches disdain melt into affected boredom on the lady’s face. ‘How did you do it?’

‘How do I know if we tell you that it won’t make it back to the Order?’ Rey asks, eyeing her painted nails as they drum on the table.

‘You have my word, but since that clearly means so little to you, you can kill me yourself if you like. Just let me enjoy my evening before you do.’

‘I’m not going to kill you.’

‘Still unwilling to get your hands dirty, Jedi?' Annoyance itches at the back of her neck, the word constantly bandied around in place of her name. Not even worth asking for in passing. 'Are you not aware of the fallout from your little stunt? Although I guess I should thank you for taking that bitch Wilde down with you.’

‘Of course I’m aware, I'm not an idiot. I knew as soon as I did it.’

‘So it was you? Interesting.’ She shakes her communicator down her wrist, unclipping it and setting it neatly down between them, jerking her head for Rey to take it. 

Rey takes it with a sigh, removing the battery and sliding it into her pocket before dumping the gutted remains into one of the half-drunk beverages crowding the table. ‘What, did you think I couldn’t?’

She leans into Rey’s space, her breath hot, smoky and sickly sweet in a nauseating mix. ‘I mean this sincerely, I have no idea who you are, hun.’

‘Don’t call me that', she hisses.

Amatha leans back, stretching her arms above her head. ‘She’s a mean one, I like her. I get what you see in her.’

‘Don’t talk about me as if I’m not even here. Whoever you think you are, if we leave this place you’ll still die with questions digging at your brain before the worms do. Maybe someone will slip something into your drink, stab you with poison as they brush past you. They’ll sweep you away with the rest of the drunks.’

‘You’re threatening me. I had no idea I’d be spoiled so on my last night in the Galaxy. Anything else you’d like to give me from that sweet mouth of yours?’ Rey presses her palms against her knees as anger pushes up her throat, bitter and heavy. She watches the lady light another cigarette, quirking her brow at Rey, and smiling around the filter. ‘Don’t look at me like you’re trying to boil my brain in my skull.’

‘If I wanted to do that, you’d be screaming on the floor.’

‘Oh really? Have you ever tried? There’s a guy over there with his greasy hands all over a server. See if you can pop his brain like a bottle.’ Rey follows her line of sight to the man, pressing his body against a server who’s brushing his hands away with a painted on smile. A bright and panicked fear response. ‘Make the Galaxy a better place and improve my evening while you’re at it.’

‘That’s enough.’ His voice breaks the hold her eyes have on the server. 

‘What? You know she could do it. Don’t you want to see if he’ll piss himself when his eyes slide down his cheeks like slugs?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Too public? Maybe we go to the backrooms. Even the droids don’t patrol back there. Whatever’s going on behind those curtains happens outside of the laws that bind this universe. Anything can be bought and sold back there. Shall we see who we can find? There’s a fair few familiar faces around tonight. Might bump into an old friend.’

‘Ask what you want to ask, Amatha.’

‘Fine, I will. Who are you?’

‘You know who I am', he replies, rolling his eyes and gesturing for a drink, needing something to hold, something tactile to cut through the mounting desire to squeeze her throat next time she takes a sip. Let her look around the room with the knowledge scraping in her mind that he could end her life with a blink.

‘No, who are you really? How do you know the General? Who are you that Snoke threw everything into taking and training you?’

‘He recognized my power in the Force.’ Rey is still at his side, eyes flitting between the two of them as he chooses his words carefully. 

‘Bullshit. He had a whole Galaxy of Force users to choose from, what makes you special?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I know you’re lying. If you’re nobody, there’d have been no reason to hide it. You’d have worn that badge with pride. You’re somebody you’re ashamed of.’

‘Stop this.’

She tears her gaze from Ben, any attempt at frivolity gone. ‘I’m not talking to you, scavenger. See I know who you are, we all do. You’re a nobody who somehow stumbled into this mess instead of dying in the sand a shriveled husk like you were supposed to. He’s something else.’

‘If I tell you will you stop insulting us every other breath?’ Rey takes the drink that has been deposited on their table, server already having disappeared into the crowd. 

‘Maybe. So you know?’ Amatha leans her head on her palm, tracking the bottle with her eyes as Rey takes a sip, flashing her a quick sickly smile.

‘Of course I know.’

‘Is that why you thought you could turn him? You can tell me, it's just us girls.’

‘We’re leaving.’ Rey pushes to stand but feels a hand press over hers, forcing her skin flat into the sticky tabletop, lit cigarette raining tiny spots of ash on her skin.

‘You’ll leave when I’ve had my drinks and enjoyed this evening and the droids come around to push us from this table. Until then, you answer my questions and I’ll answer yours.’

‘Is the Order falling?’ Rey says lowly.

‘Yes, rapidly. Who is he?’

‘How long before it falls apart?’

‘A few months at most. Our alliance with the Core is just lip-service, they’re not committing too much because they know what’s coming. Who is he?’ She digs her fingernails into Rey’s skin, boring her eyes into hers.

‘Ben Solo.’

She swings her gaze back to him as he speaks, her grip on Rey faltering. ‘Of the Organa Solos?’ Her eyes go wide at his nod. ‘Born on the day democracy was officially returned to the Galaxy. No wonder he wanted to keep you, Gods.’

‘Are you happy now?’ Ben asks, drumming his fingers on the table. 

‘How do you know that?’ Rey asks, sinking back into her seat, too tired to stand. 

‘How does anyone? His parents helped topple the Empire and were honored for it. Your boyfriend’s famous. Everyone knows who he is. Does she not know?’

‘Guess I’m not everyone.’

‘How could you not know?’

‘I knew him as Han Solo’s son, the smuggler.’

‘And the rest. Do you know him?’

‘I don’t', Rey gasps, exhaustion of the place grating at her. 'What else do you want to know?’

‘Fine, I guess if we’re on the clock, how did you get onto the base?’

‘Stole clearance codes from an Order computer, overrode the surveillance and breached the biometric security keeping the scientists as prisoners. Then fried your computer network on the way out', she rattles off, tonelessly. 

‘If you could do that, why didn’t you just board a Star Destroyer and cripple every ship in the fleet?’

‘It’s not what we were asked to do.’

‘Orders from the General. Does she know the kind of weapons she has at her disposal?’

‘I’m careful to ensure that she isn’t', Rey replies, eyes lifting to the ceiling, studded through with a constellation of LEDs. 

‘Smart thing, too. I don’t think she’d be able to stop herself from showing that hand. You’d have a target on your backs the size of a sun. I’ll ask again, have you two ever considered joining the Order? Or rejoining in your case…’

‘So you’re asking me now?’ Rey huffs, working her arms back into her jacket. 

‘I underestimated you, sweetness. But I was only playing the role you wanted me to.’

‘I have no interest in joining you. You bring pain everywhere you go.’

‘Shame. With power like that, you could take whatever you wanted from the Universe.’

‘I just want to be left alone.’

‘Sorry, but I doubt you’ll ever get that. If people know, they’ll always be something they want from you.’

‘Which is why I don’t want anyone to know.’

‘It’s a little late for that', she waves one lightly shaking hand over their table, over the situation that seemingly only exists to highlight how far they'd both failed in this regard. 'Oh, don’t look at me like that, there’s nobody I could tell that would even believe me. If that’s what you truly want all you can do is run away now and hope the Universe implodes around you and that everyone you know turns to dust. It’s the only way you’ll be free.’

‘You’re a very pessimistic person.’

‘Yeah well, being condemned will do that to a person. Ask your boy here.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ 

‘Don’t start with the naive act again. You’re shacking up with a war criminal, sweet.’

‘Stop talking to me like that.’

‘Come and make me, honey. I bet you’re a great fuck when you’re angry.’ She takes a drag and blows the stream across the table in a line quavering with laughter. 

‘Tell me about the bargain with Coruscant', Ben cuts in, dragging them back on topic, mentally counting down the seconds until they can leave the woman and the table behind, work on trying to push out her words that dig like barbs into their skin. 

‘You already know it all. It will be the jewel in the new Empire for the small price of a new fleet. What a prize. Anything else?’

‘What’s the sentiment on Coruscant?’

‘It’ll blow over like it always does. Keeping the Order close helps them to convince themselves that they’re too weak for anything significant to impact the core. The people here can recognize an empty promise a mile away, they’re what pass for currency in these parts. Are you going to kill me now, or you going to let your girlfriend do it?’

‘Do it yourself.’ She nods thoughtfully and leans back in her chair, watching them both as they stand to leave. 

‘You’re not going to leave me with something to remember you by, sweetness?’ She tracks Rey with her eyes as she moves behind her, trailing her fingers down her outstretched arm to take the cigarette from her fingers. Her heartbeat thuds against Rey’s fingers where she holds her hot skin, her fingers squeezing at the nape of her neck as she crushes the lit tip into her palm. Her cry is lost to the din of the club as they weave their way back towards the door. 

‘Get me off this planet.’

They head straight to the dock in silence, any novelty in the weaving snake of bodies evaporated away in the still air. She can’t get any words out through the kaleidescope of images spinning in her mind, too quick to focus on anything other than the creeping feeling of dread turning to nausea in her throat. Her limbs move through the motions of getting them up in the air. Nobody runs to intercept them, even as they pull up into the atmosphere and see the chemical orange leech from their surroundings. She realizes she’s holding her breath when her vision begins to spot and she curls over the arm of the pilots seat, feeling it press against her ribs. 

‘I shouldn’t have done that.’ 

‘Probably not, but she’s not lying when she says there’s no-one she could tell.’ She feels his fingers in her hair, and concentrates on their slow drag against her scalp. 

‘Someone could have seen.’

‘Even if they did, it’s hardly the worst thing that’s happened there tonight. They’ve got bigger things to worry about. I promise you, its fine.’ 

‘I hurt her.’

‘She deserved much worse.’

‘That’s not who I am.’

‘That’s why you feel bad about it. Rey look at me.’ He kneels to get in her line of sight, brushing her damp cheeks and kissing at her salty skin. ‘You’re still a good person, you just got angry. You offered her a way out and she wouldn’t take it. You did more for her than anyone else has.’

‘She’s going to die because of what we did.’

‘No, she’s going to die because that’s how they ensure success and obedience, on threat of death. You don’t have anything to do with that.’

‘Is there nothing we can do?’

‘Not for her, I’m sorry.’ He folds himself over her as she cries, ignoring the ache in his knees to stroke at her back until they quiet and eventually peter off into numb acceptance. He helps her to the kitchen where they sit at their tiny table, a cup of tea in front of them both. She speaks into the ship as she curls her fingers around her drink.

‘You knew her?’

‘Not really. She was head of weapons research. Her work rarely overlapped with mine, but I was there in the room when she argued with the other Generals trying to secure funding for the project.’

‘Do you think she’ll try to tell anyone who you are?’

‘She won’t have a chance. From the sweating and the tremor, she’d already been poisoned before we even sat down.’

‘You didn’t say anything.’

‘By the time symptoms appear, the damage is already done. I didn’t see the point in ruining her last few hours.’  She presses her thumbs at the bridge of her nose and presses the flesh there violently.

He scoops her up and takes her to bed, doubling back to set their course for the base. When he turns she’s in the doorway, her face in shadow.

‘She was right, you know. If we want to be free, we should just run and let it run its course.’

He speaks carefully, frozen to the spot, as if the eyes of the entire Universe are watching him inch his way through their conversation. ‘That could be months, Rey.’

‘We have a ship and credits. We could hide somewhere they won’t be able to find us.’

He slowly steps his way over, movement smooth and controlled. ‘We’d have to come back at some point. We’d be known for leaving the Resistance when they need us most.’

Her eyes shine where he tips her face to his. ‘We don’t owe them our lives.’

‘We do. We’d have been dead months ago without them.’

‘If we go back we’ll be stuck there. They’re not going to risk sending us out again. Our ship will be put in storage to rust with the others.’

‘I know, but it won’t be forever. We’ll get it back once it’s all over.’

‘If we survive it.’ He holds her trembling body against his as the ship hums around them. 

Chapter Text

The General finds him as Rey is off exploring the base. She’d awoken with the need to map every inch of it, peer into every shadow at what might be lurking there. 

He watches the door, wondering if she’ll work up the courage to knock. Whatever sense of duty had compelled her to cross the base, seek out the room they'd made pains to obscure, clearly it had slipped away at one of the many turns. So she paces, rubbing her arms through her thick jacket as she hesitates and doubles back on herself. After the third loop she makes, failing to tune out the scrape of her shoes on the concrete, he opens the door to the back of her head, graying hair pulled round in a looping braid. 

‘May I speak with you?’ He nods, stepping into the cold of the hallway and the relative safety of its bland anonymity. She glances at the goosebumps on his arms but says nothing. ‘I understand your desire to be out of the way, but did you really have to choose an old storage room of all places? There’s a whole base you could have used…’ She chides, scanning their corridor, little more than a collection of doors propped open, items spilling onto the floor. If she looked closer, she would see the inroads they'd carved into each room in turn, working back through the squeezing paths they made in an increasingly frenzied search for something undefinable and absent. Some object in the accumulation that everyone else must have, some thing that tells them that this is a home that welcomes them. If it's on the base, she'll find it. More likely, he'll meet her at the conclusion of her search and say nothing. There's nothing to say.

‘Is there something that couldn't wait? We’re scheduled to meet later for a debrief.’

She brings her attention back to him, at a point just below his chin. ‘Yes, you are. It’s not that.’ She sucks in a breath, letting out slowly. ‘I wanted to ask if you would be willing to share information you may have on the Order?’

He stares down at her forehead, lined and dulled by time and a life almost entirely devoid of sunlight. ‘I have been, have I not?’ he asks at a slow and careful pace. It shouldn't hurt. The conversation is an inevitability, all he has to do is say his lines. 

‘You have, you’ve so far been very cooperative.'

'So far?' he asks with a smile, mostly smothering his chuckle as she sinks a little onto her heels before catching herself.

'We are always desperate for any information we can get. Your … position within the Order, I believe you may be able to help shed some much needed light on their methods of operation.’

He blinks, shoving icy hands into his pockets. ‘I don’t think you understand what my position was within the Order.’ 

‘I don’t. But I want to.’

‘Because it could be strategically useful.’

‘Because you’re my son.’ She holds his gaze, the word like a gauntlet thrown down between them. ‘Are you aware of the rumors that are circulating about you?’

His stomach sinks, falling back into the safety of sarcasm. ‘You’d have to be more specific than that.’

‘People are coming to realize that you’re not dead, and some of them are also beginning to connect us together. They believe I sent you to the Order, that that’s why you’re working with us now.’ It's not hard to imagine these "people", swarming between the labyrinthine walls, trying to reconcile the image of their beloved leader with her estrangement from her son. In her position, he would be similarly reluctant to set them straight in that assumption. There's a viciousness to it, even if borrowed, that would serve anyone in her place. 

‘Do you wish you did?’ He looks down his nose at her, watching her twist her hands together, eyes on his bare feet, now numb from the cold. 

‘What did you say?’

‘Are you disappointed that it didn't occur to you when I was young enough for you to act on it? Or are you trying to tell me you allowed it to happen? That’s why you didn’t come for me.’

It's gratifying in a way to see her deflate, swaying on her feet in front of him. ‘I tried to. Believe me, I tried. By the time I realised what was happening you were under Snoke’s control. I couldn’t get close to you. I have spent every day since then regretting what I didn’t do and wishing you’d come back to me.’

'I was a child. Your child.'

'I know. And I failed you. I failed to do the one thing that you truly needed me for. I couldn't protect you.'

'Well I don't need your protection now. I will continue to work with you. I'll share what I know, just ensure I don’t have to sit in front of a panel of my accusers to do it. Do what you want with the rumors, you already use us to your own ends, it makes no difference to me. But beyond that I want to be left alone. Don't make me ask you again.’

‘I understand.’ She places her hand on his arm as he turns to go and his vision goes distant. ‘How is Rey doing?’

‘She’s surviving.’

‘She’s good at that.’ 

‘How would you know?’ He slinks back into the refuge of his room, letting the door do the work of holding him upright as the General’s footsteps recede into the distance, heartbeat pounding in his ears as the heat begins carving its way back through his veins. 

‘Finn!’ She spots him as she rounds the corner into the mess hall, having scoped out a few items to lift for their room. She pulls him stuttering into a hug. ‘I’m so glad to see you. You’re out of the infirmary.’ She pulls back to scan him head to toe, happy to see him practically unchanged from the version she has of him in her mind, save for the usual smothering layers that lend everyone on the base a toddler-esque waddle. The same slightly dazed smile to be rubbing shoulders with the Resistance, a whispered legend unexpectantly made flesh, folding him in without a blink.

‘Yeah, good as new. Back to my usual self again, although I did get a wicked scar out of it.' It's inevitable it would happen, pulled back to Starkiller, trying to wrench his limp body from the snow. It's a conversation that needs to happen, but her mind skids on where to start, quickly followed by her mouth, stumbling over some rebuttal she's trying to take back before it's even formed. 'Look, its uhh. It's good to see you. I heard you were back, I was wondering when we'd bump into each other. You're not avoiding me, are you?'

'No,' she gasps at her feet, before forcing her face up to meet his eye. 'No, I'm not avoiding you. I only officially got here a couple of days ago. The General's been keeping me busy.'

'So I hear. Big secret. Trouble is around here, the bigger the secret it only makes people work harder to uncover it.'

'Well then they must love me,' she chuckles, mouth dry as he steps them both of out the way to let someone past. 

'Let's just say you've been keeping them busy.'

'Look, Finn. I should have told you', she begins, stomach twisting with shame that it hadn’t been her to tell him that she’d come back to them. That he’d have to hear it through someone else, like he’s any other anonymous Resistance fighter and not her first true friend. That she hadn't even tried to explain her reappearance, justify the drastic change in her allegiance. Her new teammate, the man who had cut him down in the snow to get to her. 

‘Hey, it’s cool. A lot has happened with me too. I’ve got some time, do you want to come sit?’

He guides her to take a seat at the end of a long bench table in the mess. A few figures move around their periphery, but it’s otherwise empty and cavernously echoing as she leans in close to whisper across the table. ‘Where is everyone?’ It’s the first time she’s properly seen the base during daytime, a calm cool light suffusing it, exposing every scuffed and slightly grimy surface. Meeting Leia on the base had seen the lady oddly diminished as people hover around her loosely at a distance. Shrunken by the sprawling base, as if some quality in the air is squeezing her. 

‘You don’t know?’

‘I don’t talk much with Leia. She tells me where to go and I go. I know the Resistance are trying to weaken the Order now they’re overextending themselves…’ The same closing window of opportunity that had eyes turn to them, seeking the impossible, vaguely resentful when it's delivered.

'Trying being the word. Mostly we're just trying to survive.'

'Is there some meeting I'm not permitted to know about?'

'Meeting? No, this is just... This is pretty much everyone.'

'I don't understand...' She hides behind the lie of it, having watched the decimation of their force in near silence. 

'A lot happened while you were away. I nearly got myself killed. Again, I should say. Although I'd hope at least some people would find my actions pretty heroic.' He aims a quick wave at someone passing, shaking off her look with a shrug.

'What did you do that some people would describe as pretty heroic?' she asks with a sneer.

'Mock me all you want. I did what I had to do. What do you know, exactly?'

'I've spent the last few months running and hiding. Not a while lot.'

‘Then allow me to catch you up. Do you want a drink or something? There's caff. There's... There's caff.'

She snorts. 'I think I'll pass. If I drink anymore of that stuff I think my heart will explode.'

'Well we've got a pretty competent medical staff at least, so they've got you covered. Back in a sec.'

She takes in the room in the few moments he's gone. A hall designed to comfortably fit hundreds, dotted here and there with the odd body, nervously coughing in the oppressive silence. The only real sign of life comes in the form of a figure barging through the door to the kitchen to swap out the flask of caff for a new one, setting it onto the table with a clang. He smoothly continues his lapsed conversation, empty one swinging from his arm, any response lost as the door swings shut behind him. 

'You sure you don't want some? It's hot at least...'

'Finn.'

'Right, catching you up.' He takes a sip, eyes roving around the room in a swift pleading search for anyone more competent to take on the task, settling back on her as she narrows her eyes at him. 'So after Starkiller was destroyed, we were being trailed by the First Order through lightspeed. When I woke up, you were already gone and we were on the run. We didn’t know they’d developed active tracking until we were within shouting distance of their entire fleet and running on fumes.'

'I thought it was impossible.'

'Yeah well, so did we. We'd jump to lightspeed, have a few seconds when we got out the other sides and then boom, there they were. Just a matter of time before we ran out of fuel and that would be that. I was part of a team trying to disable it when we were betrayed. Just me and Rose, really. Have you met Rose?'

'I haven't met anyone really. Mostly I've just been stared at.'

'You're a new face. They'll move on when someone newer joins. People are, there's slowly more of us. A few more we need to go get. It's one of the better jobs around here.'

'I bet', she swallows. 

'We lost most of our fleet and 90% of our people trying to escape. When the firing stopped, Vice Admiral Holdo sacrificed herself to destroy their fleet and give us time to get to safety. By that point, this is all that was left.’ Not coincidence then, that the echoing hallways remind her of the outpost that had been her temporary home, with the same eerie feeling of sudden depopulation. Only this time she can’t wrap up her assumption as simple "re-deployment". They are simply gone, their remains drifting in the vacuum of space or burning up in the atmosphere above Crait.

‘I had no idea.’ She sinks into her seat, head falling in her hands. ‘I should have been there.’

She hears him move, sees the shadow of his arm as he extends it, wisely holding off on touching her. ‘Rey, you were trying to find Luke. At the General’s orders.’

‘But I could have helped’, she protests, hands hanging weakly on the table outside the cuffs of her borrowed jacket as she lifts her face to his. 

‘You were doing what Leia asked you to do. You didn’t know.’

‘This is really everyone?’ She reaches out to sense the map of live forms dotted loosely around the base, like a weak net over the ice planet. 

‘We still have hope. We have more than we would have done. There’s still a way to rid the Universe of the First Order, finish what they died for. We have you to thank for that.’

‘I should never have left you.’

‘You helped take out Snoke. Right now the Order is scrambling with half their fleet destroyed, they're losing what footing they had. And every place they turn they’re being pursued by their shadow.’

‘I was supposed to bring back Luke.’

‘Luke didn’t want to come back. That’s not your fault.’

‘Instead I went off on my own, convinced I’d be able to use my non-existent skills of persuasion to bring Kylo Ren round to the light.’

‘Didn’t you?’ She swallows around a lump in her throat. ‘Rey what happened to you?’

‘I found Luke', she sighs, exhaustion pressing her down into the stiff bench. 'You're right, there's nothing I could have said to him to persuade him to come back and help. I didn't want to believe it, I didn't want to be believe that we'd done so much and he couldn't even consider helping us. He wouldn't even tell me why, so I had to find out myself. That's when I went to the Supremacy.'

'You were on the Supremacy?'

'I saw them picking off the transports. I went to him, he took me to Snoke and Snoke made me watch as one by one they disappeared, knowing on every one there were the people I said I'd help and failed. You were on one of them, Leia...'

'Actually, I was on the Supremacy, too. Who knew we were that close to each other.'

'I wish I'd known, it would have been nice to know that', she smiles dimly. 'Snoke gave him an ultimatum, to kill me and end the Jedi for good. Instead he turned on his master to save me. He called off the attack on the transports. It was the last thing he did, he gave the order to stop firing.'

'Ren did?'

'Well Snoke was dead. It's not like they would have listened to me. After that point, all I could do was run. We took Snoke’s escape pod and crashed on a moon not far from Crait. I didn’t know what had happened to the Resistance, the last I saw was transports being picked off one by one. I ran and I hid. The First Order were quick to label Ren a traitor and me alongside him.’

‘I know who we have to thank for that.’

‘I waited until the Order had most likely moved further afield, repaired an old abandoned shuttle to get off planet, trading it for a clean ship and enough credits to keep moving. I’d still be running if Leia hadn’t found me.’

‘Why didn’t you reach out?’ To me. She can read the sadness in the tilt of his eyes, still trying to stay open, impassive and supportive. As if she deserves it.

‘I wanted to. But I thought if anyone came close, they’d have a target on their back. I got so used to seeing myself on the holonet if I close my eyes I can still see it, the image they pulled from the footage. How could I risk putting that on anyone? But Leia made it clear that if I didn’t come back she would find me again. From that point I've pretty much been at her beck and call. Do what she wants, if not, all it would take is one anonymous message and I'd be in a cell, awaiting trial.’

'I'm sure that's not why she wants you back?'

'It's the reality of it. It's pretty much what I signed up for bringing him back.'

‘Do you not want to be back?’

‘I do. I just don’t know how safe it is.’

‘Because of him?’

She screws her eyes shut, head pounding. ‘Because of me.’ His hand finds hers and squeezes it. She’s grateful he doesn’t argue the point with her, she couldn't handle him lying to her face. He's not immune to the veiled fear in which people talk of them, the wide berth they give them, the fact that only Leia seems to want to talk with her directly. 

‘Rey, I want to ask you something. Please just understand I’m trying to make sure my friend is okay. Are you sure you’re safe with him?’

‘I am. But I don’t know how to explain to you how I know.’

‘Try me. I'd like to think I'm pretty understanding.’

‘It’s not that. It’s…’ She concentrates on the comforting warmth of his hand over hers, letting it ground her to a body she feels herself steadily drifting from. ‘I don’t even know how I explain it to myself, if I’m honest. I don’t want you to think I’ve forgotten about what he's done. Not after what he did to you.’

‘Will it help you to talk about it?’

‘I think so?’ She furrows her brow around a tension headache forming behind her eyes. ‘But I don’t want to hurt you.’

‘Hey, it would take more than that to hurt me. I’m okay, I promise. I guess I just want to understand.’

‘Okay.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘What do you know about Snoke?’

‘Only the propaganda. A strong force user, leading the First Order in bringing peace to the galaxy.’

Her mouth pulls into an easy smile, at the smoothness at which he can pull at the thread of his conditioning, dredge the words that had swathed his life to the surface. ‘He was a strong force user. He saw potential in the Skywalker bloodline, the chance to mold a new Vader…’

‘In Ren.’

‘Yes, in Ren.' Her mouth runs dry at her inability to follow his example, say the word that had been the curse that sustained her through countless freezing nights. The word she'd left on the floor in Snoke's chamber, along with a little part of herself. 'He was sent away to train with Luke as a child. Be his apprentice, learn to control this gift he was born with. That's when Snoke found him, began talking to him, infiltrating his mind, slowly turning him to the dark.’

‘You know this from him?’

‘He showed it to me.’ She winces. ‘I can look into his memories.’

‘Like what he did to you?’

She swallows. ‘Yes. But it’s more than that.’

‘What do you mean?’

She gently removes her hands and stuffs them trembling into her lap. ‘We have a Force bond.’ She unfocuses her eyes and tries not to notice him stiffen across from her and suck in a sharp breath. ‘Somehow I think it’s always been there. But practically it means we can access each other's power and bridge our minds.’

‘Is that a good thing?’

‘Good thing or not, as far as I know it can’t be broken.’

‘So you believe it then? That he was manipulated by Snoke. That he tried to make him into a new Vader?’

‘I do. From what Luke said, or didn't say, I think he believes it, too.’

Silence, except for the whirr of the environmental conditioners fighting vainly against the cold. ‘Do you think you’re safe now that Snoke is gone? Is he different?’

‘I don’t know, I didn’t really know him before. But he killed Snoke to save me. I won’t leave him behind.'

She watches him form his face into a false mask of openness, sitting on his hands around an exaggerated shiver and shrugging. ’So you’re staying with us now?’ She nods tightly. ‘Do you want a tour of this ice ball?’ 

‘I’d like that. But right now I’m exhausted. Can I take you up on that soon?’

‘Of course. You won’t struggle to find me. It’s pretty all-hands-on-deck around here. You might even have the pleasure of having me collect your laundry one of these days. Walk you back?’

‘Thank you, I’m okay. I need to start building a map of this place if I’m not going to get lost in this overgrown freezer.’ She stands, making a beeline for the door and breaking into a run as soon as he’s lost from her view.

She makes it back after several wrong turns, bursting through the heavy door and sealing it behind her, hands stinging on the cold metal. Her shoulder flares with pain as she rips off her jacket, letting it slump to the floor and climbing in bed next to him. She rakes her hands over her face before hugging her legs tight to her. 

‘You okay?’ She shakes her head desperately, words dying in her throat, slumping as he puts his arm around her and pulls her to him. ‘Yeah, me too. Who did you get?’ he murmurs into her hair. 

‘Finn.’

‘Was he angry with you?’

‘No, he was just hurt. He doesn’t understand why I didn’t come back. And when I did, why I came back with you.’ She takes in a deep rattling breath. ‘He’s never going to look at me the way he used to.’

‘I don’t think that’s true.’ He pulls the blanket around her knees as she slowly sinks into the mattress, too tired to take off her boots. ‘He’s your friend, that’s not conditional.’ 

‘How do you know that?’ She clings to his shirt as he maneuverer her to a comfortable position, laying her head on the pillow. 

‘I don’t exactly. But I think if he weren’t your friend he wouldn’t feel hurt.’

‘What happened to you?’

‘The General found me', he says over his shoulder, sitting to unlace her boots and pull them off. 'She wants information.’

‘Are you going to give it?’

‘I’ll do my best', he smiles, tossing her boots off the side of the bed. 

‘I miss when things were simple. Back at the cave. When I hated you.’ 

He looks at her, scoffing in indignation. ‘You hated me?’ 

‘No.’ She laughs, winding her arms around his chest, burying her face against his shirt. ‘I guess we should tell the General what we know. I’m surprised she hasn’t asked us already.’

‘Do you want me to do it?’

‘No, but I don’t want to do it either.’

‘I’ll do it. I wasn’t exactly polite when I spoke to her earlier. The least I can be is professional.’

‘This is going so well already.’ She turns over and closes her eyes as he extracts himself to sit at the table, sighing before launching into a comprehensive rundown of everything they spoke about. Tastefully redacted, of course.

The Officer does a double-take as she follows Ben in and the two take in the small sound-dampened room. There’s a recording device under the table, she notes, tiredness tingeing her voice even in his mind.

‘Miss Rey, there is no need for you to be here.’ 

‘Do you have a reason for me to leave?’ She watches him shift on his feet, shuffling a few thin sheets of paper on the table and straightening them. ‘Is this an interrogation?’ 

‘It’s not. But still you may not want to hear what we’re going to be discussing.’

‘There’s nothing you can ask that he wouldn’t tell me anyway.’

‘Still I think it would be best-’

‘Rey stays if she wants to. It doesn’t affect you being able to do your job if your intent is what you say it is.’ The man says nothing, simply sliding into his seat and gesturing for him to do the same. 

‘Please, sit. I want us to be able to have an open conversation.’ He sighs as they stay standing. ‘Look, I’ll be honest with you. I know who you are, I know what you’ve done and on a personal level I don’t think I could ever move past them.’ He stalls for a moment, squaring up his mug before looking upwards to meet Ben’s eyes. ‘But I appreciate your willingness to speak with us. I know you are not the kind of person to be coerced and your work for the Resistance to date has been invaluable. I also know that you know that helping us bring an end to the Order will hasten the day that you are held accountable for your crimes. But I think it counts for something that you’re still willing to do it. I will listen to you and I will tell the General what is relevant. You should know that this conversation is being recorded, but the only person who will have access to it is me. Will you talk with me?’ 

‘If you get a chair for Rey.’

She leans against the table to look at him as the Officer leaves the room, quickly squeezing his hand in hers. Should I go? She asks, watching the door. 

I’d rather you didn’t. But I understand if you want to. She whips her head back to him in confusion, hearing footsteps moving in their direction. She presses his hand to her lips before moving to stand next to him as the man pushes the chair into the room, setting it down in front of her. 

It feels as if the oxygen is slowly being sucked from the room and replaced with their words, ever more specific questions and answers that set off more avenues of questioning like roots into the air. She feels the echo of the headache pressing around his skull like a vice, the temporary relief as he kneads at his temples with his fingertips, too frayed to even consider healing it. She does what she can, infusing her light touch at his knee with some some of her strength, kicking herself as the interviewer appears renewed by Ben’s clarity of speech, the shortening of the pauses that precede each answer. Guilt pushes bile up her throat as she realizes she’s unwittingly extended the already grueling interview. They are all in tacit agreement to ignore the audible rumbling of their stomachs, knowing a pause would make the returning that much more painful.

At length, they are free, unable to pluck any one piece of information from the deluge, so numerous as to become formless. They will come back to them, all three, in their moments of solitude. 

‘What do you need?’ She brackets his face in her palms on her lap, watching his closed lids twitch with stress. She waits as his breaths deepen, swallowing to answer her. 

‘For my brain to quiet. But I don’t have the energy.’ She smooths at his clammy skin, massaging at the base of his neck and the iron muscles there. 

‘I don’t know how to help you.’

‘It’s okay. I’m just grateful you’re still here after that.’ His hand reaches for her wrist, brushing lazily against her skin. 

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

‘Something which continues to surprise me.’ He feels her tense, closing her eyes and then opening them in frustration at the stream of images and senses that swirl to fill the darkness. ‘I’m sorry, I- ‘

‘It’s okay. You just need to sleep.’ She breaths in deeply and tries to find her balance as she feels him go lax against her, body giving in to sleep. She lays his arm down where it lolls against her, pulling a blanket over him, her legs going numb under his weight. 

Her calm evades her, as smooth as it seems on the surface, underneath the churning of stress and borrowed pain bubbles up as soon as her concentration lapses. She blinks at the ceiling in frustration, her past injuries chiming in their own impotent aches so as not to be left out. She breaths and let each throb reach its peak, radiating through her limbs, taking a kind of pleasure in ignoring their pointless alarm and stubbornly take a breath and then another. At some point she sleeps, pushing it all to the background with pure spite.

The General finds Rey as she’s dispassionately selecting what remains from the dinner service.

‘I wondered if I could take a moment of your time, Rey.’

‘Go ahead.’ She moves the items around on her tray, rolling her eyes painfully as she waits for a response the older lady seems reluctant to give. ‘What is it?’

‘I wanted to know if you’d be willing to assist the engineering team. They’re struggling and they could use anyone with mechanical skill.’

‘I don’t know if I’d be much help. I break more things than I fix.’ One such thing she'd left sleeping, curling over him in the dark to have a whispered conversation with herself, scrubbing her tears into the blankets before she forced herself upright to find her boots.

‘Then you’d still be doing better than practically anyone else on the base. Our fleet, or what’s left of it, is in dire need of repair…’

‘I'm not an idiot. I know you’re just trying to keep me busy.’

‘If it were as simple as that, there’d be no shortage of jobs to give you, I assure you.’

‘Am I to assume that every conversation I have will make it back to you?' She doesn't respond and Rey lifts the covering to a dish of something congealed and gelatinous, reminding herself it's food and she should be grateful. It's energy for another day, fuel for a fight she comes to realize coldly she has no desire to wage anymore. 'You heard about the talk today.’

‘I did. I’m told it was very productive.’

‘It was horrible. Still I guess it’s good that it wasn’t for nothing. Take it you don't eat this stuff. Guess you're the wrong person to ask what I'm looking at.’

‘Will you meet with the engineering team and take a look for me?’

‘I will. But it won’t stop me from going with Ben if that’s what he wants.’

‘Thank you Rey.’

‘Is that everything? I should probably get going.'

‘Is there something I can do for you? Is there anything you need?’

‘Do you have any ration heaters? I could do with not feeling a dozen pairs of eyes on me every time I need to get food.’ She catches the eye of one such recruit, watching them scramble to break contact and peer into their food with singular devotion.

‘We do. I can have one sent to your quarters.’ 

‘I’ll take it myself. Let me delude myself that people don’t know where we are.’

‘Of course. I’ll have the kitchen put one aside for you.’ 

‘Thank you. I’ll collect it tomorrow. Can I ask something else?’

‘Anything. If it’s within my power, Rey, you can have it. I’m supremely grateful for the work you do for us.’ 

She turns to Leia fully, leveraging her height to loom over her. ‘You want information from him, that’s fine, he agreed to give it. Ask what you want to ask, but then put him on something different. It can’t drag on forever without an endpoint.’

‘Is he alright?’ She looks over Leia’s shoulder at the few figures far in the distance, whispering their commentary of the strained interaction over their shoulders. 

‘No he’s not. If it’s about information, decide what you need from him and ask it. Otherwise it’s just torture.’

‘I will see it’s done. Can you give us a week?’

Her laugh is as cold as the food as it forces its way from her throat. ‘I’m not the one you should be asking.’

‘Do you think he could… cope, with a week of questioning?’

‘He’s been through far worse. You know that if you’ve listened to what was said today.’

‘From what I was told, yes, you’re right.’

‘I have to go now. I’ll tell him one week. Goodnight General.’ 

‘Sit. I got us food.’ She looks at him out of the corner of her eye as he slowly pushes himself up to sitting position. She finds something supremely interesting in the congealing piles of mush in front of her as he tries to catch her eye. 

‘That bad, huh?’

She gathers herself and sits next to him, pulling the tray onto her lap. ‘I saw the General. She agreed to a week of questioning, then it’s done.’

‘I’m surprised she’d agree to that.’

‘So am I, but I’m glad she did. Maybe then you can draw a line under it.’

‘I doubt I’ll ever be allowed to do that.’

She lets the statement hang their for a few moments, before dragging her attention back to the increasingly unappetizing meal in front of them. ‘Eat some food.’

‘You eat some, scavenger.’

‘Fine, I will.’ She picks up a grainy block and takes a large bite, widening her eyes at him until he does the same. ‘You’re such a martyr.’

‘So we’re back to name calling, then?’

‘You started it.’ She leans her head against him as she chews, feeling the food begin to sharpen the senses she’d allow to dull, and hating herself for it. ‘I’ve requested a ration heater, I’m going to pick it up tomorrow.’

‘Tired of their food already?’

‘I would be if we were eating it in any regularity. We’re not taking care of ourselves properly, I feel like I get weaker every day. I want to find a way that we can train.’ 

‘You look strong to me.’

‘Yeah well, I don’t feel it. She asked me if I’d help out in engineering. She says it’s not, but I suspect it’s to keep me busy and away from you when they’re questioning you.’

‘Do you want to go?’

‘I want to be useful. But I don’t want to be absent when they question you. I don’t trust them. Not when it comes to you.’

‘You should help them if you want to.’

‘Don’t you want me there?’

‘I do want you there. But if it’s going to be like it was today, I don't want to put you through that. If anything happened right now I couldn’t put up much of a fight.’

'Eat something', she mumbles, head pounding. 'You need to eat.'

She follows her own advice, mechanically going through the motions, clearing away their trays and feeling no better for it. Her eyes land on the floodlights that ring the base, seeping through their window, softened by the mounting snowfall, gaining a pulse-like throb. As if the whole place is an organism they're hiding inside. A beast with questions for her, answers that hadn't come, despite how long she gave herself to form them. Why she allowed herself to forget about them in service of herself. Whether she is capable of the kind of selfless sacrifice required of those sharing walls with her. If through her answers, insufficient and unsatisfactory, she had hastened a process already assumed to be underway. They will find her out, label her as they should, redraw a line she has already drawn between themselves and her. She guides him down to curl into her lap, stroking his skin, glad at least to find it has lost some of its chill, still reacting to the light scrape of her nails like his nerves are exposed. She speaks, hoping to drown out the drone in her ears. 

‘Did I ever tell you about the big storm I saw back home?' He doesn't answer, but it wouldn't matter if he did. 'It must have been five years ago, maybe more. We knew it was coming, you could feel it in the air when you went outside. If you opened your mouth to speak, it was as if it crept into everyone’s voice. Even the light was different, weaker almost. When people talked it was like you were hearing the tail end of a conversation; you were witnessing the end of something and knew it to be the case. I don't even know why I thought of it... Maybe it's the snow. Maybe it's the pathetic wind on this rock they call a planet.' He smiles against her leg and her stomach sinks.

'There were a few faces I didn’t see again after it hit. You would see the place you knew they used to live, but it was scrubbed clean, so completely it made you question if they were even there in the first place. There was no pattern to the people it took, sometimes these voids were still surrounded by their neighbors. I guess their foundations weren’t as deep. You can’t know until they hit, you can’t see how far they reach under the sand. You only know what kind of grip it had when it fails. You just have to believe it’s there. I guess that's what faith is, a belief that it must be strong enough, even if you can't see it. I never had that, I always feared it. You'd think I'd be used to it by now', she chuckles. 'You'd think I'd had enough practice in being terrified.' Her air huffs out of her as his fingers lightly rest at her wrist, her hand slowly combing through his hair.

'Somehow I was fine. I think living in a corpse of a machine helped. Like whatever drives those storms wouldn’t expect anything living to be hiding in there. Or maybe if there’s an energy people give off that alerts it to their presence, there’s a chance I don’t have it. It would explain why I got away with it for so long, why the storms didn’t take me, why disease and hunger didn’t. I woke up on that morning somehow having fallen asleep with this sound around me like the air was being broken apart, like the walls would be ripped away any second. This rumbling that moved through my bones. I woke up and the sun seemed to hum above me and that’s when I felt true fear. This thing that moved like insects over my skin, up my neck and into my mouth. And it was beautiful, despite everything. I looked up and for the first time I truly felt like something was looking down on me, and it wanted me to feel fear. It wanted me to look at the world it had changed and feel the difference. There weren’t even any birds. I walked into town and all I could hear was silence, people wordlessly arranging what was left, hoping to find something familiar in its pattern. You would look into people’s eyes and there was something shaking in their depths.  And I could tell they wanted to ask me why I survived. Why did I survive? There’s no answer to give them, nothing that wouldn’t hurt, anyway.' She blinks, eyes threatening to close, her heartbeat vibrating at the base of her throat. 'I don’t know how to help you, but I wish I did.’

‘You do help me. You being here helps me.’

‘I think I died on that planet. Whoever I was, that person didn’t wake up that morning.’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘Do you? Did you know what you were getting in for, sharing a life with me?’

‘Come here, lie down with me.' He tucks her in, drawing her into a hug, chin resting against her crown. 'It doesn’t scare me, if that’s what you think. I know what it means to look back at a life everyone tells you is yours and not recognize the person they say is you. I hope not everyone feels that way, but selfishly it is a comfort to me that you do.’

‘Do you think we’ll ever stop feeling like this?’

‘One day. But we won’t even notice it happen, it’ll be so gradual.’

‘Will you tell me if you see it?’

‘Of course.’

‘What if the people we become don’t want each other?’

‘They will.’

‘Promise?’

‘I promise. There is no version of me that doesn’t want to be with you, and there won’t ever be one.’

‘You can’t know that.’

‘I want to be the person I was wandering the Galaxy with you. I had never felt at peace with myself until that moment. At the time I couldn’t see it for what it was. But if I could go back I would tell myself to keep running forever. Keep out of range of it before it catches up to us. It wouldn’t be the most honest life, but no-one is keeping track of how honest we are. I would live a dishonest life with you if I could, because I have never seen you happier.’

‘I’m sorry I brought us here.’

‘You didn’t, the decision was made for us. You didn’t make me come here, I came because it is now the only chance we have to maybe have that life again, and I will gamble everything I have on that chance.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘No. But I will be. I’m sorry I can’t be as strong as you need me to be.’

‘You are strong. I wish I had half of your strength.’

‘It’s yours. It’s all yours.’

‘Sleep sweetheart. I’ll give you dreams, good ones you’ll like.’

She makes good on her promise, falling to sleep knowing he's somewhere peaceful, predictably dumped into her usual nightmares. She can't pick out his voice from her screams until her eyes open, muscles blaring as she lets them go slack. She catches her breath, damp cheek pressed against his shirt. It's too late to call true night, so she resigns herself to her tiredness.

‘You never told me what you saw in your vision…’ he whispers. The rest of the base is sleeping as they curl up together, listening to bitter winds whip into a frenzy behind flexing porthole windows. 'I never asked you.' 

‘I saw myself as a child. As if I were an audience to it, watching myself scream as their ship grew smaller and smaller in the sky.’ Her smile is weak, trying for flippancy and failing. ‘And I saw you. The night the Jedi temple fell apart, standing in the rain with a few others, little more than kids. You must have been just a boy…’

‘I was fifteen. Snoke had been in my mind since I was very young. When I left to go to him I started to have dreams. At first I thought it might have been a kindness from him. But now I know it was you. A young girl, sat on the beach, listening to the ocean. They would calm me.’

‘I dreamt of the ocean, wishing for it when I went to bed. Most of the time all I got were nightmares. But the dreams when I wasn’t alone were my favorites. An older boy, sat beside me in silence. When I saw you for the first time it shook me. And when you went into my mind I couldn’t believe fate could be so cruel.’

‘It was the start of my turn to darkness. And the time I was in the most pain. I think that pain linked us both. You my counterpoint in the light, canceling each other out. That's what I saw the first time I met you. I think I knew. Even before I met you, when you were only mentioned as part of the search for the droid. I’d been looking for you in every face I saw for years.’

‘Is that why you thought I would turn?’

‘I knew the Force intended for us to balance each other. I was sure that was the only path left for me. I'm not entirely sure I was wrong.’

'You wanted me to kill you.'

'I wanted it to be over. I didn't know what I would feel for you. How quickly it would take me over. I hope you know. I hope one day I have the guts to tell you properly.'

'I know.' She swallows, throat dry. 'I know.'

Chapter Text

She wakes in the dark of a base not yet gearing up for the day, reaching for him as her eyes blearily come into focus. He jolts as she presses her mouth to his, fragmented sleep and feverishly vivid dreams having pulled him back to a time when the only touch he would receive was hard. She waits as he re-orients himself to a reality even his most fervent dreams couldn't imagine, smiling as his hand finds her waist through the loose shirt she’d been too tired to remove. She moves it to her skin, calm moving through her restless limbs at press of their bodies together. 

‘Talk to me when you’re over there.’ She holds his chin in her hand, unblinking as his eyes try to read hers. ‘Let me know that you’re okay.’

‘I will.’

‘Leave if you need to. You don’t owe it to them to sit there and endure it. If they go too far, just leave. Promise me.’

‘I promise, Rey.’ He closes his eyes as she kisses him, her fingers moving down his neck to dig at his chest. 

‘Take these off.’ She tugs at his shirt, helping him pull it off and pressing her face to his skin. She shivers as she feels his fingers trail up her spine, shrugging out of her own layers to lie heavily against him, her ear to his heart. ‘You know if they hurt you, I’ll kill them.’

‘I know.’

‘I mean it. I knew it was a possibility coming here. It would be as easy as crippling the environmental controls. They’d freeze in their beds.’

‘I’ll say it again, you should have joined me when I asked you. We could have ruled together.’ She feels the hair at her crown move with his words, the light pressure of him setting his chin against her.

‘I don’t want power, I just want you.’ Her eyes are dark as she looks up at him, holding his gaze. She digs her nails into his scalp as she kisses him, kicking the covers away to press her overheating skin to his. Her grip shakes as she strokes him, her forehead falling against his chest as she sinks down onto him, his words incomprehensible in her ear. Damp skin and words the color of honey, she traps their stuttering breath between their mouths, her head spinning. 

She leaves him outside the room that is to be his interrogation cell with a brief press of her forehead to his, before turning to jog away before her feet can drag her back.

Remember what I said.

She’s shown the fleet by a short lady whose body seems to be frozen in an apologetic shrug. The tour is conducted at a near jog, just long enough to name each craft in her care and their current state of repair, every successive glimpse of mangled metal emphasising with a silent shout just how laughably vulnerable they are. By the time they've made their wobbling loop around and through a landscape of crumpled metal and steadily dripping fuel lines, Rey's hands are buried deep in her pockets, crushed into fists.

‘So this is it. Pretty much everything we could beg or scrape together. A few old rebellion ships we’ve been able to get some life out of. The shuttles we came here in and a few civilian crafts from recent recruits. That TIE we salvaged from space.' Rey follows her pointing arm to a lump, resting on a sheet as if a towering creature had couched up a hairball of jagged metal. 'Had to scrape the guy out of it.’ She turns at Rey’s non-response, wincing and shifting on her feet. ‘I’m sorry. You develop a weird sense of humor after enough time working on junk ships only for them to get destroyed again. I’m Rose by the way.’

No doubt it's the ever present coating of grime that stops Rose from offering her hand to shake, simply rocking onto her heels, scanning over the topology of her crumbled domain, not truly expecting a response.

‘Rose, I've heard of you. I’m Rey.’

‘I know, Finn told me who you are. He says you’ve been friends since he defected.’

‘We have. From day one I think.’

‘He talks about you a lot.’

‘I imagine he’s mad about what I did. I can't blame him.’

‘No’, Rose breathes. ‘If he is, he’s never said so. He says you saved him.’

‘I guess I did. Can you show me what we’re working with Rose?’

‘Yes, right. Sorry.’ Rose hurries ahead, wringing her hands, circling around a rusted pile of metal roughly ship shaped. ‘Right now we’re just trying to rebuild what we have. But we have basically no supplies. The General has friends, but not many this far out, so we’re pretty much limited to cannibalizing what can’t be fixed to try to resurrect what we can.’

‘What am I looking at right now?’

‘The guts of about eight x-wings…’

‘I see…’

‘We really need all the help we can get. If I’m honest with myself I think half the time I’m wiring these things into knots. When we’re lucky enough to bring stuff back, half the time I don’t even know what I’m looking at anymore.’

‘Do you have schematics we can work from?’

‘Yes, old ones. But it’s something.’ She walks Rey towards the cluttered terminal in the corner, loaded with diagrams referencing the Empire and the Rebellion. ‘Can you help me? Finn said you’re good with stuff like this.’

‘I wouldn’t exactly say that. I’m sure they’re other people on your team-‘

‘There is no team. They died on the transports. It’s just me, stuck in this room for twelve hours a day. Hoping I don’t explode something.’

‘What about the rest of the base? The team in the hangar...’

‘Maintenance and re-fueling. As they like to put it, their job starts and ends in that room.'

'Some job. Pretty sure you could train a bloggin to do that. So there's really no-one else?'

'Some have tried to help. They don’t know where to start either and apparently my personality is too much for them. So I do it alone and get weirder and stare at the wires until I start to see things in them, and then nobody wants to work with me for sure.’ Rey watches Rose pinch her nose with tiredness and try and fail to smooth a smile onto her face. ‘I’m really sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry. It shouldn't have been left to you. It’s a hell of a job to do solo. Rebuilding this alone could take months.’

‘And one recon mission and it’s all gone. Is it true you were a scavenger?’

‘I was.’

‘I hope I didn’t offend you. I know what it’s like to scrape by. Honestly, it's just nice to meet someone else like me. Have you done anything like this before?’

‘I have, with varying degrees of success. Usually varying between somewhat and utterly disastrous. But I have had some luck.’

‘Can you help me figure out where to start? I could really use a fresh pair of eyes.’

No wonder they were so precious with that TIE. Their fleet is a pile of rusty scraps. How are you doing over there?

I’m okay. Just a lot of questions I can’t answer. I don’t think I’m quite the catch they thought I was. She laughs at the tumble of loosely braided cables spilling from a wrinkled tarp, and ducks her head with a blush at the look she gets from Rose. 

‘Can I ask about your friend?’

Think I’m about to get interrogated over here as well… She stills in her attempt at bending a crumpled sheet of bodywork back into its sidings. ‘That really depends on what you want to know’, she says carefully, a childish hope forming that if maybe she doesn't turn her head, she can pretend that the conversation isn't happening. Until now they've been simply talking aloud, voicing their plans for the craft each viewed as most viable, convincing themselves more than each other that some kind of progress is being made. Rose broke the dull calm of it without warning, easily asking the question she'd found echoed in people's mind since their ship was docked with the others.

‘Who is he?’ Rose asks, loosening a gasket and watching jet black oil steadily creep its way up the side of a bucket.

Rose wants to know who you are, what should I tell her?  Rey pulls in a breath, catching with cold in her chest, zipping her jacket up to her throat. 

That depends on how much you like her…

She gives the metal one last half-hearted tug before folding her stiff limbs to sit on a trolley. ‘Another Force user, like me. We’ve been working together for a few months. The General tells us where to go and we go.’

‘I never see him around, does he not trust us?’ Rose sits against the ship, re-adjusting the bucket as the arc of burned oil falls, turning to Rey and pulling off her gloves to shake out her cramping joints. 

‘You never see me around either, would you ask me the same thing? Will you pass me those pliers?’

'You know we have gloves...' Rose offers as Rey braces her fingers against her knee to pull out the little slivers of metal that itch at her skin.

'And I prefer not to use them. What do you want to know?' Rey asks, pressing along her knuckles, feeling for any more bumps she has to work to the surface. 'Big secret, us being here. Are you going to be the one that finally asks it?' She keeps her eyes on Rose, reaching behind herself for some alcohol and working one of the cleaner rags from the pile.

‘You’re protecting him. The way people talk about him, they’re scared. Is he from the Order?’

‘He was. I brought him back. Is that a problem for you?’ Rey asks, shaking out the rag and folding it against her knee. Rose winces in sympathy as she lays the alcohol soaked fabric against her palm and curls her fingers around it, Rey's eyes twitching but holding. It burns for a second before the alcohol evaporates, long enough to watch her new colleague shift, drawing on some supply of courage to talk to her.

‘Would make me a bit of a hypocrite if it was. Finn is ex-Order. If he’s working with us now that’s all that matters to me. Are you two dating?’

Rey sighs heavily, tossing her rag in one of the buckets to be washed, loosening the laces of her boots where her feet scream at her. ‘I grew up in the desert, Rose. Until very recently I lived alone and wouldn’t hear my own voice until I dragged my salvage up to trade for enough credits to hopefully eat for the night. I’m not used to being watched every moment of the day, having people speculate about my life. I know you’re not trying to be rude but living on this base is incredibly uncomfortable for me. I know everyone is talking about me, but I try to pretend they aren’t so I can get through each day. Does that make sense?’

‘So that’s a yes.’

‘To save you asking me everyday, yes we are. But it’s important to me that that isn’t common knowledge. I expect you to respect that.’

‘Of course, Rey. It stays between us and the heap of junk that is our domain. I just miss having someone to gossip with since my sister. I lost her in the attack on the dreadnought.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘She was a bombardier. She sacrificed herself to destroy the ship. I’m proud of her, but I just wish she were still here. Do you have any siblings?’

‘No, it’s just me. If I have a family, they made sure I can never find them.’

‘That's awful.’

‘It is what it is. But you see now why I appreciate my privacy.’

‘I do.’ Rey rolls her ankles, trying to work some heat back into joints seizing with cold. ‘Do you love him?’ She stills in her movements, trying to will the question to evaporate like steam but feeling it thud behind her eyes. 

‘Sorry?’

‘Do you love him?’ She watches the Rose fish a teetering cup of caff from the workbench, curling her hands around it. They both know it's been cold for hours, it's simply a prop sustaining the illusion. That they are simply gossiping about a boy they both know. That Rose has not highlighted with damning clarity just how far the General has failed to deliver her promise to them. 'So, do you?'

‘I do. But I haven’t told him yet.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because if he doesn’t feel the same way, it’ll kill me.’

‘Why would he not feel the same?’

‘Because nobody ever has. Why would he?’

‘It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t tell him. You never know when you might lose someone. They have to know how you feel.’ She nods to herself as she hears Rose push herself up from the ground and head back to work, diving out of sight once more behind rusted metal and wires. 

‘So this is the excellent engineering team I’ve heard so much about?’ She smiles into the undercarriage of a downed fighter, pausing in the process of clipping out burned lengths of wire, surrounded by the singed smell of plastic and metal. She pulls down a section and watches his feet where he shifts, taking in the cluttered workspace, strewn with tools, half-drunk cups of caff and jars of used oil jostling for space. He imagines, correctly, the acrid taste on her tongue when she’d taken a swig from the wrong one. ‘I thought there’d be more people. Or any people.’

She slides her way back into the light, blinking the sting of ghostly wires from her eyes. ‘There’s Rose. She’s out at dinner. And now there’s me.’ She unfurls her fingers from around the wire cutters, feeling the joints slowly release their tightness as she kneads them. He looks down at her with a tight smile, offering a hand to pull her up. She furrows her brow as her she feels the grime on her skin transfer to his jacket. ‘Are you done already?’ She rolls the tension from her neck and winces.

He huffs and turns to pick through the arrangement of miscellaneous tools, thumbing at the First Order insignia etched into metal under a polymer of grime and sweat, almost entirely obscured. ‘Eight hours of meticulously annotated questioning. I wonder if they’re trying to map my brain, sell it off to the highest bidder. They wouldn’t have to look far for a buyer.’ She takes the wrench from his hand and sets it down as he blinks his eyes back into focus. ‘I’m going to head back, but you can stay here if you want to.’ She follows his line of sight to the tangled wreckage she’s been poring over and the smugdey swipes of clean metal uncovered by her hands as she worked. 

‘Do you want me to stay here?’ She twists her fingers through his and feels a jolt run through him. ‘Should I leave you alone for a while?’ She watches his chest rise and fall mechanically, the movement steady, mind only partially with her. She catches the shake of his head out of her peripheries and wraps her arms around him, squeezing him through layers of padding and canvas. ‘Let’s go.’

They pass a few people beelining to the mess hall, their shoes skidding on the floor with a screech, but are otherwise unnoticed as they move through the base. Her uniform streaked with grime, him sagging with tiredness, she updates him on the status of her work, packing her sentences with such exhaustive detail that her worry can’t slip through. The fleet is in tatters, if it can even be called that. The few ships they have for reconnaissance are aging and true hands-on experience on how to maintain them has passed beyond the narrow living memory of the base. The pilots and those with any limited engineering experience grew up with computer assisted flight and diagnostics. They don’t know how to translate their knowledge into mechanical fundamentals, the levers, pistols and switches that convert their movements into the language of machines. Many of their tools pre-date the Empire and have been scavenged indiscriminately with little knowledge of their utility or efficacy.

‘I really have no idea what I’m doing and if any of it is even possible half the time.’ She shoves her hands into her pockets as they head further into the arctic extremes of the base. 

‘You’re enjoying yourself.’ Relief rolls through her as she hears the smile color his voice.

‘I am. I guess it’s nice to have a big project again. And to have people that trust me enough to even let me try.’

‘They’re right to trust you. You’re the best hope they have.’

‘Where have I heard that before.’ She hears the bolt thump into place and shoulders into the room. ‘I could really use your help in there.’ She rips off her boots and socks, throwing them in a pile to be sanitized. He watches her, sat sagging on the edge of their cot, swaying as he holds himself up with only his grip on the mattress edge. ‘We could get it done twice as quickly if we worked together.’

‘They won’t be done with me for a while, if they ever are. Once the questioning stops it’ll be something else.’

‘Not much use to all the juicy intel without a working fleet.’ She brushes his hair behind his ear as his head lolls against her hand, feeling heat radiating from his skin. ‘You’re burning up.’ She tilts his head to look into his eyes, bloodshot and pale. ‘What did he do to you?’

‘Nothing. Just asked a lot of questions about things I’d rather not think about.’

‘You’re ill.’

‘I'm just tired. I agreed to it. I knew it wouldn’t be pleasant.’ He closes his eyes as she smooths at the bags under his eyes with her thumbs, watching the skin bloom from ghostly pale to bruised grey. 

‘Lie down.’ She unzips his jacket and pushes him to fold back boneless, working off his boots and throwing them aside. ‘Sleep. I’m going to get us something proper to eat.’ Her stomach sinks as she shoves her boots back on her swollen feet, hearing him shift and curl on his side. 

‘Rey, you’re late. The food is nearly gone.’ She smiles tightly at Rose where she sits with Finn, recounting their day as her friends politely nod in the right places, their brows furrowing at circuitous tangents that resolve into alien resolutions. They know her well enough to share her triumphs, even when they seem contradictory. Rey snags what remains, something warm and wet, cubes of what is potentially fruit in a thin syrup, and some kind of spongy cube that could be bread or insulating foam, dusted with tiny black flecks. She shoves a few energy bars into her pockets, pausing at their table to say a quick hello before leaving, half her attention on keeping the near-overflowing bowls from spilling everywhere. 

‘Is that for your friend?’ Rose intercepts Finn weighted look in her direction. ‘What? Have I said something I’m not supposed to? That wouldn’t happen if you guys would tell me what’s going on.’

‘We missed lunch. And breakfast, I guess.’ 

‘We’ve all been there. What do they have him doing? Hope it’s nothing gross -‘, she darts her eyes in Finn’s direction as he crosses his arms. 

‘I’m sorry, I really have to go. I need to wash this grease off of me before they serve me up next meal time. I’ll see you tomorrow, Rose.’ She smiles and receives an easy grin in return, before she turns back to the table. 

She balances the tray on one hand with effort as she rounds the corner, murmuring a message to the General into her communicator, a request to meet in the morning. It buzzes at her wrist to let her know the message has been received, and an alert lets her know an appointment has been added to her calendar. 

She pauses by the door to their room, debating whether to wake him. She places the tray gently down and toes off her shoes, settling down next to him to place a palm on his clammy forehead. She pulls the blankets over his shivering body and sits back, staring.

It was never going to be nice. Whether he agreed to it or not, he would be forced to vocalize all that had happened to him, all that he had done in his misguided desire for peace. That is was not forcefully ripped from him was perhaps worse, he couldn’t become an audience to it, but had to find each word and speak it, for it to be digested, weighed and measured by others. Perhaps there was a use to it, maybe once it was said he’d be able to drain the rot from his mind. But more likely those thoughts would just embed themselves even deeper, run over the tracks in his brain. For a second she considers whether she could take them from him, like she’d asked him to do once. Leave his mind blank and un-scarred. She would take his memories of her with it, she realises as dread settles in her stomach like a stone. He wouldn’t be worth interrogating, but he’d be someone completely different, with no guarantee that person would want her. Her selfishness wouldn’t allow her to take the chance, even if it would free him from pain. But he would do it for her, she knows it as certainly as she knows that she wouldn’t. 

‘Whatever you’re saying to yourself, you don’t deserve it.’ He grumbles the words into the mattress, hand reaching for her. 

‘I got us some food. You should eat something. Can you sit?’ She inches off the bed as he pushes him upright against the wall, panting with exertion and peeling his shirt from his skin with a grimace. ‘Eat and we’ll wash up.’ She watches him out of the corner of her eye as he moves the tasteless food around his mouth, swallowing reluctantly. Still it’s good to see the shake begin to lessen in his hands as he tears at the spongy thing and takes a bite, his head thudding back against the wall. 

‘I don’t know why I feel so awful.’ She nudges his limp hand for him to keep eating, and he takes a dutiful bite. 

‘I do. Judging by what he asked you when I was there, I can only imagine it’s worse when it’s just the two of you.’

‘He’s just trying to help the cause.’

‘Eight hours of questioning. You’re not a prisoner.’ 

He laughs hollowly and closes his eyes. ‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that.’ She sits and snakes an arm behind him and pulls him to lean against her side, food forgotten as she feels his cheek burn against her shoulder through her shirt. 

‘Come on, let’s shower.’ 

‘I’m sorry I brought you here.’ She convinces herself her words will be lost to the spray as she scrubs the grime from her skin. ‘I didn’t think it would be like this.’ She guides him to kneel, his hand steadying himself against her hip as she works the soap through his hair before rinsing it away. He sits as she towels his hair mostly dry, turning his head to shave him as she ignores his eyes boring into her face. She turns away to hide the burning blush on her face as she brushes her teeth. 

‘Thank you.’ He watches her as she gently lays him back down into bed, pulling the covers around them. She kisses him once, feeling her throat vibrate with a silent scream she won’t release, turning off the light.

Fear and impotent panic press down on her in the dark, heavy like a blanket over her chest. She holds her breath and stills her muscles, pleading with him in her mind to fall asleep. She digs the heels of her palms into her eyes, feeling herself suck in airless breaths. He pulls her silently into his arms and she curls up there, feeling the room spin around her. Slowly she becomes aware of his steady breathing against her and falls into its rhythm, until it’s all she perceives.

They wake with a little time to kill, making a simple breakfast, having the time to slowly accumulate layers as the fogginess of sleep wears off. She drinks her caff as he brushes through the tangles in her hair, taking his time to smooth through it with his fingers before gathering it into a braid.

She leaves him in the corridor outside the offices, his vision already beginning to glaze over at the thought of what waits for him a few doors over. She shoves her hands in her pockets against the urge to touch him, knowing if she does she won’t let go. ‘Have a nice day at work, dear.’ She knocks her shoulder against him and smiles at him over her shoulder as his hand ghosts over her back. Out of his sight she turns on herself to meet with the General.

'Good morning Rey, what can I do for you?'

'Why did you lie to us?' She catches the fleeting smile pass over the General's face, not surprised by the question, gratified to have it finally asked. 

'Come in.' She follows the General's beckoning hand, stepping into the comparative warmth, not willing to compromise her rigid stance to unzip her jacket, even if it would do something to lessen the stifling cloud creeping over her mind. Maybe it's better if she's not in her right mind, if she were, she's not sure if she could quash her desire to hurt the woman peacefully pottering around her living space, ignoring the cloud in her periphery. 'Why is it nowadays I so rarely see you two in the same room? Still hiding from me?' 

'You're the one who separated us.'

'Your skills were simply better served elsewhere. Sit, child.' Leia gestures to the low couch, a pot of tea steaming in front of two settings. She takes a seat when it's clear Rey won't follow. 'I hear your work is going well.'

'Don't try to flatter me. We came here under the promise you could protect us. We both know that's not the case. Why did you lie to us?'

'You have the answer to your question, I respect you too much to attempt to lie.'

'You need us more than we need you.'

'As is the case with any relationship, working or otherwise. Are you sure you won't have some tea? It's excellent for calming the nerves.'

Bait she won't rise to, dragging them on topic with a jerk of her chin. 'What is your plan for us, exactly?' Rey asks, leaning against the couch, counting the drumming of her own fingers against the upholstery. 

'Truthfully-'

'If you think you can manage it.'

The General takes a slow breath and releases it, stepping into Rey's space as her eyes narrow, pushing a lock of hair behind her ear as she shakes of the contact like a bug. 'With you two here we finally have a chance. I couldn't let that opportunity pass. And selfishly, I also desired to work with you again. Although I will say, you were much friendlier before all this. Is that my son's influence?'

'It's the product of being a piece in a game I never wanted to play. We both know I didn't have a choice.'

'You wanted to protect him.'

'I believed in the lie of this place. The Resistance I barely knew but had always heard of as a band of heroes, fighting for good in the Galaxy.'

'And now?'

'We're in more danger here than we were on our own. Did you know if you told me that we wouldn't have come?'

'You saw the attack on the transports.'

'I was somewhat pre-occupied fighting for my life at that exact moment', Rey chuckles, breaking eye contact to take in the room. Pleasantly warm and scented with the tang of fresh flowers. A smell that Rey had only recently traced back to its source, at a market on a planet they can never visit again, because of the "help" she'd foolishly agreed to give. 

'You've visited the base...'

'And you made damn sure we never came into contact with anyone, save for the team of people you had trailing us like we're convicts.'

'I was only doing my part to keep the two of you safe. At your urging, I might point out.' Leia steps out of her space with a squeeze of her arm, pouring herself a glass of water and setting it aside with a tap. 

'You should have been honest with us. You were in no position to fulfil your end of the bargain and you never were. Any agreement we have is void.'

Rey doesn't shift when she turns back to her, and Leia acknowledges it with a quick smile. 'I never quantified my offer to you. I assured you we would not reveal your location and offered whatever protection we could provide. You accepted because you knew it was more than you could manage on your own.'

'You know nothing about what I can do', Rey says lowly.

'Whatever you feel for him, it's not enough on its own to save him.'

Silence for the few seconds it takes something to pass heavily between their eyes. The fear she refuses to give shape even in her own mind, pulled to the surface and rendered in a handful of words. 'I'm not here to talk about him, I'm here to talk about you. How you thought I'd be so stupid I wouldn't recognize your deception. So sure of it that you parade it in my face. Your "engineering team"? A scared kid with no help and no resources slowly driving herself mad.'

'Remind you of anyone?'

'Fuck you', Rey spits, turning for the door with a shadow at her back.

'This furious anger you have, do you think I don't know its cause. You think we're trying to hurt him.'

She rounds on her and to Rey's immense pleasure, she takes a shuffling half-step backwards. 'I know you are.' 

'He is one part in this. To you, he is your entire world. To me, he is one step closer to the resolution to a conflict that has defined the lives of every soul on this base.'

'How can you talk about him like that?'

'Because if I didn't I would lose my mind, Rey.' She steps closer and Rey bristles. 'I am your General. I could not do my job if I couldn't divorce the person from the work they must do. If I do my job well, one day they will get to live the lives they deserve. But in the meantime, they are simply resources to be allocated and leveraged in a way that will best benefit the group at large.'

'That's psychotic.'

'Yes, it is. But it is also necessary. If I could not do it we would never face losses, nor would we gain any victories. There will be a time to mourn those that we have lost and will lose, but that time isn't now. It would not have served you to know the lives we lost in your absence, nor would it have helped those who survived. We need each other, it is a relationship that will never be easy, but that doesn't mean it can't be productive for us both.'

'So I'm supposed to forget that you brought us here on a lie?'

'It's a lie you wanted to believe, child. What's more, so far I have said nothing on your choice to stay with him when you had the chance to return to us. The last you saw of the Resistance we were being picked off like flies, were so surprised to learn that we survived?'

'He called off the attack. You would have been dead without his help, and this is how you repay that? Grilling him for information you're in the position to do nothing with.'

'We aren't. You are.' 

She sucks in increasingly deep breaths, each more devoid of oxygen than the last, the only justification stopping her from bringing to life the swirling images in her mind being that if she did, she'd have to tell Ben. See another part of him chipped off and fall away. 'Do you really think hurting him is going to make me more willing to work with you?'

'This anger is your power child.'

'You want anger? You've got a Darksider whose brain you're currently grinding to mush. He'll fight for you and fucking enjoy it if I ask him to. But you know that already, don't you. Thank you, General. You've answered my questions.'

She barges her way into the chill of the mechanics bay, the smell of scorched oil stinging at her nose and eyes, shoulder throbbing from the effort. Not that she had expected it to go well, exactly, she had asked for but wasn’t truly expecting to receive a glimpse into the calculating process that she had allowed them to be snagged by. Still, there is a cold kind of relief to it. Truth, by its very nature, clinical and bloodless. She’s in a better position than she was, a little of the fog having lifted and revealing a scene almost but not entirely hostile to her. Just as it always has been… 

She hands a mug up to Rose’s grasping hand, her head buried deep in the bowels of an engine, cooling with a tick. She hears her deposit the thing on the engine block with a crunch of rust. 'You know I didn't think you'd come back. Most of the time, people don't come back.'

‘Guess I'm not like most people. Need any help with whatever it is you’re doing?’ She picks at a melted wire, hanging loose in the air. 

‘Implying I have any idea what I’m doing.’

‘Sure you do. What do you know so far?’

‘It gets hot but it won’t turn over. I think this has something to do with it.’ She drops a greasy hunk of metal through a gap in the housing, towards Rey’s clasping hands. ‘Spark plug. I don’t know what’s wrong with it.’

‘Want me to take a look?’

‘Please, I’m losing it up here.’

She brushes a little spot to relative cleanliness on the floor and sets the thing down in front of her crossed knees. I’m already up to my eyeballs over here. How’s it going your end?

He’s gearing up to it. He’s got to do a few rounds of mandatory smalltalk before he swoops in for the juicy stuff. Are you okay?

Why wouldn't I be?  She stretches her arm over her head, the movement of the fabric bringing with it the smell of that room. Where she earnestly debated with herself over killing the woman. I saw your mother, is the only explanation she needs to give. You know you could tell him anything, he has no way of telling…

Are you telling me to start lying to him?

Might break it up a little. You could make a game of it. She holds the thing on the table of her palms, beginning to wrap the Force around it and feel out its shape.

What are you up to over there?

Got a busted spark plug, I’m trying to see if it’s fixable. Rose is occupied trying to untangle a bunch of wires I think someone must have braided just to spite us.

Just don’t tell her how you did it or she’ll never let you leave the place.

I haven’t done anything yet. She feels the thing vibrate weakly against her skin.

No, but you will. 

Get back to work, traitor. Warmth trickles down her neck at his amusement, bleeding through their connection. She takes a breath and turns her attention back to the layers of metal and insulation in her hands. 

The memory floods back as if it had happened yesterday, smoothing her Force signature to resonate with the tone of the object, feeling little shivers of rust and oil flake onto her skin like an animal shaking water from its fur. A metal housing and inside it something grating and scraping against itself. The glass resistor, insulating the electrode, shocked into a jagged powder. She sags for a moment in defeat, her braid falling over her shoulder. She narrows her eyes at the thing, before shrugging at her tentative plan.

She places it on the bare concrete and fixes onto it once more, harmonizing with and then pulling the tone higher and higher, feeling heat radiate into her fingers. Little pieces of glass sag into each other in the hollow interior, sticking at they shake with energy. She doesn’t know how long it takes, but her arms shake with strain as she holds them over it, trying to coax the few remaining shards into the now molten puddle spreading inside the metal casing. The heat shocks at her, even as she knows it doesn’t really touch her skin, as she begins to reshape the mass and hold it there as it begins to cool. She slumps to the floor to watch waves of heat radiate from the metal, it’s color slowly returning to its dull state. She wraps it in a towel, passing it between her hands until she can press her skin to it without a jolt. 

I might have done it. She snags a cup of cold caff from the side, a layer of dust tickling her lips as she drinks, feeling color seep back into her vision by degrees. You okay over there?  She reaches out to him to find him shielding himself, an unconscious habit she’d noticed from him when he’s stressed. She presses herself to her feet and hands the thing up to Rose.

‘Try it now.’ She steps back a few steps, as Rose works the thing back into the engine block, hearing it splutter before catching and turning over with a noxious cloud of black smoke. ‘I need to go Rose, I’m sorry.’ She waves the smoke from her face where it catches in her throat. 

‘Say hello to your boy from me.’ She leaves with a worried look over her shoulder as Rose scampers across the room for a fire extinguisher. She looks a passing recruit by the arm and pushes him into the room, pointing at Rose and hoping her glare will serve as explanation.

‘Where’s your guy?’ She stands at his back and holds his skull in her palms, as if to contain his brain that seems to push out of his eye-sockets like rising bread trying to escape its tin. 

‘Caff. He’ll be back in five. How did you know?’

‘I got half of your headache. I came to see what was happening but found you here alone.’ She pulls her hair from its loose braid and rakes her hand through it, feeling the tension let up slightly.

‘I’m sorry about that.’ His fingers lightly brush her wrist where she gently massages at his temples. ‘Are you done for the day?’

‘I am now. Rose says hi. What about you?’

He lets his head rest against her chest, his breathing deepening. ‘I wish. Not even close.’

‘Want me to heal it?’

‘He’ll be back in a minute.’

‘He’s in the mess hall. There’s time.’ 

‘Please.’ She takes a deep breath, drawing her attention to her connection with the Force, pushing it through her fingers to his skin, smoothing his writhing Force signature and feeling it gently let go of its tension. Her own jaw un-tenses as the ghost of it leaves her and she sinks slightly on her feet. She wraps her arms around his neck and kisses his cheek, feeling his lashes twitch against her skin and her hair spill over his shoulder. 

‘Better?’ She sinks to the floor and leans her cheek against his knee.

‘Much, thank you.’ He smooths her hair over her shoulder, kneading at the corded muscles there. ‘What are you doing now?’

‘Staying with you. I’d rather be here than back at the room.’ 

‘I’ll get you a chair.’

‘Don’t bother, I’m fine here. If I sit I have to keep my eyes open.’

‘You can’t sit at my feet while they’re questioning me.’

‘Why not? What difference does it make?’

‘He’s coming back.’

‘Well he’ll just have to deal with me being here.’ 

She pushes to support her own weight as he bustles back into the room, sloshing caff down his wrist. ‘Miss Rey, I promise you you don’t need to be here.’

‘I won’t have this conversation again’, she picks absentmindedly at a loose thread in the rough carpet, digging at her skin like fine wire. ‘I’m not here to keep an eye on you, I just want to be with Ben. That alright with you?’

‘We can reschedule…’

‘And drag this out even further than it already is? Ask your questions and get it over with.’ She closes her eyes and leans her temple against his knee, feeling his fingers smooth at her hair. 

‘I can get you a chair…’

‘I’m fine here.’

‘If you’re sure?’ She breathes out hard through her nose, feeling the anger melt away at his touch. 

She comes in and out of consciousness, the bassy sound of his voice blurring into one long sound, occasionally broken by reedy interruptions. He strokes thoughtlessly through her hair, soothing himself with the motion of it. Her eyes snap open to the sudden realization that there’s silence, and he smiles down at her, wincing slightly at the movement.

‘We’re done.’ She rubs at the ache in her hip as she sits, trying to push her body up against gravity that hangs like weights off of her muscles. ‘That can’t have been comfortable.’

‘I’ve slept in worse places.’ He helps her to her feet where she wobbles and falls against him, wrapping her arms around his waist. ‘I don’t think I was much use at protecting you, though.’

‘I wouldn’t say that’, he rests his cheek against her head. ‘I feel much better than I usually do. But I don’t expect you do that every time.’

‘Why wouldn’t I? I liked it. I felt better just knowing you were there. Is that weird?’

‘Not at all.’ He tucks her hair behind her ear, smudging a spot of soot on her cheek with his thumb. ‘Why do you smell like you’ve been in a fire?’

‘Engine.’

‘You did it then?’

‘I did. I think, anyway. I kind of left Rose to it. But she hasn’t messaged and I can’t hear any alarms so I think she’s good. I’m incredibly hungry.’

‘Want to brave the canteen?’

‘Not particularly, but I don’t want to eat rations again.’

‘Let’s go then.’

‘I’ll warn you I’m in no mood to talk to anyone.’ Her eyes hang on the ring of water left on the table from the mug. 

‘I wouldn’t worry about that. People maintain a strict twelve-foot bubble around me on the base. They always seem to find a reason to head back the way they were coming when they pass me.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘They know I worked for the Order, I can’t blame them.’

She leaves her hair down as they head towards the chatter of the canteen, the scrape of plates, cutlery and glasses growing louder with each step. They’re relieved to be able to serve themselves, taking a seat in the corner to watch people come and go as they chew their food, oddly sweet from vitamin enrichment, it leaves a chemical aftertaste at the back of their throat. She leans her chin on her palm as she moves a bit of bitter fruit to his tray, one of the few things they’d managed to acquire fresh, the flesh mealy but unbruised. She waits for him to eat it, her face blank, just ticking a item off a mental list, she turns her attention back to the room.

Groups are dotted here and there, chatting over their meal and digesting their days. Some air out their frustrations, just needing to hear them echoed so they can put them away for the evening. Their words are met with sympathetic nods and tired shrugs. Some sit with their clashing uniforms hanging around their shoulders, messy hair greasy from their hands raking through it, they glance their way before hands come to press at their wrists, bringing them back to the conversation. They lean back against their chairs, palms spread in question as they’re chastised.

‘Who do they think we are?’ She squeezes her mouth into a tight smile dropped in an instant as someone turns at her voice.

‘Force users. They know I worked for the Order, it doesn’t take much to connect the dots. You, I’m not sure. They know you went to find Luke and came back with me.’ His voice is low enough only she can hear, staring at the backs of heads and daring them to turn. 

‘If I tell them, do you think they’ll stop staring at us?’

‘I doubt it.’ She sighs and stabs at something on her tray, metal biting against metal in tooth-hurting scrape. She chews violently, knocking her knee with his. 

‘Do you want to play a game?’ She asks, pushing a mound of mashed something around with her fork and pressing little lines into it with the tines. 

‘Such as?’

‘Pick a person, guess what they’re thinking and we’ll see if you’re right.’

‘I don’t know if I want to know what they’re thinking.’

‘It can’t be worse than anything I’ve said to you. Go on, choose someone.’

‘Fine, her, with the braids', he mumbles into his drink, setting it down carefully. 'She’s been holding that since we got here without drinking any of it. She’s too worried to take anything in and her friends haven’t said anything, so clearly this isn’t unusual for her.’

‘What do you think she’s worried about?’

‘She’s an adviser of some kind, but not an Officer, so I doubt it’s anything big that we don’t know about.' His words lose their footing as he stops to watch his interrogator take up a tray, having changed in his absence. Their eyes meet for a moment before he catches himself, holding his tray a little higher and stepping away. Ben clears his throat and she watches him catch himself, straightening his cup on the table, eyes on it. 'Whatever it is, she’s still going through the motions of a normal day, probably hoping if she does that then things will go back to how they used to be.’

‘She’s keeping a secret for someone, something personal.’

‘And they’re relying on her to pretend that everything is normal. She’s doing a bad job at it.’

‘Shall I check?’

‘If you’re hellbent on invading her privacy, I’m not going to try to stop you.’

She smiles at him, turning her attention to the lady as she shifts in her seat, still holding the cup to her chest. She doesn’t need to sift her spoken words from her inner ones, as she smiles and tries to bring her eyes back into focus as she’s addressed by man in a bunching pilot’s jacket. She feels as if each half smile tugs directly at her tear ducts, warring to keep her face neutral and regain some control.

She woke in the morning with fear like a weight pushing on her chest. She'd dressed with a sinking feeling, as if at any time the communicator at her wrist would buzz with a brief message that could never be taken back. She’d sat on her cot, lifting her face and trying to tip her anxiety down her throat like freezing liquid. She pulled on her boots with her face to the ceiling, screwing her eyes shut and breathing for a few moments, gathering her strength for another day. She’ll sip tea with the General, and feel it move like rocks down her throat. She’ll excuse herself to let her change for the day, so she doesn’t have to see her wrists shake where she pushes herself to her feet, hear her pause to catch her breath on the short walk to her bedroom. If she does that she can pretend she doesn’t catalog all the small ways in which she’d seen her weaken in a few short days, all the times she’d met the eyes of the medic and felt his eyes sting at her. The times she’d walked in on hushed conversations that bubble away in her presence. They’d press her elbow lightly as they walk past her in understanding. She pulls her mouth into a smile that aches in its wrongness. 

Rey pulls her attention from her mind to find her watching her, red rimmed eyes twitching, too tired modify her expression into anything other than sorrow that pulls at Rey, trapping her in its gaze. She looks to the table, panting shallowly, her palm pressed against the metal.

‘What is it?’ She closes her eyes at the sound of his voice, willing herself to disappear. ‘Rey, what is it?’ Her head lolls as his hand ghosts over the skin at the nape of her neck, her hand braced against his knee. 

‘We need to go.’ Her words tumble out with her exhale in a slurred rush.

‘Will you tell me what’s wrong?’

‘Not here.’ 

‘Okay, come on.’ They set their trays on the return trolley, eyes on the door and the winding path that will take them back to their quarters. She shoves her shaking hands deep in her pockets, rounding each turn in a walk turning to a jog. 

Her jaw shakes as he holds her face up to him as soon as the door closes behind them. She hooks her hand around his wrist, working her jaw as a tear crawls down her cheek.

‘It’s your mother.’ She sucks in a wet breath, his eyes searching hers in turn. ‘She’s sick. She doesn’t want anyone to know.’

‘She thinks she’s going to die.’ She nods and feels wetness tickle at her lashes and roll down her cheeks. She watches him suck in a breath to talk, before letting it go again with a bitter scoff. She presses her face into his neck and crushes him in her arms, his head sagging against hers. 

‘I shouldn’t have done that, I’m sorry.’

‘She didn’t tell me.’

‘I know’, she feels his breath hot and wet against her neck. ‘I think you should talk to her.’

‘If she wanted me to know, she’d have told me.’

‘It doesn’t matter how you know, you do know. Please talk to her?’

‘I don’t know what I’d even say.’ His laugh is wet in the dark between them. 

‘Just tell her that you know.’ 

He hovers outside the door, cursing himself for not sending a message. He didn’t have any thoughts beyond putting one foot in front of the other, couldn’t see past the two seconds and the two seconds after it. She opens the door, wrapping her cardigan closer around her chest, waiting for him to look at her. 

‘Is everything alright?’ His composure shatters at her concern, her hand hovering over his arm at his side, a few millimeters away from touching his skin. ‘What is it, Ben?’ She nervously scans the corridor for any watching eyes as his head sags on his shoulders and he scrubs a trembling hand over his face. ‘Come inside.’ 

She pulls him into the room and guides him towards the couch, smoothing his hair from where it clings to his tear dampened face. ‘When did you get so tall? I feel like a need a ladder just to look at you.’ She folds her hands around his in his lap. ‘Will you tell me what’s wrong?’

‘I know you’re sick.’

‘I am, but I’m receiving excellent treatment and things are going well. How did you find out?’

‘Accidentally. I know why you didn’t tell me.’

‘Is that so?’, she smiles. ‘Maybe I didn’t want to give you another thing to deal with, have you considered that?’ She meets his gaze and holds it, watching the muscles around his eye cast shadows on his skin. ‘Idiot child, did you think I wasn’t going to tell you? You really are Han’s son.’ She tucks a lock of hair behind his ear, sitting back to look at him.

‘What is it?’ 

‘This cold doesn’t agree with my lungs apparently. I’d have thought they’d be used to it by now, but I guess not.’ She shrugs, drawing her cardigan a little tighter around herself. He wonders when she ever rests, if she’s always ready to receive visitors at any hour of the day or night or whether she’d sensed him coming in the back of her mind.

‘Why don’t you go somewhere warmer?’

‘I couldn’t risk the safety of everyone unless it was strictly necessary. Besides, it’s my own fault. I could tell it wasn’t good for me, but I couldn’t bear to slow down. Better to stay busy.’ She give him a brief, tired smile. ‘I have to admit, I’m surprised to see you.’

‘Rey said I should talk to you.’ 

‘You’re right to listen to her. She’s a very smart woman, if a little angry.’

‘She is.’

‘I hope she doesn’t think I was trying to keep this from you to hurt you. If she does I’ll really be in real trouble. Did you know she came to speak to me? Although shout at me would be a more accurate description. I've never had anyone care for me with the ferocity that woman has for you.’

He smiles despite himself, eyes unseeing. ‘I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve it.’ Every day he’s shocked by the universe’s reluctance to right the abomination of her entirely unearned concern for him.

She ducks her head to try to intercept his eyeline and bring him back to the conversation. He watches her lips move, the words reaching him, with the sense that they’re slightly disconnected, reaching him from two difference sources, just the slightest latency between them. ‘You’re here with us, you’re talking to me. I’d given up hoping that it was even a possibility, I can still barely believe it. I thought I’d die before I saw your face.’

‘Well, here I am.’ He sags into his seat, head thumping.

‘She nearly took your eye out, didn’t she?’

‘She did.’ He feels her eyes track the progress of the scar until it disappears under his collar.

‘Sweet girl, she spared your life even then.’

‘I don’t know why.’

‘Yes you do.’ She squeezes his knee gently and his heart jumps in his throat. ‘If I promise you that I’m okay, will you try to believe it?’

‘I’ll try.’ Fear fizzes at the back of his mind as she wraps her arms around him, wondering if she’s be able to hear his heart thumping in his chest hard enough to hurt. He can’t feel his head on his neck, just the shock of her hair as it tickles at his cheek, the scent of the oil she used to brush through it hitting him like a punch. He had gone from convincing himself he didn’t need his mothers arms around him to assuring himself he hadn’t wanted it in the first place, that it was just the form his weakness would take in his mind. Her imagined hands would push into his skin and siphon his strength from him, leave him to slump to the ground, a dusty shell that cracks on impact. It was the image of the childhood that had been twisted in his mind to start consuming itself. His weakness underlined, his continual attempts to rewrite it, treading the same worn path. Always seeking comfort, letting it needle at his skin and keep him aware of the base desires he could never free himself from. He feels tiny, sheltering in her arms from the world, she kisses his forehead and stands to lead him to the door. 

‘Why did you come back here?’ She pauses, one hand wrapped around the door as if it’s the only thing keeping her upright. ‘Why Hoth?’

‘I told myself it was practicality. A big base, fortified, away from prying eyes. Secretly I hoped that if I came back here he’d be waiting for me somehow. I still expect him to walk around the corner.’

‘I wish I could take it back.’ He allows himself to voice it for the first time and the world stays solidly standing around him.

‘I know you do, son. But I don’t think you’d be here if you did. Han knew what he was doing. I asked him to bring you back to me, he knew his death would break something in you, it would either bring you back to yourself or destroy you.’

‘He offered to help me. I killed him for it and came back anyway.’

‘I know you did.’

‘He told me it would free me from pain.’ He pulls his gaze from the floor with difficulty, feeling his head throb. 

‘Did it work?’ He shakes his head and closes his eyes, feeling the press of her tiny body as she folds over him, murmuring soothing sounds in his ear. 

‘I wish he could have met you. He would have been so proud of you.’ She allows him to hide his face as he cries, her palm cool and soothing against his forehead. She leans to whisper in his ear. ‘You should go, Rey will be worried about you and I need to get some sleep, Doctor’s orders.’ He nods as she presses a light kiss to his crown, stepping away to check her correspondence in silence, back to him.

He makes it back with no memory of the journey and flops down on the bed, all the fight gone from him. He cooperates as far as he can as Rey wiggles him out of his shoes and clothes, before boxing his face in her arms. ‘What do you need?’ Her hair falls around them in a curtain, her eyes flitting between his and the salty rash on his cheeks. 

‘To take my brain out and get a break for once.’ He watches her shiver as his fingers graze her arms, feeling goosebumps spring up under his fingertips. 

‘That I might be able to do something about.’ She squints at him, scraping her down his cheeks to grab his chin and tilt it, sinking her teeth into his neck and feeling him jolt under her. 

It’s not soft, because softness would kill him. It’s the spreading warmth of angry flesh as she bites a path down his body, unarguable imperatives hot and sharp in his ear as she strokes him, her nails digging into his cheek. His breath shortening in steps as she sucks an angry bruise over the pulse at his neck, its beat like a drum in his ears.

‘You are strong’ she growls at him, chin wet and shining as her eyes burn into his. ‘They can’t hurt you’, she wraps her hand around his throat and squeezes. ‘Only me.’ He clings to her wrist, face slowly reddening with blood. She lets him breathe when his eyes flutter and roll. ‘Say it’, she commands leaning over him.

‘Only you.’ He stammers, wincing as she squeezes him. 

‘Well done.’ Her legs shake a little as she straddles him, sliding herself against him. ‘Now fuck me.’

‘I can’t.’

‘You can. I know you can.’ She shivers as her hair slides over her shoulder and onto his chest. 

‘I don’t want to hurt you.’ His hand brackets her jaw, thumb dragging over her neck.

‘Hurt me if you need it. It doesn’t matter.’

‘It does.’ 

She rips his hand away and slaps him, eyes dark. ‘Fuck me or I will do it myself.’

He grabs her by the hair. ‘If you insist.’ Then she’s flipped onto her back and he enters her, hard enough she tries to pull away for a second, before wrapping her arms around his head and forcing their mouths together. 

She will feel it in the morning, have to pull her clothes on over the bruising over her hipbones. Know what put there as she bends to gather her tools for the day, hiding her blush in the wires. 

Chapter Text

The questions become more meandering and oblique. Queries about life on the Supremacy, his visits to the bases and his time there. His interviewer has long since stopped being surprised or disappointed by his scarcity of answers, having a better sense now, perhaps more than anyone, of how distant and repetitive his life was with the Order. He was sent out to kill for them, every other humanizing thing done behind closed doors. He was not spoken to and in time his presence in meetings and discussions had become as unremarked upon as the passing through of a pet. Occasionally garnering him a look, a querying tilt of the head if he so much as shifted on his feet, training injuries screaming for attention before he can push them aside. There was a kind of mirth in their eyes when they witnessed him do something almost human, such as cough or breath heavily. Like staring into the eyes of a wild animal and imagining a commonality there which quickly dissolves as they lumber away, shaking the flies from their hides with an unconscious twitch of their skin. But they did not see his eyes, just a figure, a threat they learned to tune out. He pieced together what he knew from their conversations and access to their systems. He was not, as they had hoped, someone instrumental to the workings of the Order. He had had the opportunity to become that man, but hadn’t taken it. If he had, he would have had the kind of information they desperately need. But in all likelihood, Rey would have killed him for it. 

His interviewer hides his disappointment well, but hadn’t argued to extend their interviews or had quickly acquiesced to their ending. He has already given over everything of value and shown himself to be nothing more or less than his master’s slave, the last living remnant of an experiment now ended. Even knowing the exact details of what he and his Knights did for the Order, being able to read the wobble in the hand of the organisation as they try to correct their course, it’s hard to pinpoint why the loss of such a blunt and glaringly mundane sect should have such obvious ramifications. So he answers questions about how food was prepared and served on the Supremacy, whether he had any direct influence on the training of troopers (very little), and who within the Order would be likely to be able to pick him out as he exists right now. Save for Hux and those long dead, no one. 

‘I think we’re done for the day. I will have a few more questions for you tomorrow, but I think you’ve given over everything you can. Thank you.’

‘It’s not a problem.’ Ben hovers his hand over his drink, untouched and stone cold, ignoring as a habit his eyes on him. It's a routine they've fallen into. For a few moments after the room finally falls into silence, he gets to feel the near tangible effect of him shifting is his estimations. 

‘I know this has been uncomfortable for you.' He smiles, trying to will his muscles to rest. If he were truly honest, he would tell him the discomfort comes later, before that is a numb weightlessness, the last few seconds of floating in the sea of it before he drags himself onto shore. 'I can understand why you needed a deadline of sorts.’

‘Rey was the one to ask for it.’

‘I know. She’s very protective of you. And you wouldn’t have asked for it yourself, that’s clear.’

He pulls himself out of his slouch, straightening his posture in a series of wincing movements to meet his eye. ‘Why? Because I’m not the kind of General you thought I was?’

‘Because you’re used to torture. In a way I think you’re comforted by it.’ 

He stares at him and lets the silence play out, locking down control over his muscles and waiting for his partner to twitch with the sympathetic urge to move. ‘Is that what you consider yourself then, my interrogator? My persecutor?’

‘Ordinarily, no. I was chosen for my impartiality in the matter. I used to work in law enforcement, when that term still held a little weight.' He shakes off Ben's look, wiping some of the cold sweat from the back of his neck and neatly folding away his handkerchief. 'I pride myself in my ability to listen and put aside my judgment until a later date.’

‘Then what is your judgment?’

‘Typically I would say that I cannot tell you. But I think I owe it you. You value the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.’ He switches off the recording device and watches the light fade away. He'd quickly taken to placing it between them in a predictable show of openness. It had come to serve as both focal point and a searing spot of pain, willingly burned into Ben's vision. ‘I don’t think you’re ever going to be able to outrun what he did to you. It’s worse now, isn’t it, being here? Worse than it was with the Order.’

‘It is.’

‘Because you’re aware for the first time. You cannot hide behind a mask, your thoughts are your own as are your actions. Every one we voice, it’s like sifting reality from a dream and finding it all to be true. You were sleepwalking through your own life for the past decade. I know you would have come to this with time, but I’ve pushed you in up to your neck.'

'How poetic', Ben replies, smiling, lips twitching with effort.

'Can I ask you a question?’

‘I think it’s a bit late for that.’

‘Do you hate me?’

Ben tries to read him, eyes flitting between his, taking in his skin, pale from strain and lack of food, clothes falling out of their wrinkles, for the first time asking him a question for which he has no answer. ‘I don’t see how it would matter if I did.’

‘But you don’t.’

‘No, I don't. I find I value the familiarity of it. What does my mother think of all of this?’ He gestures over the table, the sum total of their conversations reduced to a scuffed device meticulously centered on a stack of notebooks. 

‘She doesn’t know and I won’t tell her. It’s between you and your brain.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You should get some rest. We’ll be done by this time tomorrow. See you in the morning.’

He’s left to his thoughts with a strange squeeze of his shoulder that his brain scrambles to process, staring up at the gray rectangle of the single window as it becomes desaturated by degrees. Rey will be done by now most likely showering the filth from her skin, emerging soft and warm, limbs languid with calm. If he can make his body move, she will wrap herself around him and hold him together. If he can only get to her, she will fold her arms around his skull and hold his skull. He rests his head down on the desk and presses his skin against the cold, letting it ground him. He notes he is crying with a placid inevitability, no inclination to do anything about it. His tears run onto the table and he looks at the shivering reflection of the flickering light on its surface. Then they switch off and he screws his eyes shut until spots fire in his vision.

She finds him some incalculable time later, laying her head down over his, her skin peeling away from his damp skin with the barest sting. She pulls him to a sitting position with her arms crossed over his chest, her chin on his shoulder as she speaks to him. She smells of soap and some kind of floral tea and tells him nothing in particular. The food she has waiting for him when they get back, the succession of strange situations she’d assumed he’d gotten himself into, like a pet getting himself into mischief, turning to her with the reluctant need to be freed. She moves to his side to take his face in her hands and brush the salt from his skin with a slender smile. He watches her face fall as he crumples in on himself, pressing his head to her chest and stroking his hair with shaking fingers, calmly locking the door on them with a quick glance into the dark hallway. She bends to bring her face to his level. 

‘You’re okay. I promise you’re okay. You don’t have to do this forever.’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Exactly, just tomorrow.’ She flicks her eyes to his hand where it hangs loosely at her wrist. ‘This time tomorrow you won’t have to do this anymore. I’ll make sure of it.’ He nods weakly and her brow furrows. ‘Shall I take you back to our room?’

‘Have you eaten?’

Her smile quickly falls, brushing her face with the back of her hand, voice nasal and wet when she half laughs. ‘Why are you worried about me? I’m fine. Lost a fight with a speeder suspension, but I’m fine other than my pride. Do you want to tell me what happened?’

‘I don’t know what happened’, he scoffs, wiping his nose with a grimace. 

‘Well whatever it was, you’re better off anywhere but here. Come on.’ She stoops to sling his arm around her shoulder and pull him to his feet with one steading palm over his heart. He sways on his feet, pins and needles radiating down his legs, but he stays standing. ‘See look at that. Terrifying and imposing once again. You ready to head out there?’

‘I don’t want to see anyone.’ He jerks his head towards the doorway, it thumping as penance.

‘You won’t. It’s late.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. You needed some time. You’re allowed, you know.’ 

She leads him through the frozen hallways with his hand clamped in hers, quickening her pace as the chill immediately asserts itself against her meager layers. She tries and fails not to glance his way, walking in silence save for the deadened thump of their boots against the concrete. 

When they get back he can see that she set some food aside for him at their table. She leads him to the bed and tugs off his boots, clamping her palm to his forehead feeling his temperature. Satisfied she kneads at the knots at the base of his skull brought on by hours of tension and yet more hours of uncomfortable oblivion. ‘Do you want me to go?’

‘Please don’t', he mumbles, finding her wrist with his eyes closed and hanging on.

‘Then I won’t. You need to eat. I feel like that's my motto at the moment, so you won't make me say it again. You're going to do it.’

‘Okay.’

She presses a quick kiss to his forehead and set to work warming up what she can, doubling back to hand him some water with an incandescent smile. She crouches at his knees, folding her arms over them. ‘You need salt and water.’ She jerks her head towards the bottle and waits for him to take a sip. ‘Seems to be the only things we’re not short on on this rock. Now the water I understand, the salt though…’

‘There used to be an ocean here before it froze over.’

‘So the snow out there is salty?’

‘Dig down far enough and it is.’

‘Hmm, we’ll have to try it out one day.’

He smiles and his cheeks and head ache with it. ‘Why would we do that?’

‘It’s a good excuse to get some fresh air.’

‘I’m not sure I agree with that statement.’

‘Sorry, not all my ideas can be winners', she shrugs.

‘You’re just trying to keep me distracted.’

‘Noticed that did you. Here I thought I was being subtle. Is it working?’ 

He nods and she takes his drink from him and sets at her feet, carefully lowering herself onto his lap. ‘So here’s what I’m thinking, you eat, I’ll try to tidy this nest we’ve made for ourselves and then we’ll find some mindless garbage to watch. That sound good to you?’ 

‘That sounds perfect.’ 

She tilts his head back and kisses him, just the lightest press of her lips to his, pulling back to watch his eyes track hers. ‘Tell me if I can do anything for you. Whatever it is, you can have it. You offered me the same a long time ago. It helped me just to know the offer was there.’

‘Thank you, Rey.’

‘Your food will be ready in a second. You braving the table or are you staying here.’

‘Table.’ 

‘A wise choice. I know what we do on this bed. Speaking of, we’ve got sheets in the sonic.’ She leaves him with a smile, bustling out into the cold for the short journey to their annexed fresher. 

There’s an ozone scented static clinging to the sheets as she bundles them into her hand, pressing them to the weight in her stomach. She hates herself for how wounded she feels to see him shut down in front of her. She's the only one who knows how close she came to breaking her promise to not go into his mind when she found him, her hand hovering over his skin, close enough to feel him shiver. Whatever had happened to push him over the edge, it had happened in the cold dark and she had felt it, like cresting a hill and finding her insides weightless inside her. She spent the next few hours distracting herself with menial tasks, one eye towards the door, waiting for him to call to her, but he never did. She went to him when the feeling had lessened somewhat and she knew he had fallen into a deep troubled sleep.  Shades of it reached her as she slid on her boots, brushing the worst of the tangles from her hair, reaching out to find him at the same spot she’d left him in the morning. Reluctantly she had shut down the feeble connection his sleeping mind had unconsciously forged and stepped into the cold.

‘Yeah, its particularly bad today', she says, crossing the threshold. 'But salty, so you’re gonna eat it.’ She throws down the crackling sheets with a soft whump and begins piling loose articles of clothing over her arm from the floor, wrinkling her nose as the damp clings to her fingertips. ‘Anything else before I take it to the sonic?’

‘Not that I’m aware of.’ He watches her as she wiggles a sock out from under a crate. 

‘Don’t get used to this by the way. Don’t want you thinking of me as the dutiful housewife, I’ve got a reputation to uphold.’ 

‘I wouldn’t dream of such a thing.’

‘Good, keep it that way. I’d make a horrible wife. Uncultured, uncivilized, difficult to deal with. You’d have to be insane to want that.’

‘Guess I’m insane then.’

‘Eat your food.’

She sets her sights on stripping and remaking the pile of mattresses they call a bed on her return, wrestling with the corners to fit the sheet around them. ‘One day we’re getting a proper bed.’ She grumbles, red in the face and sweating, blowing the hair out of her eyes. He throws one of their pillows at her on his way to the fresher.

With cold water comes some degree of clarity as he washes his clammy skin and brushes his teeth, as much as he can manage towards getting clean right now. He meets her as she’s tossing little pieces of rubbish into a bag and kisses her, smothering her tiny yelp with his mouth. She relents after a few perfunctory seconds of protest and lets the bag fall to the floor, slinging her arms around his shoulders and deepening their kiss. ‘Feeling a bit better, then?’ She asks, breathless as she breaks away for air. 

‘Much.’ 

She lets herself be lead backwards to the freshly made bed and pulls him down with her. ‘Can I say something stupid to you?’

‘Feel free. You often do.’

‘Wow, arsehole. What I was going to say was you don’t have to kiss me because you think I expect it.’ She wriggles her way up the mattress. ‘I don’t want you to do it because you feel obligated.’

‘I want to kiss you because I like doing it.’

She shrugs underneath him. ‘I understand if you’re not in the right frame of mind right now. I won’t be offended.’

‘I’m okay. I had a bad day but it will help me feel like myself.’

‘Alright, if you’re sure.’ Her voice shakes where he bends to mouth at her throat. 

‘Very sure. Now if you don’t mind’, he gently spreads her knees to press his hips down over hers, grinding against her through their clothes. 

‘Point taken.’ She works her hands between them to undo his belt and rip it from its loops letting it clatter to the floor, before pulling his mouth back to hers. It’s as if the layers of fabric magnify the feeling somehow. With her skin covered, all she can focus on is the weight of him against her, dragging against skin abruptly flushed and fizzing with her pulse. She pulls away with a ragged pant as he rocks against her with a particularly firm roll of his hips. ‘Why do we never do this?’

He slides his hand under her hips to keep her where he wants her where she moves to squirm away. ‘Because you like to feel my skin.’ He watches her face contort and release with the slightly sharp pleasure of sensitive skin rubbing against wet rough fabric. 

‘I feel like I’m burning up.’

‘Is that good?’ He sinks his teeth into her neck and her groan is guttural, her fingers fisting in his shirt with a creak of fabric. He smiles down at the dents in her skin from his teeth and rolls himself against her again as her hand grips his jaw in a vice-like grip. 

‘Do that again. Harder.’

‘Do what?’

‘Bite me. Harder.’

‘That was already hard. I bite you any harder and you’ll bleed.’

‘Exactly.’ 

He pulls away just far enough he can clear his clouded thoughts, only to have them scrambled again by her face, flushed violently pink, mouth open and jaw shaking. ‘You’re serious.’

‘Do I look like I’m joking?’

He smiles despite himself, well aware of the danger it puts him in. ‘No, you look like you’re furious with me.’

‘Yes’, she stammers as he grinds against her, ‘because you’re being annoying right now. Just fucking bite me.’

He does with a stilted shrug, feeling the little shriek work its way through her throat as he breaks the skin, her chest heaving under him. She grabs him and smashes their mouths together, shaking fingers ghosting over her broken skin. She pulls aware to stare entranced at the red on her fingertips, before tracing it over her lips. 

‘Did you like that?’ She nods, eyes faraway before they snap back to his. He reaches out, giving her enough time to stop him, spreading the blood down her throat with his thumb before ducking to fit his mouth over it and taste it metallic on his tongue. She kisses him as if we wants to find every trace of it on him and reclaim it as her own. 

He breaks away as the throbbing in his trouser becomes impossible to ignore. She follows him, eyes dark. ‘I’m going to come in my pants if you keep doing that.’

‘Good, do it. We can clean them.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’m close. I’ll probably beat you there anyway.’

‘You like the blood?’

‘I like the blood, you got a problem with that?’

‘You are close, aren’t you.’

‘What that supposed to mean?’

‘You get combative when you want to come. You haven’t noticed?’

‘I will slit your fucking throat.’ 

He runs his hand down her calf to her foot, giving the cramping toes a brief squeeze. ‘You say such nice things to me. For that I’ll let you come.’

‘Let!’ 

He clamps his hand down over her mouth and she glares at him trying to twist away. ‘Shut up or I will shut you up, scavenger.’ She nods and he wraps his hand around her throat, fingers sliding on blood. Her knees clamp around him hard as he kisses her breathless mouth, her hands falling limp beside her face. He pins them under his free hand as he feels her legs shake around him, her hips rolling against his in stuttering motions. He removes his grip on her to hear her come with a shout, her head pressed to his shoulder.

She shakes with aftershocks, jerking with each press of him hard against her, urging him on with sleepy whispers in his ear she follows with her mouth.

‘Let me do it to you.’ He nods and her teeth are on his skin, biting into the muscle of his shoulder as his vision wipes. He comes with his fingers digging at the base of her skull, pressing her mouth into his skin.

She watches him with a self-satisfied smirk on her face as he slumps to the side, feeling with the earnestness of experience like he's fallen off a building. ‘Where did you learn that?’ he asks as she tries to work his shirt off his body, batting his hand away where he presses the heel of his palm to the stitch at his side.

‘I didn’t. I hypothesized, I experimented, was I right?’ His answer comes to her through a rustle of fabric as she succeeds on working it over his head. ‘Why is it nice, do you think?’

‘I don’t have the capacity to think right now.’

‘You’re still bleeding.’ She presses her fingers to it and he winces, rubbing it between her fingertips. ‘Do you think we taste different? Do you reckon I would be able to tell yours from mine?’

‘I’m sure you’ll find out.’ He closes his eyes and she bats him on the chest.

‘You’re not sleeping like that. You’ll hate yourself for it in the morning. Come on.’

He grumbles but lets himself be pulled down the corridor to the fresher and out of his ruined clothes. She stops him before he steps into the shower, pressing onto her tiptoes to admire the two semicircles of teeth on his skin, before swiping her tongue over them. 

‘Don’t start anything you can’t finish, sweetheart.’ He works an arm around her waist and lifts her into the cubicle, where she leans, watching him. ‘It generally works better if you get under the water.’

She cups down of the water over her skin with her hand. ‘I’m not getting my hair wet again. Besides you’re worse off than me.’

‘Joys of having a penis.’

‘Well I like your penis.’ She skirts around him urging him up under the water as she goes to admire the red and purple skin of her neck. ‘Good job nobody comes in here. It wouldn’t take a genius to put two and two together.’

‘We’re lucky nobody comes to this wing with the noises you make.’

‘Well whose fault is that? I’ll be sure to yawn and roll my eyes next time for you.’

‘You better fucking not.’ 

She steps in to press her skin against his, swiftly dispensing with her objective to keep her hair dry to pull his head down to hers. 'Say it again. I love it when you swear.’ 

‘What can I say, you bring out the best in me.’ His head is light as she kisses him, one hand braced against the wall for support. Then she’s touching him. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Cleaning you.’

‘I’m clean.’

‘Fine, getting you hard again.’

‘Why?’

‘So I can hang a little ribbon it.’ She glowers at him. ‘So I can put it in my mouth, alright?’

‘Not here you won’t. I’m barely standing as it is.’

‘Fine, come back to the room.’

‘We both have work in the morning.’

‘I never thought I’d have to beg to put your cock in my mouth.’ She squeezes, feeling him get hard in her grip, grinning as his hand wraps around the frankly filthy pipes, muscles tensed. 

‘Well you’re not begging now, so technically your reputation is saved.’ 

She groans and drops to her knees, gazing up at him, voice low. ‘Please let me suck you cock.’

His fingers spasm around nothing at his sides, and he slaps off the water, bending to lift her up by her arms and set her on the counter by the sink. He nudges her knees apart to stand between them, pulling her hips to the edge. ‘What happened to we have work in the…’ He silences her with his mouth, fingers working against her skin then sliding into her. She clings onto his shoulders for support as her head spins with the steam, skin still sensitive from friction, the angle letting him curl his fingers deep inside her. ‘Yeah okay, not exactly what I had in mind, but…’

‘You want me in your mouth, still?’ She nods, eyes closed. ‘Go on then.’ He steps back a step and she is momentarily bereft before sliding to the floor and taking him in her mouth. ‘Give me your hands.’ She holds them up and folds her elbows along the edge of the counter-top, holding them there firmly under his hands. ‘Hold still and I’ll fuck your mouth, that alright with you?’ She can’t speak with her mouth still on him, so she nods and he presses back hard into her throat. 

She can’t move with her head pressed back against the cabinet and her arms firmly locked in place, simply suck in breaths through her nose in between thrusts that hit the back of her throat and go straight between her legs. She works to loosen her jaw and digs her nails into her elbows, feeling as she takes him a little deeper, trying to keep her eyes on his. She chokes and her fingers spread, pressing her chest towards him chasing any kind of contact she can find. He pulls out and she gulps in a breath, working him back onto her tongue and sucking, chuckling as she feels him twitch against her. Then she’s forced back by another forceful thrust that sets her mind reeling, then another, then another. ‘How long can you hold your breath, do you think? 

She tilts her head at him, gasping. ‘Longer than that.’

‘Do you want to find out?’ She nods and he moves his hand next to her elbow. ‘Tap my hand when you need to breath.’ She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. Beyond the wall of panic she finds calm as her thighs press together, each little stab of it safely ignored. She is not, as her brain would tell her, on the brink of suffocation. She coughs and lets out of a little of her air. There’s always a little bit more. She inches just slightly up the cabinet as three thrusts in quick succession squeeze a tear down her cheek. He pulls out for a moment and looks as ragged as she feels, before pressing back in. She doesn’t have time to catch her breath, even if she wanted to, and slowly the whine becomes more insistent. And slowly she finds more strength to set it aside and open her jaw just a little wider to stave off the ache for a few more seconds. She realizes with enough time, she could come from this alone. 

His thrusts grow shallower until he pulls back entirely. ‘You said you’d tell me if you need to breath.’ 

I don’t need to breath. A smile flicks over his face at her voice in his head. Keep going.

Finally she reaches a height she can’t surpass and gray spots dot her vision. She taps his hand after a few seconds of pure panic and sucks in a lungful of air before she is pulled back onto the counter and wiped roughly with a towel.

‘Hey!’, she protests with a croaky voice, before she’s pulled forwards by the hips and he enters her and its as if her spine liquefies, panic dissolving into pleasure quick enough to give her whiplash. He bends to kiss her where she slumps back against the mirror, cool on her back a welcome counterpoint to the warm crawling like honey down her legs. 

‘Fuck, you’re squeezing me so hard it feels like you’re trying to rip it off. Feel.’ He pulls out and draws her hand between her legs so she can press her fingers inside. He moves them gently aside and presses back into her with a stuttered groan. ‘Could you really come from doing that?’

‘Yeah, I think so.’

‘What did it feel like?’

‘Like nothing I’ve ever felt before. Gods, it feels like I’m going mad.’

‘You’re not going mad.’ He looks into her eyes and kisses her before fitting her face into the crook of his neck, looping her arms around his neck. She whines against his skin under a barrage of thrusts that feel as if they ring through her body. She doesn’t realize she’s whimpering until he presses a kiss to her temple and down her neck to where the still fresh bite tingles at the contact. ‘Come, sweetheart’, he murmurs in her ear and she grinds her forehead against his skin, eyes screwed shut as it rips through her. He pulls her through it, ringing out every last second as her knees clamp shut around him. 

She kisses lazily up her chest as he strokes himself, one hand over his on the counter, hearing his breathing turn shallow as he leans his cheek on the crown of her head. ‘Let me do it.’ She takes him in her grip as she kisses up her throat and along his jawline, finally licking into his mouth and kissing him sweetly as he exhales hard through his nose against her cheek and sags on his feet as he comes. She takes his weight as he slumps against her, this hand sliding up her spine to press her to him as his gasps turn to a weightless chuckle.

‘I’m exhausted.’

‘Likewise. Hey, at least this time we didn’t make a mess of our bed.’ She drags her fingernails against his scalp and he groans. ‘Come on, I need to pee.’ 

He helps her down by her waist, leaning heavily against the counter to scrub a damp cloth over as much of him as he can be bothered to before slinging it in the sonic with the rest. They go to bed and agree on their need for sleep, then ignore it. 

She’s awake to watch the light change around her, pulling her legs to her chest and leaning against him. She wishes it was clear enough to watch the sun crawl from behind the horizon and note the passing of another night under its cold light. She smiles at him instead, deflating with a rattling sigh. They dress in silence.

‘Do you want me to stay with you?’ She notches her chin on his shoulder, her cheek pressed against his.

‘I do. But I don’t know if you should.’

‘How so?’

‘I think I just have to get through it.’

‘You don’t sound sure.’

‘I’m not sure', he whispers before clearing his throat, clipping on his communicator. 'I want you there', he continues levelly. 'But I think it would be good for me to face it. I know you’ve been there before…’

‘It’s okay. I’ll be there when you get out. I’ve got a whole mess of things to fix today anyway. Rose would probably kill me if I didn’t go.’

She turns to him at the door, and pulls his forehead down to hers. ‘Come find me when you’re done.’ He nods against her and her chest squeezes. ‘Stop him if he goes too far. It’s not supposed to be a punishment, remember that.’ She squeezes him in a brief hug, leaning against the wall with her eyes closed, waiting long enough to hear the murmur of voices through the door and feel her limbs contract with exhaustion and cold. Predictably there’s a whole list of tasks to distract her with as soon as she reaches engineering and Rose is good enough not to pry beyond a suggestive wiggling of her brows at Rey's obvious lack of sleep. She takes a scalding gulp of caff and crawls under her latest project, stomach twinging where they’d skipped past breakfast, their need for each other surpassing anything else save oxygen. 

She goes to meet him mid afternoon after her eyes refuse to pull into focus anymore. She doesn’t knock, simply walks in and leans by the doorway, arms crossed in front of her chest. The interrogator trails off with one last faltering, meandering question that loses it’s steam half way through. He clears his throat, gathering his papers in his hands.

‘Morning Miss Rey.’

‘It’s afternoon. Did you get everything you need?’

‘Yes, I believe so.’ He turns back to Ben, relief bowing his spine. ‘Mr Solo, thank you as always for your time. You’ve been very cooperative. Your work is very much is appreciated.’

‘Glad I could be of service.’

‘May we go?’

‘Of course. Be well.’

She stops in at the canteen on their way back, stuffing whatever she can into her pockets and beelining from the room, praying to whoever will listen that nobody intercepts her and requires her to talk. They eat what they can and pull of as many layers as they have energy for, falling into sleep as their bodies shake from tiredness, pushing their shed clothes onto the floor as their heads spin. 

Chapter Text

As he enters the room, a loose gaggle of pilots are poring over plans on the table, elbows locked and leaning on their knuckles. They glance back at him and disperse like a cloud at Dameron’s brief jerking nod, filing past him, eyes averted. Ben waits until they're gone to acknowledge the reason for their swift exit, their chairs still pulled aside, cluttering the edge of the large table. He hasn’t directly spoken to the man who forms a part of the General’s regular rotation of advisers since his interrogation of him on the Supremacy, but knows from how he meets his eye whenever they pass that he’s one of the few who has been trusted with the knowledge of his identity. 

Dameron’s entire body tenses, save from his eyes, that dart towards him before lifting imploring to the ceiling. ‘Long time no see. You look a little different since I last saw you. Did you change your hair?’ Ben watches the man gather up a handful of papers and set them aside, flinging down a scuffed holopad hard enough he's surprised it doesn't crack.

‘Dameron.’ Poe's eyes fix on him and narrow, a part of him churning at the sound of his own name. It’s different at least from the way other’s step away from him. A Force user who endeavors to live as far from them as possible, they hide behind the dividing line between them and he’s relieved when they do. He had known the man wouldn’t have been able to resist referencing their meeting on the Supremacy, but a part of him is amused at how quickly he’d given in to the compulsion, and how glaringly obvious his discomfort is at being addressed.

Poe slides into his seat, shaking out one of the many cups littering the room and pouring what will no doubt be the first of many caffs. ‘It's Commander Dameron to you. Your mother was insistent you could be of use to me. I am to ensure my personal biases don't interfere with my ability to take counsel, sound familiar?'

'I was told to play nice. Not that that advice has ever really worked on me.'

'I'll bet', Poe says, throwing him the perfectly practiced smile he no doubt reserves for Holovids. 'Personally, I think she has a little too much faith in the both of us.' He rips off the tops of a stack of sugar packets with more force than the thin paper warrants before flinging them in the trash, his eyes never leaving Ben. 'She seems to think that you’re reformed, and that I’ll one day be able to forget the feeling of you rifling around in my skull. Why did you do it anyway? Was it because I was her favorite? Sit down a while, I'm curious.’

Poe bristles as Ben takes a seat, eyes narrowing as he slowly removes his jacket and hangs it off the back of a vacant chair. He doesn't try to hide the fact he's staring as Ben turns to him, carefully folding his cuffs to rest his forearms against the table, just uncurls his hand from around his drink with a motion for him to speak. 

‘If you must know, I had no idea who you were. You simply had information I needed.’ There’s a kind of pleasure in it, part relief at having the conversation he knew was coming, part the same kind of amusement he’d drawn from trading insults with Hux and watching the vein in his pale neck throb. It had been true at the time, Poe had simply crossed his path. But there was a defiance in the way that he talked to him that had made him pause, a straightening of his posture that hinted that this was a man used to being known, his ignorance only sweetened it. To go into his mind and find how he was favored by the General, had Poe the skill, he would have found Ben subsumed by a feeling almost nostalgic in quality: jealousy. 'Had I known beforehand, maybe I would have kept you a little longer.'

Poe mirrors his cold smile but is still the first to break, blinking through a squinting grimace. ‘Is that why you tortured Rey? She’s her favorite now. So, close. But it’s still not you. Bet that stings, huh? I take it that's why you wormed your way into her life.’

Ben takes a deep breath and leans his chin on his palm, imagining Rey pulling the protesting man from his chair should he ever wish to indulge and tell her. ‘Are you done?’ he asks, softly.

‘Yeah, for now. I don’t want to wear out my new toy too soon.’

‘What does the General want us working on?’ He watches the man stand and pace the room, stretching his muscles into life in the way he does himself, fighting against the stiffening cold that creeps in from inactivity. 

‘The General seems to think I could use your assistance with flight plans. Half of my squadron is gone, no thanks to you.' Ben presses his mouth into a line to stop that smile that comes from the man’s almost reflexive desire to throw barbs his way. ‘And I’m in the enviable position of needing just about any pilot I can get my hands on. You fit the bill and you’re used to working with small numbers. You’re going to help me map out missions until the highly unlikely event I trust you with one of our ships.’

‘I’ve flown one of your ships before.’

He shoots him a dark look over his caff, setting it down on the table so hard the sound rings in the air. ‘Something I took up with the General. Both times you flew the TIE the flight logs showed a reckless disregard for its safety.’

‘We got it back in one piece. They’re designed to be flown like that.’ Ben stretches back in his seat, eyes closed, hearing Poe stop in his pacing as he's seized by anger, wondering if he'll give in to another desire and close the distance between them. A welcome contrast from his days spent relaying information, each probing question voiced with the toneless intonation of being read from an exhaustive list of cues. His new colleague is reactive to a fault; he can hear him breath out slowly, reminding himself of his instruction, drawing on a calm he doesn't feel to be the mediator. 

‘Maybe that’s how you do it in the Order, but our budget and troops aren’t infinite. We conserve what we have.’ He spreads his hands over the scattered holopads, still mechanically cycling through arcing flight plans. ‘If you can’t get behind that I’ll happily tell your mother you’re not suitable for this brief. I don’t know if you noticed, but there’s a lot of air vents in this place. She could put you to good use cleaning the critters out of them.’ He sinks heavily into his seat, watching the little blinking dots and their floating labels tracking across the screen, the effort it took to be halfway civil clearly exhausting him. 

‘I don’t think that’s what she had in mind when she asked two Force users to work with the Resistance.’

‘As I understand it, she didn’t exactly invite you here with open arms. She asked Rey to join us and you just tagged along.’ He can see the tiredness radiating off the man, in how he can’t stop his spine from arching, his vision unfocused on the tabletop. 

‘I am very aware of the warm welcome I’ve received here. If it were possible to keep Rey safe anywhere other than this base, I wouldn’t be here. She wants to help and I stand with her. Now that I’ve made my position clear, can we get to work?’ 

Poe nods, locked in some mental battle with himself, reaching for his drink and slowly twisting it on the table. ‘How can I trust you if you’re only here to appease Rey?’

‘I wouldn't have thought you'd want to trust me, Poe', he says with a smile. 'Are you asking what my intent is?’

‘It’s a valid question, Ben.’

He chuckles, leaning into Poe's space, waiting for him to meet his eye. ‘I want the war to end. I’m tired of fighting. If democracy is restored to the Galaxy there will be at least temporary peace. Even if I don’t see it, Rey should get to.’

‘Well, at least you’re not stupid. I can work with that.’ He sighs out a huff that stirs a few loose papers, eyes rolling to the ceiling. ‘Tell me what I’m not seeing.’ He jerks his head towards the simulations playing out silently in front of them, pulling his chair slightly aside. 

‘You know I came to ask you if you’d like that tour of the base now, but it seems you’re finding everything you need.’

‘Finn!’ She clambers back to the floor landing somewhat heavily on one knee, before brushing it away to fold him into a hug. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I do live here, same as you. You know I'm starting to think you really are avoiding me…’ She glances over at Rose who turns to busy herself with a craft they both know was DOA, stomping rather too loudly into its grated exterior to give them privacy. 

‘I know, I’m sorry. It’s just… It's a lot living here. I guess I just needed to keep busy.’ She leans back on the bench and watches him as he scans their cluttered work area, trying to make sense of it.

‘General’s got you fixing up the fleet. I’m glad, Rose needs someone who can keep up with her. I spoke to a couple of guys in the kitchens who tried to help her before. Now they’re only comfortable emptying packets into pans and stirring.’

‘What do you mean? Rose is lovely' she says, pointlessly trying to scrub some of the oil from her hands.

‘Of course she is, she just doesn’t put up with idiots or people who pretend to know less than they do. I’m sure she loves you.’

‘If by that you mean she gets an unnatural thrill out of digging into my personal life, yes she does.’ She glares half-heartedly in Rose's general direction, leaning into the speeder she's working on and trying to shove the bundle of loose wiring back behind the dashboard.

‘Everyone has their vice. Hers is gossip.’

‘Yeah, I figured that one out. Working with me is like a buffet after what I came back with.’

‘That what I came to talk to you about, actually.’ 

She leans back to find her friend studiously avoiding her eye. She picks up a bolt and turns it on her palm, trying for nonchalance. ‘Oh?’

‘Nothing bad.’ He rushes to soothe her but stops short of touching her, stuffing his hands back into his pockets where they hang in the air between them. ‘Promise you won’t get mad?’

Her tone chills, despite her desire to keep it light. ‘That really depends on you, doesn’t it?’ She takes a deep steadying breath as Finn begins a slow loop around the room, zipping up her jacket to follow him.

‘Here's the thing. I know you know people have been talking. Now they know I know you they've been asking me things. Things I don't know how to answer.’ He darts his eyes towards her, but doesn't turn, mumbling his question into his chest. 'So I guess I just came to ask what you want me to say to them.'